My Story Part II--Spiritual Beginnings

I grew up in the Fifties going to a quasi-fundamentalist church every Sunday with my parents. By the time I was 14, I wanted no part of that and stopped going. For the next 20 years, religion and spirituality played no part in my life. I felt no interest and saw no need for anything spiritual.

That began to change when I was in my mid-thirties after a series of experiences while I was stoned. One Saturday afternoon I fell into a trance out in the woods and felt at one with the universe. Several weeks later, I was sitting stoned in the park and felt the ground begin to shake--the next day I read that China and India had begun firing at each other in the Himalayas about the time I felt the ground shaking. A month later, stoned and drunk, I stood transfixed by the incredible beauty of the early morning sun shining through an old growth forest in a state park on the Oregon coast.

These experiences opened up a hunger for more of them. I spent five more years trying to recreate them with pot. That never happened. I had been given a glimpse of something, but I didn't understand what it was. It was a spiritual opening.

Six months later my emotional world collapsed. My girlfriend left, saying she no longer wanted to put up with my use of pot and alcohol. I was alone and in deep emotional pain. Soon I wasn't sleeping or eating as I slid into a major depression. By the end of three months I was beginning to feel suicidal.

And then one day I spotted a book in my supervisor's office--The Myth of Freedom written by a Tibetan Buddhist named Chogyam Trungpa. For some reason, I picked it up and began reading. In the midst of my insanity, his writing seemed the sanest thing I had read in some time. (I didn't know then that Trungpa was an unrecovered alcoholic-addict himself--so maybe that's why his writing seemed so sane to this alcoholic-addict.)

I started meditating every morning. Slowly I began to feel better, sleeping through the night and regaining my normal appetite. I read other Buddhist writings, finding a wisdom and understanding about life for which I hadn't even realized I was hungering. The spiritual opening from a year earlier began to grow.

But, of course, as I began to feel better, my denial about my addiction remained intact. I continued to get stoned and drunk, seeing no contradiction between my craving for substance-created altered states and the Buddha's teachings about craving as a major source of suffering. In fact, I often believed I understood the Buddha's teachings most profoundly when I was stoned.

Nonetheless, the seed of spirituality had been planted. I am still meditating more than 25 years later. I believe it was my meditating and reading Buddhist literature that prepared me for my awakening from denial one morning in 1984, understanding I was (and still am) an alcoholic-addict, and making a decision to turn my pot and alcohol-conditioned mind over to the power of the Buddha's teachings. And, I'm convinced, it has been this spiritual practice that led me to N and that has sustained our relationship over the years.

So over the next month or so I want to turn my attention in this blog to the topic of Buddhism and relationships in recovery.