I love AA meetings. But they're the waiting room, not the treatment. I did not realise this straight away. Imagine a physiotherapy clinic. In the waiting room, I was bent out of shape, like many of the other patients. But some of the people would regularly enter and emerge from the treatment rooms, and, over a period of months, they started looking physically taller, able to move and execute movements fluidly and gracefully, and considerably happier than when they first arrived.
In the waiting room, however, people would sometimes share tips about how to relieve particular symptoms, and these tips would work for me, for a while, but they did not solve the underlying problem.
There was a lot of talk of the existence of a solution: in fact, sometimes they would read from a book with a chapter entitled 'THERE IS A SOLUTION'. This gave me hope. Sometimes the conversation was so animated that I would forget the pain. Sometimes I found a very comfortable seat in the waiting room, which would totally relieve the ache, at least for as long I was sitting there.
But at some point I had to get up from the seat, leave the waiting room, and try and get on with my life, with tight muscles, swelling around the tendons, clicking joints and radiating pain in every part of my body. And everything I did made the problems worse, as I was further straining already strained systems and creating new imbalances and injuries by compensating for the existing ones.
At some point, even the orthopaedic chairs in the waiting room stopped helping: the injuries and strains were so extensive that no relief was possible, except with pain medication, which, over time, required ever-increasing doses. Various forms of acting out took away the pain.
Eventually I decided to look inside one of the treatment rooms. What was in there? Not even a physiotherapist. A former patient of the clinic, who learned special exercises and techniques from other patients was standing there. There was no equipment. There was a single, small manual, only the first part of which (up to page 164) actually contained the instructions.
Miraculously, the little book, its instructions, and the exercises shown to me by the former patient, who we refer to as a sponsor, worked. The underlying misalignments were corrected, and I learned new ways of sitting, standing, walking, running, lifting, in fact new ways of doing everything.
The spiritual awakening and the life of service that flows from that are the solution, not just to alcoholism, but to the underlying spiritual malady.
As Happy Dennis would say: 'HIP HIP AA, HIP HIP HOORAA!'