WEEKLY MEDITATION
Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.
-Oliver Sacks
Addictions allow us to rewrite reality. For a while. But over time, this revision begins to lose traction as the destructive components of the addiction experience inevitably increase. If we want the most out of our recovery, we will need to go farther than simple abstinence. We will need to find our way into the heart of our personal stories where we can explore the parts of ourselves that we attempted to revise through our addictions. If we do this well, we can befriend these parts of ourselves and use our painful stories to guide us toward a true healing process, one that honestly revisits the traumas and emotional wounds that led us naturally toward the mechanics of addiction as a form of relief. Then, and only then, can we learn to tell another story, one that includes a deep compassion for ourselves and an alternative way to story the pain and our attempts to sooth it. We can’t change our histories, but we can change the impact they hold over us in the present if we create changes in our lives that honestly revise the experience we have of ourselves and of life itself.
