Long-Lasting Sobriety

3 Foundational Principles

In our information-saturated world, many people care about health & wellness. Even more people have ideas about how to go about it! Everyone says their idea is the best, or at least the “newest thing” that (of course) no one has ever said before. Not to minimize anyone’s opinion, but when you look closely, you start to see that most people are saying about the same things.

Today, my aim is to highlight that there are universal patterns that exist for health, wellness, growth, sobriety, a healthy mind, and a healthy soul. The findings will not be the newest, shiniest, trendiest, most shocking, or most radical thing on the internet. Rather, my hope is that the reader may land here and have a sense of COMING HOME to something GOOD & TRUE.

As a counselor, I want to start off with foundations for sobriety. What do I mean by sobriety? Classically, “Sobriety” is connected to recovery from addiction: If you have a problematic relationship with alcohol, drugs, sex, food, money, anger, work, gambling, or other things, and you work to either abstain, leave, and/or heal from those things -then you are pursuing “sobriety.” But I use the word SOBRIETY to mean much more than just abstaining from something bad, but rather to BECOME someone good. Pursuing sobriety is to grow in virtue. A SOBER PERSON is internally free from passions, impulses, resentments, worries, and is able to approach every situation with curiosity, compassion, spontaneity, and courage.

How does one become this kind of person?

It’s a very involved process, but here are 3 very core foundational principles to practice:

1. Stay present

In most recovery circles, you hear the phrase “One day at a time.” Sometimes even, “One moment at a time.” You’ll also hear, “Do the next right thing.” In any mindfulness practice, there is a strong emphasis on the present moment. All these phrases & practices mean that the FOCUS of your attention can only exist in one moment at a time. You can send your focus forward into the future, or have it linger on things in the past, or center it on the moment you are inhabiting right now.

When your focus is in the future or past, you are not fully here in the present. You open yourself up to despair and regret coming from the past, as well as worry and fear about the future. These states also open yourself up to anger, resentment, obsession, fantasy, and any number of extreme states. The thing is: the past is already written and the future doesn’t yet exist; therefore, focusing on them is to focus on the unreal. Certainly, it is focusing on what is out of your control.

Bringing your focus to where you are now; what you are feeling now; what is expected of you now; who is with you now: you have AGENCY and can actually have an INFLUENCE! Every moment is full of wonder and grace. Even the painful moments are a gift, as they reveal to us the STRENGTH required to survive them. This is why one of the most important principles in long-term sobriety is to stay in the present moment as much as possible.

Photo credit: @gabiontheroad

2. Stay connected

Sobriety is hard. It’s a long journey. Living “against the current” sets you at odds with the rhythm & pace of a chaotic world and is extremely hard to do alone. So much of sobriety work is RETRAINING the mind & heart to think & feel in different ways. Retraining is accomplished through experiences, not just thoughts, and the most powerful experiences we will ever have will be those of RELATIONSHIPS. In short: We need people. We need a community around us moving in the same direction, and we need a few individuals we can trust enough to reveal everything about ourselves.

Some of us reading will surely balk, even cringe, or wrinkle their noses in disgust at this principle because, let’s face it: People can be troublesome and downright annoying! Being close to people requires VULNERABILITY which is really risky! In his book, The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis brilliantly said,

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

And yet…

That vulnerability is the spark to illumine our souls! If you want to sustain your sobriety: seek out a community, and within that community, a few good friends.

3. Stay teachable

Here we could also say: stay humble and curious. Cultivate a sense of WONDER! (This is very connected to Gratitude, but we’ll give Gratitude its own section another time!) The reality is: We don’t know everything. Our perspectives, while important, are limited and often skewed. To put it bluntly, sometimes we’re just wrong. And that’s not a bad thing…IF we can learn from it. It’s not even so terrible to make mistakes…if we can LEARN from them and CHANGE something to avoid them next time.

Being teachable is to adopt -with all humility- what is called the “Beginner’s Mind.” In Beginner’s Mind, you choose to start from a place of knowing nothing. This is not an insult to you, nor a message of shame! It is a powerful starting point, for once you acknowledge that you know nothing:

You can learn anything!

There is more to long-term sobriety than just presence, community, and teachability; such as: gratitude, persistence, visioning, surrender, honesty, and a host of other things! We’ll get to those in the future, but for now, as you go about seeking greater mental & spiritual health, see if you can:

~practice being present in the moment 🌱

~connect with at least one person 💞

~learn one new thing from someone wise 🦉

Do these things a little every day and slowly, steadily you will start to change into a Sober Person.