I believe God has been showing me in various ways lately that if I want to continue on my journey towards spiritual enlightenment, I’m going to need to experience a little bit more ego deflation. One of such experiences ended up taking place here this past Friday night when I was the lead speaker at the annual AA anniversary banquet. But before I get into what actually happened that evening, it’s probably best that I start from the beginning when I was first asked to be this lead.
It was late in the afternoon on the first Thursday in August this past summer when I found myself sitting in the passenger seat of my partner’s vehicle heading west on Interstate 80. The two of us, along with another, were going camping for the weekend with a couple of other friends. As my partner carried on a conversation with our other traveling companion, my phone unexpectedly rang. On the other end of it was a woman who told me she was from a local AA committee. She proceeded to tell me that my name had been put into a mix with a few other candidates to be the lead speaker at the upcoming Area 55 Anniversary Banquet and that mine had been the one selected.
At first I thought she was kidding and that someone was playing a good joke on me simply because I had been living in Toledo for only 6 months. But when she told me she heard my lead a few months earlier at another meeting, I knew she was serious and immediately my heart started racing. She then asked if I would accept the committee’s invitation, which I responded exuberantly with a yes. After a few more minutes of general conversation with her, I hung up the phone feeling like my head was going to explode. But in all honestly, the only thing at that moment in time that was going to explode was actually my ego.
I ended up spending the rest of the car ride talking about how great an honor it was to have this happen to me. First I did this with those traveling with me and then I did it with a bunch of others over the phone. I’d go on to spend a large amount of time bringing this up at the camping trip as well, including making several more phone calls too. Sadly, this behavior didn’t stop there either.
Over the course of the next month, I also randomly began telling those closest to me about this upcoming speaking engagement. In fact, at one point I was doing a mini-lead at another meeting when I purposely shared this information to those in attendance at the end of it. When I did, the word “EGO” appeared in my mind like it was shining in big neon letters. Suddenly I felt rather guilty about what I had been doing since being asked to do this lead so I decided to contact the woman from the committee who had been at the beginning of all of this. I wanted to know if my ego-filled behaviors were just a normal reaction to this. When she told me it would be best to stop talking about it and just see whoever showed up, I agreed but unfortunately I didn’t end up following her advice.
For the next six weeks, I continued to allow my ego to find a number of other ways to tell many in recovery, and even some that weren’t, about this upcoming lead. My ego swelled more and more each time I did, until a good friend in recovery heard me talking about this and said something that stopped me in my tracks. What he said was the same thing I saw in those big neon letters in my mind a month earlier and that was that word “EGO”. Little did I realize at that precise moment in time how much it really had been ruling my life?
By the time I arrived at the banquet hall a few nights later, I have to say that I had allowed my ego to envision things that were truly selfish and self-centered. With thoughts of hundreds and hundreds of people attending, standing ovations and lines of people waiting to compliment my lead, I walked in the doorway of that hall not even knowing that my ego could barely fit in between it. Two hours later as I made my way up to that podium after being introduced, I felt completely nervous, even though I had given my lead hundreds of times previously to rooms filled with much larger groups of people. When I finally reached that podium and asked for a moment of silence, my mind suddenly went blank. It was as if all of my previous leads and experience had totally disappeared. That confidence I normally had exuded every time I gave my lead in the past was notably absent. I tried to do my best to share my story as I jumped around from one thing to the next with my mind racing every step along the way. When I finally finished fifty-two minutes later, there were no standing ovations or people getting in a line to shake my hand like my ego had wanted to believe. Instead, I just returned to my seat filled with a tremendous amount of doubt and insecurity.
When the dancing portion of the evening began not too long after that, many did come up to shake my hand and thank me, but I didn’t feel rather confident about any of it. Looking back I truly believe the reason for this was that every time I’ve spoken in the past, I’ve been filled with some type of spirit or energy that I can only say was God. But on this night, I can honestly say that I didn’t feel that presence during any of my share and I wonder if that’s only because I needed to learn this very valuable lesson. The fact is all the spiritually enlightened teachers I’ve ever read about have always been extremely humble people who work daily on deflating their ego. I honestly didn’t do much of that at all over the course of the few months I had leading up to this banquet.
While I initially did beat myself up quite a bit over this after I left the banquet that night, I decided it would be far healthier to not live with regret or even look negatively upon any of what happened. Instead, I made the decision to chalk it up as a positive lesson I needed to learn about ego deflation. Because ultimately I believe that’s exactly what needs to happen a little more in my life, especially as I continue to trudge this Road of Happy Destiny towards spiritual enlightenment.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson