When I finally awaken from addiction, my Life will be transformed. The challenge is that the transformation to sobriety requires significant revelations. So, how can I start living a new and radically different life—now—if I don’t understand my old Life, and how my past led me into addiction?

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 I can’t change; all the negative conscious feelings: shame, guilt, grief, fear, desire, anger, and pride hard-wired into my brain; I couldn’t drown them or magically will my emotions to disappear. The brutal truth I had to wake up to, and accept, is that I have to understand my past to heal my past to live a different life now.

So, what is different now? What did getting sober cost me, and why doesn’t it matter if I want to stay sober?

It didn’t happen right away, but the longer I stayed sober, the more I came to understand that I was trapped in my head, thinking—constantly replaying my addicted past. I couldn’t stop the illusion in my mind of living a different future, one based only on what I already knew. But if I stayed sober, I could stay aware of my thinking; I could silently observe and quiet those addictive thoughts and dissolve the cravings to numb my mind, and temporarily erase my past. That’s when I experienced the revelation: when my thoughts quieted, my heart opened up to feeling again; my mind settled into a peaceful, compassionate, meditative state, and I felt Love energy flowing through my heart, which allowed me to accept (heal) my past and start liking myself again, enough to start projecting unconditional Love again, and feel it being reflected by the world around me. Sobriety gave me the freedom to feel Life’s creativity in me, to project and receive Love again, and that transformed everything, from living with negative conscious feelings to projecting and perceiving the positive feelings of willingness, acceptance, reason, Love, joy, peace, and, ultimately, the revelation of enlightenment: that I am not the hard-wired, thinking mind conditioned by my past, rather my true Self is the unmanifested, eternal light of pure conscious awareness. The same light that shines in each of us and unites us all in this temporary world we project.

So, what is different now? Nothing has changed about those dead memories from my addicted past; they still linger and try to haunt me. But what is different is that I am no longer adding to them. And after eight years of sobriety, I am stronger about staying aware of my addictive thoughts if they do arise; my silent, nonjudgmental true Self awareness can dissolve the illusions and cause them to go dormant and haunt me less often. Also, I act differently by not relying on my own thinking; now I rely on the undistorted feelings in my heart to respond with a positive understanding of what is real, rather than reacting based on my memories, which will only repeat the past.

In summary, my sobriety did cost me my old Life, living alone in my head, trying to manipulate the suffering from my past to be less painful now. Now I am living comfortably with my wife again. After twenty years and my awakening and recovery, she trusted me enough to remarry and live a sober life together. Now, I am sober, aware, and free from the limitations of my past, which I have accepted, and they no longer block my feelings of unconditional Love that I share with the world around me. I have a bunch of new friends in my sober-minded, open-hearted recovery community, a few old friends I knew before addiction, and I’m not sure if everybody understands me, but that’s okay: I do!

So, staying sober transformed a bunch of dead memories and being imprisoned by my own thinking of constantly repeating the past in hopes of creating a different future, into my new Life: living the reality of feeling Love flowing through my heart again—Love for myself and everything around me—in the present moment.

What did sobriety cost me? It doesn’t matter—Now!

VAB 04.26.26

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