Whatever pretty word I tried to obscure it with, innocence, naiveté, I was really fooling myself, and no one else. The truth was plain to everyone. When I got it, though, I got it completely. Twenty five years of fooling myself led me to the sudden, and profound realization of the truth. I can never use methamphetamine again without developing the phenomena of craving which sends me down a path of self-destruction. Just like any other complex system, though, when one part of a life is radically altered, every other part is forced to change. When one old idea is…

I am honored to be contributing to The Second Road. In the future I will be addressing issues relevant to recovery and relationships. My hope is to both inform you and challenge your beliefs. I want you to step back and take an honest look at yourself and what you are doing in your recovery and in your relationships. New information creates change. In fact, I believe much of our suffering comes from ignorance and misinformation. Later I discuss several ways of looking at recovery, but before I do I want to share some of my story.

I have been…

“I am hoping all of you will listen and hear me tonight. I am truly at a low point. The alcoholic in my life told me tonight that I am an embarassment. When I expressed my need for time and attention, I was recvd with a cold shoulder and told to leave. I actually drank too much tonight. I haven’t done that in a year at least. The alcoholic in my life does it regularly and i never know if they are alive or not, but tonight i did it and I am an embarassment to them because of it.…

This was sent to me by a friend who lost her youngest brother to alcohol and drugs almost five years ago. Mikey was the youngest of 6 children, had the ability to turn the the most mundane objects into works of art, was handsome, witty, was an excellent cook, an animal lover, a “neat freak”, was very well read and had an undying devotion to his family. He was also lonely, tended to take everything to the extreme, tried relentlessly to stay clean, and often did so for months at a time… only to go back into the dark, a…

Now that I’ve been off the drugs for almost nine months and I’m feeling more stable in my recovery from drug addiction, I’m starting to pay more attention to the myriad other ways that I’m dysfunctional. The main one that I am very tentatively starting to work on is my relationship with food (and eating, and body image.) Which is appropriate, I think, because my food/eating issues are very much connected to my drug-abuse issues.

Ah, food. This is the one area where abstinence just isn’t going to work. Too bad.

Now, food and I have had an effed up relationship, off…

Al-Anon has lots of slogans that help you to focus on working the program. One of my favorites is, “How important is it?”. When I think about the years that I spent worrying, being anxious and busting a gasket over insignificant crap, I know now that none of it was really important. In the grand scheme of life, there aren’t a lot of things that are really worth personal turmoil. The amount of energy that I wasted on criticism both of self and others, resentment, and a lot of other baggage never enhanced my life or anyone else’s. Instead, I…

The American writer Edgar Allan Poe produced a short story titled The Purloined Letter that is considered to be one of the progenitors of the detective story as we know it today. It involves a valuable manuscript that cannot be found by the police despite a careful search. Poe’s protagonist, M. Dupin, finds the letter hidden in plain sight, disguised as a different manuscript by writing on the reverse side, and then rolling it up to conceal the “true” writings. Sometimes we complicate the search for spiritual support in much the same way, ignoring the obvious while searching high and…

by Beth E.

It was a month after the summer solstice

And each morning the red mercury rose with the

speed of a flame against a dry, dead tree.

As I struggled to get out of bed

I looked at my closet full of clothes

Meant for times of flurries and chill

I quickly became overwhelmed

And burrowed like a mole

Crawling through the dark, dirt of my feelings

With only the broken soil of my tangled sheets

Disclosing my attempts to hide and run underground

When I could no longer deny the sun

I rose and grabbed one of my four summer outfits

From a wrinkled mass on the other side of my…

The further I get into consideration of mind, body and spirit, the more I realize how completely the three aspects dovetail. It is practically impossible to be spiritually and mentally healthy while in poor physical condition, and the aches, pains and discomfort associated with such things — even with simple poor nutrition and/or lack of exercise — will interfere with our spiritual life as well. As I once heard someone say in a meeting, “When you feel like s**t, it’s hard to rise above it.” The old adage of “a sound mind in a sound body” is oh-so-true!

Low blood sugar…

Learning to love and care for yourself is a topic that often comes up in Al-Anon. I’ve heard people share about how they never had any time to love themselves or take care of themselves because they were always taking care of others. Some people have mentioned having no money with which to take care of themselves, because they are in financial trouble due to the alcoholic’s spending. At one meeting, a lady shared that she didn’t know what it meant to love herself, and if someone would just give her a set of instructions, she could follow that and…

The following article appeared in the Baltimore Sun - it’s worth sharing. Enjoy.

By Rob Hiaasen|Sun reporter

June 29, 2008

“The only concept of god that I believed in at all, when I got here, was the God of Unintended Consequences,” Robert said, sitting across the table from me eating burritos at a taco stand at one o’clock in the morning. “Every time I drank bad stuff happened. I wasn’t trying to wreck my car, or sleep with my friend’s girlfriend, or get arrested. I wasn’t trying to lose my job or get beaten up. It just happened.”

The nature of consciousness is to sort, order, categorize, label, associate, attribute, and differentiate sensory and cognitive information. Our very brains are structurally…

The serenity prayer is, without doubt, one of the most useful — tools, ideas, comforts, guides, whatever you want to call it — that I’ve gotten from my recovery. Like most profound truths, it could hardly be more simple, and yet there is a lifetime of guidance in those few lines.

However, it isn’t guidance that I was able to accept while I was still active in my addictions. Addicts, alcholics and codependents don’t really have the capacity to deal with inaction (which is what, in most cases, the Serenity Prayer mandates). We want to be doing something, making things go…

I was on the phone with a friend one day and she commented on the fact that I was obviously not present in the call. First of all I had no idea what kind of language is “present in the call.” Second, if you were trying to figure out what you could smoke without out harming your unborn child (and I’m not talking Pall Malls) or whether you should deal with that strange wailing coming from your basement you wouldn’t be present either. Third, shut up. She told me she would be right over. Gross.
pllleeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaase go away!

I would so much…

I’ve read that it’s possible to have unconditional love of self in which you love yourself regardless of external conditions. This means being true to your feelings regardless of those around you. Based on what I know from Al-Anon, the HP loves each of us unconditionally. And if I look outside myself for love, I will not find unconditional love from another human. This has been a tough one to understand in my past but now I know that my demands for love often far exceed what the other person can give. And then my expectations of the other become…

“Caliente!”

Absolutely an understatement I thought as I nodded my head in the direction of my latin co-worker. Even hotter for me, four days out of the crack pipe. The hard work feels good, gives purpose to my day and helps me live in the moment. Trying not to fall off the scaffold, read a measurement accurately, cut, drill, etc., at an acceptable rate and quality of work keeps my head out of my empty pocket.

The structure. The relationships. The patterns. The accountability. All these elements coagulate somehow at long last to grant me opportunity to get clean and, most importantly,…

So I found this place - this place called recovery. It sucked. And it saved. The meetings, the coffee, the cookies, that smell of church basements that forced me to remember my Catholic up bringing, any form of sugar I could consume, the ego trips, the eye rolling, the clock watching,  the endless stories - it all somehow made me feel that maybe I could make it.

Maybe I was crazy but so what? I mean if this chick next to me who lost the ability to
add, subtract, and speak because of a binge could show up tonight then I better…

Grief is often overlooked in addiction treatment, and almost universally so by the 12-step programs. It isn’t necessary that this should be the case, since the 4th, 5th, 8th and 9th steps are capable of dealing with it, when used skillfully by a good sponsor and a willing sponsee, and any reasonably competent therapist who is willing to do the research and attend a few seminars can deal with it in group.

I think the reasons are more basic than that: some of the same reasons that gave us an excuse for our abuse of chemicals. Quite simply, human beings instinctively…

Since I have presumed to write about Mind, Body and Spirit for The Second Road, you deserve to know my own positions on related issues.  This is my take on living in general.  You need not feel obliged to agree with any of it, but I hope it makes sense and does not seem too stodgy — a vice of which I have been accused from time to time.

I am currently having an e-mail exchange with a lady I knew at school. She is now a minister, and I think what we are doing in our correspondence is feeling each…

I have recently been involved in a dialogue with some Evangelical Christian folk.  The results have been interesting.

As is often the case, the encounters began with an approach in an attempt to “save” me.  This sort of thing used to really bother me.  Eventually I came to realize that, unlike some lesser species, such as TV evangelists, most Evangelicals are simply trying to do me a favor.  They believe in their hearts that my soul is doomed, and they want to help.  Viewed that way, it is hard to remain insulted or angry.  Annoyed is a different matter.

Buddhists do not…