I think the biggest challenge in my life these days is keeping my heart open, especially when much of the world around me seems to not be doing so and instead chooses to lash out more than not from their hardened hearts.
I have spent decades working on opening a heart that got trampled upon and abandoned by one person after another for the majority of my life. I could write an entire novel on this, where each tragedy added layer upon layer surrounding my heart, making it become almost impenetrable at times. I’m thankful though this isn’t the case for me anymore because of all the work I’ve done around this. But active addicts who aren’t in 12 Step recovery usually have hearts that are almost entirely closed, something that tends to leave them in varying states of anger and rage.
One of the main goals of recovering addicts is to drop all the layers surrounding the heart that get piled on as the disease gets worse, and that often is a very scary thing to do. Much of the reason why an addict picks up alcohol and drugs or some other addiction in the first place is to numb themselves from the pains that life has served them. I can attest, as I spent decades perfecting the art of remaining numb by closing my heart off with one addiction after another, making my heart become a very heavy mass indeed.
Over the past decade, I have successfully been able to shed one layer after another surrounding my heart, thanks to my 12 Step recovery and my spiritual work on myself. But there are times I honestly struggle with it, especially when hatred, spitefulness, resentment, and the like is thrown my way, things I find hard to deflect and not feel when it happens. On a recent trip back to my fraternity, I felt that very thing from an active brother I didn’t know well at all, and it caused me to immediately shut down. I began to go to anger, as I sought to place a layer back around my heart not wanting to feel the pain of someone else’s hatred of me, one I know I didn’t deserve. While I knew it wasn’t about me, it was still hard to deal with. I’m thankful though that I was able to work through that anger quite quickly and find forgiveness due to the help of another brother I was there to connect with further. They assisted me that night to get me back into my heart, and into my tears, something that was able to lead to forgiveness, leaving my heart open.
While I know that having an open heart leads me often to feelings things that hurt, so much so that I shed a lot of tears, I believe it’s much better to remain this way. What I’ve come to learn on my 12 Step journey is that addicts who choose to live with hard and heavy hearts, always end up descending further and further into addiction, adding layer upon layer around their heart, leaving them in a vicious cycle of addiction that never goes anywhere but down. It may be the biggest challenge of my life these days to keep my heart open, but in the long run, I see in doing so the rewards far outweigh the costs, especially when I continue to remain clean and sober day in and day out, year after year.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
