I am finding myself in a better way.

“In the end I am still practicing this guide I first discovered in “Breaking the Cycle” and am finding myself in a better way and thankful for this gift.”

A little more than a year ago, my family had a bad fallout with one of my older brothers resulting in a restraining order by my parents and his own refusing to speak to any of us. In a fit of rage, he left a message to me berating me of all of my inadequacies and insisting of my alcoholic behaviors.

Being only a social drinker and almost never in excess, I took this as a superficial insult and really dismissed this characterization and continued living my life as it was, attempting to raise my two sons with my wife in a healthy environment. It wasn’t until around three or four months ago that I began to understand that my life was not ideal in the way I seemed to believe it was.

I was carrying much resentment, shame and anger with me and thought I was finding relief in watching internet porn, binge eating, smoking pot and lashing out in anger and trying to control almost all the situations life threw my way. In an attempt to find some stability and a more productive lifestyle I read a book about emotional intelligence and when I was done with that I picked up “Breaking the Cycle”.

Upon delving deeper into its content, I began to understand my afflictions, not with just internet porn, but in all my compulsive behaviors and especially found the concept of who I am is not who I was or who I think I am and the stories one tells themselves does not make them who they are very inspiring. I found it very helpful for me to follow these ideas brought forth to me through this book and continue to do so when I began to read another book called “The Power of Now” and in this book it also stated the almost same message from “Breaking the Cycle”; that my identity is not determined by the stories I tell myself.

I was a little caught off guard and slightly alarmed by this concept being in these two books and the wordings were almost identical to each other and yet in hindsight it really isn’t that coincidental. Within the first day of starting to read this book, I was driving home from the library when somewhere in the back of my mind I recalled that my wife had told me that Ram Dass had just died yesterday. I was not too familiar with him or the things he spoke about, but I do know that my wife told me once that she used to read his book, “Be Here Now” at her grandmother’s house when she was younger and I began to laugh out loud in an almost uncontrollable way, because of these epiphanic happenings.

It was a good three minutes that I laughed out loud to myself in the car and when I got home I told my wife of the coincidences, excluding my fit of laughter and she said to me that she heard in the car on the radio that Ram Dass would preach the power of laughter as a way to bring forth presence and I was stricken with unbelievability of what happened to me in the car on my way home. I then told her and she said, “that’s really weird.”

This whole scenario made me think of that saying in the book, “The Alchemist” which goes something along the lines of, “...when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it.” In the end I am still practicing this guide I first discovered in “Breaking the Cycle” and am finding myself in a better way and thankful for this gift.