The Hundred-Foot Journey To One’s Heart And Passion

The journey to finding one’s heart and passion can often prove to be quite challenging, especially when a parent’s own fears come in the way of it. Sometimes it becomes necessary in a person’s life to walk away from everything they know, including their family, just to discover whom they really are inside. The Hundred-Foot Journey is a delightful movie that ends up depicting this extremely well.

The Hundred-Foot Journey is all about a young man named Hassan (Manish Dayal) who has the gift of cooking. When his family is forced to flee their home in native India due to civil unrest, Hassan’s passion for the culinary becomes his only outlet to handling all his frustrations in life. After several failed attempts to settle down in various places, they eventually end up in Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val in the south of France, when their vehicle breaks down. While repairs are being made to it, Hassan’s father (Om Puri) sees promise in the remains of old run down restaurant for sale and it’s there he decides it’s time to finally settle down for good. As they prepare to open their new family restaurant there with Hassan at the cooking helm, they meet Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren) who’s the owner of the highly ranked French establishment just 100 feet across the street from them. It becomes quite obvious early on to Hassan’s family how unhappy Mallory is with the idea of an Indian restaurant being so close to her place of fine dining.

While Hassan’s father and Madam Mallory begin to battle each other out of fear for the survival of their own businesses, he finds his only peace and serenity can come by doing more of what he loves the most, which is cooking. With the aid of Marguerite (Charlote Le Bon), who actually works as a sous chef for Mallory, Hassan begins to combine his native Indian spices into various French cuisines and in the process wins the favor, and a job offer, from Mallory herself. Unfortunately, Hassan’s father doesn’t approve and instead wants his son to remain preparing the same Indian dishes his deceased wife once prepared so exquisitely. As Hassan is forced to look within at both his growing affections for Marguerite and his desire to grow his culinary talent, The Hundred-Foot Journey spins a wonderful story about the journey he takes to find what his true heart and passion is in life.

I’m so grateful for movies such as this, because I’m currently on my own journey of finding out what my true heart and passion is in life as well. Watching Hassan pursue his culinary dream regardless of what was going on around him, truly inspired me. While cooking is not and never has been my forte, writing, speaking, and teaching about all of what I’ve gone through in life is. Unfortunately, like Hassan, I’ve met my own resistance along the way to pursuing these things. My mother was the first as she was quite concerned about my openness in life. Both my sister and my partner have also at times shared this view. Sometimes friends have even questioned it as well, while some have even gone so far as trying to derail me from following it at all. But watching Hassan in The Hundred-Foot Journey seek his heart and passion no matter what the rest of the world felt he should do, clearly reminded me how important it is for me to keep sticking to the guidance my Higher Power and my soul continues to give me with my own.

So while my heart and passion may never be in the culinary arts like Hassan’s was, I do believe I’m on the right path now to developing my own after watching this movie in the theater the other day. The Hundred-Foot Journey was truly a great reminder of how important it is for me to follow my own inner guidance, even if it means I must stand apart from what everyone else thinks I should be doing.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

“When Will My Guilt And Shame Go Away In Sobriety?”

I attended an AA meeting a few weeks ago where I heard a man ask during his share when his guilt and shame would go away in sobriety. He had already completed the 5th step where one shares their 4th Step inventory with another and was frustrated with these uncomfortable feelings he still felt inside. While I do believe the answer to his question will vary for every individual in recovery, those uncomfortable feelings never left me until I stopped taking my will back and engaging in toxic behaviors.

By the time I completed my first fifth step, I too still felt a lot of guilt and shame in my life. At the time, I never attributed it to the notion that maybe I was still living in a lot of self-will run riot. In fact my life was riddled then with toxicity and anyone could see it in the friends I was hanging out with, the negativity I demonstrated daily, the gossip I participated in frequently, and the various substitute addictions I kept succumbing to. Many of my actions back then were unhealthy and some were even immoral, yet I kept doing them. So although I might have been clean and sober from alcohol and drugs at that point in time for over 13 years, my disease continued to maintain a very strong hold over me. When it comes right down to it, I didn’t give the majority of my will and life over to a Higher Power until several years later. And because of it, I truly suffered with guilt and shame, as well as many other painful emotions for far longer than I needed to. It took me having to experience a lot more discomfort and anguish for me to wake up and realize this. Thankfully, I eventually did.

Today, I’m doing everything I can to give 100% of my will and life over to my Higher Power and I’m also not engaging in any of those toxic behaviors any longer. The result of that has been a life free from feeling that guilt and shame. But that’s only because I’m not doing any of those things that once caused me to feel those terrible feelings in the first place.

The fact of the matter is this. Sobriety is so much more than just removing the substance of an addiction from our lives. It involves a complete transformation of the mind, body, and soul and it takes the removal of one’s self-will to get there. So the only answer I believe I can offer that man from the AA meeting a few weeks is that he works on turning more and more of his will over to the care of his Higher Power every single day. I know in doing so, that he will begin to find himself living less and less in any of those toxic behaviors, as they really do nothing more for a person than cause that guilt and shame, and any of the other uncomfortable feelings that may arise in recovery.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Robin Williams And Suicide

Robin Williams was such a wonderful actor, but sadly his life ended on August 11th, 2014 when he committed suicide. Unfortunately, for those like him who have ever wrestled with addictions or various mental disorders, suicide often appears as the only solution. I should know as I watched a father end his life in this way and at one point, I too even attempted it. Thankfully though, my Higher Power has helped me to see that it’s not the answer and that getting to the root of my pain and healing it, is.

My father was never able to learn this lesson. I remember watching him over the years, battle his own addictions and a bi-polar disorder. He was always “up” in moods and behaviors for various lengths of time, and then he would crash and be “down” for many months afterwards. In his last few weeks before his death, he grew completely weary of this repetitive cycle he had gone through already for most of his adult life. In a note he left behind for me, he was convinced that God was calling him home and that suicide was the answer to end all of his pain.

Nowadays I honestly can’t believe that any Higher Power who would ever want someone to kill themselves. But depression is a mental disease that’s frequently enhanced when engaging in any addiction and my father never fully grasped this. His only solution was to always take those drugs he was prescribed that were supposed to balance his moods out. But that never fixed his inner pain that kept driving him into his addictions and mental imbalances in the first place. It didn’t heal the fact he was abused and neglected on many levels growing up. It didn’t erase all the years he never received the unconditional love he deserved as a kid. Instead, addictions and prescriptions became his solution to numbing himself from it and his mental state continued to suffer throughout his entire life because of that.

In regards to Robin Williams, I don’t know if he had any of his own unhealed past wounds or traumas that had driven him into his addictions and mental imbalances. What I do know though is that anyone I have ever met who has battled their own addictions or mental imbalances has always had untreated past demons of their own. I definitely speak from experience about this, not just because of what my father went through, but because I went through it as well.

I endured a lot of conditional based loved and mental and emotional abuse growing up in my dysfunctional family. I was also sexually abused as a teenager and bullied more than I can count during most of my grade school years. When I discovered alcohol and drugs, they were the best elixir to hide from all that pain and trauma inside and it worked wonderfully for years, until I began battling with severe depression and anxiety.

Once I found sobriety from substance abuse, I chose to live in other addictions for several more decades instead of getting into those core wounds within me that I had never allowed to heal. All that did was continue this perpetual cycle of me taking medications to deal with all my mental imbalances. Psychiatrists labeled me as bi-polar just like my father and told me my only solution was to take medications for the rest of my life. But those medications were really no different than taking alcohol or drugs, as they only numbed me from feeling those wounds that were causing me to seek addictions and become imbalanced.

In 2011, all of this finally took its tool on me one day when I received a major rejection from someone I was addicted to. In that moment, the pain I felt inside from it somehow resurfaced every single one of my past wounds so much so that my brain said I should just take my life and that it would end all my suffering. So that’s when I went to my storage unit where one of my cars was being stored. It’s when I closed the door to that unit, when I started my car, and when I sat there in it without any hesitation to what I was about to do. I truly wanted to die and any thoughts of loved ones or people that cared for me didn’t matter. I just wanted my pain to end and that was it.

For whatever the reason, as I started to become drowsy in that storage unit after some time passed, something moved within me enough to reach out and call someone for help. I obviously didn’t die that day and as I write this, I realize how grateful I am now that I didn’t. Between that day and now though, I have had to do an incredible amount of work to heal from all those past wounds. Because of that work, my past doesn’t haunt me anymore nor do I have the desire to engage in any addictions. I also haven’t suffered from severe depression and anxiety in quite some time. Sometimes I find it hard to believe now that I truly wanted to die that day in my old storage unit. Thank God I didn’t but I’m very sad that Robin Williams did die in a similar way.

The fact is, there are too many people out there who end up feeling suicide is their only answer, and engaging in any addiction or having a mental disorder will only increase their chances of feeling that way. But with hard work and help from a Higher Power, I believe everyone can get to the root of their inner pain and receive enough healing to prevent this from ever happening. So far this has worked for me and hopefully in writing these words, it may somehow end up helping another one day. Regardless, I know Robin Williams will definitely be missed and my only prayer is that he is now at peace and with You God.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson