Why I Pray In The Shower

“When I talk to people about happiness, I make sure to explain that if we expect to become truly happy in life, growth has to be a very important part of it. I wrote in an older post called “Grow for Happiness” that there is both spiritual and personal growth we can acquire. Personal growth can be obtained by education, but there is more to it than just becoming more knowledgeable about certain things. For example, our experiences in life combined with our reactions to them can help us grow as a person. Although good experiences can help us grow so can what we call bad experiences. It need not matter if we react well in the beginning to these types of experiences as long as we strive to learn from them and try to improve on how we think and react to them in the future. There is also spiritual growth, but because some people don’t believe in god, this type of growth may not always be favorable. However, if we look at spiritual growth with the idea of it being nothing more than trying to be a better person than we were before, it can be easy for an agnostic or even some atheists to attempt to grow in this way as well. For me, it also helped to be open minded and believe in the possibility that there may be something more than just this world. If you read my book, you would know how a search through science actually helped me to believe this. My point in all this is that growing both spiritually and as a person enables us to love ourselves enough to be happy with who we are, and is what I call true happiness. However, I recently talked with some people who while claiming to be happy, also said that drinking made them even happier, and this made me wonder if they’re actually as happy as they could be. Now I will tell you that I refuse to judge anyone who drinks, and I don’t really care if they do, but I do care when someone abuses alcohol and has an obvious dependency on it. Science and medicine has proven that alcohol and drugs changes a person’s brain chemistry over time by depleting the chemicals that helps make all of us feel happy in life. Science and medicine also tells us that some people become dependent on alcohol and drugs because they no longer find joy in some of the things that they used to in life without using a substance. Unfortunately, when this cycle goes on for too long, it can interfere with family, work, or a person’s health, and become what most experts call addiction. Now my purpose for this post wasn’t to give anyone a lesson on growth and happiness, or addiction so I’ll finish by making clear what my belief is about true happiness. I believe that life is about levels. There are different levels of wealth among people, and there are different levels of good and bad in all of us. There are different levels of education people obtain, and people have different levels of intelligence and common sense. There are different levels of spiritual and personal growth among people, and some people never try to grow at all. Now to bring my point home about true happiness, and hopefully truly end this writing. There are different levels of happiness in life too, and as I eluded to earlier, some people claim they’re as happy as they can be because of their drinking. I know how they feel because at one time in my life I really believed I was as happy as I could be and that drinking only made me happier. However, I also drank when I was sad or angry, and many times because I was full of fears and insecurities. When I look back over my sobriety now though, I can honestly say that personal growth helped me to experience a level of happiness that I never knew, and growing more spiritual helped me to experience a level of happiness that I didn’t believe possible. I can also say that for some of us happiness doesn’t grow on trees. We need to work on it until like some trees, even when we waver in stormy weather at times, we still remain standing as strong as we were before.

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Tags: addiction, alcoholism, Happiness, personal growth, spiritual growth

I didn’t always believe in myself or in a creator that gave me the ability to be happy. I remember when I was 24 years old and in the Army, feeling quite afraid and quite unhappy because I missed my wife so much. At one point, I cried while mopping the Army mess hall after this song began playing over the sound system that was throughout the eating area. It was 1984, and I had joined the Army in February of that year to support her and our two children. After only one day I became very homesick, and a few weeks later I would hear this song and cry. Not only did I miss my wife, but I also missed my little girl and boy, and there were days when I felt so sad and afraid that I didn’t know what to do. It’s been twenty seven years since I first cried to this song, and although it’s no longer for the same reasons, the emotions I feel when hearing it today can still make me cry. I was drinking during the time I mentioned, and although I thought going into the Army would help me quit, it didn’t. I wanted so desperately to be a good husband and father back then that I had tried many times before to quit drinking, but even though I loved my family sooner or later the urge to drink would come back, and I’d choose drinking over being with them almost every time. Although this is part of the reason why the song still makes me cry today, it’s also because I feel very grateful to be sober. I’m coming up on my 15th year of sobriety soon, and I’m so glad I no longer feel the way I did back then. I had so many fears and insecurities that sometimes drinking was the only way I could cope in life and feel happy. Speaking of feeling happy, look at how happy the people at this live concert held in Budapest in 1996 seem to be. It’s the same year I would finally quit drinking for good and begin my journey from fear to belief in myself. I would also feel more happy and alive that year than I had ever felt before.

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Tags: creator, feeling alive, Happiness, kool and the gang-live in budapest 1996, sobriety

If someone would have asked me in my drinking days what I would be doing in 2011, I would have made the same joke I always did about not being alive when I was in my fifties. Although my drinking was nowhere near as bad as some of the people I drank with back then, I actually romanticized the idea of being the type of person who partied hard and wasn’t afraid to face the consequences for it. Fortunately, as all the readers of my blog know I eventually stopped drinking, and I am of course still here. The point I’m trying to make though, is that if my drinking was bringing me the happiness I thought it was at the time, I never would have made a joke like that. Then again nothing could have brought happiness to someone like me, who didn’t like or love themselves. A lot has happened in my life since I stopped drinking on April 27th, 1996, and while not everything has been perfect, I believe it was all supposed to happen for a reason. Besides that, I am able to see that many more good things happened in my sobriety than what we call bad things, and I’m at a point in my life now where instead of worrying when the other shoe will drop, I tell myself more good things will happen. It took me almost all of my fourteen and a half years sober to get to this point, but I can say I have not had an unhappy year since I’ve been sober.  I also believe this one will be another happy new year for me.  It doesn’t mean that there won’t be some challenges to face or a few obstacles to overcome, but I know now that it can only make me stronger.  I also know that as long as I continue trying to become a better person than I was before, I simply cannot fail to be happy in life, or with who I am. Something I certainly wasn’t when I didn’t love or even like myself not so long ago.

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Tags: another happy new year, Happiness, happy with who we are, living sober, loving ourselves

I’ve talked in some other posts about the things I did, and still do, to try and be a better person than I was before, but I’ve never gone into great detail about what has helped me the most in this endeavor.  You may have already guessed by the title of this post what it is, but let me elaborate on why self-examination and understanding ourselves not only helps us to grow as a person, but also find greater happiness.  The beginnings of my self-examination began shortly after I started going to AA meetings and hearing people share how much happier they became after taking a personal inventory and talking to someone about what they found. I knew if I also wanted to be happier in life I would have to do the same thing, and I didn’t waste any time in doing The Fourth Step, which was the personal inventory, and then doing the Fifth Step with someone I trusted. After doing both Steps, I felt like a burden had been lifted off my shoulders, and I began to feel the first signs of greater happiness. However, it would take doing the next four Steps and a continual practicing of the last three before I would feel like I was on the right path to becoming truly happy in life.  Although practicing the 11th and 12th Steps were instrumental in me finding the happiness I had always been looking for, I couldn’t have done so without also practicing the 10th Step. It was the 10th Step that helped me in my continuation of self-examination and even after I stopped going to AA, I would continue to take the different types of personal inventories that this Step told me about. Eventually over time, I began to understand myself better and needed less self-examination, but I would never stop looking at myself first in any situation that was giving me troubles in life. For example, if it was a situation that caused me to feel fearful or insecure, I would try to figure out why I felt that way and then proceed to change what I needed to about myself in order to stop feeling that way. Or, if it was difficulty with a relationship, although fear and insecurity was usually at the heart of this type of trouble, I would try and see where I may be at fault and change what I needed to about myself and my behaviors to help improve on that relationship. These are just the basics of self-examination and I will tell you it takes a lot of practice to get good at understanding ourselves, but when we begin to better understand our emotions and why we do the things we do that bring us troubles in life, it helps us to improve on ourselves and better understand others. When we understand others and why they behave the way they do, we begin to have less troubles with people in life,experience less fears and insecurities, and love ourselves more. I have found that loving myself is the most important key to loving others and being happy with who I am.

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Tags: personal inventory, self-examination, Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, understanding others, understanding ourselves