Wed Night AA Riverside Men's Group

Good evening, We come, at last, to the end of the book. This week we close out by reading Chapter 9 - Becoming Happy. I've had a copy of this book for a while now, a few months before we began reading it here. To be honest, when I first got the book I skipped every other chapter and read this chapter first. Somehow, I don't think I'm unique in wanting to skip the BS and just get to the "Being Happy" part!!  Although, now that I think about, the name of the chapter is  Becoming  Happy  not   Being  Happy. There is definitely a process at work here. On page 132 of The Big Book it says:  "We are sure God wants us to be happy, joyous, and free."  However, it also says in the first two lines of How it Works:   " Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program..." When I put those two facts together I realize tha...

Hello everyone, So we're almost done with the book. This week we'll be reading Chapt 8 - Finding Joy in Life - p165-182. As it so happens, while I was driving back from puriscal today I put on a speaker tape with Sandy B who happened to be talking about the exact same thing!! Now was that Odd or is that God? It's actually a great talk he gives at a group in Arlington Texas (you can find it through iTunes). To sum up the gist of the share in my own words: To get "sober" is easy... Just don't drink!! That's it... If you don't drink, you don't get drunk. (Bet a lot of you didn't know that).   But the overwhelming experience in AA is that to just "not drink" actually  really  sucks!! We'd give it a shot and say "the hell with that I'm going back out". To really  stay sober  we need to become happy, joyous and free. We must find a new thirst for living to replace the old thirst for drinking or using.  We  must  h...