Logon
Translate

User login

GTranslate

French German Italian Portuguese Russian Spanish

The Home of Evolutioneers

The Radical Spirituality of Generation X, Part 19: Picking Up the Slack: An Addict’s Journey

In Tibet, there is a class of beings called the Hungry Ghosts that are said to haunt the lower astral planes. They have tight, tiny mouths and giant, grumbling bellies, and live in a constant state of dissatisfaction because they can’t ever eat enough to be full. Our human attempts to eat our way out of dissatisfaction end just as dismally. Born free, we slowly morph into Borg Teletubbies. Drug addicts and alcoholics are simply the most exaggerated and dramatic examples of this phenomenon — the personified shadow of our culture’s materialistic end-of-the-millennium binge.

My fellow Gen Xers and I became teenagers in the “me decade,” the soulless greed fueled Reagan Eighties. Everyone was following the Alzheimer cowboy into a regressive old west fantasy world where resources were limitless. Cocaine blew egos out of all proportion, creating corporate rapists whose toxic waste was the only thing that trickled down to the people. A whole wave of former hippies caved in to materialism and became yuppies. Even the music was shallow and mechanical, full of pyrotechnics, hairspray, and soulless synthesizers.

The spirit and meaning that was missing from my formative years became my empty belly and started me on a gut-level quest for spiritual enlightenment. Before I became conscious that this was what I was seeking, though, I followed the vampire pack’s lead and developed a taste for blood. I sucked my unfair American share of resources and built myself a plush technological and pharmacological coffin. Coming out of the shadows now, I feel the need to settle my account and give back the only gold I have, the story of my soul's growth. Before recovery, I was a numb petty thief lifting energy from everyone around me with increasingly obvious sleights of hand. Now, after turning myself inside out and finding my silver lining, I am a creation of my higher self. Thanks to many years of the Divine Mother’s intervention, starting with my real mother dragging me to treatment literally kicking and screaming, I am finally picking up my slack and giving back, lending a healing hand to my community.

I will start my soul’s story with a couple of war stories that bookend ten years of slacking away from the trials of my life through extensive self-medication. I first started drinking at age eleven over an unrequited obsession with a girl. I had pined for her quietly for several years only to find out through the sixth grade grapevine that she thought I was “too weird.” This was in line with a general consensus that had been building since I learned to speak. When I found out she had a crush on a more “normal” boy, I quickly became his best friend and understudy. He drank and smoked and fought. A good mimic, I picked up those things quickly. But my young love was not convinced by my acting trick and my sense of freakishness deepened.

Drinking was successful, however, in helping me fit in better, and quickly changed from an act into a habit. In a loud, inebriated crowd my weirdness could easily slip under the radar. And if someone did confront my strange behavior, I finally had an excuse: “Well, I was just drunk! I wasn’t myself!” The next ten years were an odd odyssey: I drank a lot, smoked a lot of pot, ate a lot of acid and mushrooms, and got a lot weirder.

Then one day my charade ended. A fellow weirdo from Duluth whose bizarre sense of humor had made him a hero to me shot his own heart out with a shotgun. At the same time I lost my first true love, the first woman who saw all of me and loved me, who embraced my strangeness and called it genius. I was such a numbed-out zombie from all the drugs I was doing that I couldn’t feel the wave of grief washing over me. Without a way to get out, my emotions turned psychotic. I began fantasizing about dying accidentally. I wanted to die, but I couldn’t bear the thought of being remembered with anger or pity through the stigmatized lens of suicide. I began praying for a happy fatal accident that would set me free but let me keep my vanity intact.

Then, in the depths of my depression, a strange alchemy promised to turn my leaden hopelessness to gold. A woman in my poetry class was going through a hell parallel to mine. She, however, was dealing with her tragedies completely cleanly and lucidly, and, not surprisingly, writing much better poetry about it. Several synchronicities led me to believe that she was the light at the end of my tunnel and could save me. I began focusing all of my poems at her.

I realized I had finally lost my grip when more misinterpreted synchronicities convinced me that I was meant to go windsurfing in a thunderstorm and get struck by lightning so that I could die and be revived by one of my roommates, Phil. Phil was a big clumsy welder with five minutes of half-hearted CPR training from me, which I distantly remembered from a few drunken summers as a lifeguard. My belief was that I would win a near death experience and the love of the poetess and everything would be rosy. The deeper reality was that I was getting more than a bit impatient waiting for a happy accident to kill me. I was starting to force God’s hand.

Thankfully, the storm I thought was coming for me never arrived. I wrote a poem called “Manic Depression” that began with a manic plea for the poetess’ love and ended with me alone, floating in a limp wind on a gray lake, no bolt of hope in site. The poetess liked the poem, but was not impressed with the desperate show of affection. My self-destructive bent had been dressed up and veiled in myth and mystery, but its basic energy of “I’ll kill myself if you won’t love me” hadn’t been refined much since I was eleven. She eventually told me to stop calling. I had never reached this level of desperation and rejection before, and it was the straw that broke my slacking back and brought me to my knees, ready for treatment.

I want to stop talking about the problem now. Any more would be wallowing, because here I sit, happily writing this, due solely to a continuous string of miracles. Too often when people relapse and leave the recovery community they are written off with the proclamation that "They just haven't hit their bottom yet.” I understand from my own experience the ego-stripping gift of these tragic bottomings, but I think it's just as common that the missing link in recovery is a positive spiritual experience that lends a glimpse of a higher top. So, in the interest of balancing the scales, from here on I will focus on my peak spiritual experiences. They are the lightning life that surged through me in recovery, and brought my heart back from that dead gray day at the lake, shock by shock.

First off, my drug-addled, malnourished body had a long way to go to reclaim optimal functioning. Not much spirit would be able enter me until I did some major internal housecleaning. Over the first seven years of my recovery, every cell in my body, with the exception of my brain and spinal cord, was created anew. This is the physical underpinning of the seven-year itch, and why year seven of recovery is known as “the second surrender.” My nervous core may still have a predilection for electric intensity, but cell by cell I've built a new temple around that center. Now my high-wired fanaticism is transmitted through tissue that wants to live and manifests as a passion for purification instead of a lust for self-destruction.

Before I got clean, I canvassed for Greenpeace, rabidly attacking the corporate status quo for their poisoning of the environment. At the same time, I created fantastic and elaborate justifications for the hazardous waste I dumped into my own body every night. I was an artist who suffered from too much genius and lucidity. I needed to do some neural pruning in order to communicate with the sheep. I believed this until I got my first D minus in college and realized I'd dumbed myself down a little farther than intended.

In recovery, I began to realize that any change I wanted to make in the world had to start with my own body. I have eased the toxic influx by eating more consciously, eliminating pesticide-laden meat, and buying organically. I have cut back on refined sugars and high glycemic-index carbohydrates, which keep blood sugar levels on a vicious roller coaster. Research has shown that limiting them helps to quell the physical cravings for the quick sugary fix of alcohol that can happen in those raw, thoughtless blood sugar troughs. Exercise has also helped me maintain the momentum of my physical recovery. In my first year clean, I ran a marathon, which led me to finally quit smoking. It was just too difficult to smoke with all that bouncing up and down. Also, I have returned off and on to the pools of my youth to let loose my frozen rage, thrashing steadily away from that grey lake of depression and towards a new clarity.

A year and a half into recovery I went on my first fast. After seven days, several enemas, and some intestinal cleansers, I lost a few pounds of god knows what that never came back. That fast got some toxins out of my vision too, and my purified eyes began to see a blue-green aura around me and every other living being. Later, I learned this is the etheric body. Since then, I've tried to go on four day fasts at every seasonal transition to give the fat cells that are still saturated with waste a chance to spit their poisons out.

As my body started to function again, I became more and more able to come out of my isolation. At my lowest point using, I wanted desperately to be adored for my songs, but I was so painfully shy of performing with my guitar and harmonica that the only audience I could stomach was the pot plants growing in my closet. The only emotion I could show anymore was anger, which drove everyone close to me away. I had truly become a Hungry Ghost, unmoored from the human race. Thankfully there were other formerly ghostly souls who reached out to me at meetings and began reeling me in with their unconditional love and compassion. They spoke knowingly of the same hell I’d just come out of, but somehow had regained the ability to laugh and smile and hug. After attending for a while, I learned the mechanics of this transformation and started putting those principles into action. Meetings brought me an instant community when I most needed it. They became the family I never had, the family who really understood me.

For the last several years, I’ve participated in a sweat lodge circle of recovering people led by my sponsor Robert, an Apache pipe-carrier, sun dancer, and “windigo” — something like a sacred clown. Those sweats have helped me pray and sing more open-heartedly, my soul pouring out through my skin's crying pores. The first round of hot steam starts with prayers to the worst off in the world, people in constant physical pain. Slowly, through the next three increasingly scalding rounds, our prayers circle back to our community, our families and loved ones, and finally ourselves. At that point of utter exhaustion, there's no energy for frivolous prayers, only the terse truth of what we really need. This practice has given me gratitude and lessened the narcissism that is the hallmark of addiction and the truth behind the joke: “How many addicts does it take to screw in a light bulb? One, you just hold the bulb and wait for the world to revolve around you.” I have learned how to surmount this selfish tendency and be responsible to the larger world from Robert’s pure hearted example in the lodge and beyond it as a father and counselor.

One major way that I’ve been able to put my gratitude into practice has been to work to help others get clean. For several years I worked as a drug and alcohol case manager at Hope Haven, a six-week residential treatment center right upstairs from Colvin Manor, the halfway house where I spent my first up-all-night white-knuckled nail-biting coffee-twitching chain-smoking dysfunctional-relationship-clinging year of recovery. In the last two years I’ve been working for Community Housing and Services as a case manager for their PTO program. At PTO, I work with the same homeless addicted population but for a much longer period, up to two years. The two-year length of the program is crucial because of a phenomenon called post acute withdrawal or PAW that goes along with chronic use. Long after the drugs are gone from your body, your chemistry is still hobbled. You don’t feel pleasure. You can’t sleep right. You can’t think straight. Emotions swing from extreme overreaction to a dull flatline. A lot of people give up in this limbo because they feel worse than when they were using and suspect that they may be permanently damaged. They need a lot of cheerleading and advocating to help them have faith that these things can change.

At Hope Haven and PTO I’ve worked with the worst-case scenarios: the homeless and hopeless revolving-door cases, the angry resistant probation and parole referrals, and those with major mental health diagnoses in addition to their addictions. It often feels frustrating trying to get past their defenses. For these people to let down their guard and become fully conscious, they must come face to face with the worst human and institutional horrors of our twisted century: Rape, Incest, War, Murder, Racism. People in this population make slow progress and often take a long time to blossom and stay clean; many die trying. But periodically, I have gotten to watch one crack open and there is enough hope and beauty in those scenes to satisfy me that I’m right where I should be: lending a hand to those making the leap of faith into recovery. Being able to come full circle and help others in this way has given some much needed meaning to the self-inflicted wounding that I endured.

The recovery process is similar to a long shamanic journey. In shamanic cultures, the call to shamanic healing is precipitated by a grave and mysterious illness that takes the initiate to the brink of destruction. This dismembers the ego of the initiate so they can be rebuilt as a healer, a go-between with one foot in this world and one foot in the healing world of dreams. From this stance, illness, addiction, or even a suicide can be seen as potential gifts. But it takes a lot of time and healing to redeem them and find their hidden meaning.

The deepest gifts I received in my own years of shamanic dismemberment were when I gained lucidity in dreams. With regular dreams you strain your brain and groggily recall the experience after awakening. In a lucid dream, you are right there in the moment, feeling with your whole dream body the exhilaration and ecstasy of being free from the restrictions of 3-D reality. You can fly and melt though walls. You can experience the spirits of departed loved ones. You can experience past and future lives. You can fulfill your wildest sexual fantasies, disease and guilt free. You can change or create whole scenes with a thought, painting rainbows across the sky or creating an instantly audible symphony with just a flick of intention. These were the experiences that I was seeking as I tripped through chemically induced hallucinations that mushroomed out of my control. The lucid dreams I sometimes experienced as a child came back once I stopped blotting my consciousness out with drugs and alcohol. I quickly became a dream junkie, sleeping as much as I could, seeking my next hit of vision.

When I read that regular meditation increases the frequency of these experiences I became a religious meditator. For at least an hour a night for the last six years I have used special tapes that induce meditative brainwaves. I dissolve into the gentle flowing water on the tapes and ride the tones of crystal Tibetan bowls into another dimension. While in that wide-open state, my subconscious is inundated with subliminally encoded affirmations recorded in my own voice designed to wash my brain of all the sour self-defeating beliefs that I picked up along my crooked way. Through this practice I have gone from one lucid dream every few months to several a week.

The most powerful I’ve had resembled a near-death experience. I was lying on my face in bed and realized I was dreaming. I first got turned on sexually but I've spent a lot of lucidity satisfying earthly fantasies and I wanted something more that night so I turned over and was promptly launched through the ceiling. I was sucked up in a giant funnel — like a waterspout leading up to a sea of twinkling starlight that was liquid to the touch and sounded like a huge choir harmonizing perfectly. As I went further, the stars glowed brighter and the choir swelled and the most overwhelming feeling of peace and beauty and my own immensity overcame me. Never had I felt my personal identity dissolve so completely. It felt like I was a galactic symphony of singing stars going supernova. Everything got blinding ultra-white and I freaked out, afraid that I was dying and would be unable to return to Earth. The fear sent me back instantly to my small, solid body, but it took me several hours to feel even remotely at home in it again.

In many lucid dreams I've developed a closer relationship with Jesus, though the Jesus I’ve experienced has few qualities in common with the prudish rule-making Jesus of religious zealotry. I even had one dream where I danced sensually for him like Salome, his gaze fascinated by the spinning colors of my aura as I stripped off swirling rainbow veils and teased him with them. Infinitely tender, he has cradled me like a baby in a pink and blue mist. Infinitely compassionate, he has gently held my hand and whispered in my ear to calm me while I writhed in pain on a dream cross. Infinitely wise, he has come to advise me, enlightened and white-haired inside the great pyramid at Giza. After two thousand years of bowing to wash his beautiful but singular Piscean feet, many of us are standing up and starting to get to the core of his masterful teaching. We are following his example and getting off our crosses, owning our own divinity, and meeting him resurrected as a friend and equal. As he himself said of his mastery: “You will do all this and more.” In this egalitarian Aquarian age, Christ consciousness is finally becoming democratized.

I felt deeply fulfilled by all of these dream experiences. But then I’d wake up alone and that desperate empty-gutted eleven-year-old would take hold. He’d tug my sheets away and send me off again in search of a partner to share my dreams with. A partner whose love could heal my deepest wounding and make my recovery feel complete. For the first three years of recovery, I had a tempestuous relationship that cost me a fair share of serenity. After it, I spent a whole year crying followed by two years of meditative and masturbative isolation trying to figure out and heal my part in that relationship’s insanity. Finally, at a recovery dance, I met Kathleen Connors. I asked her if she wanted me to “do her chart,” a step up from “Hey baby, what’s your sign?” and she agreed. I was shocked to discover that she had the same exact birthday as the woman who drove me crazy in early recovery. Would I be able to get it right this time?

On our first date, we ended up naked, something she was embarrassed to admit to her ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) friends. Moving that fast with a recovering addict was a red flag for relapse. But our merger was meant to last, and every time we lost faith and became afraid, some validating magic eased our doubts. After we were together for three months, her cat Pook died. She had saved her from the humane society seven years earlier at the beginning of her own recovery journey. Pook’s death was a big emotional opening and it brought us much closer. Six months later, I dreamed of giving her a claddah ring: two hands holding an amethyst heart with a bolt of lightning carved into it. Soon thereafter, Kathleen had a dream where Pook came to her as a fox zipping up and down the steps of a Mayan temple. The day after her dream, we went to the Whole Life Expo in Chicago and kept running into people involved with Mayan teachings. The first did a Mayan astrology reading and told Kathleen that her Mayan birth sign was Cauac or purple lightning storm for short. Then, a few minutes later, we found a perfect illustration of her sign: a painting of a giant woman-tornado in a purple dress with lightning filling the sky behind her. Another painting by the same artist was of the Mayan temple from Kathleen’s dream. We bought the purple storm painting, and asked the artist about the temple. She said it was a temple in Tikal, Guatemala and urged us to go there.

Kathleen believed as I did in navigating through life by these kind of magical signs and she did not hesitate to follow Pook’s lead and get tickets to Guatamala. My stormy lightning lady had finally arrived! I had the ring of my dreams made for her just in time for our trip. While I secretly wrote and recorded a proposal song called Hades Moon, she decided on the name Moon Song massage for her massage business. Nine months after meeting, I asked Kathleen to marry me under the stars on top of a temple in Tikal. Legs shaking, I gave her the ring and played her our moon song, and she said yes. We consummated our engagement as meteors blazed across the sky. Then, after we’d climbed down the temple and started back down the jungle path, a fox ran up the trail and right by us. Pook?!?

As we got closer to the actual wedding, though, these magical memories began to fade and we began compiling inner lists of all of the attachments and bad habits that the other would have to sacrifice for our love to last. We are both Taurus’s and stubborn as bulls, which makes our relationship really easy when we agree and near impossible when we lock horns. We got more and more dug into these judgments of each other and tensions built until, two weeks before our wedding, we saw red and raged. We yelled out everything we hated about each other. Neither of us had ever been so brutally honest with someone we were so close to. After a long, frightening pause, we experienced our second surrender together. Our souls rushed in and we gushed our love for each other. We cried and held each other for hours, both having finally found someone who could love us with all our flaws, as is. Kathleen is a true moon goddess and she has gently massaged my core wound and called my dissociated soul back into my body, tingling from head to toe.

The last key piece in my recovery was the Inner Focus School of Advanced Energy Healing, an answer to the mantra "Ma Ma Ma" which I chanted inwardly for years after my first contact with the Divine Mother through the Hindu teacher Ammachi. The healings in this group of people helped me reclaim my true being. The school is truly a divine mother school: the main teachers in my class were two goddesses who complement each other perfectly. Alixsandra, who founded the school, is a big, round, blonde-haired momma who sings in spirit and channels Jesus. Laurel is a smaller, darker, curly-haired Jewish Sufi who leads dynamic dancing meditations and gives inspirational readings from Rumi.

They taught by following the group's energy clairvoyantly, which means the school changed from moment to moment to accommodate the students’ needs. We came with the curriculum written on our energy bodies. At first, their clairvoyance made me feel perpetually naked, but thanks to their sweet love and joyful humor I got beyond my initial shame. I stopped trying to hide my energetic blemishes and started bringing them into the light for healing. I began to move towards self-mastery.

With each module, I could feel healing energy anchor more deeply in my body. When it first reached my arms and hands, it was so intense and unfamiliar, I was convinced it was carpal tunnel syndrome and I would soon be disabled. Now that I've come more fully unblocked, it showers through my body and out my feet, so unless I've got carpal body syndrome, I think I'm going to be OK. In fact, I am beginning to understand how the yogis who experience this energy to the nth degree can be free from worldly addictions. When every pore of your body is soaking in bliss, it’s hard to remember that hunger in your belly.

Some of my deepest healings involved the “Goodness Process.” Basically, you say the affirmation “I am the essence of pure goodness. My goodness has nothing to do with my actions or the actions of anyone else.” And then you work to heal the chorus of negative voices that arise to deny this fundamental assumption. It took me straight to that lump of self-loathing that jumped up from my heart and stuck in my throat when I first choked on the word “addict.” And for the first time, under the relentless love of my teachers and classmates, the deepest layers of that shame and self-hatred began to melt away. It was regaining this basic faith in my own goodness that gave me the courage to make my second surrender with Kathleen.

The image of the addict I once was has been shattered by recovery. After a mystical seven year restructuring full of bad luck, struggle, and finally love there's now a totally new vision of me in the mirror. To honor my deepening experience of who I really am, I want to introduce myself as more than just an addict. There is no statement more creative than the “I am” statement. Anything that follows the “I am” statement in your brain is bound by universal laws to eventually trickle down to be created in your life. My first step in the direction of better “I am” statements was when I took the magical name Lightning Mike after many lucid dreams in early recovery where I was hit by high voltage strikes that fried and purified my ego. Now, I want to go one step beyond the twelve steps to the thirteenth step of the Moon Goddess. So I am dropping my ancestral baggage of lies and standing to my full height. I am picking up the slack in my spine and introducing a new self: "I am Lightning Mike and I am liquid singing starlight."

* * * *

Michael Dinan is a drug and alcohol counselor, a singer-songwriter, a writer, and a hands-on healer in Madison, Wisconsin. His website is www.gutproductions.com.

* * * *

If you would like to purchase the Radical Spirit book from which this essay was drawn, please email us at manage@universespirit.org and we will email you back details.

Every week we will post another article on generation X spirituality from the book Radical Spirit. For more articles and more about Evolution Spirituality and who we are, go to integrativespirituality.org 

Nike Zoom Assersion EP

Tags: