iMindShift with Steve Chandler

I was hopeless and I thought I was helpless

When you enter a 12-step recovery program, it is recommended that you get a sponsor. That person should have at least a year of good sobriety, and preferably more.

My sponsor was a man named L. He passed away a few years ago. He died sober and happy. His life before sobriety was a catastrophic mess, filled with shame and depression. All kinds of embarrassing crises caused by his addiction to alcohol.

Which was a shame because he was a gifted classical pianist and a brilliant man.

But after he got sober, his life took a strange turn into a dimension he would never have realized were he not to work a program of spiritual recovery, a program that featured his amazing work sponsoring hopeless drunks like me.

Helpless. Hopeless.

I went to meetings and started thinking this is not for me. Aren't I smarter than these people? Am I not better educated? What is this silly religious stuff they are trying to get me to believe in? Am I not above all that?

And were it not for L, I may not .... no, I would not be alive today. Because L was smarter than I was. He was eloquent. He was well-read. He was a classical pianist. He knew what to do with my objections to the meetings. He cared about me and wanted me to have what he had...which at that time, some thirty years ago, was 10 years of his own sobriety. Plus happiness. His eyes sparkled and twinkled, and he laughed when I expressed my anguish. He just laughed.

He was always trying not to laugh. He insisted that he understood my pain, and identified with it.

"I was too good for this myself," L said. Then he would point to a framed slogan on the wall of our meeting hall that said, "Your best thinking got you here."

Here! In this room full of drunks drinking coffee and telling our near-death stories.

As I work now, thirty some years later, on my Death Wish project, at capturing the epiphanies and breakthroughs---the mental miracles that occurred for me then (and are available to everyone) I am lifted almost daily by people who are writing to me with their support......

Look at what a brave woman named Monaica sent:

Dear Steve,

I’m really grateful I found you.

You don’t have to know someone to touch their lives.

Because what we’re really talking about is “the kind of love that has no price tag…”

My sobriety date is June 10th, 2002.

I’m an AA baby. My parents have had a treatment center for over 30 years. My father has literally helped tens of thousands of people get sober.

I was raised around criminals, killers, and abusers who transformed their lives.

On Thanksgiving every year my home was filled with people who had nowhere else to go.

These are my people.

Thank you for your incredible commitment to giving it your all…to learning the truth about yourself so you could teach me about the lies that I tell myself…for teaching me to powerfully create instead of take.

Anything I can do to be of service to you as you create your legacy within the prisons would be an honor and a privilege.

May You Stay Forever Jedi…

Monaica Ledell
President, Truth Hacking

 

Is SOBER a good enough word for it?

For me, and so many of the people I know who have recovered from a serious addiction, the word sober isn't good enough. And the phrase “clean and sober” isn't nearly good enough.

Sober is a cold word. (For such a warm feeling.) People say things like, “That's a sobering thought.” They are referring to a head-clearing slap in the face or a cold bath, a plunge into the cold waters below the ice of reality. Sobering.

I mean, the word isn't completely wrong. It describes the base of it, the underlying clear mind. The refreshing purification of the human system that happens with spiritual progress.

But winning my freedom from addiction was better than just getting sober. Yes, it included sobriety. But that word is chilly and cold, and recovery is like the Jordan River. Like the old spiritual says, “It chills the body but not the soul.”

Freedom warms the soul.

You are not my God

One of my daughters gave me a gift at Christmas of two CDs (I'm old school tech) of death wish songs. . .songs about addiction, suicide and recovery. This would, under most trees in winter, be a dark, demented gift.

  But for me it was a Godsend. My project (Death Wish) is a new book and series of audios that dive deep into the forest of addiction and suicide and help addicts and families and friends of addicts (in other words, the whole human race) see the path through the woods, to a glorious life.

There are 35 of these songs (and if you have a favorite song or movie relating to this subject, let me know) on my two gift CDs, and I am loving the power of this music.

Keith Urban sings You're Not My God and there is a fierce joyful anger in it that rocks me when I listen:

From the cradle to the grave
Temptations all around
But no matter how good the fix
It's gonna take you down

Now some call it a weakness
Some call it a sin
But it's all the same behind each game
I see your evil grin

But you're not my god
And you're not my friend
You're not the one that I will walk with in the end
You're not the truth
You're a temporary shot
You ruin people's lives and you don't give a second thought

 

  I remember when drugs and alcohol were my only real friends. When they were my gods. When my fear of losing them overrode everything and ruined and wasted my life. I remember that.

  Keith Urban checked himself into a residential rehab center four months after marrying Nicole Kidman, after she and some friends staged an intervention on him. His drinking and drug use was ruining his life and career.

Give a listen:
Keith Urban - You're Not My God