Sober & Shameless
“Sober & Shameless” is a podcast that flips the script on what it means to live a sober life. Co-Hosts, Taylor Klinger and Eric Andrew, graduates from the University of Self-Inflicted Victimization, along with over 80 years of combined experience in “learning the hard way” and “finding the audacity”, invite people from all walks of recovery to learn about shared experiences through genuinely improvised, hilarious, and authentic conversation. In each episode of Sober & Shameless, the hosts, along with occasional guests, will pick a topic to shed their shame about, explore ideas on how to grow through those challenges, and provide organic, light-hearted, honest, and unprofessional commentary about their experiences with addiction, strength through recovery, and life in sobriety.
Sober & Shameless
Tales of Recovery: Finding Balance, Healing and Hope in Sobriety
Ever found solace in the unlikeliest of places during your toughest times? That's the journey we embarked on, seeking comfort in video gaming and outdoor activities while wrestling with burnout and personal struggles like surgery. We're back for season two, eager to reconnect and share the lessons we've learned about the importance of self-care, healing, and balance.
Brace yourself for profound discussions with guests who've walked paths similar to ours. One of them is a recent survivor of a torn bicep surgery, whose experience has reshaped the way we view physical wellness and self-care. As we unpack our struggles with burnout, you'll hear tales of how old friends and shared passions became our sanctuary. We also dive deep into mental health, grappling with the reality of our battles and sharing strategies we've found beneficial.
On our sobriety journey, we unfold personal narratives that underline the importance of self-acceptance and finding a unique path that works for you. From attending yoga and meditation retreats to wrestling with perfectionism, we explore the significant role of a supportive network in our recovery. You'll hear stories about radical acceptance, paradigm shifts, and the transformational power of growth in sobriety. We encourage you to find comfort, inspiration, and perhaps a bit of your own story in ours. Let's walk this path together, for there's mighty strength in shared experiences.
About The Show:
"Sober & Shameless” is a podcast that flips the script on what it means to live a sober life. Co-Hosts, Taylor Klinger and Eric Andrew, graduates from the University of Self-Inflicted Victimization, along with over 80 years of combined experience in “learning the hard way” and “finding the audacity”, invite people from all walks of recovery to learn about shared experiences through genuinely improvised, hilarious, and authentic conversation. In each episode of Sober & Shameless, the hosts, along with occasional guests, will pick a topic to shed their shame about, explore ideas on how to grow through those challenges, and provide organic, light-hearted, honest, and unprofessional commentary about their experiences with addiction, strength through recovery, and life in sobriety.
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- 2 drunks
I did move my mic out of the way. Oh, here we go, I did. I was talking while it was counting. That's not good. I did move my mic out of the way, so it's not like right in my, in my face all the time.
Speaker 2:I like it. Well, speaking of in your face, let's play the new season two theme song before we have our conversation today. Yeah, man, all right, let's do it. Yeah, I like this.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:I think that was enough.
Speaker 1:I love it. I want to be on the same page. I'm gonna be on the same page.
Speaker 2:I think that's a good one. I think that's a good one. I like the song. That's a good song. I love how you listen to that all day, man. It's revving me up. Let's go, I know. Kind of makes me feel like you know, like the the bright side of a Monday morning.
Speaker 1:You know you're driving into work and you're like I don't really want to be doing this, but then you hear that song and you're like, all right, I don't think.
Speaker 2:I could fucking do this, or at least yeah, it makes me feel like just put your head down and kick some ass, and who cares? Yeah, fuck it, I like it. Well, you know what came to the conclusion that we are getting in our own way. So we're just gonna have a no holds bar, totally authentic conversation to bring about season two, because you and I just really wanna get back at this.
Speaker 1:So I just wanna say this to all our listeners we're back.
Speaker 2:Holy shit, we're back and we have no idea what the fuck we're doing.
Speaker 1:Not at all Same as the first, but that's the way it should be, and we have some reason why that should be that way, for sure.
Speaker 2:Well, dude, in all seriousness, I have missed you. To our listeners, we have actually not been in communication on a regular basis. Eric has had his life going on and I've had my life going on. There has been a huge gap of time between last episode and this episode. I wanna say shit, man. When was the last episode aired? End of season one.
Speaker 1:I think what was it the like around May, mid May, somewhere in there, right, and it is now.
Speaker 2:November 10th. Yeah, We've chit-chatted here and there and we've had some business meetings about the show here and there, but we really needed the break. I think At least I know I did, and I think we really needed to or at least I needed to implement some practices that I was preaching about, but it was not implementing.
Speaker 1:Well, absolutely, and I mean there's some things that I will share in this episode, but the bottom line is we are two drunks trying to make it in the world and we're being authentic, and the authenticity part for us was the break. We needed that break and we needed to go do our own shit for a while and we needed to navigate through some stuff, and individually as well as collectively, and I think it was all good.
Speaker 2:I do too, man, I really do. I had to go to some deep, dark places of the corners of my mind and then come back from it, and I'm still on the uptick right now, which gives me the capacity to get back and to give back. But shameless baby. There were some fucked up times during the last what is that? Six months? May, june, july, august, september, october, november.
Speaker 1:Seven months, I counted on my fingers everybody. And thank God he's got all his fingers, so it worked.
Speaker 2:I do, I do See, this is the gratitude list I'm starting right now. I have all 10 fingers.
Speaker 1:I have all my fingers.
Speaker 2:Well listen, I'm sorry, dude, Don't you have a mechanical arm right now? I do.
Speaker 1:I do. Speaking of things that you go through in the last seven months, september 2nd I tore my bicep tendon from the elbow and it just rolled right up my arm and I had a surgery and they had to repair it.
Speaker 1:And I've been in PT I am actually in so one thing I learned about it was the date of the surgery and the date of the protocol. Beginnings of PT are the counting is different. So when we started counting so I was when I started PT I was three weeks out of surgery, but PT counted it as protocol week number two. So basically what that means to all our listeners that might be following along, who probably have had orthopedic stuff going on and totally understand this, the thought was that that week, the week of from the surgery to when you first get checked, does not count, because it's that's the anything goes week. Anything could happen coming out of surgery, type of thing. But then the surgeon checks you out and said, okay, we're starting to count from here and then you'll start your protocol in two weeks. So, anyway, that's it's been. Have you ever, like, had something happen to you where everybody's going, oh man, wow, that had to hurt or whatever, and you're going no, it didn't hurt that much and honestly, I'm completely fucking intrigued by this whole thing.
Speaker 2:How is this all going to work? Well, I mean tell me what happened.
Speaker 1:So I was hiking with a friend and we were and, by the way, it was basically an uphill hike. That was the only hard part of it. It was, at that point, had been up to that point, had been super simple, but it was a good kind of cardio type of hike. A tree had fallen over the path so we had to climb over the tree. So I found the lowest part to climb over, so we started climbing over.
Speaker 2:I was talking about, like those big red, like a redwood tree, because those trunks are gigantic, like a big tree base or what.
Speaker 1:It was a fairly no, it wasn't huge like that, but it was mid middle of the road. I mean we don't have anything out here, that's that big.
Speaker 2:I'm a California kid, born and raised, so the redwoods is what came to mind.
Speaker 1:The obstacles holy crap, yeah, we don't have those, but we had big trees, but it was a good medium size trunk, got it, and so I found the easiest way to go over. I thought, and we get up on there and I start to lose my balance. So I grabbed for a branch that was right above me. I figured, oh, that'll buoy me, I'll be fine. I still kept going. I went down, I held onto the branches as I was going down it yanked my arm and as I twisted it, just like I could feel it River band, yeah, and it felt like I thought I heard a little pop, but I don't know if I did or didn't.
Speaker 1:Initially I thought I just re-injured an old injury and then it started to feel tingly and I thought, hmm, that's not a good sign. And I pulled my shirt up and there you had a little indentation in my arm where my bicep used to be. Wow, and the bicep was up here. So I had this big. It looked like I'd been working out like massively for like In one small section of your forearm, exactly it looked like freaky man, Just a little freaky yeah.
Speaker 2:It looked like you skipped forearm day yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, more or less, more or less.
Speaker 2:So they um, that's wild though man, I mean that's fucking wild and you said it didn't even hurt for you, because I mean, obviously the way you made it sound. I'm sure people are cringing right now. I mean, even I kind of want to cringe a little bit.
Speaker 1:Ow, you know, it's when I first went down, it stung around the elbow and but it was felt like similar, like an injury I'd had before. So I thought, oh it's, I just aggravated this old injury. I'm fine, right, and started walking and it started to subside the feeling. But then I started feeling this tingling down my arm. I thought, okay, that's odd. When I got to the ER, so I had another hour and a half out. I mean, we were half, we were only halfway into the hike and I had to get out. I mean I couldn't. Yeah, there's no shortcut, I had to do it. So we're doing the hike. I kept the arm up close to me and we just like did it.
Speaker 1:And when I got to the ER, the first question was, on a scale one to 10, what's your pain threshold? And like, yep, that's an odd question, cause I wasn't feeling a lot of pain. I said maybe a three, probably more like a two. And the guy stopped writing and looked at me. He goes what? And I said yeah. I said I mean, why are you asking me about pain? Cause well, that's usually a painful injury. And I said, oh, I said well, that's where I'm at.
Speaker 1:So then when I went back there, all they did was keep asking me that and everybody ever since has asked me. You know about the pain level. The worst pain I had was coming out of surgery. They didn't do a nerve block right away because they wanted to make sure the nerve block and the nerve still worked. So I woke up. I was in extreme pain. They did a nerve block. I didn't feel it. From there I was able to manage everything with ibuprofen and I got through those initial four or five days of out of surgery and, you know, been rocking ever since. The PT and this contraption is coming off. But I'm saving it for next Halloween. I'm just going to get a side face and all that and become like the terminator, I think you, you're ibuprofen, that you're Superman.
Speaker 2:I will let that dad joke just simmer.
Speaker 1:Well, I think what it is also, and I got to be, you know, I got to be cautious of this. I just think I have a really high pain threshold, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean what like, please don't make this a habit every season, by the way, because last season you had your leg stuff going on, correct? Yeah, I had.
Speaker 1:yep, I did Was it shin sponsor.
Speaker 2:What was that last year?
Speaker 1:I had it. It happened in late October.
Speaker 2:Well, that's when I felt it Because you were running, because you went from not running to being Iron man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I added in an extra activity and I was really pushing it, plus I was doing a lot of leg work anyway because I was trying to, you know, do harder hikes and I ended it with a stress fracture last year. Yeah, that was actually healing by the time I got to the doctor, because I thought I just really sprained my ankle and it just wasn't healing. So I finally went to the ortho and it was yep, you got a stress fracture, but it's healing and it's healing in the right position. So I'm just gonna throw you in a boot for a few weeks and we'll see where we're at. And that was last October. So this October I had a new adventure, not the one you drink out of Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, not Dostop.
Speaker 1:I just I am hoping and praying that we get to next October, november and I don't have to go through any of these kind of things again and I can enjoy an outdoor autumn hike like any normal human being.
Speaker 2:I mean hiking sounds dangerous. That's what I'm gathering from all of this Hiking and running sound like the worst. Everybody right now PSA don't hike, don't run.
Speaker 1:Don't listen to Taylor, don't ask for fucking health. I am a clutch and that's a big part of the story, so no, I just got back from Skyzone, the trampoline place.
Speaker 2:They amazingly survived COVID, which I'm really happy about. Long story boring One of my very first jobs at the age of, I want to say 16, I worked at Sky High Sports, which was a competitor of Skyzone in Rancho Cordova, california, and I was a trampoline instructor. I taught, like an aerobics class, aerobics on trampolines. But for somebody with my ADHD, high energy, it was a perfect sport for me to get into and to kind of vent out that excess energy from Thursday to Sunday 4 pm to midnight. And was that freshman, sophomore year of high school? Wow, and it was an amazing experience which I can. I could go on and on and on about that, but fast forwarding to now. Right, that's 16 year old Taylor. Now I am 33 year old Taylor. I thought it would be smart.
Speaker 2:I've jumped over the years. It's not like I did this cold turkey after you know what? 16 years, right? So I've jumped a little bit here and there over the years. I still have my basic skills, but I have not jumped in quite a while and I just decided to go back by myself. And I've been spending a lot of time recently playing so much Halo on PC and oddly enough I know this might sound odd to our listeners smoking a lot of hookah, which is just a version of tobacco and it's called Shisha, but I've been using those two things as a crutch which I'll talk about more later and I'm trying to break that up. This is real time. Even today I'm trying to break it up as of last week. I'm trying to, you know, get back to the basics and adopt different things into my daily life.
Speaker 2:So I went like last week I went twice. The first time I thought my lungs were going to pop. The second time, not that bad, but then I took five days off and then I went back today and I felt like my lungs were going to pop again. And oh my gosh man, the difference between 23 and 33 and 33 and 16, you know it's. I'm not getting any younger and I have to pay more attention.
Speaker 2:I really do Like it's kind of interesting for me, and I know everybody out there is like oh, 33, you're still young, I am, but at the same time I'm also not 23 anymore. So you know there is that and I have to be more cognizant of it. So it was really good though it was a great workout. My lungs are kind of calming down now, but, holy shit, man, just thought of having to pay more attention like and what our brains think at. You know, like my, my brain still thinks I'm 16. And my body is like, yeah, no, like you know, you got, you got some bum knees now, man, and your neck doesn't bend that way sometimes, so careful, right right.
Speaker 1:Well, when I did, when I was on the podcast for RE, I was interviewed by Odette and you know there's that place in there where they ask your age and I said you know I was 58. And she said, oh, 58, going on 38. And I bring that up because of what you just said, because I think that's part of it is I've got to be aware that. You know, I just have to be cautious in how I do things, not that I can't do them, I just have to be smarter about what I'm taking on and everything I'm doing is fine, I just have to do it with a little bit more caution, that's all. Again, and saying that and even the doctor said it, the PT guys say it all the time I could do the same thing 100 times again and never tear that, never tear that bicep. That was just a freak, freak accident Could happen to anybody.
Speaker 2:And so our bicep, similar to bones where, like you know, they can come back stronger. I mean, I know age plays a factor in all that too. I'm dumb, I don't know these things. I just I don't know, maybe.
Speaker 1:I mean I know that they told me that what happens is where they reattached it to the bone grows around that where that reattachment is and it helps strengthen it. Nice, so I take extra calcium and but that was something I was doing from the break last year and you know they like, yeah, I keep taking D3 and extra calcium along with, you know, working like they were all about me going back to the gym as soon as I could possibly go. So I went back. I was literally back in the gym, like probably week three of out of the surgery.
Speaker 1:Good for you, because the left side like I don't know if you know this and maybe listeners know this, maybe they don't but one of the things I found out in all this that I thought was amazing, and my brother found it, was that there's been studies Done that when people that have injuries to a limb, if they work out the other side, their, their atrophy issues will be minimal or lessened, I guess I should say, and also their ability, like I found this out too that your brain, so there's a part of your brain that works each part of your body, so your arm or arms, are worked by a certain part of your brain.
Speaker 1:So and it's intricate in terms of your right arm is worked by a certain part of your brain, your left arm is worked by a certain part of your brain. Well, when there is an injury, where that part of the body is not working, that part of the brain actually shuts down and it can be atrophied as well. So by working out on the other side, the brain balances. So whenever there's an overload on one side, it'll balance over into the other side. So by balancing over into the right side, it's it's firing that part of the brain and making it work. And it's also firing those muscles like the, the synopsis to the muscle, those muscles, that information to the muscles is still working because the brain is firing to it, which just makes healing better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I feel like I mean, it seems like an analogy for a lot of things in life, though as well, you know, even relating to, like sobriety. Why does it have to be a physical limb? It could be a mental limb that we're fucked up with right now, that we need to heal, and I feel like what you're saying is the only way to do that is you have to take action, you have to do something about it, because you're going to the gym and you're choosing to work out the other side and see results, and your brain is assisting you and compensating for it and finding harmony. I don't know about balance. I always replace balance with harmony because I always think of balance as a seesaw, and it has to be one for one, where harmony can be a symphony of sounds that correlate together, which then create unity, and that to me just seems a little bit more. I'm a musician, so that's.
Speaker 1:But look at you, man. I mean talk about work in the muscle. The segue right in sobriety was always like we've been doing this. We've been doing this these last six months.
Speaker 2:Hey, I mean honestly, I just I wasn't even knowing I was segwaying right there. I was more or less just saying, hey, like no, you're right though. It's a it's a good thing to to think about and you know there's been a lot of things for me over the last six months, seven months.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what's going on with you, by the way? I mean, we've been talking all about my arm. Let's find out what you were you're at.
Speaker 2:I'm not in any rush, man, I, I think in season one I had like a big thing on like oh, let's try and keep our episodes to 45 minutes, and then we had like an hour and a half one and I was worried about analytics and yada, yada, yada, no, I ain't got time for that. It all contributed to kind of like where we left off at season one, where I was just super burnt out and I was like I'm not necessarily just because of the podcast, you know, I actually found relief every time I had those conversations and I love all of the guests and I'm looking forward to having more guests on. But it was exhausting on the editor's side of the fence, on the, you know, production side of the house, right going in and spending all those hours clipping, editing, cleaning up our voices, making sure we had their intro, outro. You were on top of doing the show notes, things like that, and it just got so exhausting for me that I wasn't going to my own meetings anymore, I was hardly talking to my sponsor anymore and you know I I was sleeping a lot. And then I really was getting deep, deep, deep into computer gaming, which is fantastic.
Speaker 2:I honestly, was never a gamer. I mean, I always had the systems. I always had, you know, the original PlayStation. When I was a little kid I played my Game Boy, I played the Advance, I had a Dreamcast, you know. I played all of the systems all the way up until PS5 and Xbox One Series X. But I was also a PC gamer for a very short period of time and I never went back to it. I switched over to controller immediately, thinking that was the better option. But I ended up watching Netflix and using it for other platforms, you know, or other ways of watching shit. It wasn't my thing. I was always the rock climber outside, you know, let's go dirt biking. So you know snowboarding, let's go do something outside. You know, it's one of the best things for somebody like me. And in my recovery I was so focused in on the first three years of my recovery on, you know, giving back, working my steps, paying it forward, being there, open and honest for other individuals that I really slowly started to lose a sense of myself and video gaming ended up being my crutch Not initially, it was a lot of fun, because I actually initially used it, because I have a best friend of mine that lives in St Louis, missouri, who is a big PC gamer, and he told me to get a PC.
Speaker 2:We also had our small business going as well. So I was like, hey, you know what? I need? A high powered PC so then I can run some high tech machine in my garage, produce some things for the business but then secretly use it for my gaming. I was also wanting to reconnect with him on a regular basis because since I've lived out in Colorado for the last five years, I've always disassociated myself from friendships, and that's something I'm working on.
Speaker 2:I have a. I have like three best friends in St Louis, I have one really solid best friend in California and then I have a lot of other actually no, that's not true. I have like four solid best friends in California and then I have one solid best friend out here in Colorado. These are all the people that I really connect with and really identify with and they accept me for who I am through and through, and they've seen me through my darkest stuff. But when you move to a new state, like I did, I had a significant other at the time it was five years ago now and we ended up breaking up really quickly because of my alcoholism, going our separate ways and then finding respect and love for each other later down the road, because initially, I have to thank her for getting me on my path to sobriety. Well, through all of that, I then was left with this I'm alone here in Colorado. When I met my wife, I was adopted into her friend group and adopted into her family, which then obviously later became my actual family. But initially you feel like you're just this weird third party, third wheel in everything that you do. I still get that sense, even with her friends. I don't know why. It's just something that I do. So my way of curing that was when I, with you, identified that we needed to slow down, slow a roll on the podcast, take a break for a while, give ourselves the mental space we need and really start focusing on things.
Speaker 2:I had good intentions. My intentions were get into video gaming with one of your really close best friends. It's very easy to do because you get on a computer and you're instantaneously able to see each other, you're able to chat, and I started learning so many cool things about the video game world of PC gamers. Like, I know some terminology. Now, I'm not a pro, but, hey, like I know some things a lot more than I did six, seven months ago, and he taught me all about Discord. I ended up teaching you about Discord as well, because we were kind of exploring that as a platform to host some things in the future, and I pretty much then went down an interesting road.
Speaker 2:My wife joined me. She got a PC Cassie is who I'm talking about. She's helped us host a couple of episodes, and she was a guest on one of our episodes in season one, and we built her a PC, which I got to watch my buddy teach me how to do that, which was fantastic, but she is also a nursing school, and so she had those priorities, and she didn't forget those priorities because she doesn't have ADHD she's a normie, you know. She is like us, though, so she has to deal with those things, but she was able to play games for a little while with us, run some really cool dungeons and New World, and we leveled up all our characters together. It was a fantastic time over the summer and it was a great way to save money, because financial stress is another factor.
Speaker 2:That is just a whole other aspect to the depths of my despair over the last six months, and through that I then started to get back into smoking hookah, which, when I was 18 years old, it was actually a really cool thing for me and my friends in California to go to the local hookah bar and smoke hookah Actually just legally, with no alcohol. There might have been, you know, some smoking of us some than other, every once in a while there as well, but for the most part we just enjoyed it. We had a good time on it. So I just rekindled that literally from like I think I'd stopped smoking hookah at age like 19. It only lasted a short period of time, all the way up until earlier this year, and I bought my own. I actually hooked up the hose to a microphone stand so then I could PC game without having to hold on to it.
Speaker 1:Leave it to you to figure that.
Speaker 2:Hey, man, don't judge me until all those people are there, I'm actually impressed. So I mean if anybody's looking for a hookah solution to their PC gaming problems hit me up.
Speaker 1:Well, maybe you should market it. Maybe that should be the business.
Speaker 2:No, I should not market it. That should be free to society. Get yourself a microphone stand problem solved, one that bends. So I just was doing it, onesie, twosies every now and then, but then, slowly, I could feel the neural pathways starting to be built again. And, mind you everybody, I'm still sober. Alcohol, I am still free from alcohol. I'm free from all substances, obviously other than nicotine right now because of Sheeshah, from hookah and caffeine. Outside of that, no, I've maintained this entire time. I've gone through dark times but I have been able to maintain my sobriety through this by being held accountable, and I'm getting there soon.
Speaker 2:I've always had my macro voice and my macro lens throughout my entire life and I can always see myself from 80 feet up in the air, if not from outer space, and analyze myself from a third party's perspective, and I can see the writing on the wall and the tools of sobriety. Even though I wasn't actively working them at the time, I still was in the connection with people in recovery. I would still help people and people would help me along the way. It's not like I was completely disengaged. I'd be responding to posts on the internet. I'd be trying to help people that would call me and reach out and say, hey, I need to get into a treatment center, and then I would be helping out my buddy of mine who has been really struggling a lot lately but he's finding his way.
Speaker 2:So you know, with all of these factors at play and financial stress living over us, I really just wanted to disassociate. I really wanted to embrace the restless, irritability and discontentedness that life was starting to spiral me into. And I say life was, I was, I was spiraling me into that. That is me trying to place blame on something other than myself. So, through all of that and I know this is really long winded, but hey, fuck it.
Speaker 2:I got to a beautiful place of melancholy where my energies allowed me to wake the fuck up and just be OK with not being OK again. And you constantly have to shed this stuff, you constantly have to shed your shame, and it's a never ending process because it's progress, not perfection for me and I'm ill equipped to manage my own brain, which is why I started to reach out again and say, hey, I'm not OK. You even reached out a couple of times to me over the last seven months because you knew that there was just something going on. I had some other people in recovery reaching out to me as well and it's so fascinating how quick we are to say I'm good, to say it's all right, it's not that bad. We downplay it, we this, we that, because sometimes when we just say it like it is, people do shut us out or do shut us down and you know those fears can be confirmed sometimes and it's really hard to pick that hard in our lives. And then my wife and I were going through some conflicts, just fundamental conflicts in our marriage, and I'm not going to get into all of that stuff, but it was really trying and really challenging for both of us and I had to really pick up some recovery books again and really go back to the basics and remind myself that, no matter how far down this road of recovery I drive, I'm always still three feet from the ditch, which will always be right next to the road. And it's a little morbid, but it's humbling and it's a reminder that it doesn't matter how much time you have, it's subjective. All I have is this moment and today. And you know, get back to the things that bring you joy, authentic joy, and jumping on trampolines was one of those things.
Speaker 2:Getting out my heelies yeah, that's right. You know those things that came out in 2000 or 2001,. The single wheel on the back heel of a skater shoe I never stopped riding those, like seriously, I have like two pair, I think, right now, but only one pair works. I broke those bad boys out again. I was like, anytime I'm going to the grocery store for my wife and for me I shouldn't say I shouldn't say for my wife Fucking asshole. Who the fuck do I think I am? When I go to the grocery store for my family God damn it, taylor, idiot I'm riding my my heelies. Why? Because I can do it and it's fun and it brings me joy and I can be a little kid again.
Speaker 2:And surprisingly enough, they're not as dickish to you when you're 33 compared to when you're 12. I got told I couldn't healy everywhere when I was 12 years old. Now nobody says a damn word to me. It's beautiful. Except they do say dude, those are here, these. Can I get a pair of those? Where'd you get those? What website did you get those off of Healy's dot com man? They're still around, they still exist and I'll always be wearing those. It's pretty fucking fun, cool.
Speaker 1:Awesome man, wow, what a story. But it's a testament to work in the programs that we both work and sometimes adjustments have to be made, sometimes going back to the beginning in a way, or finding that foundation again that we started finding our way back to that is super important. I mean, I kind of went through not similar stuff, but I went through my own journey, especially in spirituality and also in the part of. I am a perfectionist. I think that everything I do, say whatever, has to be the most perfect. There's no doubt about it type of thing, and so I've really been working on allowing myself not to be that and what I've done is things that I think I'm supposed to do. Then I don't do them. I do something else because I don't want to think I have to do something. You know, if I want to take a break and go do something else, I do that. I really try to dig deep into. One of the biggest things, too, for me was this gave me a lot of time to really dig deep into my own journey and I'm in the process of making adjustments with that. I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but I've actually talked to you about some of that. We are. Last little side conversation, probably what a couple of weeks ago or whatever was a little bit about that and I'm really kind of in the universe is affording me the opportunity to dig in.
Speaker 1:You know, I had a chance in August to go. There's a place out here, it's in Massachusetts, it's called Kripala Institute. It is an actual yoga meditation retreat center Cool. And I did that. I went for four days and did that and that was fucking amazing and I'm so glad I did it and what was weird about it? And you would have to be, you would have to know me, know me really in a lot of different levels to understand where this is coming from. But for the very first time in a long, long time, as I was leaving that institute, I felt emotional, Like I felt like I had found something that was so important to me, to my being, to who I want to be. I mean it was very spiritual. You know, three days. It was a very spiritual, getting you know, knowing your body and knowing what it can do, and really get into meditation and all of that kind of stuff. And I walked out there and I felt emotional.
Speaker 2:Isn't that a good feeling? It's a great feeling it's fleeting.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, well, and the other thing on top of that. So the other thing on top of that was just recently, this past week, that's how recent it's been. I felt joy inside of me for no particular reason, and I, you know, I tried to put a finger on something that I, you know.
Speaker 2:I just would sound really kinky, by the way, but I wasn't.
Speaker 1:it wasn't about somebody like I just started. I wouldn't even say seeing. I just met this person who she's got. I mean everything that I'm about. She's about it 10 times more and there's just so many kind of things that line up from a spiritual perspective with this person. It wasn't about her. She's actually out of town. She was running a retreat in Arizona, so she's out of town for a couple of weeks, so had nothing to do with her.
Speaker 1:It had nothing to do with, you know, some sort of outside thing. And for me it used to always the joy was always about because I was around certain people or I was doing certain things. So it was always an activity or a person outside of the internal part of me that was creating that feeling. For the first time, at least in an opportunity where I could grasp it, I felt joy, yeah, and that to me, like I think back to the early days of sobriety and recovery and all of that. Those are all things I had heard about. But I didn't know how people got there and there were a couple of times that I thought I had gotten there but never felt it the way I felt it a couple of days ago.
Speaker 2:And it was amazing You're reminding me of when I initially got sober. There was two people I called that night when I contemplated pulling out my gun and putting it to my head, not because I wanted to commit suicide, but because I wanted the ringing in my ears to please shut the fuck up. After four days of new sleep and I couldn't sleep on my back anymore because my liver ends on tour elevated, my kidneys were really sore and inflamed and going to the bathroom was a shit show. So I called two people I called my dad and I called my best friend in California, dustin, and one could not come out for seven days and the other one couldn't come out for like a month. So my dad came out after seven days and I started working program of a and I started listening to the recovery elevator podcast and those were my two elixirs to help. I got sponsorship within two weeks and off to the races.
Speaker 2:Well, about a month later my best friend is able to fly out and hang out with me and he was only in town. I can't remember how many days it was probably like four or five days but I remember us getting in my forerunner and heading up towards Morrison, the Red Rocks area to go on a really short hike just around the Morrison area, and I can tell you, between stoplight a and stoplight b, I'll never forget an overwhelming sensation of joy I had that it sucks because you remember it so well, because it doesn't fucking happen, and I want more of that. You know, I want to pursue that shit and the authenticity behind it, the capacity to be empathetic and the allowance of a male to be able to feel and express themselves in such a way. Did he know it in that moment? Fuck, no, could I have told him 100 percent.
Speaker 2:We are the two best friends that will always hang up the phone saying I love you, I love you too. We do that, that and we're just. We fucking love each other, and that's the way the cookie crumbles, and I will always say it. But you know, masculinity still plays a part, and I'm only bringing this up because that's the last, one of the last moments. But it's very profound moment for me that I always reference back to when people talk like this, like you're talking right now, and I love it. It brings me joy actually, which is great, at least closer to it, and so that makes me feel good for you. Man Like that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, you know the thing and that I mean that explanation and what you know, what you were feeling, is very similar to kind of what I felt. And the big thing was and this is something I think in Coming into sobriety I did not have was was a love for myself, was was realizing I was OK the way it was. I didn't need to change for people, I didn't have to have everything figured out. I didn't, you know, and I needed to to grow up. You know, I just had not grown up.
Speaker 1:I drug my last year of college with me and had this perpetual idea that college existed, at least in my mind, forever and ever and ever, and it was one big happy fraternity party 24, seven at least in my brain, and I had to grow up from all that stuff. And it feels like that, as I've matured and grown up on a lot of levels with stuff. That that's where the joy is starting to happen is the idea that I'm coming into my own. I'm coming into who I need to be as a person, and or not need to be what, but who I want to be. That's not what I meant Not need to be who I want to be as a person and I am so OK with not being perfect.
Speaker 2:I am so.
Speaker 1:OK and in fact, like I mentioned this, new situations come up. So she's out of town for two weeks. I just use this as an example. In the old days, even as early as it is, and we've literally only known each other maybe four weeks, I would start tripping on the fact she was out of town for two weeks and I would make up stories in my head about how I wasn't liked or she wasn't really into it because she didn't do this and she didn't do that and all this other bullshit. And that's the way that I used to roll and I felt that coming on early on, like in the first day or two I started, I was like whoa, wait a second, where are you taking me this fucked up mind to mind, because we're not going to do that. And then all of a sudden there was peace and like I just felt peace and I was like I'm OK and this is all OK and there's nothing that I need to be worried about here. There's nothing I need to be concerned about. I in myself and still who I am, and I'm OK and I'm doing well and I just need to keep moving forward and that's what I've been doing and it's such a great.
Speaker 1:I am one of these people and probably you might be as well where I can do all the fucking reading in the world I can. I can spew knowledge to you left and right. I can sound like on this podcast or anywhere. You might hear me talk about recovery like my God, this fucking guy's got it figured out. That's the intellectual part of me, the emotional part of me, that has to actually apply.
Speaker 1:This shit struggles, you know, and really has a hard time when those emotions kind of start to get in the way, and I've been really trying to lean on my meditation and lean on the idea of emotions are going to come and they're OK, let him go, though they don't have to rule your life. You know you can move forward, and so that's been a big part of it. On top of that too and I just thought this in as a tidbit, because this is recovery I decided to get a therapist and I just started with him a couple of a couple of sessions ago. So we've only had a couple of sessions, but I'm working on some stuff in therapy.
Speaker 2:So I think recovery in general is constant work and it's a constant rework. In a sense, you're always needing to grow more. Staying stagnant is dangerous, and that's kind of what I've learned through this entire process, and I've said it before and I'll say it again I seem to learn the same. I relearn the same five things every year. I learned how to be nice to people all over again. I learned that I suck at finances who doesn't, you know? I learn that I don't know everything, and I learn to be gentle and kind, and then I learn to get outside of myself and get to being of service, and I will forget them December 31st and I will start the relearning process January 1st.
Speaker 2:That's not true, but it's a running joke inside my own mind and I really like all the things that you had to say. You know, when we're talking about the development of new relationships, or when we were known to do X and Y situation, identifying things that we can change and modify, which to you sounds like letting go, letting go of these paradigms that we've written for ourselves, these stories. We've told ourselves that if this situation occurs, I respond like this the world works like this, society is going to always do this. These are all paradigms, these are all preconceived transcripts that we wrote about our own lives, and it is shedding those, getting rid of them, but then not judging them at the same time, and not not judging them, letting them go, which is the weirdest place to be, and it only exists when you don't talk about it. So it's so profound and it's something I've been focusing on a lot lately myself Just trying to be yes, not be more, not be less, but to be and allow the transient thoughts to be transient.
Speaker 2:They are traversing across my brain and they can go and they can flow, but then playing, paying closer attention to the authentic thoughts and the ones that lead me to the eventual phrase of I know who I am, and the I am is not this meat suit that I walk around in, or the vocal cords I use, or the borrowed atoms that manifested themselves over billions of years ago that I'm borrowing right now to create my hands. The I am is this Eternal energy going through a temporary human experience and the joy of getting a superpower called perception. I get to perceive the universe, I get to witness it, I get to be a part of it, I get to contribute to it, and all of those are started with I get instead of I have to, I must, this is a demand of society. All of those negative terminologies that then poison my own brain and lead me to a shorter existence. I, those are the paradigms that are getting shifted. Those are the things that we're talking about in that building of the new relationship that you're experiencing right now is those paradigm shifts.
Speaker 2:I get versus I get to verse I have to.
Speaker 1:Or.
Speaker 2:I could hyper focus on this, or I can let it go and let it flow.
Speaker 1:Oh man, I love all of that. That's like right, right up my alley and I would actually go. When you said I am, I almost felt like stop right there, because that's it, it's I am. The moment you start adding to I am, you're building a construct of yourself, that's an image in your brain. If you're just, I am almost, if you can almost, in my opinion, if you can almost do, I am everything, that's more real because you're part of the energy field, of everything.
Speaker 1:And, and you know, tara Brock wrote a book I have not read it, I am getting it next but it's called radical acceptance and I've heard her talk about excerpts out of it and she's commented about what radical I mean the words kind of you get it from the words, but radical acceptance, radically accepting where I'm at and letting it be what it is and then going from there.
Speaker 1:So, versus trying to make it something that I want it to be, I'm going to radically accept what it is and then I'm going to figure out from there how do I manage that acceptance? You know what, whatever that might be, how do I manage that acceptance? So if somebody is saying, for instance, we'll use a relationship, hey, I don't want to talk to you anymore. You know I'm done. Accept the fact that that is what's happening and then decide what you are going to do about it within yourself, not with that other person. Not that you're going to try to fix that necessarily. Maybe you do, but maybe you don't. Maybe you'll let it be what it is, but it's through the allowing yourself to experience.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So, like you can radically accept something. I radically accept that the fucking dude across the street is gonna beat that woman, and I'm radically accepting that. You can easily argue. I'm not gonna fucking radically accept that. No, I'm gonna probably go over there and try and help, but that's, I don't think what we're referring to. In this situation, you're allowing the universe to exist the way that it is, for it's good, it's bad, it's right, it's wrong. Not saying you don't take action to it. Right, it's not without action. Responding to your own self, your own boundaries, your own morals, your own beliefs is 100% within line of that concept. I haven't read the book, but you know I feel like it needs to be said, because that's always a blurred line Whenever I talk about acceptance in general of that argument being presented back to me. Well, what if there's a gunman across the street and you just accept him killing people?
Speaker 1:No, and that's not what it's talking about. But you're right. And except it's more internal, it's more radically accepting where you're at in that moment. So the energy flows within yourself. Right, not the external consequences.
Speaker 1:Right, the fact that I mean, listen, you know, we live in a world today where people don't want to talk about things, you know? I mean, I grew up with a family with parents that if they didn't talk about things, it didn't exist. So when you can radically accept that, hey, there's a problem in this family, we need to talk about it. All right, that's true, that's real. So what are we gonna talk about to try to change that, you know, versus ignoring that it's going on and just let it perpetuate for however many more years that you let it perpetuate? And I'm talking about hardcore stuff, like a parent being an alcoholic, you know. Yeah, a parent having anger issues towards other family members and not talking to them or including them in the lives of their own kids because they're angry at them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we don't talk about blah, you know Right. We don't talk about dad. Dad's in the garage drinking again, right? You know Right? He's out there. We know he's out there. He knows he's out there. Everybody in the house knows he's out there. Can somebody come over and watch the dog? Isn't dad in the garage drinking?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, he's not.
Speaker 2:I mean he is, but he doesn't count Right. Can somebody come over and watch the dog? Yeah?
Speaker 1:So then we tiptoe around all those things and we pretend that they don't exist and we try to live a false life, a false family life that has this in it that nobody's addressing it's very ingrained passive behavior that can get developed in those situations.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And yeah, I think the path of letting go right, I even think what Dao the Dao translates to the way Right, the way in which we go Right. The sentence ends there. The second I define it anymore I'm screwing it up. So I think over the last seven months there's been a lot of deep, deep exploration, and phrases like it's always darkest before the dawn come to mind.
Speaker 2:They're a little cliche, but this is way better than what I already know I would be doing going back out and drinking, going back out and trying to numb out. And don't get me wrong, yeah, I like to smoke hookah. It's not right, but I'll take it, at least for now, way over going and doing the harder stuff. That I know will end me on a way shorter path and I know I can work on the hookah thing. The whole point of me even talking about it is because that's accountability.
Speaker 2:I have been going back and seeing my therapist as well and having fantastic conversations with him and I constantly have to shed myself of this stuff and no matter how many times I fuck up financially, no matter how many times I fuck up with hookah or whatever. Surprisingly enough, I still at least have my priorities enough well in mind to maintain my sobriety, and I think a lot of that contributes to keeping in contact with like-minded individuals and being held accountable, connecting with other people and allowing them to know what my current struggles are, and allowing people to corral around you to say it's OK to not be OK. You can go through this. But then also having the really cool friends that say, all right, yeah, it's OK to not be OK, but get the fuck up asshole. There's the thin line there between how much do I allow you to sit in bed and sulk and when do I kick you in the ass, and so it's always good to have both types of friends at your side, which is what I've had to include my wife. She's been both.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean the same for me. Listen, I still smoke pot, and I don't because I kind of grew up in this world of sobriety where I looked at what was the thing that was causing me the problem, and the thing that was causing me the problem was alcohol. Now, does that mean that my attitude towards smoking pot hasn't changed? It has, and my big thing about it is I'm very, very leery of it going down the wrong road. If it does go down the wrong road, then I would immediately say done enough, it is not. Still doesn't mean that I'm not thinking about the idea that maybe I should. Just, I'm kind of at a place now where it doesn't matter anymore. It's not really important to me, because with everything I'm doing, and especially the physical part of what I'm trying to do, I just feel like that is something that, for me, probably will be let go of soon enough.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think that, with regards to substances like marijuana, where it's pretty blaringly obvious that it's going to be legalized pretty soon here, and regardless of what you think personally on recreational use, purely focusing on the medical side of the fence, leaps and bounds of information out there and more research to be done on the medical benefits of using such a thing. To me, people who can consume that currently self-diagnosing in a sense because you can't really get the medical advice you need to take it appropriately the research isn't all done yet on a federal level. I mean locally, you can get it prescribed to. Yes, it's similar to taking ibuprofen, it's similar to and don't quote me on this stuff, guys- I'm still just a fucking drunk idiot.
Speaker 2:But what I'm getting at is your journey is yours, my journey is mine, the second I try and control. Your journey is the second. I'm fucking at my own, and love and acceptance, tolerance and patience, kindness is all part of my program and I fully think that you're going to explore what you're going to explore. That's your journey and it's a beautiful thing and I'm all for it. And I think that the less we force on other people our own opinions about the definition of what recovery and sobriety is, the more we're able to fill everyone's cups with more love and acceptance, because I think it's just way more of an appropriate thing. Sorry if that sounded like a weird tangent. Well, no, no.
Speaker 1:Because you bring up a couple of points. That and why I brought it up, was, first and foremost, listeners out there to go oh wait, so I got to stop everything to get sober. Well, I don't know if I want to do that. So I want the listeners to know that, hey, there's different pathways to how you get sober, how you decide or how you define sobriety. Maybe that's probably even better If it keeps you, if what you're doing is helping you. So if quitting alcohol was your main thing but you still smoke pot or whatever and that helps you, when you're able to move forward and you're able to be positive and your life is able to grow and expand and do all the things that we hope happens in a sobriety situation, then who am I to tell you you're wrong? I'm not that person. Secondly, the reason why you brought it up was so here you talked about hookah and you defined it and it's tobacco. But the moment you said it was tobacco, probably most people go oh, it's only tobacco, oh, ok, which is ironic.
Speaker 2:Which should be way more high on the schedule of drugs than marijuana in my personal opinion, along with alcohol. Alcohol should probably be a schedule and drug. No medical benefit and no use in a society. Is a schedule and drug. There is medical benefit to alcohol, sadly, but yeah, no use in a society. Yeah, yeah, no, that's an extremist view, but that's because I'm sober. Let me be biased, fuck you.
Speaker 1:But I do think that one of the things that I had to really do was, first off, realize that I'm not perfect and that I don't need to be perfect to work a program. I don't need to be perfect to get better. I can get better without being perfect. It's not about all or nothing, and I've been really, really trying in the last almost five years now to get away from the idea of I have to be perfect or I can't do this. And that goes for everything in my life, not just my journey in recovery, but in everything that I do.
Speaker 1:I don't go after anything now with oh I can do that perfect, so I'm going to go do it. Oh, I'm not going to do that perfectly, so I'm not going to do it. I do shit that turns out weird, but I like doing it and I just did it and I'm OK with it. And I think that we have to as a society, we live too much within these blurred lines not even blurred lines, very strict lines of here's who you're supposed to be, and if you can't be that person, then you can't play, You're not allowed in the game.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, and it takes an alcoholic to come up, or a drug ear and alcoholic to come up with a phrase like that. Right, where we're extremists, we're all or nothingists. So leave it up to us to be like oh, you are going in smoking weed. You're not sober at all, whatsoever. You can unsubscribe right now. We don't want to see you back here again until you're 100% sober, off of everything. If you're using mouthwash that has hints of alcohol in it, you're pretty much fucked. You might as well just go to hell right now.
Speaker 1:You drink kombucha.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you might as well just go back out and drink, or if you drink, kombucha, right? Because, it contains alcohol and it's a little bit unregulated. We could have a whole discussion on that.
Speaker 2:Maybe we should do that on episode two, but I love this though, eric. I really do. I think it's. All. These things are the raw things that I think people don't like to talk about in open forums and, honestly, thank you, sir, for bringing up some of these conversations, because that's the point of this is being able to shed our shame, have conversations that are raw and be able to learn from each other and to be able to say things that we change our minds on tomorrow who fucking knows why? Because this is an exploration, and who knows what tomorrow is going to bring. My brain has changed 80 million times, if not more, since the start of this conversation, so let alone my lifetime, and that's because I'm constantly trying to analyze and interpret the world, and as new information comes in, I can change my mind.
Speaker 2:Or just and that's something I feel like society has forgotten a little bit is you have the ability to change your mind?
Speaker 1:Well, right and just simply listening and being open to the listening process and not judging immediately, which we all do on all facets of the world. And I really think the moment somebody's telling you that, oh, you're not doing everything, well then you're not sober that person is using their ego to condemn you number one and number two. It's not up to them to make that decision whether you are sober enough to be part of the tribe. It's up to you.
Speaker 2:If you are, if whatever it is you're doing is working and keeping you moving forward in the right way in my opinion, then keep doing what's working and I will always give the flip coin to whatever we're talking about and say that, if you need a fucking strong, stern kick in the ass and get yourself a good Bible thumb big book thumper not Bible number, but big book thumper get yourself a good, strong sponsor that says no, motherfucker, you ain't doing shit anymore. This is the way you're going to walk, this is how you're going to talk, this is how you're going to do shit moving forward. Why? Because you haven't been able to make a goddamn decision in your whole fucking life and you need some fucking structure. That's OK too. Yep, absolutely, because that is what I needed, and I can't knock the person who needs what you need, just like you can't knock the person that needs what I need, and it depends person to person.
Speaker 2:Some people need that allowance, they need to explore, they need to figure things out for themselves, and, in all honesty, there isn't one right answer to this, because there are people out there that can do x, y and just not z, and there are people out there who can't do anything at all whatsoever, to include the mouthwash. So, at the end of the day, though, we have to be open and honest with ourselves, because nobody gets us fucking sober. We have to come to the conclusion for ourselves, and I think that's ultimately a really cool thing. Once we make that decision, lower those energies of our addiction and start rising ourselves up to the potential that exists all around us the ability to perceive this universe for a short period of time on a rock that is moving billions of miles an hour, heading towards a black hole following a sun.
Speaker 1:OK, so I've got a question for you. Hey, wait, I didn't finish my thought, god damn it. I'm like, ok, I know we're going deeper to that dark hole, let's just talk.
Speaker 2:I'm called an asshole.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I do have a question for you because I know my answer and I think I might know what your answer might be. In the last seven months, do you feel like that you have done work and have grown? Just simple yes or no?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes, I agree, I feel like I'm the same. The only reason I ask that question and hopefully, as the listeners are listening is this the bottom line is this If you are working and working, a program means everything. So you're working. It could be your spirituality, it could be your physicality. Maybe you decide, hey, I'm going to start eating right, I'm going to try to start walking every day, or whatever it might be.
Speaker 2:It could be any of those things, even if you're not sober yet, even if you're just sober curious.
Speaker 1:But working things and getting better every day is what this is all about.
Speaker 1:A bunch of lips, baby, and you can do that, and you could be on the verge of saying, hey, I'm done drinking. So you might be sitting here listening to this saying, ok, I'm really thinking about it, but I haven't pulled the trigger yet. But maybe you're already starting to eat better, maybe you've cut back a tiny bit, maybe you're trying to get involved in things you've seen involved in before or whatever. You're trying to do positive things in your life. You're already working a program. You may not be totally done, but you're working a program. And for all those out there that are on day one for the 1,000 time, you're still working a program. You're still making it happen. It's taking you time to get there, but you're getting there. And that's the whole point in all of this and I think what we were sharing today on this was our point about this is just do the work, whatever that means. Do the work to get better as a person.
Speaker 2:I think that's brilliant, eric, and I think that's a good segue into a conclusion for episode one of season two of Sovereign Shameless. I couldn't agree more. I think that to all of those listening out there, to those that listened through season one, thank you, thank you, thank you. The individuals out there struggling on day one, the people out there who are struggling on day 10,000 and one right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, great point 20 years of sobriety. I think that's what that is. It's fucking hard. There's no way to get around it other than what I've been trying to practice lately is let go of the feeling of wanting to quit and not wanting to quit. Letting go of it, Because what I've learned up until now is the more I hold on to what I desire, which is not necessarily sobriety anymore, because it's other things. Insert X here If it is. I desire sobriety and I'm on day 1,000 and I'm batting one day. The desire is the issue and I need to let that go. I need to quit resisting the flow of life, and that does not mean give into temptation. It means to let temptation go as well. You're letting all of it go and flow and allow the universe to exist. So I feel like this second half of the episode got really woo woo on us there, man.
Speaker 1:I listen, I'm okay about that.
Speaker 2:I feel like I need a lot of fucking candle or some shit. I don't fucking know man, Do I need to cleanse myself?
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, you do. I think I farted Well for some people that be cleansing. So to each his own right To each his own. That's what we're talking about.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh dude. I think this is a great episode of episode one. Thank you to all our listeners. We love you all very much and, in the spirit of season two, we do not know when our next episode is going to be airing, and that's okay with us, because we're gonna let that fucking shit go and flow down the river. I had a huge issue with it on season one of being super consistent and trying to hold a standard to compare myself with other sober podcasts that are fantastic, brilliant individuals and they're amazing people. I am not them and I am who I am. I am right, eric.
Speaker 1:I am, I am.
Speaker 2:And I think you and I briefly discussed this before. But we need to be authentic to ourselves. So we will release episodes, we promise and we will be back and we will be adding new fun content along the way, but don't fucking ask me when and I think that was meant towards me as much as towards all of you.
Speaker 1:So I will, yeah, eric, but I agree, and yeah, we're trying. Listen, sometimes you gotta give yourself a break and sometimes you know, when we get caught up in the minutia of it's gotta be this way or else type of thing, we're just fucking ourselves is what we're doing and it doesn't work. And the whole idea of all this was one to come in, just talk and two, to really show everybody kind of the raw footage of what it's like to be in this world and what it's like to be sober in the working processes on a daily basis. They're not always pretty and they're not always perfect and they're not always you know. Oh, we're going in the right way.
Speaker 1:La la la is everything great? You know, sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's a struggle, sometimes we get plateaued and we have to just sit there for a while until we figure it out and that's all good. That's part of all of this. So I'm glad that the listeners were here today, I'm glad that we were able to do this content and definitely there'll be more to come, but we just don't know when.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Stay tuned. Hey, wait in the words of the military stand by to stand by. There's more coming your way.
Speaker 1:Love you guys. I did move my mic out of the. Oh, here we go. I did. I was talking while it was counting. That's not good.
Speaker 2:I did move my mic out of the way, so it's not like right in my face all the time. I like it Well, speaking of in your face, let's play the new season two theme song before we have our conversation today. Yeah man, all right, let's do it, let's do it. Woo, yeah, I like this one. I love it. I think that was enough.
Speaker 1:I love it. I could listen to that all day. Man, it's revving me up. Let's go.
Speaker 2:I know it kind of makes me feel like, you know, like the bright side of a Monday morning. You know you're driving into work and you're like I don't really want to be doing this, but then you hear that song and you're like, all right, I think I could fucking do this, or at least you could.
Speaker 1:Yeah, makes me feel like just put your head down, kick some ass, and who cares?
Speaker 2:Yeah, fuck it, I like it.
Speaker 1:Well, you know what?
Speaker 2:I think we just decided to hit the record button because we've been procrastinating recording episodes for season two for so long and you and I came to the conclusion that we are getting in our own way. So we're just going to have a no holds bar, totally authentic conversation to bring about season two, because you and I just really want to get back at this.
Speaker 1:So I just want to say this to all our listeners we're back.
Speaker 2:Holy shit, we're back and we have no idea what the fuck we're doing.
Speaker 1:Not at all Same as the first, but that's the way it should be, and we have some reason why that should be that way, for sure.
Speaker 2:Well, dude, in all seriousness, I have missed you. To our listeners, we have actually not been in communication on a regular basis. Eric has had his life going on and I've had my life going on. There has been a huge gap of time between last episode and this episode. I want to say shit, man. When was the last episode aired? End of season one.
Speaker 1:I think what was it around May mid-May, somewhere in there. Right, I want to say it in the May.
Speaker 2:It is now November 10th. Yeah, we've chit-chatted here and there and we've had some business meetings about the show here and there, but we really needed the break. I think At least I know I did and I think we really needed to or at least I needed to implement some practices that I was preaching about, but it was not implementing.
Speaker 1:Well, absolutely, and I mean there's some things that I will share in this episode, but the bottom line is we are two drunks trying to make it into the world and we're being authentic, and the authenticity part for us was the break. We needed that break and we needed to go do our own shit for a while and we needed to navigate through some stuff individually as well as collectively, and I think it was all good.
Speaker 2:I do too, man, I really do. I had to go to some deep, dark places of the corners of my mind and then come back from it, and I'm still on the uptick right now, which gives me the capacity to get back and to give back. But shameless baby. There were some fucked up times during the last what is that? Six months? May, june, july, august, september, october, november. Seven months I counted on my fingers everybody.
Speaker 1:And thank God he's got all his fingers, so it worked.
Speaker 2:I do, I do. See, this is the gratitude list I'm starting right now.
Speaker 1:I have all 10 fingers. I have all my fingers.
Speaker 2:Well listen, I'm sorry, dude, Don't you have a mechanical arm right now? I?
Speaker 1:do I do? Speaking of things that you go through in the last seven months, september 2nd I tore my bicep tendon from the elbow and it just rolled right up my arm and I had a surgery and they had to repair it.
Speaker 1:And I've been in PT I am actually in so one thing I learned about it was the date of the surgery and the date of the protocol. Beginnings of PT are the counting is different. So when we started counting it so I was when I started PT I was three weeks out of surgery, but PT counted it as protocol week number two. So basically what that means to all our listeners that might be following along, who probably have had orthopedic stuff going on and totally understand this, the thought was that that week, the week from the surgery to when you first get checked, does not count Because that's the anything goes week. Anything could happen coming out of surgery, type of thing. But then the surgeon checks you out and said, OK, we're starting to count from here and then you'll start your protocol in two weeks. So anyway, it's been a. Have you ever had something happen to you where everybody's going oh man, wow, that had to hurt or whatever, and you're going? No, it didn't hurt that much and honestly, I'm completely fucking intrigued by this whole thing.
Speaker 2:How is this all going to work? Well, I mean, tell me what happened.
Speaker 1:So I was hiking with a friend and we were, and, by the way, it was basically an uphill hike. That was the only hard part of it. It was, at that point, had been up to that point have been super simple, but it was a good kind of cardio type of hike. A tree had fallen over the path so we had to climb over the tree. So I found the lowest part to climb over, so we started climbing over.
Speaker 2:I was like those big red, like a redwood tree, because those trunks are gigantic, like like a big tree base or what.
Speaker 1:It was a fairly no. It wasn't huge like that, but it was mid middle of the road. I mean we don't have anything out here, that's that big.
Speaker 2:I'm a California kid born and raised, so the redwoods is what came to mind. I was like holy crap, we don't have those.
Speaker 1:But we have big trees, but but it was. It was a good medium sized trunk Got it, and so I found the easiest way to go over. I thought and we get up on there and I start to lose my balance. So I grabbed, for a branch is right above me. I figured, oh, that'll buoy me, I'll be fine. I still kept going. I went down, I held on to the branches. I was going down, it yanked my arm and as I twisted it, just like I could feel it Rubber band, yeah, and it felt like. I thought I heard a little pop, but I don't know if I did or didn't. Initially I thought I just re injured an old injury and then it started to feel tingly and I thought, hmm, that's not a good sign. And I pulled my shirt up and there you had a little indentation in my arm where my bicep used to be. Wow, and the bicep was up here. So I had this big. It looked like I'd been working out like massively for like.
Speaker 2:In one small section of your forearm, exactly.
Speaker 1:Exactly, it looked like freaky man, just a little freaky.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you look like you skipped forearm day. Yeah, yeah, more or less.
Speaker 1:More or less so they um.
Speaker 2:that's wild, though man, I mean that's wild. And you said it didn't even hurt for you. Because I mean obviously you, the way you made it sound. I'm sure people are cringing right now. I mean, even I kind of want to cringe a little bit how it's.
Speaker 1:when I first went down it's stung around the elbow and and but it was felt like similar like an injury I had before. So I thought, oh it's, I just aggravated this old injury. I'm fine, right. And I started walking and and and it started to subside the feeling. But then I started feeling this tingling down my arm. I thought, okay, that's odd.
Speaker 1:When I got to the ER, so I had another hour and a half out. I mean, we were half, we were only halfway into the hike and I had to get out. I mean I couldn't. Yeah, there's no shortcut, I had to do it. So we're doing the hike. I kept the arm up close to me and we just like did it. And when I got to the ER, the first question was, on a scale one to 10, what's your pain threshold? And like, yeah, that's an odd question because I wasn't feeling a lot of pain. I said maybe a three, probably more like a two. And the guy stopped writing and looked at me it was what? And I said yeah, I said I mean, why are you asking me about pain? Because well, that's usually a painful injury. And I said, oh, I said well, I'm, that's where I'm at.
Speaker 2:So when.
Speaker 1:I went back there. All they did was keep asking me that and everybody ever since has asked me. You know about the pain level. The worst pain I had was coming out of surgery. They didn't do a nerve block right away because they wanted to make sure the nerves still worked. So I woke up. I was in extreme pain. They did the nerve block. I didn't feel it. From there I was able to manage everything with ibuprofen and I got through those initial four or five days of out of surgery and, you know, been rocking ever since the PT. I'm good this, this contraption, is coming off, but I'm saving it for next Halloween. I'm just going to get a side face and all that and become like the Terminator.
Speaker 2:I think you your ibuprofen, that you're Superman. I will let that dad joke, just simmer.
Speaker 1:Well, I think what it is also, and I got to be, you know, I got to be cautious of this. I just think I have a really high pain threshold.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean what like, please don't make this a habit every season, by the way, because I know last season you had your leg stuff going on. Correct, yeah, I had. Yep, I did. Was it shin sponsor? What was that last?
Speaker 1:I had it. It happened in late October. Well, that's when I felt you were running because you.
Speaker 2:I was running from not running to being Iron man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I added in an extra activity and I was really pushing it. Plus I was doing a lot of leg work anyway because I was trying to, you know, do harder hikes and I ended up with a stress fracture last year. Yeah, that was actually healing by the time I got to the doctor, because I thought I just really sprained my ankle and it just wasn't healing. So I finally went to the ortho and it was yep, you got a stress fracture, but it's healing and it's healing in the right position. So I'm just going to throw you in a boot for a few weeks and we'll see where we're at. And that was last October. So this October I had a new adventure Not the one you drink out of, Right?
Speaker 2:Okay, not Dostoe.
Speaker 1:And then I just I am hoping and praying that we get to next October, november and I don't have to go through any of these kind of things again and I can enjoy an outdoor autumn hike like any normal human being.
Speaker 2:I mean hiking sounds dangerous. That's what I'm gathering from all of this. Hiking and running sound like the worst. Everybody right now PSA don't hike, don't run.
Speaker 1:Don't listen to Taylor. I am a fucking health, I am a clutch and that's a big part of the story. So do you know?
Speaker 2:I just got back from Skyzone, the trampoline place. They amazingly survived COVID, which I'm really happy about. Long story boring One of my very first jobs at the age of, I want to say, 16. I worked at sky high sports, which was a competitor of Skyzone in Rancho Cordova, california, and I was a trampoline instructor. I taught, like an aerobics class, aerobics on trampolines. But for somebody with my ADHD, high energy it was a perfect sport for me to get into and to kind of vent out that excess energy from Thursday to Sunday 4pm to midnight. And was that freshman, sophomore year of high school? Well, and it was an amazing experience which I can. I could go on and on and on about that, but fast forwarding to now. Right, that's 16 year old Taylor. Now I am 33 year old Taylor. I thought it would be smart.
Speaker 2:I've jumped over the years. It's not like I did this cold turkey after you know what 16 years, Right? So I've jumped a little bit here and there over the years. I still have my basic skills, but I have not jumped in quite a while and I just decided to go back by myself. And I've been spending a lot of time recently playing so much Halo on PC and, oddly enough I know this might sound odd to our listeners smoking a lot of hookah, which is just a version of tobacco and it's called Shisha. I've been using those two things as a crutch, which I'll talk about more later, and I'm trying to break that up. This is real time. Even today I'm trying to break it up as of last week. I'm trying to, you know, get back to the basics and adopt different things into my daily life.
Speaker 2:So I went like last week I went twice. The first time I thought my lungs were going to pop. The second time, not that bad, but then I took five days off and then I went back today and I felt like my lungs were going to pop again. And oh my gosh man, the difference between 23 and 33 and 33 and 16, you know it's. I'm not getting any younger and I have to pay more attention.
Speaker 2:I really do Like it's kind of interesting for me, and I know everybody out there is like, oh, 33, you're still young, I am, but at the same time I'm also not 23 anymore. So you know there is that and I have to be more cognizant of it. So it was really good though it was a great workout. My lungs are kind of calming down now, but, holy shit, man, just thought of having to pay more attention Like and what our brains think at you know, like my brain still thinks I'm 16. And my body is like, yeah, no, like you know, you got, you got some bum knees now, man, and your neck doesn't bend that way sometimes. So careful, right, right.
Speaker 1:Well, when I did, when I was on the podcast for RE, I was interviewed by Odette and you know there's that place in there where they ask your age and I said you know I was 58. And she said, oh, 58, going on 38. And I bring that up because of what you just said, because I think that's part of it is. I've got to be aware that. You know, I just have to be cautious in how I do things, not that I can't do them, I just have to be smarter about what I'm taking on. And everything I'm doing is fine, I just have to do it with a little bit more caution, that's all. So, again, in saying that and even the doctor said it, the PT guys say it all the time I could do the same thing a hundred times again and never tear that, never tear that bicep. That was just a freak, freak accident Could happen to anybody, you know.
Speaker 2:So our biceps similar to bones where, like you know, they can come back stronger. I mean, I know age plays a factor. Until that too, I'm dumb. I don't know these things.
Speaker 1:I just I don't know. I mean, I know that they told me that what happens is where they reattached it to the bone grows around that where that reattachment is and it helps strengthen it. So I take extra calcium and but that was something I was doing from the break last year and you know they were like, yeah, I keep taking D3 and extra calcium along with you know working, like they were all about me going back to the gym as soon as I could possibly go and when I went back I was literally back in the gym like probably week three of out of the surgery. Good for you, because the left side like I don't know if you know this and maybe listeners know this, maybe they don't but one of the things I found out in all this that I thought was amazing, and my brother found it, was that there's been studies done that when people that have injuries to a limb, if they work out the other side, their their atrophy issues will be minimal or lessened, I guess I should say, and also their ability, like I found this out too that your brain, so there's a part of your brain that works each part of your body, so your arm or arms, are worked by a certain part of your brain.
Speaker 1:So and it's intricate in terms of, your right arm is worked by a certain part of your brain, your left arm is worked by a certain part of your brain. Well, when there is an injury, where that part of the body is not working, that part of the brain actually shuts down and it can be atrophied as well. So, by working out on the other side, the brain balances. So whenever there's an overload on one side, it'll balance over into the other side. So by balancing over into the right side, it's it's firing that part of the brain and making it work. And it's also firing those muscles, like the, the synopsis to the muscles, those muscles, that information to the muscles is still working because the brain is firing to it, which just makes healing better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I feel like I mean shit. It seems like an analogy for a lot of things in life, though as well, you know, even relating to like sobriety. Why does it have to be a physical limb? It could be a mental limb that we're fucked up with right now, that we need to heal, and I feel like what you're saying is the only way to do that is, you have to take action. You have to do something about it, because you're going to the gym and you're choosing to work out the other side and see results, and your brain is assisting you and compensating for it and finding harmony. I don't know about balance. I always replace balance with harmony because I always think of balance as a seesaw, and it has to be one for one, where harmony can be a symphony of sounds that correlate together, which then create unity, and that to me just seems a little bit more. I'm a musician, so that's.
Speaker 1:But look at you, man. I mean talk about work in the muscle. The segue right in sobriety was almost like we've been doing this. We've been doing this these last six months.
Speaker 2:Hey, I mean honestly, I just I wasn't even knowing I was segueing right there. I was more or less just saying hey, like no, you're right though. It's a it's a good thing to to think about and you know there's been a lot of things for me over the last six months, seven months.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what's going on with you, by the way? I mean we've been talking all about my arm. Let's find out what you where you're at.
Speaker 2:I'm not in any rush, man. I. I think in season one I had like a big thing on like oh, let's try and keep our episodes to 45 minutes, and then we had like an hour and a half one and I was worried about analytics and yada, yada, yada, I know I got time for that. It all contributed to kind of like where we left off at season one, where I was just super burnt out, not necessarily just because of the podcast, you know, I actually found relief every time I had those conversations and I love all of the guests and I'm looking forward to having more guests on. But it was exhausting on the editor's side of the fence, on the, you know, production side of the house, going in and spending all those hours clipping, editing, cleaning up our voices, making sure we had their intro, outro. You were on top of doing the show notes, things like that. And it just got so exhausting for me that I wasn't going to my own meetings anymore. I was hardly talking to my sponsor anymore and you know I was sleeping a lot. And then I really was getting deep, deep, deep into computer gaming, which is fantastic.
Speaker 2:I honestly was never a gamer. I mean, I always had the systems I always had, you know, the original PlayStation. When I was a little kid, I played my Gameboy, I played the advance, I had a Dreamcast, you know. I played all of the systems all the way up until PS5 and Xbox One Series X. But I was also a PC gamer for a very short period of time and I never went back to it. I switched over to controller immediately, thinking that was the better option. But I ended up watching Netflix and using it for other platforms, you know, or other ways of watching shit. It wasn't my thing. I was always the rock climber outside, you know, let's go dirt biking, let's go. You know, snowboarding, let's go do something outside. You know, it's one of the best things for somebody like me. And in my recovery I was so focused in on the first three years of my recovery on, you know, giving back, working my steps, paying it forward, being there, open and honest for other individuals that I really slowly started to lose a sense of myself and video gaming ended up being my crutch Not initially, it was a lot of fun, because I actually initially used it, because I have a best friend of mine that lives in St Louis, missouri, who is a big PC gamer and he told me to get a PC.
Speaker 2:We also had our small business going as well, so I was like, hey, you know what? I need? A high powered PC so then I could run some high tech machine in my garage, produce some things for the business but then secretly use it for my gaming. I was also wanting to reconnect with him on a regular basis because since I've lived out in Colorado for the last five years, I've always disassociated myself from friendships, and that's something I'm working on. I have a. I have like three best friends in St Louis, I have one really solid best friend in California and then I have a lot of other actually no, that's not true and I have like four solid best friends in California and then I have one solid best friend out here in Colorado. These are all the people that I really connect with and really identify with, and they accept me for who I am through and through, and they've seen me through my darkest stuff.
Speaker 2:But when you move to a new state, like I did, I had a significant other at the time. It was five years ago now and we ended up breaking up really quickly because of my alcoholism, going our separate ways and then finding respect and love for each other later down the road, because initially I have to thank her for getting me on my path to sobriety. Well, through all of that, I then was left with this I'm alone here in Colorado. When I met my wife, I was adopted into her friend group and adopted into her family, which then obviously later became my actual family. But initially you feel like you're just this weird third party, third wheel, in everything that you do. I still get that sense, even with her friends. I don't know why, it's just something that I do.
Speaker 2:So my way of curing that was when I, with you, identified that we needed to slow down, slow a roll on the podcast, take a break for a while, give ourselves the mental space we need and really start focusing on things. I had good intentions. My intentions were get into video gaming with one of your really close best friends. It's very easy to do because you get on a computer and you're instantaneously able to see each other. You're able to chat and I started learning so many cool things about the video game world of PC gamers. Like I know some terminology. Now, I'm not a pro, but hey, like I know some things a lot more than I did six, seven months ago, and he taught me all about Discord.
Speaker 2:I ended up teaching you about Discord as well, because we were kind of exploring that as a platform to host some things in the future, and I pretty much then went down an interesting road. My wife joined me. She got a PC Cassie is who I'm talking about. She's helped us host a couple of episodes, and she was a guest on one of our episodes in season one, and we built her a PC, which I got to watch my buddy teach me how to do that, which is fantastic, but I she is also a nursing school, and so she had those priorities and she didn't forget those priorities because she doesn't have ADHD, she's a normie, you know. She is like us, though, so she has to deal with those things, but she was able to play games for a little while with us, run some really cool dungeons and New World, and we leveled up all our characters together.
Speaker 2:It was a fantastic time over the summer and it was a great way to save money, because financial stress is another factor that is just a whole other aspect to the depths of my despair over the last six months, and through that, I then started to get back into smoking hookah, which, when I was 18 years old, it was actually a really cool thing for me and my friends in California to go to the local hookah bar and smoke hookah, and actually just legally, with no alcohol. There might have been, you know, some smoking of us, something other every once in a while there as well, but for the most part we just enjoyed it. We had a good time on it. So I just rekindled that literally from like I think I'd stopped smoking hookah at age like 19. It only lasted a short period of time, all the way up until earlier this year, and I bought my own. I actually hooked up the hose to a microphone stand so then I could PC game without having to hold on to it.
Speaker 1:Leave it to you to figure that out.
Speaker 2:Hey, man, don't judge me until all those people are there, I'm actually impressed. So I mean, if anybody's looking for a hookah solution to their PC gaming problems, hit me up.
Speaker 1:Well, maybe you should market it, maybe that should be the business.
Speaker 2:No, I should not market it. That should be free to society. Get yourself a microphone stand problem solved, one that bends. So I just was doing it, onesie, twosies every now and then, but then, slowly, I could feel the neural pathways starting to be built again. And, mind you everybody, I'm still sober. Alcohol I am still free from alcohol. I'm free from all substances, obviously, other than nicotine right now, because of Shisha, from hookah and caffeine. Outside of that, no, I've maintained this entire time. I've gone through dark times but I have been able to maintain my sobriety through this by being held accountable, and I'm getting there soon.
Speaker 2:I've always had my macro voice and my macro lens throughout my entire life and I could always see myself from 80 feet up in the air, if not from outer space, and analyze myself from a third party's perspective, and I can see the writing on the wall and the tools of sobriety. Even though I wasn't actively working them at the time, I still was in the connection with people in recovery. I would still help people and people would help me along the way. It's not like I was completely disengaged. I would be responding to posts on the internet. I'd be trying to help people that would call me and reach out and say, hey, I need to get into a treatment center, and then I would be helping out my buddy of mine who has been really struggling a lot lately but he's finding his way.
Speaker 2:So you know, with all of these factors at play and financial stress looming over us, I really just wanted to disassociate. I really wanted to embrace the restless, irritability and discontentedness that life was starting to spiral me into. And I say life was, I was, I was spiraling me into that. That is me trying to place blame on something other than myself. So, through all of that and I know this is really long-winded, but hey, fuck it.
Speaker 2:I got to a beautiful place of melancholy where my energies allowed me to wake the fuck up and just be okay with not being okay again. And you constantly have to shed this stuff, you constantly have to shed your shame, and it's a never-ending process because it's progress, not perfection for me and I'm ill-equipped to manage my own brain, which is why I started to reach out again and say, hey, I'm not okay. You even reached out a couple of times to me over the last seven months because you knew that there was just something going on. I had some other people in recovery reaching out to me as well and it's so fascinating how quick we are to say I'm good, to say it's all right, it's not that bad, we downplay it, we this, we that, because sometimes when we just say it like it is, people do shut us out or do shut us down and those fears can be confirmed sometimes and it's really hard to pick that hard in our lives. And then my wife and I were going through some conflicts, just fundamental conflicts in our marriage, and I'm not going to get into all of that stuff, but it was really trying and really challenging for both of us and I had to really pick up some recovery books again and really go back to the basics and remind myself that, no matter how far down this road of recovery I drive, I'm always still three feet from the ditch, which will always be right next to the road. And it's a little morbid, but it's humbling and it's a reminder that it doesn't matter how much time you have, it's subjective. All I have is this moment and today. And you know, get back to the things that bring you joy, authentic joy, and jumping on trampolines was one of those things.
Speaker 2:Getting out my heelies yeah, that's right. You know those things that came out in 2000 or 2001,. The single wheel on the back heel of a skater shoe. I never stopped riding those, like seriously, I have like two pair, I think, right now, but only one pair works. I broke those bad boys out again.
Speaker 2:I was like, anytime I'm going to the grocery store for my wife and for me I shouldn't say I shouldn't say for my wife Fucking asshole, who the fuck do I think I am? When I go to the grocery store for my family God damn it, taylor, idiot I'm riding my my heelies. Why? Because I can do it and it's fun and it brings me joy and I can be a little kid again and surprisingly enough, they're not as dickish to you when you're 33 compared to when you're 12. I got told I couldn't hear you everywhere when I was 12 years old. Now nobody says a damn word to me. It's beautiful. Except they do say dude, those are here. Can I get a pair of those? Where'd you get those? What website did you get those off of? Healy's dot com man? They're still around. They still exist and I'll always be worried in those. It's pretty fucking fun. Cool, awesome man.
Speaker 1:Wow, what a story. But it's a testament to work in the programs that we both work and sometimes adjustments have to be made, sometimes going back to the beginning in a way, or finding that foundation again. That we started finding our way back to that is super important. I mean, I kind of went through not similar stuff, but I went through my own journey, especially in spirituality and also in the part of I am a perfectionist. I think that everything I do, say whatever, has to be the most perfect. There's no doubt about it type of thing, and so I've really been working on allowing myself not to be that and what I've done is things that I think I'm supposed to do. Then I don't do them. I do something else because I don't want to think I have to do something. If I want to take a break and go do something else, I do that. I really try to dig deep into. One of the biggest things, too, for me was this gave me a lot of time to really dig deep into my own journey and I'm in the process of making adjustments with that. I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but I've actually talked to you about some of that. Our last little side conversation, probably about a couple of weeks ago or whatever was a little bit about that and I'm really kind of and the universe is affording me the opportunity to dig in.
Speaker 1:I had a chance in August to go. There's a place out here it's in Massachusetts it's called Kripala Institute. It is an actual yoga meditation retreat center Cool. And I did that. I went for four days and did that and that was fucking amazing and I'm so glad I did it and what was weird about it? And you would have to know me, know me really well, know me really in a lot of different levels, to understand where this is coming from. But for the very first time in a long, long time, as I was leaving that institute, I felt emotional, like I felt like I had found something that was so important to me, to my being, to who I want to be. I mean it was very spiritual. You know, three days. It was a very spiritual, getting you know, knowing your body and knowing what it can do, and really getting into meditation and all of that kind of stuff. And I walked out there and I felt emotional.
Speaker 2:Isn't that a good feeling?
Speaker 1:It's a great feeling.
Speaker 2:It's fleeting.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, well, and the other thing on top of that. So the other thing on top of that was just recently, this past week, that's how recent it's been and I felt joy inside of me for no particular reason, and I, you know, I tried to put a finger on something that I, you know. I just wish I would.
Speaker 2:This sounds really kinky, by the way.
Speaker 1:But I wasn't. It wasn't about somebody Like I just started. I wouldn't even say seeing. I just met this person who oh, nice she's got, I mean everything that I'm about. She's about it 10 times more and there's just so many kinds of things that line up from a spiritual perspective with this person. It wasn't about her. She's actually out of town. She was running a retreat in Arizona, so she's out of town for a couple of weeks, so had nothing to do with her.
Speaker 1:It had nothing to do with, you know, some sort of outside thing. And for me it used to always the joy was always about because I was around certain people or I was doing certain things. So it was always an activity or a person outside of the internal part of me that was creating that feeling. For the first time, at least in an opportunity where I could grasp it, I felt joy and that to me, like I think back to the early days of sobriety and recovery and all of that. Those are all things I had heard about. But I didn't know how people got there and there were a couple of times that I thought I had gotten there but never felt it the way I felt it a couple of days ago and it was amazing.
Speaker 2:You're reminding me of when I initially got sober. There was two people I called that night when I contemplated pulling out my gun and putting it to my head, not because I wanted to commit suicide, but because I wanted the ringing in my ears to please shut the fuck up. After four days of new sleep and I couldn't sleep on my back anymore because my liver enzymes were elevated, my kidneys were really sore and inflamed and going to the bathroom was a shit show. So I called two people I called my dad and I called my best friend in California, dustin, and one could not come out for seven days and the other one couldn't come out for like a month. So my dad came out after seven days and I started working program of AA and I started listening to the recovery elevator podcast and those were my two elixirs to help. I got sponsorship within two weeks and off to the races.
Speaker 2:Well, about a month later my best friend is able to fly out and hang out with me and he was only in town. I can't remember how many days it was probably like four or five days but I remember us getting in my forerunner and heading up towards Morrison, the Red Rocks area, to go on a really short hike just around the Morrison area and I can tell you, between stoplight A and stoplight B, I'll never forget an overwhelming sensation of joy I had that it sucks because you remember it so well, because it doesn't fucking happen. And I want more of that. You know, I want to pursue that shit and the authenticity behind it, the capacity to be empathetic and the allowance of a male to be able to feel and express themselves in such a way. Did he know it in that moment? Fuck, no, could I have told him 100 percent?
Speaker 2:We are the two best friends that will always hang up the phone and say and I love you, I love you too. We do that, that and we're just. We fucking love each other and that's the way the cookie crumbles and I will always say it. But I, you know, masculinity still plays a part, and I'm only bringing this up because that's the last, one of the last moments. But it's very profound moment for me that I always reference back to when people say when people talk like this, like you're talking right now, and I love it, it brings me joy actually, which is great, at least closer to it, and so that makes me feel good for you, man, like that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, you know the thing and that I mean that explanation and what you know, what you were feeling is very similar to kind of what I felt. And the big thing was and this is something I think in coming into sobriety I did not have was a, was, a love for myself, was was realizing I was okay the way it was. I didn't need to change for people, I didn't have to have everything figured out. I didn't, you know, and I needed to to grow up. You know, I just had not grown up.
Speaker 1:I drug my last year of college with me and had this perpetual idea that college existed, at least in my mind, forever and ever and ever, and it was one big happy fraternity party 24, seven at least in my brain and I had to grow up from all that stuff. And it feels like that, as I've matured and grown up on a lot of levels with stuff. That that's where the joy is starting to happen is the idea that I'm coming Into my own, coming into who I need to be as a person, and or not need to be what, but who I want to be. That's not what I meant not need to be, but who I want to be as a person and I am so okay with not being perfect.
Speaker 1:I am so okay and in fact, like I mentioned this, new situations come up. So she's out of town for two weeks. I just use this as an example. In the old days, even as early as it is, and we've literally only known each other maybe four weeks, I would start tripping on the fact she was out of town for two weeks and I would make up stories in my head about how, you know, I wasn't liked or she wasn't really into it because she didn't do this and she didn't do that and all this other bullshit. And that's the way that I used to roll and I felt that coming on early on, like in the first day or two I started, I was like whoa, wait a second, where are you taking me? This fucked up mind of mind, because we're not going to do that. And then, all of a sudden, there was peace and like I just felt peace and I was like I'm okay and this is all okay and there's nothing that I need to be worried about here. There's nothing I need to be concerned about. I in myself, I'm still who I am and I'm okay and I'm doing well and I just need to keep moving forward and that's what I've been doing and it's such a great.
Speaker 1:I am one of these people and probably you might be as well where I can do all the fucking reading in the world. I can spew knowledge to you left or right. I can sound like on this podcast or anywhere. You might hear me talk about recovery Like my God, this fucking guy's got it figured out.
Speaker 1:That's the intellectual part of me, the emotional part of me, that has to actually apply. This shit struggles, you know, and really has a hard time when those emotions kind of start to get in the way, and I've been really trying to lean on my meditation and lean on the idea of emotions are going to come and they're okay. Let them go, though they don't have to rule your life. You know you can move forward, and so that's been a big part of it. On top of that too and I just throw this in as a tidbit because this is recovery I decided to get a therapist and I just started with him a couple of a couple of sessions ago. So we've only had a couple of sessions, but I'm working on some stuff in therapy.
Speaker 2:So I think recovery in general is constant work, and it's a constant Um rework. In a sense. You're always needing to grow more. Staying stagnant is dangerous, and that's kind of what I've learned through this entire process, and I've said it before and I'll say it again I seem to learn the same. I relearn the same five things every year. I learned how to be nice to people all over again. I learned that I suck at finances. Who doesn't? Well, you know? I learned that I don't know everything, and I learned to be gentle and kind, and then I learned to get outside of myself and get to being of service. And I will forget them December 31st and I will start the relearning process January 1st.
Speaker 2:That's not true, but it's a running joke inside my own mind, right, and I really like all the things that you had to say. You know, when we're talking about the development of new relationships or when we were known to do X and Y situation and identifying things that we can change and modify, which to you sounds like letting go, letting go of these paradigms that we've written for ourselves, these stories. We've told ourselves that if this situation occurs, I respond like this the world works like this Society is going to always do this. These are all paradigms, these are all preconceived transcripts that we wrote about our own lives, and it is shedding those, getting rid of them, but then not judging them at the same time, and not not judging them, letting them go, which is the weirdest place to be, and it only exists when you don't talk about it, right? So it's so profound and it's something I've been focusing on a lot lately myself, just trying to be yes, not be more, not be less, but to be and allow the transient thoughts to be transient.
Speaker 2:They are traversing across my brain and they can go and they can flow, but then playing, paying closer attention to the authentic thoughts and the ones that lead me to the eventual phrase of I know who I am, and the I am is not this meat suit that I walk around in, or the vocal cords I use, or the borrowed atoms that manifested themselves over billions of years ago that I'm borrowing right now to create my hands.
Speaker 2:The I am is this eternal energy going through a temporary human experience and the joy of getting a superpower called perception. I get to perceive the universe, I get to witness it, I get to be a part of it, I get to contribute to it, and all of those are started with I get instead of I have to, I must, this is a demand of society, all of those negative terminologies that then poison my own brain and lead me to a shorter existence. I, those are the paradigms that I'm trying to get to. Those are the paradigms that are getting shifted. Those are the things that we're talking about in that building of the new relationship that you're experiencing right now is those paradigm shifts.
Speaker 2:I get versus I get to verse I have to or I could hyper focus on this, or I can let it go and let it flow.
Speaker 1:Oh man, I love all of that. That's like right, right up my alley and I would actually go. When you said I am, I almost felt like stop right there, because that's it, it's I am. The moment you start adding to I am, you're building a construct of yourself, that's an image in your brain. If you're just, I am almost, if you can almost, in my opinion, if you can almost do, I am everything, that's more real because you're part of the energy field, of everything.
Speaker 1:And Tara Brock wrote a book I have not read it, I am getting it next but it's called Radical Acceptance and I've heard her talk about excerpts out of it and she's commented about what radical I mean the words, kind of you get it from the words. But radical acceptance, radically accepting where I'm at and letting it be what it is and then going from there. So, versus trying to make it something that I want it to be, I'm going to radically accept what it is and then I'm going to figure out from there how do I manage that acceptance? You know what, whatever that might be, how do I manage that acceptance? So if somebody is saying, for instance, we'll use a relationship, hey, I don't want to talk to you anymore. You know I'm done.
Speaker 1:Accept the fact that that is what's happening and then decide what you are going to do about it within yourself, not with that other person. Not that you're going to try to fix that necessarily. Maybe you do, but maybe you don't. Maybe you'll let it be what it is, but it's through the allowing yourself to experience Right, right.
Speaker 2:So, like you can radically accept something. I radically accept that the fucking dude across the street is gonna beat that woman and I'm radically accepting that you can easily argue. Well, I'm not gonna fucking radically accept that. No, I'm gonna probably go over there and try and help, but that's. I don't think what we're referring to. In this situation, you're allowing the universe to exist the way that it is, for it's good, it's bad, it's right, it's wrong. Not saying you don't take action to it. Right, it's not without action. Responding to your own self, your own boundaries, your own morals, your own beliefs is 100% within line of that concept. I haven't read the book, but I feel like it needs to be said, because that's always a blurred line Whenever I talk about acceptance in general, of that argument being presented back to me. Well, what if there's a gunman across the street and you just accept him killing people?
Speaker 1:No, and that's not what it's talking about. But you're right, and except it's more internal, it's more radically accepting where you're at in that moment.
Speaker 2:So the energy flows within yourself.
Speaker 1:Right, not the external consequences.
Speaker 1:Right the fact that I mean, listen, we live in a world today where people don't wanna talk about things. I grew up with a family with parents that if they didn't talk about things, that didn't exist. So when you can radically accept that, hey, there's a problem in this family, we need to talk about it. All right, that's true, that's real. So what are we gonna talk about to try to change that Versus ignoring that it's going on and just let it perpetuate for however many more years that you let it perpetuate? And I'm talking about hardcore stuff, like a parent being an alcoholic, a parent having anger issues towards other family members and not talking to them or including them in the lives of their own kids because they're angry at them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we don't talk about blah. We don't talk about dad. Dad's in the garage drinking. Again, right, you know? Right, we don't talk about that. He's out there. We know he's out there. He knows he's out there. Everybody in the house knows he's out there. Can somebody come over and watch the dog? Isn't dad in the garage drinking?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no he's not.
Speaker 2:I mean he is, but he doesn't count Right. Can somebody come over and watch the dog? Yeah?
Speaker 1:So then we tiptoe around all those things and we pretend that they don't exist and we try to live a false life, a false family life that has this in it that nobody's addressing, you know.
Speaker 2:It's very ingrained passive behavior that can get developed in those situations. Absolutely. And yeah, I think the path of letting go right, I even think what Dow the Dow translates to the way, the way in which we go Right. The sentence ends there. The second I define it, anymore I'm screwing it up.
Speaker 2:So I think over the last seven months there's been a lot of deep, deep exploration, and phrases like it's always darkest before the dawn come to mind. They're a little cliche, but this is way better than what I already know I would be doing going back out and drinking, going back out and trying to numb out. And don't get me wrong, yeah, I like to smoke hookah. It's not right, but I'll take it, at least for now, way over going and doing the harder stuff. That I know will end me on a way shorter path and I know I can work on the hookah thing.
Speaker 2:The whole point of me even talking about it is because that's accountability.
Speaker 2:I have been going back and seeing my therapist as well and having fantastic conversations with him and I constantly have to shed myself of this stuff and no matter how many times I fuck up financially, no matter how many times I fuck up with hookah or whatever. Surprisingly enough, I still at least have my priorities enough well in mind to maintain my sobriety, and I think a lot of that contributes to keeping in contact with like-minded individuals and being held accountable, connecting with other people and allowing them to know what my current struggles are, and allowing people to corral around you to say it's okay to not be okay, you can go through this. But then also having the really cool friends that say, all right, yeah, it's okay to not be okay, but get the fuck up asshole. There's the thin line there between how much do I allow you to sit in bed and sulk and when do I kick you in the ass, and so it's always good to have both types of friends at your side, which is what I've had to include my wife. She's been both.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean the same for me. I listen, I still smoke pot and I don't, because I kind of grew up in this world of sobriety where I looked at what was the thing that was causing me the problem, and the thing that was causing me the problem was alcohol. Now, does that mean that my attitude towards smoking pot hasn't changed? It has, and my big thing about it is I'm very, very leery of it going down the wrong road. If it does go down the wrong road, then I would immediately say done enough. It has not. Still doesn't mean that I'm not thinking about the idea that maybe I should. Just, I'm kind of at a place now where it doesn't matter anymore. It's not really important to me because with everything I'm doing, and especially the physical part of what I'm trying to do, I just feel like that is something that for me, probably will be let go of soon enough.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think that you know, with regards to like substances like marijuana, where it's pretty blaringly obvious that it's gonna be legalized pretty soon here, and regardless of what you think personally on recreational use, purely focusing on the medical side of the fence, leaps and bounds of information out there and more research to be done on the medical benefits of using such a thing To me. You know people who can consume that currently self-diagnosing in a sense, because you can't really get the medical advice you need to take it appropriately. The research isn't all done yet on a federal level, I mean locally. You can get it prescribed to. Yes, it's similar to taking ibuprofen, it's similar to and don't quote me on this stuff, guys- I'm still just a fucking drunk idiot.
Speaker 2:But what I'm getting at is your journey is yours Right? My journey is mine. The second I try and control. Your journey is the second. I'm fucking at my own Right. And love and acceptance, tolerance and patience, kindness is all part of my program and I fully think that you know you're gonna explore what you're gonna explore. That's your journey and it's a beautiful thing and I'm all for it. And I think that the less we force on other people our own opinions about the definition of what recovery and sobriety is, the more we're able to fill everyone's cups with more love and acceptance, cause it's just I think it's just way more of an appropriate thing. Sorry if it sounded like a weird tangent.
Speaker 1:Well, no, no, because. Well, because you bring up a couple of points. That and why I brought it up was, first and foremost, listeners out there to go oh wait, so I gotta stop everything to get sober. Well, I don't know if I wanna do that. So I want the listeners to know that, hey, there's different pathways to how you get sober.
Speaker 1:You know how you decide or how you define sobriety. Maybe that's probably even better If it keeps you, if what you're doing is helping you. So if quitting alcohol was your main thing but you still smoke pot or you know whatever, and that helps you, when you're able to move forward and you're able to be positive and your life is able to grow and expand and do all the things that we hope happens in a sobriety situation, then who am I to tell you you're wrong? You know I'm not that person. Secondly, the reason why you brought it up was so, here you talked about hookah and you defined it and it's tobacco. But the moment you said it was tobacco, probably most people go oh, it's only tobacco, oh, okay, which is ironic, which should be way more high on the schedule of drugs than marijuana in my personal opinion, along with alcohol.
Speaker 2:Alcohol should probably be a schedule and drug. No medical benefit and no use in a society. Is a schedule and drug. There is medical benefit to alcohol, sadly, but yeah, no use in a society. Yeah, yeah, no, that's an extremist view, but that's because I'm sober. Let me be biased, fuck you.
Speaker 1:But I do think that one of the things that I had to really do was, first off, realize that I'm not perfect and that I don't need to be perfect to work a program. I don't need to be perfect to get better. I can get better without being perfect. It's not about all or nothing, and I've been really, really trying in the last almost five years now to get away from the idea of I have to be perfect or I can't do this. And that goes for everything in my life, not just my journey in recovery, but in everything that I do.
Speaker 1:I don't go after anything now with like oh I can do that perfect, so I'm gonna go do it. Oh, I'm not gonna do that perfectly, so I'm not gonna do it. I do shit that turns out look weird, but I like doing it and I just did it and I'm okay with it. And I think that we have to as a society, we live too much within these blurred lines not even blurred lines, very strict lines of here's who you're supposed to be, and if you can't be that person, then you can't play, you're not allowed in the game.
Speaker 2:Well, and yeah, and it takes an alcoholic to come up, or a drug ear and alcoholic to come up with a phrase like that.
Speaker 2:Right when we're extremists we're all or nothingists right so leave it up to us to be like oh, you are going in smoking weed. You're not sober at all whatsoever. You can unsubscribe right now. We don't wanna see you back here again until you're 100% sober, off of everything. If you're using mouthwash that has hints of alcohol in it, you're pretty much fucked. You might as well just go to hell right now.
Speaker 1:And don't come back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you might as well just go back out and drink, or if you drink, kombucha, right? Because, that contains alcohol and it's a little bit unregulated.
Speaker 1:We could have a whole discussion on that.
Speaker 2:Maybe we should do that on episode two, but I love this though, eric. I really do. I think it's. All. These things are the raw things that I think people don't like to talk about in open forums and, honestly, thank you, sir, for bringing up some of these conversations, because that's the point of this is being able to shed our shame, have conversations that are raw and be able to learn from each other and to be able to say things that we change our minds on tomorrow who fucking knows why? Because this is an exploration, and who knows what tomorrow is gonna bring. My brain has changed 80 million times, if not more, since the start of this conversation, so let alone my lifetime, and that's because I'm constantly trying to analyze and interpret the world, and as new information comes in, I can change my mind.
Speaker 1:Or just.
Speaker 2:And that's something I feel like society has forgotten a little bit is you have the ability to change your mind.
Speaker 1:Well, right, and just simply listening and being open to the listening process and not judging immediately, which we all do on all facets of the world. And I really think, the moment somebody's telling you that, oh, you're not doing everything, well then you're not sober that person is using their ego to condemn you number one and number two. It's not up to them to make that decision. Whether you are sober enough to be part of the tribe, it's up to you. You need, if you are, if whatever it is you're doing is working and keeping you moving forward in the right way in my opinion, then keep doing what's working.
Speaker 2:And I will always give the flip coin to whatever we're talking about and say that, if you need a fucking strong, stern, kick in the ass and get yourself a good Bible thumb, big book thumper not Bible thumper, but big book thumper get yourself a good, strong sponsor that says no, motherfucker, you ain't doing shit anymore. This is the way you're gonna walk, this is how you're gonna talk, this is how you're gonna do shit moving forward. Why? Because you haven't been able to make a goddamn decision in your whole fucking life and you need some fucking structure. That's okay too. Yeah, absolutely, because that is what I needed, and I can't knock the person who needs what you need, just like you can't knock the person that needs what I need, and it depends person to person.
Speaker 2:Some people need that allowance, they need to explore, they need to figure things out for themselves, and, in all honesty, there isn't one right answer to this, because there are people out there that can do X, y and just not Z, and there are people out there who can't do anything at all whatsoever, to include the mouthwash. So, at the end of the day, though, we have to be open and honest with ourselves, because nobody gets us fucking sober. We have to come to the conclusion for ourselves, and I think that's ultimately a really cool thing. Once we make that decision, lower those energies of our addiction and start rising ourselves up to the potential that exists all around us the ability to perceive this universe for a short period of time on a rock that is moving billions of miles an hour, heading towards a black hole following a sun.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I've got a question for you.
Speaker 2:Hey, wait, I didn't finish my thought god damn it.
Speaker 1:I'm like, okay, I know we're going deeper to that dark hole, let's just talk. I'm teasing, I'm like I can't go to the dark hole. Yeah, but I do have a question for you because I know my answer and I think I might know what your answer might be. In the last seven months, do you feel like that you have done work and have grown?
Speaker 1:Just simple yes or no? Yes, yes, I agree. I feel like I'm the same. The only reason I asked that question and hopefully, as the listeners are listening is this If you are working, and working, a program means everything. So you're working. It could be your spirituality, it could be your physicality. Maybe you decide, hey, I'm going to start eating, right, I'm going to try to start walking every day, or whatever it might be. It could be any of those things, even if you're not sober yet, even if you're just sober, curious. But working things and getting better every day is what this is all about you know and again.
Speaker 1:you know, and you can do that, and you could be on the verge of saying, hey, I'm done drinking. So you might be sitting here listening to this saying, okay, I'm really thinking about it, but I haven't pulled the trigger yet. But maybe you're already starting to eat better, Maybe you've cut back a tiny bit, Maybe you, you know, you're trying to get involved in things you used to get involved in before or whatever. You're trying to do positive things in your life. You're already working a program. You may not be totally done, but you're working a program. And for all those out there that are on day one for the thousand time, you're still working a program, You're still making it happen. It's taking you time to get there, but you're getting there. And that's the whole point in all of this. And I think what we were sharing today on this it was our point about this is yeah, just do the work, whatever that means. You know, do the work to get better as a person.
Speaker 2:I think that's brilliant, eric, and I think that's a good segue into a conclusion for episode one of season two of sober and shameless. I couldn't agree more. I think that, to all of those listening out there, to those that listen through season one, thank you, thank you, thank you. The individuals out there struggling on day one, the people out there who are struggling on day 10,001. Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah 20 years of sobriety. I think that's it. That's what that is. Um, it's fucking hard. There's no, there's, there's, there's no way to get around it, other than what I've been trying to practice lately Is let go of the feeling of wanting to quit and not wanting to quit. Letting go of it, because what I've learned up until now is the more I hold on to what I desire, which is not necessarily sobriety anymore, because it's other things. Insert X here If it is. I desire sobriety and I'm on day 1000 and I'm batting one day. The desire is the issue and I need to let that go. I need to quit resisting the flow of life, and that does not mean give into temptation. It means to let temptation go as well. You're letting all of it go and flow and allow the universe to exist. So I feel like this second half of the episode got really woo woo on us there, man.
Speaker 1:I listen, I'm okay.
Speaker 2:I feel like I need a light of fucking candle or some shit. I don't fucking know man, do I need to cleanse myself? Yes, yes, you do.
Speaker 1:I think I farted Well for some people I'd be cleansing. So to each his own right To each his own. That's what we're talking about Dude.
Speaker 2:I think this is a great episode of episode one. Thank you to all our listeners. We love you all very much. And, in the spirit of season two, we do not know when our next episode is going to be airing, and that's okay with us, because we're going to let that fucking shit go and flow down the river. I had a huge issue with it on season one of being super consistent and trying to hold a standard to compare myself with other sober podcasts that are fantastic, brilliant individuals and they're amazing people. I am not them and I am who I am. I am Right, eric, I am, and I think you and I briefly discussed this before, but we need to be authentic to ourselves. So we will release episodes, we promise and we will be back and we will be adding new fun content along the way, but don't fucking ask me when.
Speaker 1:And I think that was meant towards me as much as towards all of you. So, eric, I won't, but I agree and yeah, we're trying. Listen, sometimes you got to give yourself a break and sometimes, you know, when we get caught up in the minutiae of it's got to be this way or else type of thing we're just fucking ourselves is what we're doing, you know, and it doesn't work. And and the whole idea of all this was was one to come in, you know, just just talk and to to really show, you know, everybody kind of the raw footage of what it's like to be in this world and and what it's like to be sober in the working processes on a daily basis.
Speaker 1:They're not always pretty and they're not always perfect and they're not always you know. Oh, we're going in a row, we're going in the right way, la la lies and everything great. You know, sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's a struggle, sometimes we get plateaued and we have to, we have to just sit there for a while and until we figure it out, and that's all good. That's part of the that's part of all of this. So I'm glad that the listeners were here today, I'm glad that we were able to do this content and definitely there'll be more to come, but we just don't know when.
Speaker 2:Stay tuned. Hey, wait in the words of the military stand by to stand by. There's more coming your way.
Speaker 1:Love you, guys, yeah.
