2006 -- My Amazing Year

This story does not end with me finding success in a fabulous career or saving hordes of starving children, but it does end with me finding relative peace at the end of a long, dark night.

I’d been teaching Germans my native English for six years when all this started. I’d been teaching the employees of an oil refinery near the border to Poland for three years, and had been looking forward to the end of the courses there, after which I had planned to take a few weeks off and look for better paying work.

Little did I know that I would fall into a deep depression the very next day after the course ended. That was July 1, 2006. I wasn’t depressed because I missed the refinery. I had students there that I liked, but I had never really felt that I was living up to my full potential there. I had wanted it to end, but without any job at all, my life immediately seemed pointless. I felt completely worthless.

I felt like a lazy drug addict because that’s what I was. For years I had been smoking pot almost every day. Now that I had no job I smoked even more. Pot is a depressant and, while I occasionally smoked so much that I forgot my problems, it made my condition worse. I had embarrassing experiences on the phone, in town. People would want to meet up with me and I would have to say, “no, I’m too tired this evening”. The truth was usually that I was high. I stopped going out. My flatmate did the grocery shopping. Now, as I look back at my calendar, there’s almost nothing written in July or the first half of August—two hairdresser appointments, a couple events I ended up not attending, that’s all.

I started searching for a psychotherapist and found two Americans here in Berlin. I met with them both and they were both lovely and very professional. I knew I would be able to establish a rapport with either of them. Choosing between them came down to their speciality. One, Robin Miner, specialized in addiction therapy. The other, Laura Deming, specialized in career counselling. It was a tough call, but I decided that my central issue was my lack of career goals and I chose Laura.

You may wonder at this decision, but I can tell you that it was very hard to tell if my addiction to cannabis was causing my professional inertia, or if it was the other way around. I’m not one of those people who’s always known what they want to do for a living. I’m one of those people who’s never known. During the summer of which I speak I spent several hundred dollars on the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, which is supposed to help with such decisions. As I took the test it was clear that I didn’t know myself any better than I did when I was a kid. Do I prefer “thoughts” or “feelings”? I don’t know. “Theories” or “facts”? Beats me! The result of the test was completely inconclusive, but one thing that did resonate with me is that I’m a person who gets “excited by possibilities”, or at least I was when I was a teenager. Choosing what to study in college was extremely difficult for me. I was interested in so many things. I didn’t know if I wanted to work in an office, in a hospital or in the forests of northern Wisconsin. I ended up choosing theatre as a major because it seemed to be the only constant in my life up until that point. Once I was in college surrounded by other enthusiastic theatre majors I was able to completely engross myself in the program, but still couldn’t decide what aspect of theatre to focus on. My official emphases were costume design and scene painting, and I was good at both, but I also wanted to act, sing, dance, draw, direct, etc. Before I even got into the professional world it was embarrassingly clear that I would be a jack of all trades but a master of none – a hopeless dilettante.

When I left the United States, my new hope for a career became teaching English as a foreign language. It was clear that I had some of the qualities necessary to be good at this but, as you already know, I did it for many years and it never became really enjoyable. I just couldn’t commit to it fully enough to live up to the high ideals I set for myself in the classroom. Perhaps I was afraid of committing to something as much as I’d committed to theatre and getting burned again.

I turned 30 and I couldn’t find any passion for anything anymore, and without any passion, I couldn’t do anything well. At least I couldn’t do any job well, and that makes a person immature and worthless in our society. That was how I felt.

I started meeting with Laura because I thought my problem was that I needed a profession, and she was a specialist in dealing with such cases. The ironic thing is that we hardly ever got into her “career counselling”. Instead we talked about my addiction, getting me through my day to day depression and improving my lack of self-esteem caused mainly by my childhood trauma.

I guess almost everyone has a childhood trauma and this was mine: I was picked on at school really, really badly because I was a very feminine boy. This started when I switched schools in third grade and we had our first recess. I went outside with a group of kids and immediately one of them said “why are you playing with us?” I looked around and realized that I had naturally gravitated towards the girls’ group. They told me to go play with the boys. All the kids began noticing how “girly” I was and they started taunting me by calling me a “girl”, apparently the worst thing a person could be. I heard this “insult” constantly, every day. The few times I asked a teacher for help they always took the position that I was bringing it on myself and I should modify my behaviour, which would also have been the opinion of my parents, had I told them about it. I was completely alone with this problem. This was the beginning of not only a conflict between me and society but also an internal conflict. Most kids would have just gone and played with the boys and tried to act like them. While I desperately wanted the ridiculing to stop, the rebel in me refused to conform to this stupid convention that the sexes should be completely divided. Yes, it was a very strong and mature position for a nine-year-old to take and, looking back now, I’m very proud of how I began that journey. It was 1982 and I was way ahead of my time, but I didn’t know that for sure then. As I got older, the insults just got worse. When I graduated to junior high school the taunt “girl!” got replaced with “fag!”, and I swear I heard this word fifty times a day. In the five minutes between each class I felt like a salmon swimming against a malevolent river of insults, and this didn’t start letting up until I was in my last semester of high school. That makes ten years of daily ridicule.

So maybe you can see why self-esteem would remain an issue with me for a long time. Back when I was in school, the general opinion was that the worst thing in the world someone could be was queer, and as I gradually became surer and surer that this was my nature, I couldn’t always be stronger than the society that told me I was perverted and disgusting.

I was also still holding on to great anger, and in 2006, fifteen years after I’d graduated high school, I still couldn’t forgive the society that had persecuted me so as a child.

I read a lot of self-help books in 2006 and the first one was “Loving What Is” by Byron Katie. It was actually an eleven-hour audio tape which I listened to at my computer. If I recall correctly, Katie’s personal story was that she gradually fell into a deep, somewhat unexplainable depression, which progressed to the point that she couldn’t work any more, couldn’t deal with her responsibilities as a wife and mother, and felt she had to move into a half-way house. One morning she woke up on the floor of the half-way house – she considered herself unworthy of sleeping in a bed! – and was struck with a revelation which immediately brought on hysterical laughing, cured her of her depression and led her to develop what she calls “The Work”.

The basic Work involves finding a belief you have against someone or yourself and testing it against four questions:

1. Is it really true?

2. Can you be absolutely sure that this is true?

3. How do you feel when you think this thought?

4. Can you think of any reason to hold onto this thought?

When I took the belief I had had for decades, the kids I went to school with shouldn’t have ridiculed me, and held it up to the first two questions, I couldn’t honestly say that it was true. After all, kids ridicule each other. That’s what kids do. That’s reality. That’s the way the whole world is and, as Katie taught me, who am I to argue with the whole world? My answer to question three was that I felt angry and vengeful. My answer to question four should be obvious to you. I did The Work on my angry thoughts about the adults around me at that time and society in general and met with the same result every time. And in this way, at age 32, I was finally able to forgive what people had done to me in my childhood… at least intellectually.

This was the point from which I started with Laura. She was wise and sympathetic and I gained some insights I wouldn’t have otherwise gained. She directed me towards wonderful resources. She lent me the horribly titled book “From Panic to Power” and I realised I had some of the same problems as people with panic attacks and I needed to come out of a vicious cycle of negative thinking. She pointed me toward the videos posted in the internet at http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k14790 of Positive Psychology, the most popular class at Harvard, where I learned that I had some of the symptoms of the sickness called “perfectionism”, despite the fact that I’d scarcely done anything perfectly in my entire life. These lectures also taught me about the scientifically proven benefits of mindfulness meditation and how to practice it.

I know some very wise people who have tried meditation but who do not practice it. Even the brilliant Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön, says that the type of mind she has doesn’t lend itself well to meditation. So while meditation doesn’t seem to be for everyone, I strongly believe that everyone should try practicing it for a while, because the majority of people can benefit from just 10-15 minutes a day. Just look at this list of benefits of meditation which scientists have found evidence for:

increased creativity

better memory

higher motivation

stronger immune system

improved reaction time

clearer self-concept

reduced alcohol consumption

reduced stress

less depression

improved relationships

higher self-esteem

better self-acceptance

more self-responsibility

stronger personal integrity

higher IQ

more purposefulness

more HAPPINESS

To say meditation is easy would not be true, but the principles are easy to understand and you can start without any instruction. There are just two basic principles:

1. Focus on one thing. The most common thing to focus on is the breath. Observe yourself breathing an if other thoughts enter your mind, which they inevitably will, don’t feel the least bit discouraged. Just go back to observing the breath.

2. Stay in the present moment. This is such an important thing to practice in life in general, but most people almost never do. When you meditate, you are dedicating that time to giving your mind a break from thinking about the past and planning the future.

There are other kinds of meditation which are not hard to get started on and many other things you can do which also stop the chatter in your head, such as getting comfortable and listening to classical music. Everybody needs some kind of practice like this to relieve stress, the number one cause of illness.

At the end of August a few things happened in my professional life. Some work producing CDs for an educational publisher fell into my lap. Not very much money and not at all steady, but something other than teaching. At first I was scared to death of it, as I was of everything during this time. What got me more scared than I’d been in years was the job I got teaching English at a university, which also fell into my lap at the end of August. It wouldn’t start until October and I was already terrified.

There were positive changes to my professional life, but I was still smoking pot every day and was terrified of quitting. I came to the realisation that part of the fear was the fear of giving up my youth, not my childhood but the period right afterward when I escaped the hell of my school years. When I went to college I started smoking with my first ever circle of longer-term friends who liked and respected me. It was by far the best time of my life up to that point. That was how smoking came to represent my sweet, care-free youth for which I had waited until my 19th year, and quitting seemed like breaking up with a dear friend of 13 years. Paradoxically, I wanted desperately to finally grow up and live to my fullest potential, and I knew pot was holding me back. Knowing that I was an addict made me scared of taking on any project. No one knew I was an addict, I seemed quite in control, but with every year my work got shoddier and shoddier.

In September I went to the USA for two weeks to visit my parents with the homework assignment from Laura to go to a bookstore and choose between some books that she recommended.

The first book I read was “Healing Back Pain” by John E. Sarno, M.D., and here I’m about to tell you one of the most miraculous things that happened to me in 2006. I was at my parents’ house, like I said, and feeling very tight, tense and claustrophobic. My parents have a pretty big house, which my dad built himself, and my mother has filled it with junk over the years. She’s in her mid-seventies now, has many psychological problems of her own, and insists that her problem with the house is not that she hangs onto junk, but that she needs to organise it better. My parents are somewhat used to living this way, but as soon as I got there my ankles started hurting because I couldn’t walk through any room in a straight line. My parents are both very sweet and smart and actually very easy to get along with, but I had a very hard time dealing with their idiosyncrasies during this stay. My body was tense, my back was hurting, and I was desperate for relief.

My back pain actually started in college, which I imagined was from working bent over either at a sewing machine or over a canvas on the floor. The soreness was worst between the shoulder blades, radiating up into the neck and shoulders. Often I felt like someone had ground up my back like hamburger. It was quite debilitating.

As I lay on my bed in my parents’ house reading “Healing Back Pain”, my back pain was as horrible as ever. With every page I tossed and turned, reading on my back, on my front hanging off the bed, sitting up in bed, sitting in a chair, lying on the floor, you name it. I only read in my room, though, because I didn’t want my parents to see the title of the book and worry about me. At first I thought that my back pain was acting up so badly because of the pressure I’d been putting myself under all summer to finally find a profession, because of my fear of the university I was about to teach at, because of my frustration with my mother, because of the long flight across the Atlantic and because of some mysterious injury in my past. But gradually, as I read the book, it dawned on me that my back was acting up so badly at that moment because my subconscious mind didn’t want me to have the information in the book. This may sound crazy, but makes perfect sense once you’ve read this wonderful book. Dr. Sarno explains that we store emotions in our bodies, particularly rage and guilt. During years and years of research he’s shown that the vast majority of back problems do not come from physical problems such as injuries or poor posture. What happens is the brain directs oxygen away from the muscles, which causes them to hurt. This is especially common in our western culture. Apparently back pain hardly exists in Africa, can you imagine! And would you believe that this problem which had accompanied me for a dozen years was gone just a few weeks after reading this book, just by understanding the true nature of the problem?! It was like a miracle.

While I was at my parents’ I dug out some audio cassettes that I hadn’t heard for years but had never forgotten. The first was the recording of a psychic reading I had received around 1998. It was interesting to hear what had come true and what hadn’t (yet). The second was a lecture by a woman named Caroline Myss (pronounced like “mace”), whom I had found out about inadvertently through the same psychic. I had listened to this tape in 1998 and had taken notes on it but it hadn’t changed my life as it would in 2006.

Caroline Myss, PhD, whom I’ll permit myself to call Caroline, is a medical intuitive. That means she can read the energy emitted by your chakras, receive impressions and interpret them symbolically, and can tell you if you have an illness. I believe her PhD is in theology, and she’s studied mystics and different spiritual traditions. At some point she noticed correlations between the seven Hindu chakras, the seven Christian sacraments, and the seven levels of the Kabalistic tree of life.

If Caroline had been just an ordinary Christian, I never would have listened to her. When I was nine years old I started going to a presbyterian church after school on Wednesday afternoons. I immediately believed everything they told me there and adopted their ideas of what was a sin and what wasn’t. I asked Jesus into my heart as I was instructed to do and I quickly became very good at leading a pious life and thinking only pious thoughts – I’m not kidding. But after I entered junior high, the church gradually lost its hold on me. First of all, the abuse that I suffered there was so extreme that it just wore me down. After a while I wasn’t “turning the other cheek” anymore, but was trading insults. I started using foul language for the first time in my life.

But I guess it wasn’t until I was much older that I finally renounced Christianity. As I became an adult I realised that my mother’s catholic upbringing had made her prudish and ashamed of her body – to this day I’ve never seen her naked. When I became comfortable with my sexuality, when I was about 20, I realised the church’s role in the society which had tortured me for being androgynous and homosexual, which was clearly my true nature. I saw no evidence of God in the world, and thought everyone who believed in Him was deluded. This was unfortunate because I ended up missing out on a lot of wisdom. Anytime an intelligent person would mention God or praying I would tune them out, and that was how I was for about 15 years.

By the time I got to 2006 I firmly believed in many things such as ESP, the survival of our consciousness after death, reincarnation, and considered many things to be possible. The existence of God, however, was something I still equated with the narrow-minded teachings of the Vatican and the fanatical born-agains.

Because Caroline seemed so wise, I listened to her in my room at my parents’ house. She had a way of using the words “God” and “universe” interchangeably, which challenged my view of God as an imaginary old man in the sky with a long white beard. Suddenly I realised that if I just substituted the word “universe” every time she said “God”, I could agree with everything she said! Could it be that my disbelief in God was just a matter of semantics?

On this audio cassette, Caroline Myss says that illnesses come from losing energy, and we lose it by making bad choices, choices out of fear. She says that an addiction is one of the most toxic things for the spirit because it’s choosing to give away your energy again and again to a substance which controls you. It makes the heart and the mind incongruent. The addiction is a way of ordering life around a consistent choice in order to compensate for the inability to be a congruent person. She describes the role the sacrament of Confession has in this, the energy of which is contained in our fifth chakras, the “will power” chakra. She says that when she notices she’s giving her energy to something, she lights a candle and calls her spirit back.

I tried it. On my dresser there was a little white ceramic bird with a candle in it that I’d only lit once or twice when I was a kid. I opened it, lit the candle and prayed for the first time in many, many years. I felt rather hypocritical considering that all that time I’d considered praying completely useless. I was just so desperate to quit smoking pot and everything Caroline had said made so much sense. I prayed for about five minutes, proclaiming my wish to quit and stating all the reasons why and repeating again and again I call my spirit back. I call my spirit back from this horrible addiction.

One thing that’s important to emphasize is that, by Caroline’s definition, an addiction can be to a substance, to sex, to the need to control others, or to any thought that you attach yourself to. If we examine ourselves with this knowledge, then it’s clear that everyone has had addictions. If we didn’t, then we would be completely intolerant of people that do. Too bad that most people don’t realize this and express superiority to addicts. I will forever feel compassion for them, no matter what they’re addicted to.

Let me give you an example of an addiction I think a lot of us share. A couple days after I prayed for the first time my mom called me from the other room. I rolled my eyes and groaned, irritated out of habit. It’s not as if my mother calls me every fifteen minutes. In fact, my parents have always given me tons of space. I realized in that moment that I was completely attached, or addicted, to the thought that my parents were irritating. How adolescent in a 33-year old man!

Well what do you know! I just took a break from writing this, turned on the BBC World Service, and there was a report on “how spirituality can help you stay sober”. I’m not lying! And this is part of what I want to tell you about. I’ve believed for many years that synchronicities are something to be paid attention to, and in this period of my life, beginning with the events that I just described, synchronicities began occurring very, very often. I would hear the same obscure word three times in the same day. When, in the US, I went to the bookstore the second time, I decided to buy Caroline Myss’ book Anatomy of the Spirit, the book of that audio tape I described. While in the bookstore, I opened the back cover of the book where there is an advertisement for her next book, which at that time I did not know about.

Can depression, anxiety, fatigue, and physical illness result from a failure to discover your purpose in life—the “sacred contract” that you and you only can fulfil? Caroline Myss answers this vital question with a brilliant synthesis of psychology, healing guidance, and spiritual insight in Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential.

I was elated that this author, whose wisdom I was already convinced of and intrigued by, had written a book about exactly my problem. I left the bookstore with her two books and a book called Life’s a Bitch and Then You Change Careers, which my therapist had recommended and which I still haven’t read to this day (but I intend to someday).

On the airplane on the way back from the U.S. I started reading Anatomy of the Spirit, and was absolutely riveted by the revelations within it as well as Caroline’s writing style. She studied journalism before she got her PhD and, I can tell you, her writing is such a wonderful gift to the world. Anyway, almost at the end of the flight, the woman who was sitting two seats away from me noticed the book and said she’d read it! She’d read Sacred Contracts as well! In fact, she’d read most everything Caroline had written and had even met her! This woman, Nelida, was flying back to England from the U.S. where she had attended a Kabbalah conference and, if I recall correctly, she said Caroline Myss had been there!

So these synchronicities were making me start to think that maybe I was on the right track.

But the hardest time was yet to come. When I got back to Germany it was time for me to start teaching at the university which, as I already mentioned, had me paralyzed with fear. Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken on the job. I had already decided to stop teaching when it got offered to me. I hadn’t looked for it. I got asked because of connections I’d had. It was in higher education and therefore a huge step up from where I’d been teaching and so I decided to take it, to do this one last gig, just one semester and then I would quit if I wanted. It wasn’t only the prestige of being a university lecturer that convinced me to take it. I had already promised myself long before never to do anything again just because it would “look good on my résumé”. There were other factors that gave me hope that this would be the kind of teaching that was right for me. It was with young college students and I was interested to see if I would click with them. They would be getting grades from me and would therefore theoretically bring much more energy to the lessons; I wouldn’t be the only one working hard. Previously, my students had always been customers capable of leaving my class whenever they liked. The university was located five hours from Berlin on the Baltic coast, so I would hopefully get to know a whole different part of Germany. I don’t really understand completely why I put myself through hell with this job. It was a really nice place to teach. My colleagues were friendly and helpful. The classrooms were equipped with every kind of media I could ever wish to employ. Perhaps I felt unworthy of teaching in higher education, especially since my friends who hired me had never seen me teach. I can’t put into words how great my resistance was to doing the necessary work to prepare for class. When I started, it was all I could do to prepare my first day of lessons. Planning the semester, as I felt a good teacher would have done, was impossible for me. It wasn’t that I didn’t put any of my energy into the job. On the contrary, the three days that I spent on the Baltic every week took all my life’s energy, but in fear and not in preparation. It was putting a strain on all aspects of my life, to say the least. I started smoking cigarettes again, having been off them for over two years, just to be able to have something to control my mood with. I knew it was creating another problem for myself in the long term; I just wanted to know that I could make myself feel better for a few minutes by having a cigarette. I’m really very lucky that I didn’t come out of all of that fear and anger with a chronic disease.

The misery culminated toward the end of the semester, when my best friend with whom I live couldn’t take my depression anymore. For the most part, my friend was a great comfort to me during this time, but on this particular evening he felt the need to rant at me about how hard it was for him living with someone depressed, that it effected him too. He vented all his frustration with me at the worst possible time, the evening before I had to travel to the university. I spent the night in anguish, absolutely crying myself to exhaustion. I left town early the next morning in order to get out of the apartment, choosing the lesser of two hells.

I was completely broken and torn with no one else to turn to but God. I suppose that had been His plan for me. I think I may have been in a dark night of the soul. I prayed constantly and heard nothing in return. Still, my commitment to prayer was a comfort to me. Even though I could muster no discipline to prepare my lessons, at least I could pray religiously every morning and evening and dozens of times in between without ever skipping a day. And it felt good to pray for others, too. Part of my misery was knowing full well how privileged I was and feeling it was all going to waste.

And every evening, as soon as lessons were over, I made a beeline to my guestroom to get high. I spent all my evenings off high as well. It was a futile attempt to relax. It never worked but I did it all the time anyway. The third Wednesday afternoon in November I reached for my pipe, forgetting that I had a therapist appointment that evening. I guess I did it subconsciously intentionally. I then had to go to see Laura high. It was very embarrassing. She said that the pot smoking was undermining everything that we were trying to accomplish. That’s exactly what I’d been thinking for years. Who knows what I would have accomplished in college and all the years since then if I hadn’t been a stoner? I prayed that the time had finally come for me to quit. Thanksgiving was coming and I thought, if I quit on Thanksgiving, I’ll have something to be thankful for.

Thanksgiving Eve I had an appointment with Laura. The end of November is dark in Berlin. The night comes at around 4 or 5pm, and I remember sitting in Laura’s yellow-lit living room with night all around us and feeling as if I were more in the night than in the light of the room. It was like looking at the scene through teary-wet goggles. I told her I was thinking about switching to the other therapist, the one who specializes in addiction. She agreed that was a good idea. Then I told her I was tentatively planning to smoke my last joint that evening. Her eyes got big and hopeful, but only for a second, because when I said it I got the fluttering breath you get when you’re about to sob. She said it seemed more like I was parting ways with a dear friend than liberating myself from an addiction. She was dead on right.

If you’ve never been addicted to a substance, this will seem hard to understand. One of the reasons people get emotionally attached to their substance is that, even when no one on earth has time for them, the substance is always there. It’s dependable—more so than any friend. Pot was also very romanticised in my mind because in college I always smoked it with friends, often with very dear friends. You will recall that throughout grade school and high school I had had almost no friends, so I really associated the ritual of smoking pot—and all its smells and feelings—with finally belonging to a group of people that liked me.

I did in fact quit that evening, and a week later I wrote Laura about it.

Hi Laura,

The evening after our last session I went home and lit a candle and did a Last Joint Ritual, followed by a Last Cigarette Ritual. I don't really know why, I don't think this has ever happened before, but the last cigarette made me really sick. I couldn't even finish it. I laid down in bed and after a few minutes it was all I could do to get a bucket from the bathroom so that I could throw up, and throw up I did. I threw up once and then called my flatmate into the room so that I would have a witness to the event. I wanted him to be able to remind me of it later. I threw up again and again until everything was out of my stomach, which was a lot. Afterwards I felt better. It was all very dramatic and very weird.

So it's now been one week and one day since I've smoked anything, which is a really long time for me. The last time I went a week without smoking must have been when I was in the US. If I go two weeks without smoking then I will be able to say that it's been two years since I've managed that. If I go for more than a month then I think it's more years than I can count on one hand since I’ve done that.

I notice that I'm a bit more productive. For the first time since the beginning of the semester I cleaned my pig sty of a room, so I guess I'm not as depressed. I still got very depressed the two days before I taught at the university, though. But after my classes on Monday I went jogging for the first time. I know I wouldn't have done that if I were still smoking.

On the train back from the Baltic I had a whiskey and cola, which was really delicious and put me in a great mood, but made me think that I could smoke a joint. When I got home I asked my flatmate if he thought it would be terrible if I did, given that I had just taught two especially harrowing days (there’s loud construction work going on right above my classroom, just another really upsetting thing). He said it was out of the question and that I was a model for him and everything. I asked him if he thought that my skin would stop itching if I smoked one (Ever since I stopped I’ve been sweating buckets in the night, which seems to be connected to the rashes on my ankles and elbows. I don’t know if it’s because I stopped smoking or if it’s just uni-stress.), because I really wasn’t sure if it might help or not. He said no, it wouldn’t help, and that satisfied me. I wasn’t in a bad mood, I was elated to have the Baltic coast behind me, but I just couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted a joint. I didn’t want a cigarette and I didn’t want a bowl with just pot in it, I wanted a joint, which is weird because I’d only been smoking joints regularly for about a month. It’s only tobacco-pot joints that I crave and in a way that makes it easier because it seems like I’ve only had the addiction for a short time. We watched a thriller on television and I finally forgot about smoking.

Writing about this is making me want one now, so I’m gonna stop. I’m still an addict and this is still getting lots of my energy, dammit. I'm not free at all. I don’t think my life is going to suddenly take a dramatic turn for the better.

I wish you a wonderful Advent! We’ve made Adventkalender for each other. It's a lot of fun.

Best wishes,

She called me up to give me encouragement. She said she thought the vomiting was a kind of purging. At the time I wasn’t sure because I didn’t know if I would succeed in quitting. I thought the vomiting had more to do with the enormous fear I had of quitting, and also of not succeeding. I was so sad. I said I could hardly see the point in not smoking when either way it was getting all my energy.

I started going to the therapist who specialises in addictions, Robin Miner. In the first session I said I had “so many problems”, and so she had me make a list of all of them, all my “issues”, which filled a whole page and spilled over onto the second side. Doing this, I became extremely emotional. When I told her that I’d quit smoking the week before, she said that the withdrawal was obviously the reason I was so emotional. I cried hysterically half the time, going through tissue after tissue. Afterwards I felt a bit better. My sinuses felt huge and clear and my face very puffy, you know the “cried out” feeling—well, it stayed with me for two days, I’d cried so long and hard!

As the Taoists say, “no storm lasts forever”, and eventually the semester at the university came to an end. My therapist and all my friends had advised me to quit, but I stuck it out until the end. I suppose this is something to be proud of. My cravings for marijuana slowly dissipated. I had to smell it coming from my roommate’s room every day, and at first this was very tempting, but after a while I started regarding it with distaste.

I’d like to say a bit about this, because I know a lot of addicts who may be reading this live with other addicts. There’s no question that I would have smoked less in those five years had I not lived with my best friend. On the occasions when I would have taken a break from the stuff, he always had some, and if it was in the house, I couldn’t resist it. I’m not sure that I would be substance-free now, though, had I not had him to supply me endlessly. You see, in order to really be free from a substance, no matter what it is, you have to be able to say I will never do it again. In order for me to reach this step with cannabis, my situation had to get very, very bad. I had to spend a fortune on it, waste days and days on it doing nothing, embarrass myself by turning up high at my therapist’s, et cetera, et cetera. Laura suggested a couple times, as many experts do, that I might want to quit living with my best friend in order to be able to quit pot. My response was that, if I did that, the pot would have taken away my best friend and there was no guarantee that I would be able to quit in another apartment anyway. I once heard Deepak Chopra say that an addiction was the greatest gift you could ever receive, because recovering from it entailed such a deep spiritual journey. I’m not gleeful that I spent all those years as an addict. However, I am proud that I seem to have found the strength to recover completely, which may be the most difficult thing that I have ever done. And it’s true that without the addiction I never would have been desperate enough to say that first prayer in my bedroom at my parents’ house, which ultimately led to the rediscovery of my spirit, which has been centre-stage in my life ever since. Now, every time I smell smoke coming from my flatmate’s room, I’m amazed at how I feel no craving at all, at how the lesson that pot is bad for me has been so completely internalized. I don’t think I would be so wise if I had left my friend. There’s also the fact that I’m a quiet role model for him now, though he insists to this day that smoking every day is absolutely no problem for him, so great is his denial.

Though I would recommend separating yourself from any addict friends who seem to want you to remain an addict as well. This was not the case with my friend. He saw how unhappy it made me and is very relieved that he doesn’t have to deal with me being torn from within anymore.

Speaking of Deepak Chopra, his book Overcoming Addictions was a great help to me during this time.

Slowly Robin and I were spending less time talking about addiction and were able to spend time working on other issues, like what happened to me in my childhood. To be honest, talking about this wasn’t very productive. I had already talked about it with friends and journaled about it many times. I had forgiven everyone! Still, the issue of my wounded past was somehow unresolved in my mind and I didn’t know what I had to do about it in order to move on.

When New Year’s Eve came, I treated it very specially. While most people would be out drinking and indulging in excesses, I would stay home and begin 2007 as I wanted to spend the entire year—in the strength of quiet, solitary meditation. I even clipped my hair off that evening as a symbol of my commitment to my spiritual practice. It was a beautiful night.

The next day the most wonderful thing happened. I went onto Caroline Myss’ website and clicked on a video of an interview she gave. Like so many times before, she seemed to be speaking directly to me.

The easiest way to not proceed [in healing] is to begin your day in your history. And that has to stop. That has got to stop. That’s number one. So [you’re] not allowed anymore to go backwards, ok? And that includes no more talking about your past. No more! It’s just over with! … And if you say, “well I still have some unresolved issues”, that’s fine. Put them on the side and get back to them in six months. But for the next six months you construct your life based on what’s true today.

This was an enormous revelation to me. Could it possibly be true that I could just forget about the wounds of my childhood? I didn’t have to discuss them in therapy or do any more “work” on them? I considered this a moment and thought, you know, I think I can just forget about all that now. That’s just what I did on that New Year’s Day and I haven’t looked back ever since.

Life is not a bowl of cherries. I believe that I have a lot of maturing to catch up on. You don’t mature properly when you’re high every day. I still don’t know what I want to do with my future—being substance-free hasn’t changed that. The difference is that it doesn’t terrify me like it used to. Caroline says that it’s impossible to miss your purpose in life, that God has a plan for all of us, yet we are still able to make choices. The spiritual practices that I have adopted since I said my first prayer are giving me hope. There are steps backward, but all in all I feel that I’m healing. I don’t know what I want to do with my future yet, I still have no real goals except to commit to my present daily spiritual practices and witness my blocks to divine guidance gradually fall away, one by one. Fulfilling this commitment along with having quit smoking are my major sources of self-esteem now, and considering that for years I had no spiritual practice and that smoking made feel like a total loser, I think that is truly amazing.

I invite anyone to comment on my story.