'Going to AA' and meeting reliance

The phrase 'going to AA' implies that AA is a place you can physically go to.

For me, AA is not a location, a time and a place in a church hall.

It is the me I have become, so I take it wherever I go.

When I was new, I was dependent on meetings, I thought. This was not strictly true. I can be truly dependent only on God. 'Depend on God' is not an instruction but really a description of the truth of reality phrased in the imperative. The self that I relied on and foolishly return to, to rely on, does not exist. 'Man-made images of self'. The sex, money, power, prestige, comfort, thrills, and appearance that are the treasures of the ego all stem from the picture of myself my ego would like to build. So the only real reliance is on God. Anything else is leaning against a wall that turns out to be air, causing me to tumble to the floor.

So, does that mean I cannot rely on the people in AA? What would that mean? Relying on their cells, muscles, cerebral cortices, livers? What is the 'them' I would be relying on? What they say? Well, sometimes silent people can be strength. And I tried and failed to rely on people before AA to disastrous effect, so 'people' are hardly a reliable resource in general.

The truth is this: I have relied on the God in others, working through them, as them.

AA is the God I connect to within me and channel out to you. That is why I take it wherever I go.

If this is not a living truth, I have one or both of these problems: (1) internal blocks (2) service outage.

The internal blocks consist in resentment and guilt / shame over unforgiven 'harms' of others and non-amended harms of my own. Fear is the product of these.

Service outage occurs when I am acting based on self; it is no good having a beautifully functioning delivery van if you are not delivering anything.

I need to unblock the tubes, and release the valve at the bottom.

Then the love of God flows, and I never need drink again.

When I'm feeling 'dry' and sensing a need for meetings in particular (as opposed to service in the narrow sense in AA and the broadest sense in the rest of my life), I can sometimes be hoping to siphon off some of your God-consciousness for me as an alternative to actually doing the work to become unblocked and be of service myself.

Of course meetings are important and highly effective as a vehicle for the teaching and practice of the Twelve Steps and also provide opportunities for Unity and Service, thus ensuring the internal scaffolding of the AA triangle that keeps the AA circle of health reliably in place.

However, they are not a substitute for the programme: they are the expression of it.

A first sign of a weak or faltering programme is meeting reliance, and the inability to cope or face life without the daily meeting.

Obviously, when I was new and was not yet recovered, meetings were the only source of God.

Today my chief responsibility is to make sure I am the best embodiment of AA I can be.

And then, and only then, is my reliance truly on God.