Blog entry for:

all feelings will eventually pass. the reading, of course, focused on painful feelings, and yes pain sucks. yes when i feel pain, i want to change the way i feel. so yes, no matter what, i have to be vigilant about what it will mean to relieve my pain through a quick dose of sumthin'. sumthin'.
there is of course, a flip side to this particular scenario, which i was also as much of a trap and excuse to use. namely enhancing a feeling like joy, to alter it into something even better. i want to make it last, to be reminiscent of that very first time. to return to that state, that i only reached once, but maybe…
so feelings, for me, are a trap and yet,m i cannot help but feel. feeling is part of the human condition, all i can do, is to channel my reactions to feelings into my recovery program and allow the POWER that fuels my recovery to make the changes necessary in me, to keep me from using.
pain is not necessarily a bad feeling and joy is not necessarily a good feeling. the trick for me, was once i took off the value judgement as to how good or how bad a feeling was, i got freedom from a whole bunch of garbage i have been carrying since the day i realized i was having feelings, way back before i even started using. part of becoming whole and genuine, is to short circuit, eliminate or just plain ignore a lot of the cultural and social conditioning, i grew up with. not that i blame the world for being an addict or revert to that old stance of, “see what you made me do!” no that condition, good, bad or indifferent, is just what it is, conditioning. i got a bunch of good lessons on being human, through that path, and i also took a lot of those lessons and morphed them into something that serves the part of me i call addiction. one of those lessons, and one that i really ran with, was that feeling pain was BAD! pain was to be avoided at all costs and barring that. quickly and decisively eliminated, after all, the world does not want to see a gloomy Gus. the end result, was that when i arrived, i had managed to numb, ignore and basically stuff away over a quarter of a century of feelings, since that behavior started long before that very first high.
as sad as all of that sounds, it has made into the man i am becoming today. each and every day, as i work a program of active recovery, i discover, uncover or generally reveal the way to get freedom from not only active addiction, but also from the social and cultural conditioning, that no longer serves any purpose in my life. hence, i am able to walk through feelings, without having the desire to use, and with less and less of a desire to alter the way i am feeling right now.
i have, however, rambled on long enough, and although there is not a lot i HAVE to do, today; there is plenty of stuff i WANT to do. it is a good day to let go, feel whatever it is i am feeling and realize that yes, this too, shall pass.

∞ DT ∞