You are the only one who can change anything about yourself… Your thinking, your rituals, your behaviour, your actions… You are the only one who can stop putting the alcohol into your mouth… You are the only one who can create a better life for yourself.
There are many many ways that you can hold yourself back. Persisting with alcoholic thinking. Continuing to associate yourself with your alcoholic lifestyle… Calling yourself sober, in recovery… Putting roadblocks in front of yourself like PAWS… These are all things that you do to yourself… The ideas might be somebody else’s, but you’re the one who, through your belief, allows them to act on your brain, on your thoughts, and on your life… There is nobody that can save you put yourself…
Today’s video is based around a saying by Buddha which is:
“No one saves us but ourselves”
Whenever I quote religious or philosophical leaders, I consider that I am not a religious man, however, Buddha could be classed as a philosophical leader.
A lot of Buddha’s teachings were based around the power of yourself, the power of yourself in every walk of life. He teaches that you should only really be influenced by yourself and value your own opinion most of all, out of everything else your opinion should come out on top.
We are the only ones that can change our mind. We can change our state of mind, we can change our perceptions, the frames that we look at life through.
When I first started on my journey to quit alcohol my frame of looking at the world at the time was that “I was an alcoholic” and my alcoholism was affecting people around me, my business, my life in general and my life in general was going downhill.
I think everything about that statement is true except for the alcoholism bit. It was my behaviour, it was the behavior of drinking alcohol that was causing all the problems.
Even though I might have thought that this alcohol thing was something that was beyond me and something I needed to get control over, it had alluded me for a long time.
I was under the mistaken identity of being a drinker and when I am under that identity and I think about myself as a drinker then I don’t think as alcohol as being part of the problem.
I think about myself as being the problem, and if alcohol is not the problem and I’m the problem then I have to cut down on the alcohol use and moderate it, but as I know and many other people know, this is a virtually impossible task to achieve because of who we are as drinkers and what alcohol is as a drug.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t make any difference, because you are giving your power over to something else, you are giving your power over to this inner liquid in a bottle, you are giving your power over to a label, “alcoholic“, or a label, “sober“.
You are giving your power over to other people that are saying:
“This is the way alcohol is, this is the way alcoholics are and this is the way you are always going to be in your life.“
“You are always going to have this disease, you are always going to have this genetic defect and you are always going to have this alcohol presence in your life.“
And that’s giving away your power and that I think for this sentence, “no one saves us but ourselves” that’s the most important part of it.
That you can damn yourself by giving your power across to somebody else and thinking that somebody else is going to save you because they are not. You are the only one that can save yourself, in this situation at least and nobody can take the action but you.
No one can stop putting the stuff into your mouth but you.
Nobody can quit drinking but you.
Nobody can move on or give you the life that you want to live but you.
I hope you got something out of that, stay safe and keep the alcohol out of your mouth.
“If you are looking for that one person that will save you, look in the mirror.”
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
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