As I wrote in a recent article, I am half-a-year sober.
When I quit drinking, I told myself that it was going to transform my life. And my god was I right. My life has begun to completely transform. In ways that, at the time, I could have never predicted or even fathomed.
Here are some more of the 8 ways going sober has transformed my life:
Face Every Aspect Of Your Life Head On
This extended sober period really made me aware of how much I was self-medicating on some level. Not even just simply with alcohol consumption, but choosing to avoid facing certain areas of my life, certain aspects that were contributing to my unhappiness. When you aren’t drinking (and you don’t smoke weed or do other drugs), you literally have no vices to escape to or numb yourself with. You have to face yourself head on. You have to stare at your shit square in the face and come to terms with it. This can be painful. It can be uncomfortable. But it can also be empowering. You have to sit with yourself and really sit with the areas of your life and parts of your soul that are torn up and disconnected.
For myself, this really forced me to face the truth of how I was really feeling about things. It forced me to really self-evaluate where I was at, deep in my heart and soul. To be honest, I realized how unhappy I was. The way I’d constructed my life in certain areas was not fulfilling me. I felt isolated. I felt alone. I knew that something had to change. Something had to give. Because the way that I was currently living was no longer going to work for me.
Going sober gave me the sobering realization that I had to change and transform my life in the following areas if I wanted to be happy:
• I was self-sabotaging myself with a poor self-care routine and poor personal health.
• My mental health and mindset were negative and one of scarcity and limitations.
• I was living with some deep, underlying unworthiness that was keeping me caught in this cycle of self-destruction via my inner critic that wasn’t letting me find the pathway to abundance to achieve my ambitions.
• I was dissatisfied with my community and starving for deeper levels of connection with more aligned people.
• I was restless in my soul and needed to find a new way of being in order to establish more peace within myself.
• I was constantly caught between living in the past and future, but not the present moment where true happiness and peace-of-mind are cultivated.
One of the greatest gifts that this sober period gave me was the most honest evaluation of my life ever. Nothing being saturated by alcohol and vices to numb myself. Just the sobering truth that was being revealed by my truest self—by my soul—of what it needed to feel full, to feel nourished, and at peace with itself.
While it was difficult to come to terms with some of these areas and these parts of myself, the discomfort of its arrival also started to present a pathway to healing—a pathway to my higher self that would finally break old patterns that kept me confined to lower levels of my potential self.
Improved Willpower, Boundaries And Self-Worth
One of the fastest ways to enhance your self-worth is to quit a toxic habit for an extended period of time. Think of it like lent for your self-worth. Think of the number of people who regularly engage in a toxic habit but wish that they didn’t. Like people who smoke and wish that they didn’t because of the health risks. So, essentially they’re engaging in this thing that makes them feel good (short-term) but actually fills them with shame (long-term). So, if you’re able to successfully quit a toxic habit and live in complete accordance to self, you naturally enhance your self-worth, strengthen your relationship to self, and empower yourself to make positive decisions towards improving your life.
I actually find that this is a very effective strategy when it comes to dating. So, for anyone who’s single (or in a relationship, it doesn’t matter), if you can successfully quit a toxic habit for a period of time, you’re naturally going to enter the dating field with clearer boundaries and a greater sense of self. That’s because this affirmation to make positive choices for yourself gives you more empowerment to say no to things that aren’t aligned with you. This will translate to you being less susceptible to wasting time with the wrong people because you’re more connected to yourself and have built more resolve to not indulge low-value activities/people that take you away from your higher self.
Even in a relationship, the ability to say no to a toxic habit is going to translate to you to being more inclined to take ownership for your faults, rather than living in a delusional state of denial (i.e. someone who has an addiction but is not ready to admit that to themselves or anyone else)—as well as operate within more closely defined boundaries of what will and will not work for you. All of this is going to invite your partner to join you in higher level choices, communication, and overall, a higher quality relationship.
I have always been the guy who was a people-pleaser and would often say “yes” even if I actually meant “no”. This translated into relationships where I was ignoring my intuition and getting involved with people who I knew, deep down, were not the right people. Being able to follow through with my sober commitment definitely improved my ability to say no to things/experiences I don’t actually want to do, or weren’t in agreement with me. This quieted the voice of the inner critic because of less self-sabotage and I developed a higher appreciation of self.
Being able to follow through on my sober commitment also showed me just how strong my willpower actually is, which empowered me to continue to make more positive choices that enhance my life and take me closer to my higher self on a long-term, big picture scale.
Complete Clarity
By far the biggest game-changer during this sober period was the degree of clarity with which I saw things. It was insane just how clear everything became all of a sudden.
This all started with the crazy dreams that I began to have in the beginning. They say that weed and alcohol kills the dream chemical that causes us to dream in our sleep. It’s not like I never had dreams while I was drinking, but the vivid dreams that I started having were fucking insane. Like deep, deep mummy tomb slumbers where you feel like you’re paralyzed and are in this crazy Willy Wonka world. They kept happening night after night, even if I’d wake up in the morning and fall back asleep for an hour. BAM! I’d have my craziest fucking dream that would blow my damn mind!
After that, I began to see opportunities in places that I’d never seen before. I was open to those subtle nudges and messages that the Universe was sending me in a way that I’d never been privy to before. For so many years, I tried to force my vision on the Universe. I was stubborn and focused on a particular way of things working out. And no matter what was presented to me by the Universe, I’d still try and hammer home my vision.
But that changed. I started to listen for the first time in my life. And I started noticing the way I saw things shifting. I really began to ramp up the consistency on posting relationship articles and relationship content to social media. I went deeper and more honest than I ever had before. The lines between my mind and soul were free-flowing with inspiration and authenticity. And I started receiving this continuous flow of emails, DM’s, and messages from people telling me how much my articles were moving them, inspiring them and helping them in their journey. They kept coming. Message after message. I kept writing. Kept creating. And these messages of affirmation from others telling me that they needed and wanted my message, my truth, kept dropping into my orbit. In a way that I’d never experienced before. I don’t know whether the messages were more frequent now, or perhaps my lines of communication with the Universe just had a better connection now.
Because before this period, I don’t think I would have received its message with the clarity in which I did. I recognized that I was being guided somewhere. I realized the Universe was calling me to do something. Whether I was ready for it or even wanted to do it, I was being chosen to do something. And I started to listen. I started to understand what was happening. Before, my stubborn ego would have consciously avoided this message and stayed married to its own vision, without flexibility, but the clear state I was operating in made the calls too loud for me to ignore. Too precious and sacred to shove to the side. So I didn’t, I moved toward the call with an open heart and a soul ready to be in service to what I was being called to do.
I chose to surrender. This surrendering brought me into full contact with my power. My power to transform. To ignite. To inspire. To move those around me with my message.
I recognized an opportunity in a way that I never would have been able to before. What was that opportunity? That I could make a living helping people. That whether or not I even understood it, this was what I was supposed to do. So I just leaped and trusted the call.
So I decided to become a life coach and relationship coach and create educational programs around the lessons I’ve learned from my own pain and failures. I will be releasing my first educational courses this fall. And I’ve already coached a few people and actually helped them achieve breakthroughs. Over the course of the next 8-9 months, I will be launching my online coaching business in a very big way with the vision to transform people’s relationship to themselves, their paradigms of what they believe to be possible and their relationship to the ones they love.
I’ll give you a little sneak preview: the energy I feel inside to sit in service of other people and help them improve their lives is one of the greatest gifts I have ever been given. I feel an immense amount of responsibility and gratitude to be called to do this type of work. It’s like taking natural heroine every day.
And I genuinely and compassionately want to serve people, in a way that feels like I’m accessing a light to my essence, in complete disregard of ego. Very quickly it’s instilling the type of peace and compassion into my heart that I’ve always yearned for, but never been able to experience.
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This post was originally published on jamienrae.com, and is republished on Medium.
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