There are almost as many ways to escape the high level of stress and agitation that bombard us in our day to day lives as there are people looking to escape the pressures: cigarettes, alcohol, pills, food, gaming, facebook, sex, shopping, gambling add any combination of the above and the list expands exponentially.

We do these things because they work, and they work fast, they help us escape, turn off, and build our own personal container in order to continue to push forward and accomplish all the things we have to do in our fast paced society. There comes a time in many of our lives when it becomes too painful to continue using these escapes, the consequences are beginning to severely outweigh the benefits. The truth is these things are killers, and we are losing our families, our careers, our health, and even our freedom to these fixes. When the day comes that we realized we are putting more and more effort into our fixes and getting less and less reward for a shorter period of time. When the scale has tipped to such a point of obvious injustice, it is usually at this time that we become willing to look for a different solution and find a way out of the crisis that has become our lives.

I have been having conversations with others that evoke change in thinking and behavior for decades. I have worked with business executives, and spiritual leaders, many creative personalities and a wide variety of colorful people that have deeply touched my life as we worked together to overcome adversity, meet challenges, push past obstacles, to establish resiliency and begin to thrive again.

If life were always good and easy, we would numb to the enjoyment and cease feeling the joy. This does not mean that life need to be a veil of tears. We do need to be able to experience a range of emotions without over identifying  and getting lost in the emotion. Alcoholics tend to be highly intelligent and sensitive people. I believe there is a different scale of intensity of feeling for everybody, and alcoholics are on the high side of the scale.

If our feelings are intense, the painful ones can be excruciating.

(Stay with me here, I know it is a departure, but…) Learning to see emotions as guides to our beliefs, and following those guides to see which belief of ours is out of synch with our current experience can be a wonderful tool to releasing our attachment to the suffering. At the same time we can honor our deep capacity for feeling, we can walk the fine line of allowing our emotions to move in and through us, to act as guides and, by learning to decipher their messages in a way not taught in our society, we can go from apparently disadvantaged by our sensitivity to highly functioning individuals. Once this change has taken place, escaping becomes not only undesirable, but a hindrance to our new effective and present lives.

My personal commitment to Shamanic Breathwork and the discovery of my own inner healer/shaman has been a crucial part of my journey. I have gone from being taken over by my emotions, to being able to walk through significant life experiences while remaining present for the experience, and for my loved ones. This is emotional sobriety, it is the key to a quality of life far better than I had ever achieved, or imagined possible. It doesn’t exist because I have narrowed my life down to the few people and places that don’t set me off. It exists in spite of conditions that I wish were different. I can say “yes” to life, to adventure, and experiences. If you are reading this, and you have read this far, my deepest hope is that you will contact us at Sacred Spirals or one of the other Shamanic Breathwork Facilitators and commit to yourself. You are your most precious asset, the life you create deserves your best!

Namaste