I am celebrating 11 years in OA and 11 years of abstinence September 17, 2016 god willing.  I wrote the following piece in December 2005, almost 90 days into program and abstinence.  At that time the future looked bright as I was working the steps and moving beyond the blocked emotions to feel each day.  I had no idea how bright the future could be.  Since then, I have gotten married, have two children and have had better jobs with more responsibility.  I also have more out of my life in less obvious ways.  Overall, program has given me my life.  Here’s a look at how it started for me:

I’m told I was first given Carvel soft chocolate ice cream at three months.  I’m told that when I was about four years old, I used to go around at family events and finish the dregs of peoples drinks while the adults sat down to dinner.  I guess I have been a compulsive overeater from a very early age.  My first memories are from a little later.  When I was six or seven, I used to sneak desserts, usually chocolate.  And lie about it, of course.  I remember spending the night at a friend’s house.  His mother had a small party that night.  We snuck down to the party, raided the chocolate candies and stuck them in our underwear to sneak them back upstairs.  After Thanksgiving one year, I went into the fridge, opened up the chocolate almond bark and took a piece.  When my mother asked who opened it, I told her I saw my grandfather do it.  Of course I had eaten my fill during the meal, but there was chocolate to be had.

Candy was often used as a reward.  I also had the typical Jewish grandmother.  She would have us over, prepare way too much food for four adults and two children, and then say “Someone has to finish this, there is too little to put away.”  That someone was usually my father or I.  I don’t actually ever remember being full as a child.  I was pudgy, but I seemed to get a 2 day virus once or twice a year.  Everything that went in came back out.  I would lose 5-10 lbs.  I was also very active, played a lot of sports and ran around.  So I never got huge.  But food was always on my mind.  I didn’t need a lot of money, but was encouraged to get jobs shoveling snow, babysitting and the like, to learn responsibility.  Since my parents paid for most things, I spent my money on sweets and fast food.

When I got to college, things started to change.  I had more interests that required less movement, and the meals were often keep going up to get more food.  Between that and the drinking, I started putting on weight.  And I learned not to have any self control.  Then I graduated and eventually got a job.  Now I was practically sedentary all day, and I had lots of money, so I could eat a lot.  I started to spread.  So I went on my first diet, Weight Watchers at work.  I lost about 16 lbs, then went back to my same old eating habits.  I gained and lost for a little while, then stopped bothering with losing.  I was still active when I wanted to be.  I went on week long bicycle trips and played ball with friends or on company teams.  I felt that as long as I was able to be active, the weight was not a problem.

I was very unsuccessful at dating (of course not my fault) and by 27, decided not to date anymore.  For seven years I wouldn’t even consider it.  I decided I was happier alone.  Or perhaps my disease decided, but I hadn’t figured that out yet.  Then at 32, disaster struck.  I was having problems with muscles in my stomach.  I had trouble tying my shoes.  I went to the doctor.  I had an umbilical hernia.  He also did some blood work.  I was less than five points away from being diagnosed with Diabetes II.  I had surgery on the hernia and I started Atkins.  I stuck to it for six months and lost 47 lbs, from 242 down to 195.  I gained a lot of it back, but never let myself over 230 again because I was finally scared (at least a little).

At 34, I did some workshops and trainings that helped me decide to get my life back.  By this time, I was not dating, was very closed to everyone I cared about, was not advancing at work anymore and blaming everyone except myself, and had reached my one major remaining goal in life.  I owned a decent sized one bedroom apartment in NYC.  I was done living and just coasting along, claiming to be happy.  I even fooled myself.  After the workshops, I started dating again.  Decided I wanted a family.  I also got involved in volunteer work again and started finding things in life to enjoy.  And I started allowing myself to feel emotions besides anger.  I started living.  But food still was the centerpiece of my life.

A friend from the trainings joined OA.  She tried many times to get me to go, but I did not have a problem.  I was keeping myself between 220 and 230.  Finally, after she lost about 100 lbs, I was ready to admit I had a problem.  I suddenly realized I could not be active the way I had been.  And I was having knee problems.  36 was too young for knee problems, so I said I would go.  I hated my first meeting.  She had started me on a food plan and I had come up with my abstinence.  After a week and a half, I went to my second meeting.  Then I committed to it and started going to more.  After a few weeks, she called me up on a Sunday afternoon and asked if I had a sponsor yet.  I told her I wasn’t ready for that yet.  After a long discussion, I ended up going to a meeting that night to hear someone speak that she recommended.  I asked him to be my sponsor.  Within a week we started working together.

I have been abstinent since my first meeting.  As I write this, I am finishing day 87.  G-d willing, I will soon have 90 days.  I have already led a meeting and spoken at two.  Service has become a major part of my program.  I can’t succeed without it.  I go to 3-6 meetings a week and have started Step 3.  I feel confident in myself.  I am two and a half months into a new job for more money and responsibility but less hours.  And I can truly say I am able to experience joy in my life.  My day begins and ends with reading literature, I pray every morning, and I have started as an interim sponsor.  I also have room for time with friends, belonging to clubs and spending time with family.  Life is good and I am committed to living it, happy and healthy.

By Andy P.

I’m a big fan of the fourth step fear prayer: Please remove this fear, and direct my attention to what you would have me be. I use the prayer for all sorts of troubles. I close my eyes, and implore, “Higher power, please remove this {whatever}, and direct my attention to what you would have me be,” then I meditate to listen for the answer, and write out what I believe my higher power would have me be instead of the fearful, squirming, confused, uncertain person I can sometimes become.

My sponsor sometimes asks me to spiral out my fears. It’s not a far leap for me between fearing the cost of rent in this city, for example, to a future where I have no home, no love in my life, a future where I wander, aimlessly, miserably, for all my days. When I go through this process with my sponsor, she’ll sometimes ask of this miserable vision of my future, “Is that your higher power’s plan for you?”

And when she asks that, I throw my hands up and shrug. My higher power, while deep, abundant, and powerful, does not have a date book. I don’t have a higher power who makes plans, or knows what should or should not happen to me. I spell my god with a lowercase g, because while there’s a rich and loving place inside myself I can turn to when my finite human will falls short, I do not believe there’s a chess player in the sky, plotting my moves, eight turns ahead. This has been a challenge for me in program. I’ve been told to “get a bigger god,” and while my god has grown, my disbelief will not as yet suspend any further than this point.

Recently, my sponsor and I had an email exchange on this topic that I found to be illuminating and cathartic. With her permission, I’ve shared this exchange below. We hope you get something from it, too.

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Sponsor: Is that your higher power’s plan for you?

Sponsee: As we’ve discussed, my higher power doesn’t make plans. And I just can’t get my head to a place where that’s part of my hp concept. Not when I think of all the world’s suffering, throughout history. Tell slaves in shackles that their higher power had a plan for them. Jews on trains to the camps. Those poor people, today, walking across Europe without borders open to them, running into the ocean, because that’s a better fate than the war they’re running from. Young people who die in miserable suffering ways from terrible diseases. Or even my luck at having been born middle class, in NY, in the US, while half the world can still die from a mosquito bite or diarrhea.

For these reasons and more, I cannot trust that my higher power “has a plan for me” that’s any different from any of the miserable fates that might suffer anyone else. Disease, homelessness, toothlessness, obesity. If it could happen to anyone, it could also happen to me. Even if I’m in prayer, in meditation, in recovery, in abstinence, in love and light, I believe it could still happen to me. I believe plenty of slaves, and dead jews, and migrating refugees, and people dead from dysentery, probably had a spiritual practice, faith, trust, hope, love, and lived open, god-centered lives. So if it can happen to them, why couldn’t it happen to me?

Sponsor: The answer is, it could happen to you. There is nothing in our recovery literature anywhere that guarantees us an easy way, a way without pain, without trouble, without loss, grief, torment, fear, unknowing…  I have had all of these, in and out of recovery, and still I live in the faith that all of it has meaning, that, as it says in [a piece of outside literature], “all things are lessons God would have me learn.” The faith I carry through all of it is that, even in the worst of it, I am being shown my highest good.

Doesn’t make any of the really hard stuff any easier.  It just gives me hope that “this, too, shall pass,” and when I am on the other side of it, all will be well, even if I do die of disease, homeless, toothless, obese, etc. That faith keeps me going through the worst of it. That part of the original version of the third step prayer is part of my belief system, “take away my difficulties, that transcendence over them may bear witness…” I pray for that, and trust in that, that I may be lifted up even in my suffering to a higher level of awareness, transcending my own humanity in the service of a higher calling, to show others that they, too, can be okay in their difficulties, can survive them, even flourish in spite of them, (or because of them?).

That is, I believe, God’s plan for me; to be the light of the world, to show others that they, too, are the light of the world.

By Lauren L. and Cindy M.

Mary Ann F. gives her reflections on the most recent retreat from January 22-24, 2016.

We took off from West 58th Street right on time and arrived at the Guesthouse in Chester, Connecticut 3 1/2 hours later. It was the start of a big weekend with speakers, shares, writing and even a talent show. The title of the retreat was The Gift of Recovery, Give It Away to Keep It. Friday night we had an opening meeting, an orientation so to speak.

But things began in earnest on Saturday. After breakfast began the speakers with breakout groups. Something new was added this year: there were questions to write on after the speakers and before the breakout groups. There were also panels of three speakers, each of whom spoke on a topic like Recovery and Rediscovery. There was some free time on Saturday and if you couldn’t go out due to the blizzard, you could talk, workout in the fitness room, play ping pong or a board game. You could also be quiet and read and/or write. It also gave the people who would perform in the talent show time to rehearse. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were buffet style with a variety of food, all fresh, both cooked and raw, which enabled everyone to keep to their own food plan. The talent show was loads of fun as fellow attendees sang, danced, read poetry and performed.

The following day there were more speakers and sharing. For the entire weekend, there were craft tables where you were encouraged to make a card that would be put into a bag and later on each person would pick out a card to take home. I still have my card from the last retreat. I sometimes look at it when I need some support. In the last breakout group meeting, everyone wrote his or her phone number down on a piece of paper that went into a bag and then that bag went around the circle as each person picked a phone number. You would call that person after you got home to help ease their entry back into reality and someone would call you as well.

The blizzard travel ban was lifted on Sunday and the bus arrived early. We packed up, checked out and boarded that bus and it was an uneventful trip back to New York as the roads were clear.

What the retreat does for you is give you a big shot of program in a concentrated way. You hear a lot of different speakers, meet and make friends with a number of people, and hear experience, strength and hope from all sides. It’s also a lot of fun.

Next retreat is July 8th through 10th, 2016, at the Guesthouse. The setting is peaceful, and there is a walk as well as a meditation both Saturday morning and Sunday morning. Try it! You’ll like it!

Tom M. is the outgoing Chair of the Greater New York Metro Intergroup after serving in this position for the past two years. He has been a member of OA since April 1981. During that time he has held service positions in Connecticut Intergroup, Massachusetts Bay Intergroup, San Francisco Intergroup, and now New York City. Metro Memo interviewed Tom about the state of Intergroup.

MM: What is Intergroup anyway, and why is it so important?
TM: Intergroup is just the name we have for groups in a particular area coming together—apart from our individual meetings—to do the necessary work to keep the OA fellowship going. No one individual meeting prints the meeting lists, for example, or answers a help line, or maintains a website. All the groups come together, in theory at least, to keep these common, necessary functions going.
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