Welcome to post PRIDE recovery. The great parties, parades and gatherings have passed, now it’s time to put PRIDE into your life with balance, inner spirit and meditative observations. But where to find time for that?” There’s just too much – too much to learn, to see, too much information, technology and techniques, too many ways to pleasure, too many ways to pain. Too much! How can we be expected to take it all in and deal with it? Perhaps we don’t have to take it all in OR deal with it. What a relief to know that we can go deeper and deeper into whatever we wish, and through that exploration come to understand the everything. Since all of creation is a whole and the oneness of all creation is a reality, our world is indeed a holo-movement or hologram. In exploring the depths of one thing, we gain wisdom about others. Our task, then, is to see what calls to us, what piques our imagination, what stimulates our being and asks us to delve deeper and deeper into it. When we follow this calling, we will find balance. “
These wise words of codependency recovery guru Anne Wilson Schaef remind me that my current intuition has value. When I was bang at it, using chems & alcohol regularly, I thought that spontaneous thinking and acting out was intuition. What I discovered with personal development was that I was addicted to imbalance and that this spontaneous ‘acting out’ was unhealthy, unfounded in wisdom and detrimental to my health. Basically I couldn’t trust myself and conned myself that I could. Most gay men come into therapy, recovery or personal growth to find balance, but the moment we start searching the net, self help books or lists of therapies to consult, it’s easy to become unbalanced with too many choices. Best if we leave it another day then.Most of us choose have chosen at some point a stimulant to balance us ; alcohol, coke, hash, club drugs, nicotine or a person for example, at first it works then it starts to get out of hand, it gets too much and then we are hooked into being taken hostage, kidnapped until we set ourselves free.
Recognising that we are not the most important person on the planet is a beginning in unfurling the freedom flag. Freedom comes from standing back and making informed choices rather than letting the ego run amok. It’s easy to think we are missing something if we don’t join in. Many people don’t possess a mobile phone, an ipod or have access to a computer. They more than survive. Many have learnt that it takes courage to be with yourself, to sometimes dispense with the demands of the modern age. This is why we crave a day by the sea, a walk in nature or wear sloppy clothes for a week or two. No performance needed.
What most of us find in personal development is that we are quite amusingly mad. When we get clearer about our own insane thinking we see that the world is madder than first thought. No wonder Antony Newley sang ” Stop the World – I want to get off “. But the result of any therapy is to decide which world we want to live in, so ask yourself that question, take stock and seek balance. What perception of the world ” out there ” do you have “. Does it deliver? It is only a mirror image of your inner world view. Think sanely in balance and the world will change around you.Take stock, by checking out the past few weeks, or the last weekend. Write down what caused you to feel PROUD, then write what could be improved, what needs addressing, what needs to be thrown out. The lighter you are balance is achieved.
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This blog of mine first appeared on July 2 2013 on http://www.guyspy.com/post-pride-balance-2/ in my RELATIONSHIP GUYD column.
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