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UNCENSORED VERSION
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[Transcript Below]
It’s been a tremendous gift, actually growing up, becoming a man in recovery, getting spiritually dialed in, and having a relationship with my higher power. That changes everything. And then on top of it, I don’t drink anymore. Tears of joy, that’s all I can say, just tears of joy.
I’m glad you guys are here because I can’t do this alone. Should I use the word “sobriety”? Should I use the word “recovery” instead? Because they can mean different things, and context matters. This is one of those things where there are different points of view on what sobriety is and what recovery is. Whatever my point of view is, it’s just my opinion. I just want to say that. A universal for me is anyone who acts too certain about something. I run far and fast. I’m not really into that. I try to surround myself with humility, with people who are quite clear that they don’t know everything.
One thing that came into my mind is that “sacred sobriety” is a play on words. I probably would have chosen “sacred recovery” to be more accurate with what I’m trying to do with the project, but sacred sobriety rolls off the tongue. It’s memorable, and to be completely honest, it’s a branding thing. What I did to cover all my bases was the tagline. If you notice, the tagline is “reverence, ritual, and recovery,” so I have the word “recovery” in there.
What do I think about when I hear the word “recovery”? Well, what I think about is that it’s not just about putting down the drink or stopping using the drug. You know, as they say, it starts with stopping. So it starts with sobriety. The other thing about the word “sobriety” and what “sober” means is that sober for one person could just simply mean that they don’t do their drug of choice, but they don’t have a problem with anything else. There’s California sober, where they’re not as strict as, let’s say, AA sobriety—you don’t touch anything. So AA sobriety is where you don’t touch anything that affects you from the neck up. I would probably say that’s the most extreme version of sobriety.
There’s California sober, where they’re allowed to use plant medicines for healing, and they’re allowed to smoke weed as long as it’s medicinal or helps their mental health or something like that.
The AA camp looks at the California sober camp with judgment, of course, and vice versa. So even in the world of recovery, there are different factions. I’m not here to take a side on any of that. I was brought up in AA, but then I benefited from plant medicine therapy later on in my recovery. I honor both paths. I honor both cultures. I’ve adopted what I heard many, many people say in both of those cultures, which is: You have to find your own path. Each individual person in recovery, it’s trial and error. What I found in recovery, with incredible mentorship and sponsorship, the unexpected gift that I received was that I started to grow up. I started to get spiritually dialed in. I started to have a relationship with my higher power. Now, when that happens, that changes everything.
Not thinking I was a man, but actually becoming a man. My god, this slide. It’s absolutely true. We can come into recovery, and our one and only goal is just to stop using, stop drinking. But if we do this thing right, if we enter into full-on recovery from the ground up, I’ve seen people walk into recovery and not do much of anything in terms of changing their personality and changing their habits, and they get sober. It’s rare, but I’ve seen it. You can walk into recovery, be an asshole, get five years of sober time, and still be an ass. Honestly, I’m not even going to judge that. If that saved your life and that worked for you, and that’s all you wanted to get out of it, I’m not here to judge that. I probably don’t want to hang out with you, but I’m not going to judge that.
The really cool thing about this deal is you can come into recovery and become the person you’ve always wanted to be. I think if we’re being honest, deep inside, we’ve always wanted to be that honest person of integrity, the person that people look up to and who helps others.
The other thing is learning to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. This is still something I’m going to work on, I’m sure, until the day I die. But the more I lean into that, it’s like an exposure therapy type of thing. The more mindful I can become of my emotional states, the more I can lean into those feelings instead of trying to push them away. When I try to push them away, I have a tendency to think about things like numbing myself out—which could be Netflix. For some people, it’s excessive video games, excessive anything where you just completely check out. Granted, those things are less destructive than grabbing a couple of fifths of vodka.
If someone’s version of recovery is completely checking out in video games and Netflix, even for the first year, I say have at it, do whatever you need to do to stay alive.
The other thing about recovery is to actually seek out challenges, to understand life is hard. And if I think that it shouldn’t be hard, there’s a big issue there. The moment I’m able to accept the fact that life is hard—life is hard for all of us, so in that way it is fair—it might not seem like it’s hard for people because we can all put on a good show, but I promise you, life is hard for everyone. The moment I can accept that, when challenges come my way, there’s no resistance to them anymore. That’s where the big problem is. Then I’m able to allow the challenge to come to me. I’m able to handle the challenge. With practice, I’m able to get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. And then it just becomes a game. It’s like, cool, here’s a new challenge. Let’s see what we can do with this instead of fear and anxiety.
My takeaway message here is it would be a shame if you came into recovery with the only goal of getting sober or putting down your drug of choice. There is so much more available to you. I can’t even… You can become the person you’ve always wanted to be. When that day comes, you will feel… I remember when that started to happen for me. And… Tears of joy. That’s all I can say. Just tears of joy. And no one prepared me for that. My god, this slide. I’m going to run with that. I really like that.
