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Welcome to Spiritual Psychology.
My name is RenƩe LaValley McKenna and I bring my 30 plus years as a recovering addict and ex-crazy person turned therapist and shamanic healer to bring you snackable teachings on spirituality,
Psychology,
And all things personal growth.
And today I want to talk about leaving addiction behind.
And although I'm in my 35th year of addiction recovery,
I have to be honest,
It's a topic I actually kind of avoid,
Except in my own personal growth and therapy work.
Now certainly I have worked with countless clients over the years,
Helping them to dissolve,
Resolve,
And come into their own form of recovery from many types of addictions.
And from many perspectives,
I suppose I could say I'm an expert on the field of addiction,
Both personally and professionally.
I actually feel that there is a deep mystery around the tremendous suffering and grip of addiction and the process or experience of recovery from it.
As verbose as I am,
I find it difficult to talk about,
But part of my practice is to do difficult things as frequently as I can just for practice and to keep me in shape.
But this is not a comprehensive overview of addiction and recovery.
It's just my limited perspective and experience of it.
And there are many,
Many ways to get clean and sober.
And what has worked best for me is a combination of 12 step fellowships and deep and sustained personal and spiritual growth work with a hefty spiritual practice on the side.
And I did a podcast on the 12 steps,
Number 61.
The 12 steps for everyone,
If you want to learn more about the 12 steps.
They're basically a set of very practical spiritual principles to be actively applied in our life in place of addiction.
And humans are multifaceted creatures.
We're physical,
Mental,
Emotional,
Spiritual,
And social.
And because we are a system,
Healing or dysfunction in any one of those areas affects the health of the whole system.
And although this can be confusing or even incomprehensible,
It does seem that what's happening here in the physical material world is only the tip of the iceberg.
And that on the deeper levels or from a meta perspective,
Physical reality is actually an expression of energy or consciousness that's always in motion.
The Hindus call it Maya,
Which is actually the idea that it's an illusion.
And although my body and the chair that it sits upon and this microphone in front of me have form,
On an atomic level,
They're mostly space and energy.
I recently saw the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once,
Highly recommend it.
And one of the characters says,
Don't you ever wonder what's really going on here?
And for much of my life,
I've only wondered what's going on here in the most practical way and how it applies to me,
Usually about how can I have more happiness and less suffering.
And over time,
My experience has been that working with those different aspects of our humanity,
Physical,
Mental,
Emotional,
Spiritual,
Social,
That the spiritual is the foundation that underlies all of them.
And that when I straighten out spiritually,
All the rest of the pieces fall into place.
May take some time,
But that is,
I believe,
The root of our human suffering,
The existential fear or misunderstanding of our experience of feeling separated or disconnected from the larger system.
I think it drives every form of suffering and dysfunction in the world.
And I feel like I was born with some existential suffering,
Particularly fear,
Had anxiety as far back as I could remember,
And a tremendous sense of isolation and disconnection.
It drove me to steal candy bars,
Cigarettes,
Playgirl magazines.
My best friend's mother had a subscription to playgirl and a stack of them next to her bed.
And we used to grab some soft porn playgirl magazines,
A pack of her mother's Newports,
And I'd steal some hundred thousand dollar bars from the Cumberland farms down the street.
We'd go into this little patch in the woods behind my house when I was about nine or ten,
I guess,
Trying to find some thrills and get some relief.
And even at that tender age,
I had already tried the good girl route,
Getting all A's in school and having my artwork on the board.
And outward success did not make me feel better.
So I started the path to sex,
Drugs,
And rock and roll,
Thrill seeker.
Not long after that,
I found acid and other psychedelics and pretty much would take any drug that people would hand me.
Uppers,
Downers,
In-betweeners,
And I drank alcohol as much as I could get my hands on it.
And although I was a daily pot smoker for a really long time,
I more loved the social aspect of passing a joint around.
I loved selling weed.
My first forays into being an entrepreneur made me feel kind of cool.
Plus people sought me out,
Made me feel popular.
The pot always made me stupid and paranoid.
And if I drank too much and smoked a joint,
It would immediately put me into a blackout.
But once I discovered there were substances that could change the way that I felt,
I didn't really care about anything else.
Most of what we do in life,
We do to create a felt experience.
We work,
We buy things,
We live places,
We have relationships because of how they make us feel.
And I gave up on outward success pretty early.
I just didn't touch the near terror that I lived in most days.
And drugs and alcohol,
Boys and being a petty criminal,
Mixed in with binging and purging,
Food every couple hours,
That kept me really busy,
Medicated and distracted from my soul suffering.
And for many years I felt like distraction and medication was the best that I could hope for.
I didn't know that healing and transformation were actually possible,
That my fears could be dissolved,
That my emotional wounds could be healed,
That my unresolved suffering and patterns of dysfunction could truly be resolved.
And now I know they can because they have.
In a very slow and developmental,
Incremental pace,
My addictions have dissolved one at a time and I was told to pick the one that would kill me first and the rest would fall into place.
Pick the one that's most presenting,
That's causing the greatest havoc or dis-ease.
Clarify what the addictive pattern is.
Stop the addictive pattern and do whatever is needed to tend to the authentic unmet needs that come up when I put the plug in the jug or put the cigarettes down or stop fucking the married man or stop abusing myself with food or compulsive spending.
Just like our body has kind of an order of operations of healing,
The same is true for our psyche and our spirit.
And whatever's causing the most suffering,
That's the thing we need to tend to first.
And I guess the mystery of addiction and recovery for me is that I cannot do it by myself.
And my powerlessness,
My inability to figure it out,
To be able to stick with a positive change has forced me to heal that existential experience of disconnection because I have had to find a higher power and I have had to have the help of other people and I still need those things today.
And that format of relationship with self,
Relationship with God,
Relationship with others seems to be the healthy dynamic that we need as humans.
In Buddhism,
They talk about the Buddha,
The Dharma,
And the Sangha.
Buddha is the emanation of source.
The Dharma is the spiritual teachings or principles that tell us how to relate with ourselves and others,
How to live in a healthy way in the world.
And the Sangha is the community.
Again,
Humans are a multifaceted system and the healthier we are in each area of our life,
The healthier the whole system is.
And over time,
I have gotten recovery in just about every area of my life.
First it was drugs and alcohol,
And then it was food,
And then it was sex,
Love,
And relationships.
And then I let go of cigarettes and my codependency and my relationship with time and procrastination and avoidance and overworking.
And I'm currently looking at my relationship with money.
And I haven't ingested anything mood or mind-altering since Valentine's Day of 1988.
I accidentally took a big swig of vodka thinking it was water one time when I was in Russia,
But I spit it out.
And I actually have no desire to change the way I feel today.
In fact,
I spend a lot of time opening to actually feel my feelings.
My emotions and feelings are the keys to my internal and my external experience.
Feelings are the flavor,
Texture,
Color of life.
They also provide deep insight into my own internal process and my experiential connection with others.
And again,
There's a great mystery to addiction that I don't understand.
I have buried so many people who were clean and sober for long periods of time and decided to experiment with drugs and alcohol again and didn't survive the experiment.
My dear friend and roommate,
Bobby,
One of the most beautiful angelic souls I've ever known,
A gorgeous man,
Hung himself in a treatment center.
After five years of being clean,
Made a little too much money,
Started doing coke again,
Started shooting dope,
And he lost everything.
And then he took his life.
My amazing friend,
Karina,
Another stunningly beautiful person,
Funny as hell,
So smart,
Crackhead,
Stayed clean over 10 years,
Had children and a husband.
She had a glass of champagne on New Year's about five years ago and has not been clean more than a couple months since.
In fact,
I'm still in touch with her husband.
And the last I heard,
She overdosed on Dilaudid in their house.
He had to do CPR on her while he was waiting for the paramedics.
They came and shot her up with Narcan.
She was furious that she was still alive.
My friend Tommy was seven years clean,
Wanted to have a spiritual experience,
Started to do some magic mushrooms,
Wash it down with a little beer.
The next thing,
He's living on the street for three years,
Ended up back in jail.
He's clean again now.
The extremity of the Jekyll and Hyde nature of deep addiction still baffles me.
So although I am a risk taker in almost every area of my life,
I don't mess around with addiction.
I'm going to chew up and spit out too many wonderful people.
And I was involved in the Buddhist organization created by the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh,
The Order of Interbeing.
It's a Zen order for laypeople.
And they have a bunch of tenants or vows that you take.
And one of them is to not sell or use alcohol or drugs because of the suffering it causes in the world.
And we live in a very addictive culture right now,
Looking to change the outside,
To make the inside feel better.
And that's the wrong direction from my experience.
That when we fix the inside,
The outside falls into place.
And whether people can do that on a non-spiritual basis,
That's totally up to them.
But I know that when I have asked for help,
Help has come,
Often in unexpected ways.
And the mystery of the destruction and suffering caused by active addiction is matched by the mystery of the grace,
Healing,
And joy that are found in recovery.
And true change in almost every area of my life has almost always come when I realized,
I can't figure this out.
I don't know what to do.
And that defeat or humility or letting go,
Surrendering the fight almost always opens some trapdoor that I didn't know was there.
And there's another option.
A third way.
I like the saying,
There's my way,
There's your way,
And there's God's way.
And opening my mind to that third door can continue to be a challenge to this day,
But that is always the best path for me.
And I usually don't know where that door is leading.
It's my job to walk through that third door.
So if you are suffering from any form of addiction,
Drugs,
Alcohol,
Sex,
Food,
Money,
Work,
Relationship,
Gambling,
Freedom is possible.
And if you're suffering because of other people's addictions,
Freedom is possible.
But from my perspective,
The path to freedom is through that third door of God's way.
And I get to give up my way and your way.
And if you're suffering,
Ask for help.
The universe is listening.
And our job is to pay attention to how that help comes and to accept it and participate in it.
Blessings on your path until we meet again.
This is RenƩe LaValley McKenna for Spiritual Psychology.
