Sunday, April 13, 2014

With Rigorous Honesty I Surrender

We fall and we get back up again.  Yes, after almost three years of sobriety I fell... I took my will back, my disease took over and I began to believe that I would be ok to have a drink again.  That drink led me to the depths of my disease in a few very short hours.  It only took one night to realize more clearly than ever that I have an allergy of the mind and body.  My relapse lasted one day and beneath my ego's desire to use it to keep me out there, it has turned out to be an incredible gift of deeper surrender and a stronger awareness of my own disease process.

Today, with the help of my loving sponsor and an incredible sobriety community, I am 18 days clean and sober once again. 18 days seems to pale in comparison to the almost three years that I had but somehow each of these 18 days feels like gold to me and I value my sobriety like never before.  There is a new level of surrender which is actually so refreshing and I get this funny feeling that there is whole new level of opportunities and gifts that live at this level of surrender.  It's like I decided to play mercy with alcohol just taunting the disease to see if it's real and if I have it.  Mercy I cry out and once again I have surrendered.  This week someone about my age from this small town where I live died of a heroin overdose and all of a sudden any shame that was associated with my relapse faded into sheer gratitude for being alive.  I have learned to reframe relapse as a symptom of sickness and not a sign of being bad.  I am not a bad person, I am a sick person and as long as I keep coming back I am on the road of recovery.

Being new in recovery again I am filled with tons of unbridled emotion and yesterday I was reminded of what in an incredibly sacred place my yoga mat is.  Like a magic carpet I can take all of my fear, all of my sadness, all of my desire to be anywhere but in the moment that I am in, to my mat and somehow I always come away feeling much more grounded yet uplifted.  This is a powerful tool for these early days.

So, I bask today in letting go of what I know that I don't know and I live in that sweet spot of surrender.  I find my freedom and my bliss right here where I am standing.

4 comments:

  1. It's a disease that wants to kill us. I should have 3 years in June. My home group, a gratitude meeting, meets 6 days a week and has about 60 people attending, on average, each morning. There's people with long term sobriety and people who do research and come back. We need them all!

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  2. Hello,

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  3. Your article is very helpful thank you very much for sharing .

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