An Accidental Mystic in Recovery

How surrender saved my life

I am eleven. I am beaten up every day in gym class because I am weird and poor and one of only two white kids in the whole school. At home, I am my stepfather’s emotional punching bag. On the weekends, my hippie dad who I adored my whole life starts taking me to a clothing-optional hot spring. One day, he leaves me alone in the soaking pools with a pedophile. My mother is depressed. She either doesn’t see what is happening or does not care.

Every night I pray to G-D that I will die and go to heaven. One day, my prayers are answered, just not in the way I want, but maybe in the way I need? A lady in a cloak comes to me in a dream. We are in my trailer watching my mother and stepfather fighting over rice, boiling on the floor. My baby sister is crying.

This is not your fate, the lady tells me. She says an awakening will happen in my thirties. My life will get better then. This was all very disheartening. My life sucks now, that’s what I was thinking. How would I make it that long?

The last time I saw the lady, she appeared as a ghostly figure floating in front of my bedroom window. This was the last time I felt at peace.

All through elementary school, I had been a straight-A student. This all changed when the lady left. By twelve, I was practicing black magick on the playground with my best friend, Sharon, also a follower of Marilyn Manson. I had gotten nothing out of being good. By the time I turned thirteen, I had sex, tripped on LSD, drank alcohol, tried meth, and run away from home. I thought I was rebelling from my parents and society. Years later, I would realize I was mirroring what I was subjected to growing up, but with a different covering.

Finally, the day the Lady predicted came true. On Christmas morning at the age of thirty-four, after chasing romantic fantasy and treating my PTSD with alcohol and drugs for over twenty years, I had my first spiritual awakening, and it was terrible.

For years, I had blamed my husband for my drinking and my desire to have affairs outside of our marriage. I was convinced that his porn addiction and his alcoholism fueled my own bad behavior. After drunk driving to my drug dealer’s house on Christmas Eve night and nearly killing myself, I awoke the next morning with a painfully clear realization. I had been drinking and chasing romantic fantasy long before I met my husband. If he were taken out of the equation, I would continue to destroy myself.

The worst thing about this revelation was that I didn’t know any other way to live. My mind was ruled by a victim consciousness brought on by years of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. My addictions helped me to avoid the pain that I had no tools to heal from. Here I was, thirty-four, and I didn’t know how to save my soul. Afraid of my own life, I got on my knees, and I prayed. Like a person facing their own death, I felt powerless, and because of this, I surrendered.

Oddly enough, G-D came as a voice in my head that sounded very much like a drug rehab counselor. Go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Of course, I thought this was bullshit. But after two months of trying to “control” my drinking and failing miserably, I listened to the voice.

On a spring morning with a heavy heart, I went to an AA meeting. I will remember that day for the rest of my life. I walked into a room of over thirty women and heard my story repeated back to me with startling clarity. These women had used alcohol and people to run from themselves. They came from neglect and abuse. Their stories were my story. They were strangers to me, yet, somehow, I knew them.

Then it happened. The room took on a brightness and a warmth I had not experienced since I was a small child in my mother’s arms. In that moment, I experienced the universe not as separate mechanical parts whirling in a void of dark matter, but as a conscious, interconnected organism that had my evolution in mind.

My whole life, I had been trying to control everything around me, thinking that if other people would just change, then my life would get better. I could finally see that I was trying to play G-D, and I didn’t have to do that. That trying to change my external circumstances in that way would only lead me to more suffering. I did not have to change anyone but me. A weight lifted. I heard a voice, just let go. It was clear to me in that moment that the answer was not control, it was surrender.

Now eight years sober, I have found that through a ritual practice focused on aligning my will (my ego) with a higher will (G-D), my life has taken on a meaning and depth I would have never thought possible in active addiction.

A wise man once said that mysticism is equal to love. And what is mysticism but the desire to be one with G-D. And what is G-D but a vast and beautiful energy running through this dualistic world of order and disorder, death and birth, of pain and joy. The biggest lie I was ever told was that G-D was separate from me. That this world and its people were not of G-D and G-D was not of them.

Most of my life, I felt intrinsically unique in my victimhood. I drank because I felt alone, unworthy of love, separate, misunderstood. By changing my belief. By having the faith to surrender to a G-D of my own understanding and asking for help in a power greater than myself, I have been gifted with the experiential knowledge that I am connected to all things. This knowledge has cured me from my victimhood, and it has cured me of my spiritual malady.

You would think giving my life and my will to G-D would cause me to have no power. This turned out to be the most empowering thing I have ever done for myself. When I align my will with a higher power and ask that power to guide my every decision, I stop looking outside of myself for validation. I take charge of my own destiny. I become the magician of my own life.

We invite you to share.

What role has surrender played in your recovery?
Has spirituality, in any form, influenced your sobriety?