Those who insist they’ve got their “shit together” are usually standing in it at the time.

STEPHEN LEVINE

19

THE “END OF MY ROPE” IS A NOOSE

Taking a sincere no-bullshit look at our mortality along with ourselves and our past actions can definitely be an uncomfortable and often embarrassing endeavor. The thing is, touching these places is what we need to do if we want to really get on with our healing, reconnect with our inherent basic goodness, and remember our fundamental nature as open, empty, and free. That’s why the last few chapters shared at length the Buddhist teachings on dependent arising and emptiness—they help us to directly touch our spacious and free Self, our Everything Mind. It’s from that place of emptiness that we can look directly at ourselves—our mortality, our fuck-ups, and all the places we fall short in life—with compassion and fearlessness, recognizing that none of it is as personal as we’d believed. From our ego’s perspective, this sounds completely counterintuitive because, as far as the ego is concerned, we are nothing more than our physical body, its sense perceptions, its past (and present) actions, and especially its mortality. As we go deeper into our understanding and experience of emptiness and dependent arising, we’re able see past this illusion and take a much lighter approach to working through the things we previously avoided because they seemed too painful and embarrassing.

One of the best attitudes we can cultivate during this process is the ability to laugh at some of our past screwups—especially for those of us who have really been through the wringer. Roshi Bernie Glassman and actor Jeff Bridges wrote a wonderful book titled The Dude and the Zen Master, in which Bernie offers a simple practice to help us break up the seriousness we place on life and all its myriad situations and experiences—both good and bad. Bernie writes: “Wake up in the morning, go to the bathroom, pee, brush your teeth, look in the mirror, and laugh at yourself. Do it every morning to start off the day, as a practice.”1

I’m so glad I came across that practice because I can’t even begin to tell you how much time I’ve spent berating myself over things like the emotional harm I caused others during the years of my active addiction. But really, what good does negative self-talk like that do for anyone? Learning to laugh at ourselves and life a little bit more can really go a long way in helping us to take things easier. It took quite some time for me to break that cycle—the negative self-talk and overly serious attitude about life—but I finally realized all the energy I was putting into berating myself could be used for actually effecting positive change in the world (if even only on a very small scale). I came to terms with the fact that there is nothing I can do to change my past, but what I could do is put my energy into living the best life I can today, being of service wherever possible, and learning to bring compassion and levity to unpleasant past memories when they arise.

This shift has helped me let go of so much needless suffering. Of course, there are still some extremely dark times, the ones that I’ll never be able to laugh at, much less make some semblance of peace with. But like most people who are recovering from addiction or (as I quoted Father Keating as saying in the introduction) from “the human condition,” I’m left with at least a few ridiculous memories.

Something that comes to mind happened during my early twenties. My closest drinking friend and I had finally begun to admit to ourselves that we had a problem. No catastrophic event led us to this realization. We’d just gotten exceptionally sick of ourselves and how shitty our day-to-day existence had become: wake up, hit the liquor store, go to work, take a break to sneak some drinks and snort some pills (usually Ritalin to stay focused and energized), hit another liquor store at lunch, take another break for drinks and pills, finish work, go home, drink more, sometimes band practice and sometimes not, either way drink until passing out, and repeat.

My friend and I had actually attended a 12-step meeting a few months before coming to terms with our problem, but we were (of course) half in the bag when we went. After sitting there for the first forty-five minutes, we decided we weren’t nearly as bad off as the others in the room and decided to take off. Yes, this from two people who needed a drink to go to a 12-step meeting in the first place.

So having attended that one meeting and deciding that it wasn’t for us, we figured we’d take matters into our own hands. Our brilliant idea? Well, it was more of a collaborative, two-pronged approach. We knew that we had to replace the alcohol with some other drink (this was well before the Red Bull/Monster energy-drink craze, which I’m sure we would have opted for had it been available at the time), so we decided that Kool-Aid, yes, Kool-Aid, would be our saving grace. Why Kool-Aid? Well, our rationale was that the sugary goodness would be enough to satisfy our urges for alcohol. As for the second part of our two-pronged approach? Marijuana. We had no interest in actually being sober per se, but rather just not drinking anymore. As far as we were concerned, weed was natural (which, sure, it is), plus we’d already been smoking it for years and hadn’t had any major issues as a result, so it couldn’t have been bad for us.

So there we were, smoking weed and drinking Kool-Aid, and we bullshitted ourselves into believing that this ridiculous method would work. And it did . . . for all of two days before we went back to drinking. Since we had accomplished such a magnificent feat of abstinence, to celebrate we decided to add sniffing heroin to our repertoire . . . and so it went.

Now I’m not here to debate whether marijuana, or even alcohol for that matter, is “bad” for an individual, because only you know what’s right for you. If you suffer from the disease of addiction, as my friend and I do, then drinking any type of alcohol or smoking pot and thinking it’s not an issue is something you may want to reconsider. The saying “A drug is a drug is a drug” is popular among recovering addicts for a reason. Replacing one drug for another—alcohol for heroin, or pot for alcohol—may work for a few days (or even months), but it’s been shown time and again by sad and often tragic examples that we’re inevitably going to return to our drug of choice and end up right back where we left off the last time we were using (and that’s the best-case scenario).

I have friends who are able to drink and/or do certain drugs recreationally, and that works for them, so who am I to judge? I just know that in my and many other addicts’ experience, there is no middle ground. I’d be full of shit if I said there weren’t times when I wish there were. I don’t romanticize using, but there are certainly occasions when a drink sounds great, or a joint, or dropping out of “reality” for a bit on an acid or mushroom trip. But I’ve learned through several relapses that it just doesn’t work like that for me. And the same can be said for those who turn to any sort of external distraction—food, shopping, video games—to try to mask whatever pain they’d rather not feel. Avoiding pain through acts of aversion does no one any good because they only keep the pain suppressed, and that’s the shit that wreaks havoc on our insides, causing stress, anxiety, depression, and so many other unnecessary and awful experiences.

Today, I use my occasional fleeting thoughts about how nice it’d be to get fucked-up as a reminder of the times when I did act on them and how that landed me in jails, emergency rooms, and psych hospitals. So it’s in gratitude that now I have a sound-enough mind to sincerely take that into consideration and, after doing so, simply say No fucking way to going back down that road. Not today.