Putting an end to my pattern of relapse has been all about dropping ALL my other priorities, bottles etc... i.e. going literally to any lengths...  (I ended up travelling 2,000 miles to a meeting in Bournemouth, UK. I'm still there - and still sober...)

I eventually grasped that in all my years in the fellowship I had never really completed my own Step Zero. I had never "given myself completely" to this program, the way the WB puts it... I had not joined the fellowship deep in my heart. I  was still a kind of ambassador from the world outside (a world I continued to see as normal - while today I see the fellowship as normal, and the world outside as beautiful but deranged...)

The bottles in my own way have been: my public reputation, my life-style, my beautiful retirement home, my income, my trophy wife, my cosmopolitanism, my work.... all of which I now know I was putting before my relationship with my HP and the fellowship...

Today, having literally walked away from all that, I find they are all still there for me, but in the meantime I have found something much better: a relationship with my HP that is worth more than all those bottles combined.  It's as if my whole perspective has changed (Chuck C's new pair of glasses... "we have had a spiritual awakening")

What we seem to be doing here in Bournemouth UK, under our HP's guidance, is encouraging men who have had this same difficulty (actually a Step 3 difficulty) to come and spend time with us by the sea here (2 hrs from London), develop a really close relationship with their own HP and heal from all those bottles by surrendering them...