How do I know if I am ready to get sober, and more importantly, am I ready to stay sober? For many, this question arises when our addicted body and mind are on the verge of collapse, or have already hit bottom in addiction, from the physical pain and mental suffering we can no longer tolerate—totally exhausted from the discomfort and unhappiness that we are living. The truth is hitting bottom in addiction may be one of numerous wake-up calls each of us will receive in our lives, prompting us to look within our earthly ego body-mind to uncover our spiritual Higher Power of true Self-awareness. Some may begin looking within following the death of a loved one, or their own near-death experience, an accident or illness; some after a loss of their physical livelihood or artistic expression; others when dealing with emotional heartbreak;  and others experiencing a simple sunrise or random auspicious event in Nature; still others while reaching out with compassion or empathy to help others in need. Unfortunately, many of us choose to travel the long, torturous road of pain and suffering in addiction, oblivious to the multitude of wake-up calls Life may present—before we hit bottom. That’s when the mind stops thinking, and our Self-awareness effortlessly meets our survival needs in the ever-present moment.

The truth is that until we are truly ready to stay sober, we are not ready to get sober! The brutal truth is that thinking, in our head, that we are ready to get sober doesn’t mean we have opened our heart to intuitively feel and understand how we need to live our life differently to stay sober. That is the unfortunate truth for most addicts: after hitting bottom and staying sober for a while, our thinking mind resurfaces and starts recreating the past again; until we lose focus and stop paying attention to the warning bells still ringing in the world to which, eventually, we may return to try living a sober life. So, soon after feeling the urgency and doing the work, we forget about the strength of awareness we found within to get sober, and quickly re-identify with our body-mind self-image in the world, and lose the fortitude to continue observing the mind and dissolve our addiction cravings within—to stay sober.

So, the real question is not, how do I stay sober; it’s how do I stay aware? After I hit bottom in addiction, and my mind shuts down and stops thinking, and my true Self-awareness awakens in sobriety; how do I stay aware of what my mind is doing—when my mind wakes up again? When this question arises, it means we have truly received the wake-up call: that it is time to listen to our internal guru (a.k.a. God, Higher Power, Universal mind, or whatever…), and once we hear the wake-up call, we can’t unhear it; once we see the Light of Awareness, we can’t unsee it! Now we know, and we will never forget, that we have the power to stay soberly aware of what our mind is doing: its constant thinking, recreating, planning, and imagining. Also, the beauty is knowing that true Self-awareness gives us the Higher Power to observe our thoughts until those thoughts dissolve silently, which quiets the mind into a meditative state, rendering our addictions powerless, and that’s how we stay sober: we stay aware!

That’s why we are here in Recovery: our mind hit bottom in addiction and shut down because it had exhausted all our embedded thought patterns from the past, in search of a cure that doesn’t exist in our body-mind or outside of it; so, it stopped thinking, and ever-present true Self-awareness took over our body and brought us to Recovery to save our body-mind—otherwise, eventually, we will die from addiction! So, please don’t forget that by quieting the mind to look within, we can always find ever-present true Self-awareness, which gives us the strength to dissolve our past with loving-kindness and the Higher Power to overcome our addictions and stay sober by staying aware!

VAB  07.23.26

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