Trying So Hard

SURRENDER. SURRENDER. SURRENDER.  It’s not that you’re not trying hard enough, or that you haven’t been clean long enough or that you aren’t praying enough each day or providing for yourself in life enough.

It’s simply that you haven’t yet surrendered.  And by surrender, I mean accept and embrace the purity of the lessons you chose to learn in this lifetime.  Accept all of your circumstances and experiences and seek ways to earnestly change them.

You’re fighting yourself and these life lessons on a consistent, daily basis.  You are doing everything in your power to evade them, as opposed to surrender to them, thus the drugs, alcohol etc.

You brought all of these experiences to yourself to learn from them and to transcend them, not be destroyed by them.  The drugs and alcohol are/were attempts to mascaraed deeper unresolved issues.

I understand that you believe “fighting” is what you must do to maintain your sobriety, as it is how you cleaned things up to begin with.  And you can’t understand why it is the worst time in your life when you are doing all these things, trying so hard and doing all this fighting.

However, the simple truth is that by fighting and evading, you wear yourself down, bringing more of what you are trying to escape from to yourself.  By surrendering, you empower yourself.

It’s not that you won’t have to exert effort every moment of every day, to transcend these life lessons and your inner demons, it just means you’ll learn to do it from a place of calm and confidence, not fear and fighting.

Earnestly address and deal with the issues that led you to become an addict in the first place, as they lie festering, causing you to fight more, do more, bringing about other external unpleasant life circumstances and experiences, even though you have gotten sober.

Actively seek out individual or group counseling.  Open yourself to the healing benefits of meditation, yoga, quiet solitude and the daily practice of gratitude.  Be incredibly mindful of your thoughts, feelings and the people with whom you chose to surround yourself.

And do not become an isolationist.  It is by becoming open and aware of ourselves that we transcend our current incarnation of ourselves so as to create a yet more improved version of self.

 When you stop “trying” and just “be”, you’ll come to understand the gift of surrender and you and your life experiences will change dramatically for the better.