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“Get busy with life’s purpose, toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue – if you care for yourself at all – and do it while you can.” Meditation 3.14

Last week I found writings from Jan 1st 2017. I forgot I wrote them. I described myself as riddled with anxiety and depression, wishing I was more articulate, and drinking too much, yet encouraged I had found new interests in philosophy and art.

“I want to figure out the type of man I want to be and think through how that man might conduct himself.”

“Oh yeah and I’ve committed to 60 days of no drinking.”

Even though drinking was destroying my mind, body and relationships, I was afraid to stop completely. My entire identity was wrapped up in it. Rarely did you see me without a glass of whiskey. I didn’t know who I’d be if I stopped. I didn’t think anyone would like me.

I decided on that day to to grow a beard and write publicly for the duration of my “experiment” with not drinking.

Whether you believe it to be circumstance or providence, the universe, through the love of friends, teachers, coworkers, and strangers, gave me the foothold I needed to continue my sober journey. I listened to my own body and soul. I held on.

A year later, at nearly 42, I’m the healthiest I have ever been. I understand myself better, and I am learning how to be in healthy relationships.

A year ago, my character was not equal to the love and opportunity that was being given to me. I have a long way to go, but I now feel better about what I am giving back.

Previously I was a man of no faith. I now have a practical faith. It is rooted in this sutra.

Sutra 2.1: tapah svadhyaya ishvara-pranidhana kriya-yogah

1) Practice and accept pain as part of the soul’s purification.

2) Study both yourself and the ancient scriptures

3) Surrender to God

Practice. Study. Surrender.

I set out this year to find and heal myself. I am happy, and at peace with who I am becoming and how I am living.

I’m getting closer.

My wish for you is if there is anything you need to change that you find the courage and strength to change it.

Get active in your own rescue. Let me know if I can help.

I love y’all. Happy New Year!

Thank you for allowing me the space to share my journey with you. If you think this will help anyone please feel free to shar

Day 350 snuck up on me. It is crazy how quickly ten days (or your life) can pass. I have been sober almost a year now. So young in my sobriety I am still experiencing many things for the first time.

The holidays have always had strange effect on me. I love the season. I (too) often break out (poorly) singing Christmas songs in the office (sorry) from I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas to Wham’s Last Christmas. However, as the Christmas spirit grows around me I begin feeling more and more like I don’t belong anywhere and feel very alone I in the world.

If you thought I drank a lot, I drank twice that during Christmas. Within minutes of arriving home, I would pour a glass of whiskey. I would sit, drink and go through the motions while ignoring both the past and the present. On Christmas Day, I would drive back, pick up a bottle and drink on the couch leading to crying for reasons I will never understand until I passed out.

I grew up with what would appear a storybook Southern Christmas. Most of my entire family lived in or near the small town of five hundred I grew up in. All the aunts, uncles and cousins would gather at my Granny Bootsie’s house. But holidays were always hard for me. I dreaded them. It seemed everyone had something to talk about but me. I felt like I had very little in common with the people around me. I was shy, nerdy and awkward. I didn’t want to play two hand touch in the backyard, and if I did or didn’t, I was made fun of. I didn’t hunt nor do I care to. I found myself just wishing I was at home playing with the Star Wars toys that Santa left under the tree. (Hint: Star Wars stuff is still favorite gift.) I just didn’t fit in.

Last Christmas was particularly impactful. As a drove home on Christmas Day I heard George Michael died. 54 was too young. Drunk, I texted mama and asked how old granddaddy was when he died. “57, heart attack, complications due to alcoholism” Six days later I stopped drinking.

For the first time in two decades I will be sober on Christmas Day. For 20 years, every year, I would show up but not be there. This year I will be there Mama. I love y’all.

This passage from The Gita makes me think of @taylorhuntyoga “What the outstanding person does, others will try to do. The standards such people create will be followed by the whole world.” 3.21

December 31st, 2016 was my last drink of whiskey. I wish I could say I committed to being sober the next day but I didn’t. I knew I was destroying my body and my relationships. I knew I needed to stop drinking for good, but I gave myself an out. I was going to “experiment” with not drinking for 120 days.
In March 2017, I traveled to St. John for vacation. This was my first sober vacation. The friends I was with were overwhelming supportive. I brought a book I bought at my shala, “A Way from Darkness” by Taylor Hunt. It is a book about his journey in life. Every morning I read his story over breakfast highlighting all the sentences that resonated with my experience.
On vacation, I joined the @trinifoundation yoga challenge. Now, I am the last person who should be doing this. On my best day I am an awkward unathletic Southern boy doing yoga and most days more like a sweaty walrus. But maybe if I could get on his radar it would push me to commit to being sober.

Holy shit, I am one of the winners. How in the fuck did that happen? I won a workshop with Taylor. There was no way I could go to this workshop and tell this man I had started drinking again.

Eight months later I met Taylor for the first time in Atlanta. I was still sober and sharing openly about my struggles and sobriety. It was my first Ashtanga workshop. I had lived in fear I was not “good enough” to do one. I did it.

Last week I went out of country for the first time. I traveled to Costa Rica to practice with Taylor and many other amazing humans. Taylor shared that he knew of me before the yoga challenge; that my teachers cared a lot about me and had reached out to him for advice on how to help me back when I was drinking. He selected me as a winner in the the yoga challenge so I would have to meet him at a workshop.
Why one man chose to help someone he didn’t know, I don’t know, but I do know I want to be more like that. Time to do the yoga!

Thank you, Taylor.

I cried this morning. I was sitting in my chair attempting to read the Yoga Sutras in its entirety before work, and I just started crying. My tears were a salty mixture of overwhelming gratefulness, a lifetime of regret and a sense of purpose.

This is the sutra that caused the first tear: “The cause of suffering is that the unbounded Self is overshadowed by the world” Yoga Sutra of Pantajali 1.17

I don’t deserve this life I have, and I am grateful for it.

I spent 20 years being a selfish manipulative asshole trying to achieve a twisted definition of success. For more than two decades I have been miserable trying to be what I thought the world said I needed to be. I drank so people would love me, and I drank because not everyone did.

I am frustrated I don’t know how to help others. When asked how I stopped drinking the only answer I can give is that I started doing Ashtanga yoga, began studying the Stoics, and I am lucky to have friends who never gave up on me. Friends who saw something in me I didn’t. Maybe it is helpful to know change is possible. I assure you if this addict can do it, anyone can.

Through my Ashtanga practice I have found faith. I’m sure I sound crazy when I tell people that studying the Yoga Sutras is like reading someone else explain what I have experienced over the last 4.5 years.
I am thankful to have found the Stoics. I wish I had been introduced to these words as a younger man. Maybe things would have been different. “Whatever anyone does or says, I must be a good man. It is as if an emerald, or gold, or purple, were always saying: ‘Whatever anyone does or says, I must be an emerald and keep my own color.” Meditations 7.11 “No, you do not have thousands of years to live. Urgency is upon you. While you live, while you can, be good.” Meditations 4.17 “All that you pray to reach at some point in the circuit of your life can be yours now – if you are generous to yourself.” Meditations 12.1 “What progress you ask have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.” Seneca

I want to spend the rest of my days being a good man; a man worthy of the universe that gave me birth.

Dr. Flores asked last week how I felt about everything. He meant the last 3 months where I truly had to face myself, the last 9 months since I got completely sober, the last 4 years since I entered recovery and the knowledge of why I drank away the last 20 years. I replied, “If the cost of all I have gone through is the man that is sitting here today, I would gladly pay it again.”

This is the healthiest – physically, mentally, spiritually — I have ever been.

Patanjali tells us in Yoga Sutra II.21,

Tadartha eva drsyasyatma

The seen exists only for the sake of seer. (Sri Swami Satchidananda )
Nature and intelligence exist solely to server the seer’s true purpose, emancipation (Iyengar)

What Patanjali is saying here is that the universe exists to help us find our true self. We just have to be willing.

We can learn and be shaped by our experiences or we can succumb and give up. Only after I stopped trying to escape from life was I able to begin to learn about myself. I had to listen and surrender to the lessons I was being taught. I had to face hard facts, take action, and ask for help. I had to do the work. I have to continue to be refined.

My studies in chemistry tell me the universe will always spontaneously move towards disorder and chaos, and only by putting in energy in can you reverse it. This has been my experience. Once I started putting the work in through therapy, yoga, philosophy and loving others has the chaos begun to subside.

My life is not what I thought I wanted 20 years ago or 3 months ago, but I would not trade who I am today for anything. I was selfish then. I am grateful now.

“Yes, getting your wish might have been so nice. But isn’t that exactly why pleasure trips us up? Instead see if these things might be nicer — a great soul, freedom, honesty, kindness, saintliness. For this is nothing so pleasing as wisdom itself.” Marcus Aurelius Meditation 5.9

Today I choose wisdom, good character, sobriety and kindness. Last weekend, I made a new friend, began to heal an old wound, and fully experienced meeting my friends’ child. Before I was sober, this level of joy would not have been possible.

Day 270 of Complete Sobriety: Night and Day

A couple of nights ago, a coworker and I were goofing around after an event and taking pictures under the lights outside of the Fox Theatre. We were laughing and being silly. A random snapshot captured the picture on the right.

I cherish this moment. I remembered a time when this type of casual playfulness was foreign to me, especially sober.

The picture on the left was taken around Feb 2013. Six months prior I was recruited from teaching to be a software developer. I was elected to chair a board committee at my alma mater. This photo was taken because I had just pledged $10,000 to help inspire young alumni to give back. I was proud to be featured in the alumni magazine. To the observer and even some of my closest friends, it seemed was on top of the world.

Comments on social media hinted at a different story:

“Something’s missing in that picture…OH! I know!!! No cocktail in your hand!”

“A picture of him in a raft with a beverage would have been better!”

The reality was I was only sober a few hours of the day. I weighed nearly 250 lbs. I hated myself. I was willing to be whoever others needed me to make people like me. I gave thousands of dollars just for approval and recognition. I was talented enough to hide my darkness, but it was tearing me apart.

This picture shows how much one can change in 4 years.

May 25th, 2013 – I walked into my psychologist’s office, Dr. Philip Flores, and admitted I needed help. I began treatment for a decade-long battle with substance abuse.

Jan 13th, 2014 – I was introduced to Ashtanga yoga and the loving community at Balance Yoga Atlanta. The Ashtanga method of practicing yoga is transformational.

Jan 1st 2017 – I stopped drinking so I could have the clarity to truly understand myself, begin to heal and focus on being the best human I can be.

Today I am better. I am grateful. I now do things I love. I now give because I care. I now have a lot of love to give.

Funny, I am never asked if choosing sobriety is worth it. I believe no one asks because the difference in me is like night and day.

Fee free to share if you think it will help someone.

I attempted to read the Yoga Sutras years ago as part of a 3 month Ashtanga immersion at our shala. They not resonate with me. The language seemed too dense and odd (ie colored impressions), but I had bought the book and it remained on my shelf.

There was no grand plan earlier this year to begin studying the sutras. Newly sober, I was as scattered as I can ever remember being in life. I was caught in a tornado of figuring myself out and barely understood myself from moment to moment. One night in June, I was extremely restless and indecisive. I’d pick up a book only to start a movie then I would tire of it and surf new television shows to stream. I flipped open Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and randomly read:

3.11 sarvarthata ekagratayoh ksaya udayau cittasya samadhiparinamah

The weakening of scattered attention and the rise of one-pointed attention in the citta is the transformation towards samadhi.

You should know I am fascinated with Jung’s concept of synchronicity. Hole. Lee. Shit. I was scatterbrained as hell, and I find this. I started writing. The passage continued to make me think and inspired the chemist in me to relate it to quantum mechanics. As I focused and wrote more about how inconsistent I was being in life I began to calm, and in that peace I caught a glimpse of what might be going on. I now had some awareness.

I started reading the sutras regularly and recently been reflecting on these two:

2.1 tapah svadhyaya Isvarapranidhanani kriyayogah

Burning zeal in practice, self-study and study of scriptures, and surrender to God are the acts of yoga.

2.2 samahdi bhavanarthah klesa tanukaranarthasca

The practice of yoga reduces afflictions and leads to samadhi.

This has been my experience with yoga. The self discipline of practice led me to examine myself and even though I understand more than ever about myself, the things I have not yet been able to address, I try to surrender to the universe and have faith it will work out as long as I continue to take proper action.

Kriyayogah is the yoga of action. I’ll see you on the mat.

I began my Ashtanga yoga practice at Balance Yoga nearly 4 years ago. At 246 lbs (no, I could not touch my toes) and newly in recovery I went to my first yoga basics class. I learned the first few poses in the Ashtanga primary series (had no idea what that meant.) Ashtanga is a sequenced, mostly self-led practice . As you build strength, gain flexibility and master your breathing your teachers (❤️ you Kathy and Marsha) will allow you to progress in the series.

This discipline of doing the same sequence 5 to 6 days a week allows you to really be in tune with your body. At first I saw great results, but over the next 3 years I was plagued by weakness and injury. My muscles would shake in most poses. As soon as I would build up to half-primary series an injury would knock me back down. Vinyasa was not available to me as I would have pain simply from holding plank. I was still drinking heavily daily and proudly wore a shirt that said, “whiskey + yoga.” It’s about balance right? 😁

I was supposed to be getting stronger; my muscles were deteriorating. I was supposed to be making progress. I was going backwards. For three years I struggled. I would have so much pain in purvottanasana (pictured here) it would derail my practice and often set me back. I wanted to give up. I couldn’t help but think, “If my muscles are falling apart, what is happening to my heart?”

In January I stopped drinking. In 8 months, my practice has improved more than the 3 years before. Last week I completed all asanas in primary series for the first time. I am able to vinyasa and, on good days jump through. I can now hold purvottanasanaa, and it feels good to open my heart.

Not drinking made all the difference. This is part of my story. If you have any questions please reach out. I love you.

I stopped drinking 220 days ago. Recently I questioned my decision. I am recounting these events to remind myself why I chose this path; why it is necessary.

By May of 2016 my body was falling apart. After practicing yoga for 3 years, my progress halted. A chronic shoulder injury, tendonitis and weakness plagued me. I collapsed on Piedmont Road sober one afternoon. Blood work showed a major vitamin D deficiency. After some research, I was pretty sure I had alcoholic myopathy. It takes months of not drinking to reverse. If drinking affected muscle this way, what was it doing to my heart?

In September 2016, I read, “A ‘Memory Hacker’ Explains How to Plant False Memories in People’s Minds”. This stood out, “The world as you know it only exists to you, [as you are] right now. Every day you wake up a new person,” with a different brain.” I could to wake up with a new brain! Just feed it goodness not whiskey. It gave me hope I could change.

A few days later, an article, “I HATE saying I’m SOBER,” appeared on LinkedIn. Jenny Schatzle’s story resonated with me. I could identify. I wrote her. She was very kind to respond. More hope.

I attended a close friend’s wedding in November. I disgraced myself. I got into a heated argument with my friend, the groom, at rehearsal dinner. I got blackout drunk at the wedding. The next morning I woke up sickened with the feeling of not knowing what I said or did or how I embarrassed my friends. I am still ashamed.

George Michael died on Christmas Day. His death hit me harder than any other death that year. I had already been drinking most of that day, and upon arriving back in Atlanta I listened to his music, drank myself into a stupor and cried. He died at age 53. It seemed so young.

At 11:03 that night I text Mama, “How old was daddy’s daddy when he died? He had a problem with alcohol right?” “57, heart damage from alcohol”

“How long had he been sober?” “15 years.”

Will I live to 57?

For me, there is only one choice. Stop drinking.

I never met my grandfather. He died 8 days before I was born. I want to thank him for helping me do what was necessary so I can become the best man I can be. I love you.

If you think this post will help anyone please feel free to share.

“Transformation isn’t sweet and bright. It’s a dark and murky, painful pushing. An unraveling of the truths you’ve carried in your body. A practice in facing your own created demons. A complete uprooting before becoming.” -Victoria Erickson

Arrogance told me I could do this on my own. My ego demanded it. The truth is even though I am surrounded with the most amazing and supportive friends and communities anyone could ever hope for, I often feel alone. Drinking was such a part of my identity. I had no choice but to ask for help.

In the last 10 days, I found myself unconsciously walking to my favorite bar — fortunately having the strength to sit on a bench and write instead. I have had to asked friends to give up their personal time to just sit with me without being able to explain. I conceded and asked strong men and women I know in recovery for guidance. I went to AA for the first time because an angel of a friend reached out at just the right time.

I’ve been been drunk for more than 20 years. I remember being on front campus of college in my 20s, and after a short pleasant conversation this acquaintance commented, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you sober before.” Back then I foolishly saw it as a badge of honor. Hearing this 20 years later at the age of 40 was a wake up call that helped set me on this journey.

What started as a 120 days experiment became a choice to stop drinking. I choose to face my past, fully experience the present and become the best man I can be. The man I want to be.

I feel I have a lifetime of lessons to learn and behaviors to unlearn. It is daunting and recently feels like I’m at war for my soul. But this is why I chose this path — to, for once, feel the things I need to feel and make the changes I need to make. Being honest with yourself is brutal. Regret fucking sucks. Pain is necessary, and it is ok to ask for help. I will endure, and I will do the hard work required.

There is no going back; there is only through.

Thanks for letting me hold myself accountable to you. Thank you to my brother for leading the way. Happy birthday. I love you. I could not do this without you.