Howard P. — Gilbert, AZ — AA

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Howard P. of Gilbert, Arizona, was booked into the Desert Pow Wow in June of 2006, and the desert kept asking him back — this archive holds him again the following June, leading a session on relationships in sobriety.

Outside the desert he is one of the better-documented teaching voices on the circuit. Eight of his talks sit in the public recovery-audio archives, and their titles read like a syllabus for the interior work: what Step Four showed him about being immobilized by fear, low self-esteem and the entanglement of the past, a program that works for atheists, and above all Step Eleven — meditations on the Twelve Steps, and an instruction he is remembered for, to mark the spot where you last saw your higher power pass and go sit in that window again. He carried the material well beyond Arizona: the Monterey Bay Area Roundup in 2003, a Day of History in Tempe in 2008, workshops going back to the early nineties.

That is the speaker this tape catches: not a man telling a drinking story, but one teaching a room how to sit still long enough for the eleventh step to do something.