If I genuinely awaken from addiction, my life will be transformed. The trouble can be recognizing how my new life is different—if I don’t understand my old life.
Those who understand others
are intelligent.
Those who understand themselves,
are enlightened.
-Lao Tzu-
For me, after I hit bottom in alcohol addiction and got sober—nothing changed. I was still sixty years old, retired, living alone with my dead memories from forty-five years of active addiction. Memories that I could not change; no matter how much negative energy: shame, guilt, grief, fear, desire, anger, or pride I dammed up in my mind, I couldn’t drown them or make them disappear. The truth is that I can’t change my past. So, what is different now? What did getting sober cost, and why it doesn’t matter?
It didn’t happen right away, but the longer I stayed sober, the more I came to understand that I couldn’t change anything about my thinking. I couldn’t stop the illusions I created in my mind based on my past. However, if I stayed sober, I could stay aware of my thinking; I could quiet those thoughts and dissolve the illusions of still living in the past. I discovered a transformation: when my thoughts quieted, my heart opened up to feeling again, and my mind calmed down into a peaceful, compassionate, meditative state. It allowed me to stop thinking and start feeling what was happening and respond with the intelligence that had arisen out of my suffering to distinguish an illusion in the past from what is real in the present moment.
So, what is different now? Nothing has changed about those dead memories from my addiction, and they still try to haunt me. But what’s different is I am no longer adding to them, which means after six years of sobriety, I stay aware of those thoughts, and my awareness can dissolve those illusions and cause them to haunt me less often. Also, I act differently by not relying on my thoughts but staying aware of my thinking. I started relying on what I feel in my heart now to respond with the understanding of what is real in the present moment and not react based on my memories (thinking)—repeating the past.
In summary, my sobriety did cost me my old life living alone; now, happily, I live with my wife again after twenty years, and she trusted me enough to re-marry me. I have a new sense of direction, no longer trapped on the horizontal timeline of thinking, projecting my memories through psychological time to control an imaginary future. Now, I am aware, sober, and free from time, without the resistance of thinking (time) blocking my feelings of unconditional love from flowing through my heart into the world. I have a bunch of new friends in my sober-minded recovery community, a few old ones I knew before addiction, and nobody understands me, but that’s okay: I do!
So, staying sober transformed a bunch of dead memories and being stuck in time—thinking in my head, repeating the past to create an imaginary future—into my new life, feeling reality flowing through my heart—love for myself and everything around me—in the present moment.
What did sobriety cost me from my past?
It doesn’t matter—Now!
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