Yeshaia Blakeney

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Instant Gratification vs Gratitude

What to expect in this episode

  1. Addicted to instant gratification
  2. Becoming attuned
  3. A sense of belonging

 

Being addicted to instant gratification

 

Definitely, technology is an example of being addicted to instant gratification and to attempt to be gratified by making more accessible to you, more and more instant gratification, is like trying to put out a fire by pouring oil on it.  

 

You have to change.  So, you have to switch from the basis of my life is my ego desires in the moment, what I want, to something much broader. Maybe I can become gratified if I can become the person who I want to be.  

 

Well, who is that person that I want to be?  Well, I want to be a person that is in harmony with myself.  I want to be a person that’s in harmony with my environment, and what is the result of becoming attuned and being more in harmony with yourself and environment?

 

A beautiful resonance,  that we tend to call gratitude.  A sense that I belong and really an actual feeling that we have inside of ourselves of being in the same song with the world,  so to speak.

 

But that has to do with like getting out from these sort of narcissistic and isolated activities, whether that be drug addiction or technology addiction pulling out of that and being much broader – really seeing – and there’s a pain, there’s a pain in that transition, we call it detox.

 

One way or the other, right.  If we wean ourselves off of some small narrow focus that worked for a while, but no longer is working to satiate our lives and we’re no longer growing from it, when we first pull off of that thing, there’s a painful detox.  In the case of drugs and alcohol, it’s a physical detox. In the case of other behaviors, it’s like a moral spiritual detox.

 

What’s it like for me to disconnect, step away, and then reconnect to the larger whole, there’s a pain involved in that, but then there’s a freedom and a relief involved in that, and suddenly I’m not in myself anymore on my phone.  And a funny thing to me is like when you’re walking to a Starbucks and you see 30 people at their tables, on their laptops, clicking away.

 

I totally get what’s going on, at the same time, you wonder like wow, if this is your daily routine, what’s it like to kind of pull off of that?  What would you see if you pulled off of that screen for a little bit noise and question, well what am I doing? What’s going on?

 

At first, it would be scary and frightening and painful, and then you’d go, wait a minute, hum, there’s a rich and diverse world in here and I’ve been so locked into this activity that I can’t see it.  

 

One story that I had or an experience that I had, it was super weird for me, I was not a happy person and in fact, I didn’t know what happiness was.  I remember somebody asked me, “Are you happy?” and I literally looked at them and I go, “What the fuck does that mean?” I just had no idea what that even meant, because I had never experienced happiness.

 

I’d experienced fun.  I had experienced excitement.  I’d experienced hyper-frustrated, angry, but never happiness.  And my first moment of happiness was a deep moment of gratitude and I was driving with my daughter, I think she was probably five at the time.  I was in a Cadillac, on Venice Boulevard going to Gloria’s Mexican Restaurant, (shout out to Gloria’s) and it was raining, it was nine at night.  I was going to meet some of my friends and I decided I was going to bring my daughter along.

 

She was going to come hang with the boys.  And I remember, I put my hand back on her head and all of a sudden, tears welled up in my eyes.  I mean, nothing was going on. I was on Venice Boulevard driving to a Mexican Restaurant and all of a sudden, like these tears start coming and it went from “why am I crying” – right into my heart.

 

My heart opened up and I thought, what is that?  I had my hand back here and I’m crying and there’s rain on the windows and I went, I’m grateful.  It was love. It was happiness. It was gratitude, it… wasn’t words. I’m putting words to it now, but it was an overwhelming feeling of being filled up with love and care.

 

“It was an overwhelming feeling of being filled up with love and care”

 

And it was a really spiritual moment for me, in that my ego-mind says, “What the hell is going on here!” Then, “Oh, oh, oh, You’re grateful, you’re grateful…”

 

And I think, “what am I grateful for?” This is all in my mind and at first. You’re grateful for your daughter, you’re grateful to be a dad, to be with her and connected to her.  And then it was – but my daughter didn’t birth herself, oh you’re grateful for your wife, the mother of your child.

 

But then I go, but wait, she didn’t come out of nowhere, and I thought, “oh you’re grateful for her parents, my parents…” and it just kept going out and out, in sort of concentric circles.

 

I realized I’m grateful for the orchestrator of this moment,  the orchestrator of all of this that allows for moments of love and gratitude.  And that for me, was a spiritual moment, it was a moment where I was connected to God, or whatever you would care to call that.

 

And it was a real shift in my recovery from like seeking and competing and wanting to do that – stuff, to – oh no, I need more of this. So that became a different kind of a drug for me.

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The Secret Agreement To Treatment

What to expect in this episode

 

  1. It’s hard to give up your freedoms
  2. You need to trust others before you can trust yourself again
  3. Recognize what capital F freedom is

 

The whole crazy interesting dynamics of treatment

 

You know, treatment’s nothing like the marketing on the website, you go on the website and there’s a picture of two people sitting by a swimming pool and it’s like, “Oh, a romantic, safe place, where all of your needs will be taken care of, with a chef!” Maybe there are Treatment Programs like that, but they’re not very effective.

 

Treatment has a whole crazy interesting dynamic that’s not good to market on your web site, which is part therapy, part jail. What do we mean when we say that? Well, people come into treatment because, you know, they don’t trust themselves.

 

Basically, they’ve been engaging in a behavior that’s harming themselves, they’ve made multiple commitments to stop themselves from harming themselves and they’ve continually betrayed themselves and don’t trust themselves anymore.

 

So, then they come into treatment and you do your Intake, you have your conversation, you come to see if they’re appropriate, and then you shake hands and you say, “Okay, you’re coming in here”.

 

But, underneath that handshake — there’s a secret deal. What’s the deal? The deal is the client comes in and says, “I don’t trust myself, so I’m going to give you some of my freedom, because I can’t make my own healthy choices and I’m going to let you make decisions for me, okay?” and now, it’s like any easy deal, if you’re a decent person like I am.

 

“You’re like great. I’ll take a little bit of your freedom for a short period of time until you can begin to trust yourself and then you know, onward and upward”.

 

But, the secret part of that is, “I’m going to give you my freedom because I need you to take it, because I don’t trust myself, but in three weeks, I’m going to be fighting tooth and nail for my freedom back, even though I still don’t trust myself”.

 

Giving up your “freedoms”

 

This is the interesting dynamic of treatment — where people are willingly giving up some of their so-called freedoms to be able to walk to Starbucks when they want or make a phone call when they want, because they don’t trust themselves, but they’re so addicted to those so-called freedoms the non-capital F for freedoms, lower cast freedoms, that they fight you tooth and nail later.

 

And the process of holding somebody through that, holding somebody through until they come to a place of higher recognition, until they come to a place of recognizing what capital F freedom is, what real freedom is, freedom from their self, you know, freedom from the ego-self, freedom from my addiction, the freedom to say yes, the freedom to say no, right.

 

 

 

Schedule a 30-min consultation with Yeshaia 

 

Schedule Free ConsultationSchedule Free Consultation

 

We are Rooted in the Foundation of the  12-Steps and Believe in Long-Term Care

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Hitting Rock Bottom

 

What to expect in this episode

  1. Yeshaia’s Rock Bottom Moment
  2. Incarceration & Panic
  3. When the Darkness in Your Life is Exposed
  4. The Need for Something “Good”

 

Yeshaia tells the story of his own “intervention“. The day he went to jail and the weight of his life and his decisions came into sharp focus.

 

Finding Rock Bottom in Jail

 

I went to jail I remember I was in the county jail, and I had a panic attack – because I was so frightened and I was scared of the trouble I was in, and I was also really ashamed.

 

Because suddenly the darkness that I have been living in was really palpable to me and I couldn’t find anything in my life that felt good.

 

That was a bottom for me, yeah, it was, it was an eye-opener – Oh my god there’s nothing good and me and in my life! – and so as soon as I realized that I knew what I needed I needed good something good – you know – that really began the journey of recovery for me.

 

 

Schedule a 30-min consultation with Yeshaia 

 

Schedule Free ConsultationSchedule Free Consultation

 

We are Rooted in the Foundation of the  12-Steps and Believe in Long-Term Care

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Opening Up the Locked Heart of an Addict

 

What to expect in this episode

  1. The Paradox of Addiction
  2. Thread Between Unhappiness & Drug Abuse
  3. Help People Recover by Helping them Find Happiness
  4. The Day Yeshaia’s Heart Began to Open
  5. Cutting Through the Fear, Hopelessness
  6. Create Connection, Hope, & Opening the Heart

 

Addiction is Paradoxical

 

So, one of the things about addiction is, it’s paradoxical.  On the one hand, it’s very complicated, biological psychological phenomenon, on the other hand there are parts of it that are very simple, like, you’re never going to find a happy person who’s using tons of drugs.

 

you’re never going to find a happy person who’s using tons of drugs

 

We know there’s a relationship between being unhappy or demoralized or hopeless and the state of addiction, right.  So, we can gather from that, I gather from that, that one of the ways that we help people recover, is to help them find happiness or as I often talk about it, you know, opening the heart, because many people who are coming into addiction are really numb, they’ve really numbed out a lot of their feelings.

 

I know that because I was that, you know, since I was maybe 12 or 13 years old, I really stopped having the wide range of feelings that we have as human beings.  I want to share a story about one of the moments that my heart opened up. It’s a true story.

 

I have a daughter named Eden and she’s short, you know, short for her age.  My wife is also you know, relatively short. And I love basketball and so, you know, I want her to try the sport.  She was playing on a basketball team and the entire season I’m going to every game and she’s not making a single shot and she’s watching other people score and I’m you know, just kind of holding it in and feeling bad for her, that you know, she’s not succeeding in the way that she wants.

 

And the last game, there were all these parents around the basketball court and the ref, you know, it’s like five-year-old’s, so the ref is like holding people back, so the kids that never made a shot get a chance to make a shot.  And the ref is holding people back and my little five-year old daughter takes this basketball and she throws it up, you know, potty-shot style, and it pops in the hoop.

 

In that moment, like the moment that you heard the pop from the net, you know, the ball, my heart went, “Pop” and it was like it had been closed for years.  You know, even in sobriety. And I was like “Oh, my God what happened?” And I would just remember, I was like in this circle and I turned around and I put my hands over my face, because I was so surprised by what it felt like to feel love and feel your heart, and I began to cry, you know.

 

And I didn’t know what to do, other that to hide it, because I had never felt it before.  And so, you know, I relate that to sobriety and recovery, that we’ve got to be able to cut through a lot of our nomenclature, a lot of our fears, a lot of our hopelessness and we’ve got to be able to cut through a lot of that complexity and we’ve got have a lot of heart in the work.

 

You know, and really recognize what we’re doing.  I’m not saying there aren’t other factors, there are tons of other factors, but somewhere in the core, it’s about connection, it’s about hope, it’s about opening each other’s heart, it’s about seeing each other, seeing myself and you, and you seeing yourself in me, and cultivating those moments.

 

Because when you have those moments, you don’t go back.  I’m not going to climb back into the shadows and the darkness.  I know that there’s love. I know that there’s light. I know that there’s care out there.

 

 

Schedule a 30-min consultation with Yeshaia 

 

Schedule Free ConsultationSchedule Free Consultation

 

We are Rooted in the Foundation of the  12-Steps and Believe in Long-Term Care

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