Cultivating Hope In Addiction Recovery

Carol Wilke shares her story of recovery from addiction and offers tools for anyone overcoming a challenge in life. When we have the courage to ask for help and tap into our inner connection with the Divine, it will lead us back to wholeness.

Transcript

I can tell you this,

At the very abysmal worst of my drinking,

I so desperately wanted my life to be different.

I couldn't see a way out as my life got smaller and smaller and darker and darker.

I really didn't even have a reference for a place of joy or hope because I couldn't see it and I couldn't feel it.

I started drinking at the age of 16 to be funnier,

To be wittier,

To be more comfortable in my own skin,

To essentially be more comfortable with who I was.

And by the time I reached the age of 43,

I was drinking to keep from seeing who I had become.

I didn't get a DUI.

I didn't lose my house,

I didn't lose a job,

I didn't crash my car.

But what I did lose were my family,

My friends,

And every ounce of self-esteem and hope that I might have once had.

There is something so despairing about promising yourself over and over and over again that you're going to quit and then never being able to quit drinking or to stop using drugs.

It just erodes the very fabric of your being.

As it says in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous,

It causes pitiful and incomprehensible demoralism.

It also causes guilt and shame and remorse.

As alcoholics and addicts,

We feel that there is something so intrinsically wrong with us because we can't seem to have the willpower or the moral fortitude to stop drinking or to stop using drugs.

The destruction that we seem to cause all around us is an absolute mirror and reflection of the destruction that we are causing within us.

One night I found myself on my bedroom floor sobbing.

I felt so alone as I had the phone in one hand and the phone book in the other desperately looking up the number for Alcoholics Anonymous.

I didn't know what to do,

But I knew I needed to do something.

I had hit rock bottom and I knew that if I didn't do something that I was going to end up drinking myself to death.

I knew that my body could not sustain the amount of alcohol that I was pouring into it on a daily basis,

Nor could it sustain the nightly blackouts I was having every single night for eight months.

So how did I begin to see hope?

I can tell you from the bottom of that pit that it seems impossible.

And yet here I stand having come out on the other side of this disease living a life of tremendous joy and happiness today.

Now we might not have all been down the path of addiction,

But I think all of us have been in places in our life where we yearned for more,

For a solution,

For hope to move us beyond a challenge or a transition or a crisis in our life.

So this morning I want to talk about the power of hope,

Whether you are currently experiencing an addiction of any kind,

Whether you love somebody who is in the throes of addiction,

Or whether you're simply facing a challenge in your life.

I want to share with you a few of the things that I have found on this journey that have fostered hope.

The first is the courage to surrender and ask for help.

It takes so much courage to get beyond addiction.

It is hard and it is painful to be sure.

But when we can have enough humility to say those three simple little words,

I need help,

Then we can start on this road to recovery.

I know how hard it is to say I'm ready,

I cannot do this alone.

This small act of humility can radically change our lives forever because the truth of the matter is we weren't meant to do it alone.

I want you to really hear me say this,

Whatever challenge you are facing in your life,

You are not meant to do it alone.

When I found myself on my knees dialing the number for a recovery organization,

I had gotten the times and addresses of a few recovery meetings.

I blew the first one off,

I was just too scared.

But I had gotten myself into this place,

This limbo of a place where I couldn't drink and I couldn't not drink,

And I literally thought I was going insane.

So it was on a Monday night that I found myself in a Lutheran church in Littleton,

Wandering around the school of that church looking for a recovery meeting.

And there was a teacher who had stayed late that evening getting her classroom ready for the next day,

And she heard me wandering around out in the hall,

And she came out and asked me if I needed help.

I flushed deep red with shame and embarrassment as I mumbled something about looking for a recovery meeting.

And here's the interesting thing,

Instead of giving me directions,

She literally gently took me by the arm,

Walked me down the hall,

Down the stairs,

To the basement,

And into that recovery room.

I was like a deer in the headlights,

And when I turned around she had gone.

Right before she found me,

I had almost convinced myself,

This is not for me,

I'm not going to do it,

I don't want to go to a meeting,

I can't do this,

It's too hard,

I'm too ashamed,

I was just about ready to go home.

And had I gone home,

I have no doubt I would have started drinking again,

And had I started drinking again,

I have no doubt I would not be here today.

I don't know who this woman was,

I don't know her name,

But I know that she was one of my angels that evening,

And on some level she saved my life.

I had to be willing to surrender and have the courage to say,

I'm looking for a recovery meeting because I need help.

As I look back on the path from my recovery from alcoholism,

I can see where when I had the courage to timidly place one foot in front of the other,

God blanketed me with courage that I didn't even know I had the power to possess.

As I began to surrender into the process of recovery,

I started developing tools for living,

And for the first time in my life,

I was free from the guilt and the shame that had trapped me for so long.

I can see now where I had to reach deep into my heart,

Like Dr.

Patty talked about last Sunday,

I had to reach deep into my heart for courage.

I started to realize that the truth is,

Life is always for us,

It is never against us,

And there are always hands reaching out to give us a step up.

When we finally surrender and have the courage to say those three little words,

I need help.

What I learned from this is that I could breathe my way through fear and come out even stronger on the other side.

I learned that I could take whatever it is that life had to give me and not be crushed.

I began to see that fear comes from the head,

But courage comes from the heart.

When Oprah was celebrating her 50th birthday,

She said,

What I've learned in these first 50 years is that if you can allow yourself to breathe into the depth,

Wonder,

Beauty,

Craziness and strife,

Everything that represents the fullness of your life,

You can live fearlessly.

Because you come to realize that if you just keep breathing,

You cannot be conquered.

Divorce,

Trauma,

Disease,

Disappointment,

You cannot be defeated if you just keep taking one breath followed by another.

I've seen this many times in my own life and a thousand times over in the lives of others.

Surrendering is all about coming to the realization that there is a life so much larger than the little me.

I had to come to an understanding of God or a higher power,

And that was no easy task for someone who did not believe in anything outside of herself.

I would say that I was probably an agnostic.

I had no use for God,

No use for religion,

No use for church.

I didn't want to have anything to do with any of it.

I grew up in Japan,

And I can remember having a very numinous experience as a little girl.

I was probably nine or ten years old,

And a family friend dressed me up in traditional Japanese kimono and along with her daughter of the same age took us to a Shinto temple.

Now,

I've been to many,

Many temples in Japan,

But never like this,

And she taught me how to clap my hands,

Light the incense,

Bow my head.

And it was a very seminal moment for me because there amongst the smell of the incense and the chanting of the monks and the thundering boom of the big drums,

For the first time in my life I had a tangible presence,

A feeling of the power and presence of God.

It felt real to me.

And as an adult,

As I spiraled into alcoholism,

I lost any connection to that.

I lost any connection to that feeling and that connection that I had as a little girl.

I was about three months sober.

I had just met my wife Tracy,

And I had this huge hole deep inside of me.

I knew I needed to get this God thing if I was going to stay sober.

And so Tracy invited me to go to church with her.

I was completely and totally resistant.

And I had countless reasons why this was not a good idea for me.

But she persisted,

And I acquiesced.

And so it was on a Sunday morning that I found myself here at Mile High Church,

Over in the auditorium before this beautiful sanctuary was built,

I sat in the back row on the end,

One foot in the aisle,

And I thought,

If that Dr.

Roger guy gets too preachy,

I am out the door.

And here's what happened.

As I sat crying through that first service,

I realized I had come home.

I realized I had come home to that same feeling I had in that Shinto temple so many years ago that it was here at Mile High Church that God became tangible to me once again.

And it was here through all of you that I began to feel and see the power and presence of the divine.

I began to realize that the effort required to stay sober wasn't about white-knuckling it or forcing it,

But about surrendering to a power greater than myself to enter into a partnership of divine grace.

If you had told me that Sunday,

That 17 years later,

I would be standing here as an associate minister of Mile High Church,

I would have never,

Ever believed it.

It simply started with having the courage to surrender and say,

I need help.

And surrender isn't only about surrendering to everything out there,

But it is about accepting ourselves,

About loving ourselves right where we're at,

About absolutely believing that we are good enough.

Because the truth is,

How can we not be?

We are these amazing and beautiful outpicturings and expressions of the divine.

We are so uniquely and beautifully and wonderfully made in the image of God.

Our founder,

Ernest Holmes,

In the Science of Mind textbook says,

Never limit your view of life by any past experience.

The illusion is in the way in which we look at things.

We have looked at poverty,

Degradation,

And misery until they have assumed gigantic proportions.

Now we just look at harmony,

Happiness,

Plenty,

Prosperity,

Peace,

And right action until they appear.

This is good news not only for those of us in recovery,

But really for all of us to know that we can move beyond our past,

That we can surrender into the flow of life,

That we can change our thinking and change our life.

And this moves us into a greater experience of hope.

The second element of cultivating hope that I want to talk about this morning is an understanding that we have an internal compass that is always guiding us back to the divine.

We cultivate hope by just letting go and allowing ourselves to be a part of this larger life.

We don't have to figure it all out.

We don't have to figure out what our place on this planet is or what our grand plan in life is with our human minds.

We have this creative spark and wisdom that always exists within the very center of us.

The migratory pattern of the monarch butterfly is a great example of this.

This amazing migration journey captured the imagination of a Canadian boy named Fred Erkhart who spent nearly 40 years as a zoology professor trying to understand how the monarchs migrated and where exactly the millions of monarchs spent the winter.

Nobody had been able to figure this out.

He came up with pressure adhesive labels and people,

Volunteers all over the country would tag butterflies with these pressure adhesive labels and then when they found butterflies,

They would report back to Erkhart who tracked them on a map in his office with push pins.

This was obviously before computers and bar codes.

After 40 years of this,

On January 9th,

1975,

Erkhart got a call from a volunteer in Mexico City who had been scouring the countryside on his motorcycle to help out Erkhart.

And he had heard about swarming butterflies up in the mountains in central Mexico.

In 1976,

Fred and his wife Nora traveled to Mexico where they negotiated steep roads to a village,

Crested a hill at 10,

000 feet in the Sierra Madre Mountains and this is what they saw.

Suddenly they found themselves surrounded by millions and millions of monarch butterflies.

This is what Fred Erkhart said about the experience.

Unbelievable.

What a glorious,

Incredible sight.

I had waited decades for this moment.

We had come at last to the long sought,

Overwintering place of the eastern population of the monarch butterfly.

And here's another photo of him in that moment.

He goes on to explain,

While we stared in wonder,

A pine branch three inches thick broke under its burden of languid butterflies and crashed to the earth,

Spilling its living cargo.

I stooped to examine the mass of dislodged monarchs.

There to my amazement was one bearing a white tag.

By incredible chance,

I had stumbled on a butterfly tagged by one Jim Gilbert far away in Chaska,

Minnesota.

Erkhart had finally cracked the code of the monarch migration.

What is astounding about this story is that this entire seasonal migration happens over three generations.

The monarch butterfly makes one of the longest migrations on earth and it does so with pinpoint accuracy to a single mountaintop in Mexico without ever having flown the route before.

The monarchs start from that very small mountaintop in central Mexico.

They fly to Texas where they feast on milkweed and lay eggs.

Those eggs end up as the second generation butterfly that then flies to the northern part of the U.

S.

And they lay eggs.

Those third generation butterflies that emerge from the chrysalis in late summer somehow have the instinct to fly 3,

000 miles to a sunny ancestral haven in Mexico that amazingly they have never been to.

How does this fragile,

Little,

Wind-tossed butterfly find its way,

Only once mind you,

Across prairies and mountain valleys and deserts and even cities to this remote pinpoint on the map of Mexico?

What is the internal programming or instinct that guides and steers them home over generations?

I believe that we have this very same internal guidance that is always leading us back to our connection with the divine.

God not only breathes us but is the very fabric of who we are.

We are here to remind each other that we have this internal compass that is always guiding us back home,

Always guiding us back to wholeness,

To wellness,

And that that is only a breath away.

The third and final aspect of hope that I want to talk about this morning is oneness.

I want to share with you an extraordinary experience that I had 16 years ago that really illustrates how seeing oneness in all of life can absolutely transform us.

I was in Japan with my wife Tracy,

So excited to visit all the places that I remember going to as a little kid.

One day we went to Meiji Shrine in Tokyo,

And I can remember going there many,

Many times as a child.

It was a very quiet morning.

We were among only a handful of visitors to the shrine.

Now,

I'd been in a bit of a funk that day.

It had been a year.

I'd have a year of sobriety,

And I hadn't missed a single recovery meeting,

Sometimes to a day,

Until that trip.

I had gotten myself in this very sketchy place around my recovery and my sobriety.

I was moping over the fact that I couldn't drink Japanese beer.

This is a kind of thinking that we alcoholics and addicts often experience,

And there's a picture of the entrance to the temple.

Just outside the entrance to the shrine were huge,

Huge racks of sake,

And seeing them sent me into this emotional tailspin.

Now,

What was really crazy about this is that even when I was drinking,

I couldn't stand sake.

I never drank it.

And so that's just how crazy I had allowed my thinking to get.

And as I moped through this beautiful,

Ancient,

Silent temple that had been the imperial family's temple for centuries,

I was only fixated on the fact that I couldn't drink Japanese beer and sake.

In the main courtyard of this temple,

There was a huge,

Old,

Ancient,

Sacred prayer tree.

And templegoers would write their prayers and wishes and dreams on wooden plaques.

There's a picture of it here.

And hang them up around this beautiful prayer tree.

And then several times a day,

The priests would come out and circumambulate around this tree,

Praying over all these requests.

Really a very beautiful,

Lovely spiritual practice.

Now,

Interestingly enough,

I'm in my own funk in my head,

And Tracy's walking a little bit ahead of me.

And as we approach this tree,

She says,

Hey,

Carol,

Come and look at this one.

There are thousands and thousands of prayer plaques on this tree.

Most of them written in Japanese,

Only a handful in other languages.

And as I move forward to read the one that she stood in front of,

I saw that it was one of the few in English.

And I got goosebumps as I started to read it.

Here's a picture of it.

I wish I continue to stay sober in this life and hope all AA's do too,

One day at a time.

DLH,

Dublin,

Ireland.

I just stood there with my mouth open.

And I realized in that moment how connected we all are in our oneness.

And in that oneness,

How we are always reminded of hope.

And as I stood there,

I had an overwhelming sense of the connectivity of all life.

And I was amazed that I was a part of it and that I hadn't killed myself drinking.

Awareness of oneness shifts our perception.

And it allows us to see everything through the eyes of God.

And when we can do that,

Then we can begin to appreciate everything just as it is.

This story reminds me of the one mind that is God,

Whether we are in Dublin or Tokyo or Denver.

It reminds me of the one heart that connects us all.

That's really what oneness means to me.

At the heart of our New Thought teaching is this principle that our hearts and our minds are connected to a divine power,

And that gives creative authority to our thoughts.

This is the birth of hope.

In recovery,

I learned that I have the power to create the world I want to see and the world I want to be in,

And it starts with me.

When we can be willing to look beyond our limited thinking,

We can shed old patterns that don't support our spiritual growth.

We can shift our perception to see the world anew from a different perspective.

We can set powerful new intentions for our lives that connect us to all that is and move us into a powerful experience of hope.

I want to end with a beautiful story by Anne Lamont.

She says,

I heard something last week from a sober friend that almost completely captures my understanding of goodness in life,

A story that has been medicine for my worried,

Worried soul.

Carolyn stopped drinking at the age of 40 with zero interest or belief in any kind of higher power,

To whom she might have been able to turn when cravings overcame her.

But after a year of white-knuckle sobriety,

Contemptuous of a higher power,

Hanging on through willpower,

She one day heard and then found a frog in her shower.

She lifted it and gently carried it in her cupped hands through the house.

She could feel and,

Of course,

Imagine its terror.

She took it out to the garden,

Where there was a moist patch of earth over near the blackberries,

And set it down.

It sat stuck still for a bit,

And then it hopped away into the bushes.

She said,

My name is Carolyn.

I'm that frog.

Anne Lamont said,

I am too,

And I'm also a big helper.

When I have felt most isolated and lost,

I have always ended up being carried back to the garden in people's good hands to where I needed to be,

Afraid and not breathing for much of the way.

And I have helped carry scared people the best I could.

You have too.

Isn't that what grace is,

When some force of kindness against all odds with unknown hands brings us from fear and hard tiles to a moist patch in the earth and sets us down.

All I can do is try and help you get back to where there is moist soil and fresh air,

And let you help me.

Those happen to be the two things I want most in life.

I too was that frog.

Al-Hai and this community have taught me the power of surrendering and simply asking for help.

I've learned to surrender,

To let go,

To accept life on life's terms.

I've learned that I have an internal compass always guiding me back home,

Always guiding me back to the divine spark that exists within me.

And that there is so much power in knowing that we are intrinsically and eternally connected in oneness through our heart,

Our mind,

And our spirit.

Most importantly,

It's taught me how we can,

Each of us,

Carry each other back to the garden.

That is the power of hope in recovery.

Reviews

Amazing! Thank you

Amazing!!!

That was profoundly moving. I just lost my brother to alcohol addiction. Thank you so much for sharing ♥️♥️this VERY important- and hope filled message.

Helpful & hopful

Thank you for this absolutely Beautiful recovery story of hope.

Thank you so much! Just for my internal compass took me today… 🐸

Amazing talk. Thank you. Hope ODAT.

An absolutely Inspiring story! Spoken soo beautifully from the soul which will certainly cultivate soo much hope in ANY recovery. Thank you soo much.

Thank you for inspiring me and countless others. 😇