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once again, back to one of the topics i hammer home. i am all on board with this concept and sometimes my peers drive me nutz, when they go on and on about feeling good or bad. just to be clear, “good” and “bad” are NOT feelings, they are value judgements i attach to various emotions based on how much i like them and what i was cultured by society to believe. i can remember as a child my family telling me not to feel certain ways, or ask HOW could i feel that way. being socialized into looking at feelings and emotions, just caused me to swallow the ones i was taught were unacceptable, and pretend to feel the acceptable ones. unfortunately, in active addiction i ran with that, and when i finally walked into the rooms, i was more than a bit confused about the true nature of emotional responses and what to call them. i had collapsed everything into rage and ecstasy, and there was nothing between them. imagine my surprise, when after a few days clean, i had all sorts of feeling that i could not identify, much less deal with, in real time.
my response was to quickly do what i could to deal with them and one of the ways i disguised value judgements on what i was feeling was to call them “positive” or “negative.” changing the language so i could divert myself from the real issue, namely that for the most part WHAT i feel, is something i am powerless over. and yes, i am POWERLESS over what i feel, unless of course, i resort to my bag of tricks, that allows me to change the way i am feeling.
my recovery journey, has been one, of uncovering the garbage as well as the jewels that i buried under years of using. most of the “garbage” was the ways and means to suppress, ignore and generally divert those feelings that i was taught were bad or socially inappropriate. removing value judgements from what i feel, has been a HUGE part of the spiritual journey and one based in the spiritual path that i have modeled my recovery after. in that tradition, nothing is “good” or “bad,” they are merely opposites and each exists to define the other. so where was i? oh yes, the Tao of feelings as explained by me! actually that is more than enough, the part that is important for me, is that ALL of my feelings are necessary and sufficient to make up the whole me. just as addiction and recovery define who i am, each is part of the whole and neither exists in a vacuum. my journey has been one of learning to balance the two. when i came to the rooms, that balance was there, it just was addiction consumed so much more of the whole than the recovery part, in fact i would have been hard-pressed to even find a spark of recovery anywhere within the man i was. my journey has been to reclaim me, from addiction and learn to be complete and whole, including my feelings, even the so-called negative ones such as: “anger”, “jealousy” and “envy.” as i walk this path and apply the program i have been given, to my personal journey i get to see that i more than likely was always an addict, and once released i was consumed by addiction. since i always was, that implies i always will be, and that is okay today, as it means i am not some sort of obsessive-compulsive, anxiety-ridden, manic-depressive, crazy freak show, i am just another addict, doing what comes unnaturally to me, living clean, just for today. it is a great day to be clean. as i have a bunch of weather dependent (as in i NEED NICE weather) chores to accomplish today, i better get rolling on into my day.
good, bad or indifferent, i have never died of a feeling, so judging them is just a waste of my time, i have so many more things to judge as this day goes on, and what i am feeling diverts me from all of that.

∞ DT ∞