Staying Put

The hardest thing about sobriety is having no escape from dealing with the strong emotions of life.? I don’t think we realize what it is we are doing when we spend countless minutes scrolling social media or spending money on Whamazon.? It’s almost second nature to just turn on that TV after work to “decompress” or to zone out.? We don’t question our actions and ask ourselves why we do these things because I don’t think it is something we think about.? I know I never did.? I never thought that I craved being busy at work because I was avoiding something in my life.?

What is it we are really running from?? Is it boredom?? Unhappiness at home?? A lack of purpose in our lives?? ?Forget the fact that we don’t ever wonder why we habituate in certain ways.? There could be many reasons as to how we acquired the habit of escaping, but the fact remains that we all do it whether we realize it or not. ?For me, I use lots of tools to numb out the pain of life now that alcohol is gone and I’m realizing that these methods are no longer serving me as true means of escape.? I still feel anger (quite frequently), sadness, guilt, boredom, jealousy, fear, hope, love, and everything in between.? And I really and truly can’t get away.?

My family is truly amazing and a wonder to behold and it is always those closest to us that bring out the things we need to work on most on ourselves.? Through meditation and reading/listening to spiritual teachers, I’ve learned how to pay attention to the feelings inside me and to create space for those feelings.? So now instead of going from 0-60 into anger when my children evoke something inside me, I’m aware of the sensations that tune me into the first signs of irritation so I can then take a moment to collect myself and breath before engaging in the situation.? This is extremely difficult.? I fail. Often.? So, a lot of what I have to do is also learn to give myself grace and turn around the tendency to criticize myself and focus on what is good.? And what is worth celebrating is the fact that I was aware of the irritation and the progress that has been made.? I don’t have to be better then anyone else, and I don’t ever want to compete with anyone else, but I do want to be better than I was the day before and the day before that.?

Part of the fear of really diving into my shadow self and doing the shadow work is because of the stories that I’ve created about what that might mean or look like when I start digging in.? I fear the unknown because I let myself imagine the worst.? I basically am creating a story line based on fiction and then letting that story control my life instead of stepping back and realizing that it is just that – a story.? The biggest obstacle to being fully alive is ourselves.

I had a friend at work tell me that they had a fundamental need but were afraid to ask someone to fulfill that need.? There is so much bravery and self-awareness in that confession.? But what is interesting is that the fear expressed is based on a story created in their head because of life experiences.? Rather than experience the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, we chose to be “safe” and not allow ourselves to be vulnerable to another person.? Yet that “safety” comes at a large price and the obstacle is truly a made-up story.? What would life be like if we could remove the story?

Another similar example comes from Jordan Peterson’s book “Twelve Rules for Life”, rule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.? Jordan explains that people will 100% make sure their dog gets their medication, but we constantly forget to take our own.? This simple fact demonstrates the lack of love we have for ourselves, if we can’t even bother to take our own medicine knowing full well that without it, we could put our health in serious danger.? ?If we keep running away and escaping into the bottle, the next TV series, our phones, whatever, because of our fear of what may be lurking in the shadows of boredom, then we are basically admitting we do not actually love ourselves enough to believe we are worth fulfilling that emotional need, taking the medicine as prescribed.

When I finally was able to say that I know who “I am” that came with it an understanding of the fundamental desire that I needed to love myself.? I did not love myself before I started on my journey and there was so much pain.? The pain is still there, don’t get me wrong, but it has shifted.? Hard to explain really.? But I know what it means to love myself now and because of that I am able to love others and I think that is fundamental to everything.?

The years of self-loathing ran deep and it came with a sense of abandonment and loneliness from when I was a child.? When we are not present for our children, we are emotionally unavailable to their needs and it has a profound affect on their sense of self.? My father was an alcoholic and he remarried quickly after his divorce.? I might have been 3 or 4.? He spent most evenings at the bar, was never violent, but left our parenting up to my step-mother who was basically a child herself and had a quick temper.? We pushed her buttons and her behavioral response was traumatic.? It was a very hard childhood and I was not able to be with my mother.? And it hurts now, such raw pain, and the memory is making me tear up and my nose run.?

My point is that my upbringing has led me to think that I am not worthy of love by the people closest to me and so I am guarded, and most interactions are laden with a fear of rejection.? This is an obstacle that I am trying to remove so that I can come at every interaction as whole as possible with the least amount of bias.? It’s not easy to do and I suck at it a lot, especially at home, but I want to be better for my family and for everyone I meet.? It’s not fair to them that they are subject to my insecurities because I have not done the due diligence in facing my shit.? They deserve better than that.?

With all this processing and working through my gunk, I’ve learned that I was never really taught how to process emotions in a healthy way.? I remember going to a psychologist when I was in my senior year because I had all these emotions and didn’t know how to express them, and their solution was to put me on medication and claimed I was bi-polar.? I’m not, or if I am, I must be extremely high functioning.? Either way, it didn’t solve the problem. I went to college anorexic and came home with bulimia.? If it wasn’t for my mom taking the time to be there for me, I would never have gotten back on my feet and gone back to college to complete my degree.? ?

All of this inner child pain remained hidden and dormant while I was drinking.? I can’t hide from it now.? There is no escape.? The old ways of survival: avoidance, addiction, alcoholism are no longer part of my path.? I truly believe that meditation allows us an avenue to find freedom from suffering but what I didn’t understand until recently is that we can’t meditate away the pain, the sorrow, the hurt, the rage.? They don’t go away, they are still there, we just learn to give them space and not let them overtake us.?

When issues arise in our lives with people we care about and even those we might not enjoy being around, we find so much truth about ourselves.? We learn about the things we have repressed when we pay attention and use these moments as lines of inquiry.? But we can only do that if we put the obstacle of fear aside because we have learned that we are worthy of love, of that goodness, of that beauty that exists in the world.? The real goal is to let ourselves feel whatever it is we are feeling, by giving those feelings space to be, and not attaching a story line to them or attach our conscious awareness to that feeling so that we don’t get lost in it.? We have to stay put and let it just be what it is.?

A friend introduced me to Pema Chodron recently and in her teaching on “Getting Unstuck”, she talked about this notion of staying put in an example about Scabies.? She basically said that emotions are like scabies, they make you want to scratch and scratch them but if you continue to scratch them you can bleed to death.? Emotions are similar in that they get stronger the more you attach yourself to them.? If you allow them to be, no matter how intense the urge is to scratch them, then you will eventually heal.?

Meditation teaches us that feelings come and go, thoughts come and go, sensations come and go, and that the only thing that we can truly count on as permanent is the fact that everything changes.? There is nothing within our minds that we can hold on to and it actually this impermanence that provides me with a sense of ease because I know that no matter how bad it hurts right now, that pain will not last.? And it will only get stronger if I get lost in the emotion because I’ve created a story about it.? What all this boils down to is that there is truly no escape from my emotions, that any self-created obstacle can be removed by stripping out the stories habituated over time, and that true healing comes from just staying put.

Imagine a world where we aren’t scared of our feelings, where we understand how we physically and emotionally react, where we mindfully not induce suffering on others?? Imagine a world where we can all feel safe knowing that escape is no longer an option we choose, but instead we chose to stay. ??I am on this journey because I want to be emotionally available for my family and to provide a healthy environment for their childhood and because I want to be able to be the best version of myself for them and for everyone that I meet.? ?I want everyone to be happy and to feel free and I pray that the thoughts, words, and actions of my own life be a contribution to that happiness and freedom for all.