In my daily meditation reading, the author talks about how addicts avoid uncomfortable feelings through substance use. They reassure the reader that pain, like all things, will pass, and that all feelings must be experienced and not intellectualized. I agree with most of what the author put forward; however, I never avoided feelings when I […]
One of my goals here is to sift through traditional Twelve Step recovery concepts and make the language and ideas more palatable for agnostics, free-thinkers, atheists, and non-believers who, like me, are in recovery from addiction. I also work stuff out in my mind as I write, with my first draft often becoming my published […]
Making amends is about owning-up for bad behaviour that hurt someone else. It’s about looking them right between the eyes and acknowledging “I did exactly this, and you bore the cost of my wrongdoing.” In the Secular Twelve Steps, making amends is Step Nine, the final stop along the journey of ‘cleaning-up the wreckage of […]
I haven’t felt the urge to post here in almost a month. I have been writing, nevertheless, focused on working the Secular Twelve Steps with my sponsor. I’ve also been regularly attending peer-support meetings, getting out of my cocoon and rejoining the human race. The purpose of this post is to talk about how I […]
I’ve been writing notes on two topics, security and identity, and I just realized that, together, they are actually one topic. For me, at least. I was always looking for someone else to provide me with security. I’ve never been willing to provide security for myself, even in sobriety. My relationship with security makes up […]
I am sharing what I have learned about my own relapse, a nine-year meandering in the desert that ended last April when I returned to the 12-step program and its peer-support meetings. Over the past five months, I’ve spent many hours in deep deliberation, trying to understand why I left recovery in 2014. It is […]
Love yourself, they say. But what if we haven’t a clue about healthy love actually is? On top of that, ask any ten people to define love and you’ll get ten different responses back. Love is a lot like ‘spirituality’: when we try to define love, we don’t find its limits but instead our own. […]
“Spirituality is one of those realities that we have only so long as we seek it; as soon as we stop seeking, we stop finding; as soon as we think we’ve got it, we’ve most certainly lost it.” Kurtz, E. & Ketchum, K. What does the spiritual journey seek? A wise teacher would probably reply […]
“When we attempt to ‘define’ spirituality, we discover not its limits, but our own.” ~ Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketchum, The Spirituality of Imperfection. Religion concerns itself with boundaries: belief against unbelief, insiders against outsiders, church and state, etc. If I try to define spirituality, I can refer only to my own incompleteness and am […]
The Peace of Wild Things 
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