Pleasuring Myself, continued...

A reader left this comment on my post from yesterday, and I wanted to respond to it here, because I think it raises some interesting points that got me thinking about it a bit more:

Well I think the goal is to be happy moment by moment as much as you can. So what's the problem with pleasuring yourself? Just strive for getting outside your own ego as much as you can, and then you're still moving forward, I say. 

I'm not sure I can agree with that.  I'm not sure I should agree with that, for my own safety.

See, my problem is that, more often than not, that instinct or drive or need to pleasure myself, to make myself happy, has led me to do stupid, self-destructive things.  On more than one occasion now, it has come close to killing me.  And it's a virtual certainty that, if left unchecked, someday it will succeed.  So pleasuring myself is my problem.  And so I feel that, for my own good, I can't allow myself to just try to be as happy as possible moment-to-moment.  Because what happens when the thing that will make me happy is also something that hurts me in some way?

So I feel like I need to do something to correct that behavior, that need to pleasure myself.  And right now, I'm not sure that I actually am.  Yes, it's true that I'm no longer indulging in those self-destructive pastimes at the moment, and that I've replaced them with more self-constructive activities, but I don't feel that I can take any credit for that.  Because I didn't do anything to foster that change.  The circumstances around me have changed, but I'm still responding to them in the same way I always have before.  I still feel just as strong of a need to pleasure myself, it's just that the methods in which I want to achieve that pleasure are now different.  As I said yesterday:  before I wanted to get high and get off, so that's what I did, and now I want to meditate and study mathematics, so that's what I'm doing.

The root cause of my self-destructive behavior lies in that need to make myself feel as good as possible for as much of the time as possible.  Yes, I'm now indulging that need in a constructive manner, but since I had no hand it actually making that happen and am only following where the flow takes me, then how can I trust in that and believe that I am now somehow "better?"  I have put no Will into this.  I am not behaving any differently, not really.  I'm just responding to different stimulus in the same manner as before.  So, what happens when the novelty wears off?  What happens when I suddenly find that I'm not deriving the same amount of joy and satisfaction out of these healthy activities as I once did?

What happens when I finally do want to get high again?

Because that day will come, no question.  And if I haven't done anything to correct the root cause of that desire, then how will I be able to resist it?  And I guess that's the problem in a nutshell:  I'm not resisting.  Because for me, there's nothing to resist.

Most people in my situation (newly-sober addicts) are in a constant battle against their own desires.  They are struggling against themselves to try and resist the urge to do the one thing they want to do more than anything else.  And their entire recovery is built around that internal conflict.  I know that I am an addict because I have experienced that conflict for more of my life than I care to admit, and because most of the times that I have fought those urges, I have lost.  But that is not my experience now; that is not what I'm going through today.  I'm not getting high right now because I do not want to get high right now.  I am sober because, right now, I want to be sober.  I have no urges to resist or fight against.  They just disappeared, and I ran with it.  And so that makes me feel like I'm not really doing the work.  Like I'm not really getting any better.  That I just got lucky.  That I had a brief window of opportunity, and I seized on it.

But this is not going to last forever.  Eventually, the winds of my desire are bound to blow back in the other direction again.  And I'm going to need to know ahead of time how to respond when that happens, or else it's going to catch me off guard and I'm going to fall right back into the same self-destructive patterns that I feel so blessedly and falsely liberated from right now.  But how can I possibly prepare for that?  Should I be resisting every pleasurable desire I have, irrespective of de-structive vs. con-structive?  Do I need to be living a monastic life?  (Frankly, I'd rather OD.)

Maybe I just need to cross that bridge when I come to it.  Maybe there's no point in worrying about it.  Maybe I should just accept this period of productive activity for what it is, and be grateful that it came so easily to me.  Maybe I should just focus on how lucky I am that I don't have to go through that struggle the way so many other addicts do.

And it would be so easy to do all of that, if only I felt in any way responsible for this change of fortune.  If I just felt that I had some hand in bringing this release about, then I would know that I actually am resisting, that I am doing the work - just in my own unique way, outside the range of the typical experience.  The same way I seem to do just about everything else.

Maybe that is true.

Could that be true?

No, I don't think so.  I've fought hard before, and I've won.  And I've fought hard, and lost.  But this time, I wasn't even fighting at all.  I had given in to my desires 100%.  And even though I knew I was hurting myself badly I still didn't try to resist.  I just didn't have it in me.  But then I hit a bottom I hadn't even seen coming.  And it scared the shit out of me.  And I responded to that fear by running as fast as I could in the opposite direction.  Basically, I scared myself straight.

How can I take credit for that?

I can't.  I didn't really do anything.  I got lucky.

But what I can do?  I can be grateful.  And oh, how I am.

And I can look on the bright side.  I can make the most of it.  I can do everything in my power to get as much out of this experience as I possibly can, for as long as it lasts.  And if I'm lucky, and smart, then the things I learn during this temporary reprieve will prepare me to know what to do and how to respond when that inevitable day finally arrives, and my desires shift their poles again.

And that's gotta be enough.

Brightsiding...

I'd wanted to write something about Spring, today being Eostre, the Vernal Equinox.

But I'm not feeling it.

What I am feeling today, is frustrated.  And I'm still going with the flow, so here we go...

Today's just been one of those days.  Everything that can go wrong, seemingly is.  My smartphone just up and died last Friday night.  The replacement arrived yesterday, but I couldn't make it back to the store before they closed.  Was going to pick it up tonight instead, but as soon as I got into the office this morning, I was reminded that I volunteered for a CPR class this evening after work, so I won't be able to make it back to the store in time again, which means I'll be without a phone for another day.  My browser crashed my computer, costing me 45 minutes of my day that I desperately needed in order to get some of my work done trying to fix it.  Run to the bathroom real quick, there's an Out-of-Order sign on the door.  Run upstairs to use that bathroom instead, and the door slams back on a wound-too-tightly hinge, and the door handle nails me right in the middle of my forearm.  Go to get coffee, and the pot is empty, and no one has started another one brewing.  And I could keep going, but I'll stop there.

With each and every one of these little annoyances thrown in my way, I am reminded of ManniMoonYin's Universal Tautology #3:  "Look on the bright side.  Make the most of it.  Choose joy, and you will be joyous."

I'm trying.  I really am.  As soon as I realize that I'm pissed off or upset about some minor injustice committed against me by the universe, I say to myself, "Ok, what's the brightside here?"  And then I try to think of the situation in those terms, instead of in terms of getting fucked by fate.

Another day without my phone?  Brightside - learning life-saving techinques in a CPR class.  Bathroom out of order?  Brightside - get to walk a little farther, and up a flight of stairs, burning a few extra calories.  Door handle cracks me on the arm?  Brightside - the pain helps to toughen me up and gain endurance.  Have to brew another pot of coffee?  Brightside - get to spend a few minutes just standing still, relaxing, listening to the slow gurgle of the machine as it brews.   And, of course, each and every one of those difficulties also carries the implicit Brightside of giving me another opportunity to practice looking on the brightside.

But it's not always that easy.  From past experience, I remember that some of the hardest moments to maintain UT #3 were when the brightside wasn't so obvious.  Like losing an hour's worth of working time dealing with a computer crash.  It's hard to figure out how to be happy about that.  And somehow, the fact that it's an excellent opportunity to practice brightsiding doesn't really make up for the amount of frustration and aggravation I feel.

Sometimes, the answer becomes clear after a while, if you're patient, and attentive.  As in this case, when I restarted my browser (which had caused the crash), and, miracle of Miracles, I somehow hadn't lost all of my tabs and settings!  The relief that I felt just then was a wonderful physical sensation, and I allowed myself to just sink into the delicious feeling of it, like a hit, or an afterglow.  It was fantastic.

Or, perhaps a better example would be my mother's death.  The pain was devastating at first, and it was years before I could see how it was actually a good thing to have happened.  As much as we didn't want to admit it at the time, and as much as we didn't listen to her when she told us, the truth was that she was crazy, and she was in a lot of pain, and she was devastating our family.  And she knew that.  And her suicide was, at least in part, the ultimate act of love.  She sacrificed herself to save our family.  And she did save our family.  All of the happiness and joy in life that we have experienced since her death we owe, at least in part, to her.

(Broswer just crashed my computer again as I was writing this.  Brightside - an opportunity to practice patience and acceptance.  I didn't do very well, but at least I had the opportunity to try.)

But the hardest times of all, are when I try, but simply fail to imagine any brightside at all.  I think and I stretch and I reach and I try my hardest to come up with something, anything that could serve as a potentially beneficial outcome to some unpleasant turn of events, but I just can't come up with anything.  Or nothing I come up with is good enough.  It's times like that, I have to learn to trust.

The Christians would call that "faith" - belief stemming from a will to believe, rather than knowledge or fact.  But I don't use that word for this, and not just because I want to avoid all the xtian baggage that comes with it.  It's also just not what I mean.  Because, believe it or not, I actually consider myself to be a skeptic.  I know that might seem contradictory and hard to believe, considering some of the whacked-out, mystical, some might even say superstitious things I believe.  But I would call myself a skeptical believer.

Yes, I believe in magick.  I believe that I (or, really, anyone, for that matter) can affect changes in consensus reality through non-local means.  But I don't believe that just because I want to believe it.  Yes, I wanted to believe that magick was real and possible and that I could learn to do it.  But I didn't know if that was true or not.  And so I spent years and years studying and practicing and testing and experimenting.  And it was only after repeated, verifiable success after repeated, verifiable success that I was finally able to accept that yes, magick is actually possible.

So, yes, I believe.  But only because I was able to prove it to myself beyond all shadows of my doubt.  Hence, I'm a "skeptical believer."

And so, when I get in these situations where I cannot imagine any brightside to my misfortune, it is not faith that I rely on, but trust.  I fall back on all my past experiences where I have felt the Way, the Flow, the Tao, and remember how in those mystical moments the path has appeared in front of me from out of nowhere, brick-by-brick at my feet.  I remember every instance of hindsight realization, where I find that though I didn't get what I wanted, I got exactly what I needed, even when I didn't know that I needed it.  I remember every time that I didn't know what to do, and so followed my instincts for lack of any other response, only to find that my instincts had led me to do exactly what needed to be done.  I remember all of these moments and I remember how these lessons have been reinforced through experience over and over and over and over again throughout my entire life, even before I'd ever heard of "The Tao" - and I trust in that feeling.  It has never failed me.  Not once.

And, honestly, in those moments when I'm lost in the pain or sadness of it all, it's not the trusting that's the hard part.  It's remembering to trust in the first place.  Because we're told our whole lives that these things aren't possible.  That you aren't supposed to believe in them.  And that, if you do, you're crazy, or broken, or sick, or in some other way wrong.

I guess in that way, I'm lucky.  Because I've never given a fuck what anyone else has to say about what's right, or what's wrong, or what's true.

And that is my Tao of Choosing Joy to be Joyful.