Suffering–hitting bottom–is a shock to awaken me, to help me understand life–NOW. An opportunity to receive universal grace, to awaken my intelligence within; if I awaken and allow yourself the grace to totally feel the pain and understand the temporary nature of loss and suffering, the desire to escape through things outside of me–addiction–will dissolve in the eternal present moment.

Hitting bottom happens when I don’t know how to stop suffering in addiction.

All of us have hit bottom in our addiction, which caused us to seek help because we could not think of anything else to do to keep from hurting ourselves or others. Let’s not sugarcoat it; each of us instinctively had to get help to survive addiction, and thankfully, we did, but what now?

My bottom happens when my mind is exhausted from wasting all my energy trying—when I don’t know how—to think my way out of addiction. I don’t know how, but when I hit bottom, my mind was exhausted, my thinking stopped, and my addiction stopped—temporarily. When I don’t know how I discover the truth; when my mind was completely spent, and there was no movement of thought. I became aware of my mental conditioning and realized that my thinking causes my suffering, that I am addicted to my thinking, and that my thinking is based on my past mental conditioning.

So, my question is: What happened when you decided to get help?

Not what fucked-up events happened that caused you to seek help, but when you hit bottom and got sober, what changed about the way you see yourself or the way you see what is happening in the world around you? How are you holding onto what changed? How are you holding onto that awareness?

I finally had to tap out….

For me, at the age of sixty, after forty-five years of alcohol addiction, I finally had to tap out. After all those years of trying to think my way out of addiction, my mind was exhausted, and little did I know that in the early days of my sobriety, I started to become aware of the thinking patterns that were causing my addiction—I began to become aware. In the past five-plus years, I have put most of my energy into growing that initial glimpse of the light of awareness—my ability to observe my thinking nonjudgmentally. Another word for nonjudgmental observation of my thinking is meditation, which can happen anywhere at any moment. I am learning to channel all my physical, emotional, and mental energy into observing—not thinking. When I don’t know, I focus all that energy in effortless attention—without judging everything—in that energy, I discover my Higher Power, which gives me the strength not to repeat the past but to do the next right thing in the present moment to stay sober!

6/15/23

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