Spirituality

Feelings

/ Tim / 1 Comment

“The great part about recovery is that you can feel again. The lousy part of recovery is that you can feel again.” 

My goal, when I was still in my disease, was to numb the feelings that flowed through my head. I wanted to escape how I felt about myself, about others and about situations. I couldn’t deal with how I was feeling so I tried to eliminate them completely. Loneliness, depression, fear, anger and resentment were some of the stronger feelings I felt more or less at any time and often in a combination of two or three. I had only one way to deal with them, and near the end, even that didn’t work. I didn’t know how to live with them. I guess I missed that course in life: Dealing with Feelings.

For the first three or four months in recovery I was on the proverbial ‘pink cloud’ where everything was wonderful. Then it hit me. I had started to work on Step Four and I was realizing all of my defects of character. As the saying goes, a sober horse thief is still a horse thief. I might have been in recovery, but I was now a ball of emotions and feelings that I had to learn to manage. I had begun to feel again. I remember going on a bit too long at one meeting. Afterward, another member asked me it I had a sponsor. “Of course I do!” I replied somewhat proudly. “Maybe you should use him,” suggested the member.

It was in the heart to heart discussions with my sponsor that I first started to learn that to deal with feelings I first had to accept them. Using examples of his own life, he showed me how he worked through those strong feelings in early recovery, just as I was doing: by working with his sponsor, by talking about them and by discovering their source, the ‘exact nature’ of those feelings. Why was I angry? Who or what was I angry at? Was there threat to me? What can I do to diminish my feelings of anger? I learned how to do the same with other feelings as well.

Analysing my feelings helped to diminish their strength and power. I learned that I needed to acknowledge what I was feeling and where it was taking me. I didn’t have to allow the feeling to take me into depression or loneliness, anger or fear. I had a choice. My feelings didn’t have to dictate my reaction. If I was lonely, I could go meet a friend or pick up the phone and call someone.  I  didn’t have to wallow in loneliness, allowing it to spiral me downward into deeper and deeper sadness. Often I would just get on my motorcycle and drive and drive and say the Serenity Prayer over and over until I felt peace replacing the strong feelings that threatened my recovery.

My life is manageable today and I lived more in tranquility than chaos. The frequency of those strong feelings is diminished. Strong feelings still do come up but not as often and I know that I can’t avoid them. I have to deal with them. It’s my choice when I do so, but sooner rather than later works for me and frees me to enjoy my life and not be burdened by it. I am grateful.

 

Dream

/ Tim / Leave a comment

A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. You must break out of your current comfort zone and become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown. -Denis Waitley

Dream! Plan! See a future that you want for yourself! What are your hopes and aspirations? What are your goals? Where would you like to see yourself in five years? Ten years?

What? You don’t see it as possible? Then you haven’t looked around you. Miracles happen, wishes come true and dreams are realized because people make them. I sit in a room full of people who had no dreams and little hope and here they are clean and sober and living lives beyond their wildest imagination. I can read online everyday success stories of people who came out of abject poverty and yet created a completely new world for themselves. The skyscraper you see glittering in the sun or the castle overlooking the valley were once dreams in the minds of their creators that have now been realized.

Not possible for you? Then you don’t know the process for fulfilling a dream. As addicts and alcoholics we spent hours solving the problems of the world and sharing with everyone who had the patience to hear what we might have done and what we were going to do. Unfortunately we never picked ourselves out of the gutter or got off of the barstools to make those ideas come true. We came back to the same place day after day and said the same things over and over again. If we do thing same things we get the same results. No one has ever married the person of their dreams, bought a house on a tropical island, written a book or fulfilled any dream by sitting on the barstool. You have to step away from what is and walk towards what can be.

Fulfilling a dream takes work. It takes patience. It takes humility. People often tell me that they wish they could live in the rainforest near the ocean as I do. I tell them that they can do so if they want to. “It’s not impossible.” They reply that they can’t, they have a job and family and a mortgage. What they are really saying is that they don’t want to risk a change of what they have to get what they want. They might like the idea of stepping out of their comfort zone, but they really don’t want to make the necessary changes. They don’t want to do the work needed or the time to do it so it’s all really just pie in the sky. What they are really dreaming about is finding a genie in a bottle or a visit from their fairy godmother.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Chinese proverb.

I’ve learned in my program of recovery to enjoy the moment, live in the present and trust the process. And I can still dream. I am learning not to live in the future, rather work toward it. If I want a sober and clean life it begins one day at a time and gradually the days begin to add up. At first it’s difficult. It’s change from the norm and out of my comfort zone.  With the Twelve Steps, it gets easier. I have to do the work. My dreams are the same. I have to work at them. I have to take that first step toward them today and another step tomorrow. And it all starts by stepping off the stool.

Life on Life’s Terms

/ Tim / 1 Comment

I grew up with my fair share of stubborness. After all, I used to say, I’m half Irish and half Dutch, so being stubborn is totally infused in my blood. If I knew something to be true, it was true and that was it. Period. It was important for others to understand my point of view, which I was quite sure, was the correct one. Like most people, I tried to live life on the terms dictate by my Ego.

My Ego gave me a sense of control over the people, places and things around me. I had an education, I was a quick thinker and I could resolve problems fairly easily, so I was pretty sure that I was right most of the time. Oh sure, once in a while I might make a mistake; I am human after all. I was pretty sure that I was doing fine and that the world was in the wrong in a lot of cases. But somehow, with my bright mind and sense of right and wrong I ended up at the doors of a meeting room looking for help.  Something was wrong and it had taken me a lot of years to realize it.

Living life on Life’s terms means two things for me today. First, this little gem reminds me that I am not in control of the people and events around me. I never was. My circle of control is about as large as I can swing my arms about myself, though in reality, I’m learning that it extends maybe to the tip of my nose. I can only control how I react and respond to the people, places and things around me. I’m learning that I can’t even control my thoughts. They just seem to pop into my head. What I do with those thoughts is up to me.

Life on Life’s terms is secondly, about acceptance. It is realizing that I am not right all of the time, probably most of the time. It is accepting that I can see only one facet of a situation. It is seeing that truth is fluid and changes with new discoveries in life. The only certainties in life are that there is no certainty, and that we don’t get out of here alive.

Acceptance of life on Life’s terms isn’t about being a door mat or about giving up on life because I can’t do anything about it. It’s about living a life of integrity with the realization that I have limited control and that I don’t have all of the answers. I go forward and I will make mistakes and I will learn. Things will happen to me and those I love that I won’t like and I can get through them.

Life is not perfect in the sense that everything isn’t rainbow, butterflies and unicorns. Life on Life’s terms gives me a perspective for living that make life easier to live. I can allow life to flow along and enjoy it as it happens. I can observe those things which interest me and stay more in the moment, dropping past resentments and fears of the future. I trust the process of life and know that the river of life will always let me float along.