Good morning, everyone. This is March 9, 2025, my name is Dana reading this is my coming to the path talk. Speaking publicly is not something I'm very comfortable with. Not at all. So when I was asked to give this talk, I wanted to say no, but given the opportunity to talk about myself for 45 minutes, I couldn't help myself and say yes. Kind of regretting that choice right now. Anyway, we'll get going. So I was born on January 12, 1978 in a small village in the mountains of North Wales. My mother was a math teacher. My father was a fleet engineer and a climbing bun. We didn't have a lot of but we but we were comfortable. I have one sister a couple years older than me. I don't remember much of Wales, but once my sister and I became of school age, which in Wales is taught in Welsh, our parents moved us back to England. We moved to near Newcastle in the north of England, where my mother's family was from. I was a shy, sensitive kid, but I hid my shyness by being the class clown and always trying to get a laugh. I was a bright kid with an aptitude for math, science and the arts from as early as I knew the word. I wanted to be an architect. Found school very easy, so I remember being bored a lot. I was very close to my mother, and I was a real mummy's boy. My relationship with my father was more strained, and we didn't connect very well. When I was 11 or so, we moved from the north and we moved to the Midlands, where my dad's family was from. We stayed with my dad's mum for half a year while we found a house. My grandma was a very pious woman. I remember her cooking the blandest food I've ever eaten. We, however, were not a religious family in any way. We never went to church, never talked about God or religion. My grandma had recently divorced. My grandfather, who I don't even, who I only met twice. He was a Korean military man who'd served in the Second World War, and he was an angry and mean alcoholic. Wasn't long after moving to our new house that my mother had a first nervous breakdown. We were out shopping together, the two of us, and I was nagging her incessantly for some toy I wanted, and she broke down crying and didn't stop. She was taken away to a mental hospital for a month or so. Seemed like forever. I was scared and confused, and I felt really guilty. My mother's mother came and stayed with us for a few months to help out. I don't remember her being the kindest woman, she'd had four daughters, two of which died in childhood. Her husband had also died of alcoholism. She told me the reason my mother to go away to hospital was because I was a bad boy. I believed her, and started to feel I was bad in some way.
When she came back from hospital, she wasn't the same. She would hide in the corners of rooms, crying and afraid.
When I was 12, my dad mortgaged our house and bought into a scaffolding business with a partner. For a few years, the business prospered, and we were living the high life. When I was around 13, I started smoking and drinking. It was amazing. Gave me confidence. I was suddenly funny, interesting, brave and socially at ease. But it also had its pitfalls. I almost always drank too much, too fast, and ended up being violently sick. I just needed, I just needed to learn how to manage it, and this was a preoccupation that stayed with me for the next two decades. By five by 15, I was experimenting with drugs, any kind whatever, and I always had to do more and push the limits of my consciousness. I. Eventually, my dad's partner embezzled the money out of the business, and he went bankrupt. I was 15 or so at the time. While things were falling apart for my dad became emotionally removed. He started drinking heavily and fought with my mother and me constantly. I got into a fight with him one day and told him he should leave and be better off without him. He grabbed me by the throat and put me against the wall. He'd never been a violent man before. Had just pushed him too far. My mum stepped in and threw him out. They were divorced fairly soon after that, I remember being happy about it at the time, I was 16, and my mother and I moved into a new house together, and my sister left for university. When I was 17, my mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer, she had a couple of botched surgeries, spending a lot of time at the hospital. She was too weak for further treatment, and was given a few months to live. She spent a little time at home, but was then moved to hospice. This rocked my world. I was constantly worried, angry, scared and morose, and didn't know what to say to her. I'd visit a lot, but she'd encourage me to go see my friends and have fun, which I did, I'd stay out all night, drinking and doing drugs. You my dad moved back into the house to help look after me, which I resented after a terrible few months watching her right away. A month before my 18th birthday, she passed away. I remember just feeling empty. Looking after had been such a big part of the past year that with her gone, there was this big void. I remember feeling glad she'd finally passed. Her suffering was over, but then feeling guilty for feeling that way. My girlfriend at the time, had moved into my mum's house with me a few months before she died. After she died, asked her to leave and abruptly broke it off with her, I just couldn't be emotionally close to anyone. I smoked a lot of crack that year. I somehow managed to finish out the year at college, I decided I didn't want to do another seven years of schooling to become an architect, so I applied and got accepted into art school to study sculpture. So in the fall, I put down the crack pipe and went to Carlisle University. It was in the north and I chose it mainly because it was near the mountains in the Lake of the Lake District in Scotland.
One of the things I appreciate about my dad was he instilled in me the love for the mountains, and he had taught me how to rock climb. University was going to be a new start. I wanted to lay off the drugs they'd been getting out of hand. However, in my first week of college, I was pulled over for drink driving and lost my license for two years. What I remember at this time was this feeling of invincibility. My mum dying was the worst thing I could imagine happening in my life. There was nothing else to fear. I looked for danger wherever I could be, it on the cliff rock climbing or on the streets at night when the pubs closed. Amazingly, considering the risks I took, I never came to any real harm. Something was looking over me.
I did well at university, despite being unpopular with the professors for being wild and drunk all the time. My second year, I was chosen to represent Carlisle in Flensburg, Germany, a sister city. Flintsburg had sister cities all across Europe, and they asked each city to send a sculptor or two to work on a project. There was a park in the city that had a bunch of very large elm trees. Each sculptor got a tree. I spent an entire summer there working on the project and met many amazing people. Traveled around Germany and visited lots of art communes. I remember being on top of the world, making art, partying hard, never sleeping, and with unlimited energy. Me. When I came back, I was plunged into a deep depression. Had depressive episodes before. My moods were always like a roller coaster, but it was very different and much worse. This was a pattern that would repeat itself for years, periods of unbridled energy, excitement, creativity and wild drinking, followed by deep depression and drinking to find Oblivion, trying to escape my racing mind and thoughts of not wanting to go on and not wanting to exist and doing everything not to feel the emotional loss of my mum. After university, I moved to Norwich in East Anglia, and joined an artist collective and made sculptures. On the weekends, I worked as a community service probation officer taking out offenders to complete their community service. At the climbing gym, I met Harvey Rayner, who some of you might know he was very different from the rest of my friends. He barely drank, didn't take drugs, and spent a lot of his time meditating. We would hang out after climbing and drink tea, chat and then meditate together. He gave me a copy of the three pillars of Zen. I remember it really resonated with me, like words were put to thoughts I didn't know I'd already had, and it felt very familiar. I remember really enjoying the meditation to get some peace and quiet in my normally racing mind.
I enjoyed a good couple of years in Norwich, making art, partying with artists and musicians, climbing and meditating with Harvey, but I was getting itchy feet and wanted to see the world. I had some money saved up from a couple of recent commissions and bought a ticket to travel the world. The first leg of my flight took me to Bangkok, Thailand. After a week in Bangkok, suffering from culture shock, waiting on a visa to Burma, I started my adventure traveling by bus and train at the western border of Thailand. I visited many sleepy towns, lots of temples and monasteries and the remains of the various cold capitals I ended up near the border with Burma on the river Kowal, and the site of the Deaf railroad sites from the Second World War Japanese concentration camps where they'd used Allied prisoners to build a railroad through the jungles and mountains of Burma into China. It was said a prisoner died for every sleeper laid on the railroad. It was here I wandered into an allied War Cemetery 1000s upon 1000s of crosses in neat rows. Under the name and rank on each cross was some personal note or poem from the family reading these notes, I was just consumed by grief, the sheer enormity of the Second World War and the world's collective grief just hit me wave after wave with each note I read. I was sobbing like I'd never done probably the first time since my mother died. Took me hours to be able to gather myself together and leave a cemetery. Came to the realization that loss and suffering were pervasive, touching all and my loss wasn't so special. Looking back now, I wonder if this was the start of me grieving for my mum, but that pain and loss seemed so overwhelming. I was too afraid of being lost in it. I soon shut it down and drowned it out. I started to tire of traveling the way I had been bumping along on uncomfortable busses, seeing endless temples and Buddhas. I enjoyed meditating at the temples and the hospitality of the locals, but starting to think traveling wasn't for me. I needed something to do. I then met a group of three guys in a bar who were cycling for Asia. I thought that sounded so cool. They asked if I wanted to join them. The next day, I bought a shitty mountain bike, strapped my rucksack to the back, and off I went. The first few weeks were physically brutal, but it felt great to have something to do, and the slow pace of travel through the countryside suited me. We were treated like heroes by the locals, and always had a place to stay and people to party with in northwestern Thailand, I met a guy in a coffee shop called Kore. We hit it off and became fast friends. He was a refugee from Karenni state, a small state in Burma, who had been fighting a civil war for over 50 years. He. We visited his home. He showed me around his camp. I met his family and went to his school. He told me they were losing their English teacher next year, and did I want to come back in five months and teach at school? I said, Yes. I bought some textbooks on teaching English as a second language to study while I was cycling, and off I went. We cycled through Thailand, Laos and up into China, and then Tibet, occasionally losing a guide to injury or just parting paths, but then picking up a new partner. Our eventual goal was to cycle to Everest
on these travels, I was always drawn to Buddhist temples and monasteries. I would just let myself in and find the meditation hall and just go sit. I was very bold and didn't worry about protocol. I invariably would go get to meet with the monks and spend time chatting. I was deeply affected by them. They seemed to shine with a calmness and kindness and openness and curiosity. There was a peace and serenity that I saw and I deeply wanted for myself. I specifically remember meeting a hermit who had been living in a cave for 20 years. He spoke wonderful English, and we spoke for hours. His curiosity was infectious. When we were in western China in a town called Dali, it was just myself and another Englishman left, and the months of drinking and smoking were catching up on us. We decided to spend a month or so at a Shaolin Monastery, primarily to detox, but also to maybe learn a little kung fu. It was something about monastic living that felt so familiar, like a returning home, even though I'd never done anything like it before. I let the sound of the big vows struck at four in the morning to rise and start practice. I loved the sittings and watching the monks do the Kung Fu exercises like a beautiful mass dance. My companion and I, however, were the most clumsy and uncoordinated English men you've ever met. We suck terribly at the Kung Fu and brought much amusement to the monks and consternation to the Shifu after about a month at the monastery, the soles of my feet were so bruised I could barely stand it was ta it was time to leave. We headed west into Tibet in the Himalayan foothills. We slept in tents most nights, but were occasion. But when we occasionally came across a settlement or monastery were welcomed in again. The monks made a deep impression on me. Eventually, the days of endless uphill toil, snowy passes and incessant coal took its toll about 500 miles east of Everest, we gave up. We headed east to coming and flew back to Bangkok. I parted ways with my friend and headed north on the 1000 mile solo trip back to the refugee camps and to start my job as a teacher.
English was never my strong suit, so I struggled with teaching, but then, luckily, I was asked to teach science at a different camp, defit in the mountains and jungles in the border area with Burma, and like the cramped camp I've been teaching at, this camp was extremely remote and spread out along a beautiful river. I taught science at this camp for a couple of years. I loved the simplicity of life and having almost no possessions, I felt connected to the simple tasks of living, collecting water and firewood, hunting for food, working by candlelight, cooking over a small fire, building and repairing my home with bamboo and leaves I collected from the jungle. I felt I was doing valuable work, and felt valued and appreciated, but it also grew lonely and isolated. I was the only foreigner living in my camp and native English speaker. Although I tried not to drink while I was at the camp working, I would drink heavily on the weekends, when I went to the closest town to meet friends.
I was hospitalized twice through drinking while I was at the camps, once with a very bout of gastritis and another with pancreatitis. I also suffered from malaria, I was told by a doctor that I should never drink again. This lasted for about six months, but when I went back to the drink, I never touched spirits again. In my second year of teaching, I met a young American woman who was teaching in one of the other camps, and fell in love i. After a few months, she left to go back to the US. Although I was planning to spend another year at the camps, I decided it was time to leave. I left and spent a month traveling Northern India and around the early Buddh sites, then flew to the US to be with Sarah. I originally, originally came to America on a six month tourist visa, but we soon realized for me to stay longer, the easiest way would be to get married. So we took the leap, figuring we could always get divorced after getting married, I had to go back to the UK to wait for my green card. This took about a year. I got a job working as a tree climber, and studied Arbor culture. When I got back to the US, I realized it was going to be very hard to make a living as a sculptor, so I continued to work as a tree climber. I did this for a couple of years, eventually becoming a certified arborist, but decided I want to get at wanted to get out of it after a back injury, an injury that had ended up with me addicted to oxycodone. I remained on oxy for two to three years, miserable in pain and very angry. It changed my personality. I'd never struggled, struggled with anger issues before, but now I was a raging asshole. I hated working in pain and wasn't good at managing the stress. I was an unpleasant co worker and an unpleasant husband. In the midst of all this, we acquired, acquired a chunk of land, and I designed and built a house. I was working 50 plus hours a week at work, then building a house at night and on the weekends, I was stressed out in constant pain and constantly raging. It was a rough couple of years, meditation and spiritual growth were the last thing on my mind during this time, I was just striving to get ahead. I finally decided I was done with tree work, and I would go back to school and get my masters in architecture. After finishing some prerequisites at college, I was accepted at Berkeley. I was all set to sell the house and moved to California when a really bad, early snow storm hit buffalo, the trees still had their leaves on them and were destroyed by the weight of the snow. I teamed up with an old colleague and started working on storm cleanup, what started as a quick postponement of grad school to make a bunch of quick money and get out, sucked me in. It turned into a business that I ran for the next decade and a half. Eventually, I got off the Oxy before Sarah had had enough, and soon I started to feel like my old self again. The anger subsided and became more manageable, although it's still something I struggle with to this day, business became a fast success with the help of the storm, and I was consumed by making and spending money, traveling, rock climbing and having as much fun as possible.
And my drinking was more under control during this time, and I found that if I drank a six pack every night, I wouldn't go on drinking binges as much. This worked for a while. I still struggled with depression during this time, but medicating myself with beer and weed life wasn't bad. I After running the business for about six years, we decided to try for a child. We had been on the fence for a long time, thinking we wouldn't have one. It didn't take long before we were pregnant. I decided I wanted to stop drinking if I was to be of dad, and couldn't but I couldn't put it down. A few months into the pregnancy, Sarah woke to a lot of bleeding and pain and needed to get to the hospital. Had gotten drunk that night, and she couldn't wake me. She had to call her dad to come pick her up and take her in. I woke the next morning not knowing where she'd gone. Later, I got a call to say she'd had a miscarriage. I felt terrible I'd let her, let her down and let myself down. But as bad as this experience was, still wasn't enough for me to put the drink down after the miscarriage, we had to go to Planned Parenthood in Buffalo for a DNC to remove the fetus. There was a bunch of pro life protesters outside, and I remember an older woman getting in our faces screaming that it wasn't too late and what we were doing was a sin. I don't think I've ever wanted. Punch someone more in my whole life, or being more disgusted by Christianity? Luckily, I had enough sense to know getting into a physical fight with an old woman was the last thing Sarah needed, right there. It wasn't long before Sarah was pregnant again, this time going to full term,
we decided to try for a natural birth with a midwife at a birthing center. After three long days of labor, completely exhausted, Sarah gave birth to Eloise. Towards the end of the delivery, things got very heated in the room, very scary. Sarah bled a lot. I was so scared I was going to lose her that when Eloise finally did come, I didn't want her to hold her. I did not take to fatherhood. Well, Sarah and Eloise were inseparable, and I felt very much left out. Instead of working harder to be a part of things, I started to drink more and work more and go away on the weekends, kayaking and climbing more. The more I did this, the worse I felt about myself, and the more I drank, I was spiraling down into a depression I spent most of my days driving around making sales calls at this time, and what started with a bottle or two of beer on the end on the drive home from the last call led into taking that drink earlier and earlier in the day, before long, I was buying a case of beer first thing in the morning to drink while I drove around, and then another at the end of the day to take home. I was also smoking joints like cigarettes. When I finished work, instead of going home to my family, I'd go to my office. I couldn't drink or smoke fast enough to drown out the bad feelings and shut down my mind. Late, I'd finally go home, hostile and unavailable to pass out, then wake up the next morning vowing today would be different. I wouldn't drink, but by eight or nine in the morning, I'd be taking my first drink to repeat the same endless cycle. My only reprieve was on the weekends, when I go away white water kayaking. But even then, the drinking soon took over.
By the time Eloise was free, Sarah had had enough and moved out. She said I needed to go to AA and stop drinking, get a therapist and stop smoking weed, or we were through. I knew I couldn't keep going on like this, but I couldn't make the change. It was too late to save my marriage, but I eventually did go to AA and get a therapist. I'm not sure what finally made me do something. Maybe just sick and tired of being sick and tired and hating myself, but I eventually stopped drinking. After about a week or two, I knew I wasn't going to make it, though, and I needed help, as Sarah's aunt a long time, AA member if she'd take me to a meeting the next morning, at 7am we were going into my first AA meeting. I felt totally beaten, and although I totally bristled at the prayers at the start and end of the meeting, I listened people shared around the room about their experiences when they first came into AA, no one had been on the winning streak. They were just like me, and their stories resonated. I remember feeling like for the first time in my life, I was connecting with people just like me. I wasn't alone. I had found my people. It was just unfortunate. They were a bunch of drunks, and I was in a church basement. I remember it was all I could do not to burst out crying that morning, and it was for fear of that that it stopped me from sharing. But I felt something that day that I hadn't felt in a long while, hope. After the meeting, I talked with an older gentleman who'd been a businessman and a successful businessman and successful but what, but still had managed to almost destroy his life with alcohol. He seemed very kind, and I connected with his story, so I asked him to be my sponsor. He told me I should do 90 meetings in 90 days. So the next morning, I was back at the same meeting. I'm not sure what I shared about that day, but I remember feeling such a sense of relief to be dropping. The Mask and asking for help. I went to that morning meeting every day and met with my sponsor every week, where he read the big book about AA to me and explained to me all about alcoholism and what it was going to take to get and stay sober. It was with him that we read the doctor's opinion, a chapter from a doctor who in the 1930s specialized in the treatment of alcohol. And he stated the following,
men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol, the sensation is so elusive that while they admit it is injurious, they cannot, after a time, differentiate the truth from the false. To them, their alcoholic life seems like the only normal one. They are restless, irritable and discontented, unless they can again expect again, experience a sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks, drinks which they see others taking with impunity, after they have succumbed to the desire again, as so many do, and the phenomena of craving develops, they pass through the well known stages of a spree, emerging remorseful with a firm resolution not to drink again. This is repeated over and over, and unless this person can experience an entire psychic change, there is very little hope of his recovery. On the other hand, and strange as this may seem to those who do not understand, once a psychic change has occurred, the very same person who seemed doomed, who had so many problems he despaired of ever solving them, suddenly finds himself easily able to control his desire for alcohol, the only effort necessary being that required to follow a few simple rules.
That entire psychic change he talked about, I learned was a spiritual awakening, and the rules he talked about were to trust God, clean house and help others. So he started working through the steps together, which starts with step one. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, and our lives had become unmanageable. I had struggled with managing alcohol my whole life and failed, and although I thought of myself as materially successful, I had to admit that spending most of my days wanting my life to end was pretty unmanageable. Step two, came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. This I struggled with a power greater than me, sounds like God, and I didn't believe in God, but I had to admit that what I saw in the rooms of AA were people like me, hopeless alcoholics, getting sober. They couldn't do it alone. The clincher for me was when I was reading the following a quote by Herbert Spencer, buried in the appendices, at the end of the big book, there is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man In everlasting ignorance. That principle is contempt. Prior to investigation,
this helped me just keep an open mind and suspend my disbelief. But then with but then I hit a wall with Step three, made a decision to turn our will and our life over to the care of God as we understood him. How was I to turn my will over to to a god my skepticism and contempt for the Christian church and resentment towards a god I didn't even believe in? How was I to surrender to that? I could see there was a solution, but I became sure it wouldn't work for me. I was terminally unique. I was on a long drive to the southern part of the state to look at some woods to be managed when all hope for the future and AA left me. I'd hit the end of the road. I couldn't go back to drinking, and I couldn't stay sober. I was in total despair, sobbing while I was driving. Over the past couple of years, the one thing that stopped me killing myself was the four I couldn't do that to Eloise. Had them grow up. No. Knowing their dad had killed himself. But then it dawned on me, if I drove into a bridge abutment, I could make it look like an accident. A calm came over me. I knew there was a way out. I was sad with the thought that I'd believe in this world, but relieved I had a solution. The next morning, I was at my morning a meeting as usual, and I shared a little about my experience the day before, not thinking the alarm it would sound. My sponsor caught me after the meeting and pulled me into a side room he'd been in AA long enough to experience several newly sober members who had also struggled with mental illness take their own lives. He strongly encouraged me to check myself into a mental hospital before I did anything rash. Within a couple of hours, I was signing over my freedom to a psychiatric hospital, placing my trust in the physicians working there, for someone so committed to self reliance, this was a surrender to something or someone outside of myself, placing myself in someone else's care. I don't think it was what the big book had in mind, but it made sense to me at the time, the 10 days I spent at the hospital stands out in my life as some of the best I was broken open. Something had changed in me. I felt a connection to something greater than me, and an openness and closeness to my fellow humans. Instead of hiding myself away from the other residents, which would have been my reflex thinking I was better than them or not sick like them, I accepted in myself I was broken and needed help. My mask was off, and it was incredibly freeing. Originally, I was treated for suicidal depression, but the antidepressants they gave me triggered a mania. They soon diagnosed me with bipolar one disorder. It made total sense. I looked back at my life and saw all those episodes of extreme mood, elevation, advanced creativity, racing thoughts, impulsive and dangerous behavior, followed by periods of deep depression. I was amazed. I'd never realized it earlier, and was glad to have a name for it, for whatever that meant. I was released from hospital on lithium and feeling better than I felt in years. The mania had subsided. I was still feeling bouts of depression, but had a renewed hope in AA and my recovery. It was after the hospital, my old friend Harvey, now living an hour from me, saw I needed something to help calm my racing mind, and suggested I meet him at Chapin Mill on Tuesday nights to meditate and hang out. Originally, I was more interested in just the socializing, but I soon remembered how much I enjoyed to meditate. I fell in love with Chapin Mill, the Zen dome, the chanting and waymon and Errol, who were so welcoming and loving. I remember still struggling with thoughts of suicide, but knew I wasn't going to do it. I was afraid to tell anyone this, for fear I'd be sent back to the hospital. But in daisan, with way men I felt safe and heard and loved, I'd tell him how I was really feeling there was something so powerful about the way he just sat with me in my fear. I just felt totally loved. I felt safe at Chapin Mill, and was soon volunteering and staying over there as much as I was able. I
before my separation with Sarah, I bought a beautiful piece of land with the dilapidated cabin on a gorge overlooking a couple of waterfalls. In the divorce, I was happy to get that while she kept the house. She was also kind enough to agree to 5050, custody of Eloise, which I am so grateful to her for. I completely remodeled the cabin into a cozy house, which was such a therapeutic place to get sober in after the hospital. My sponsor, also a bipolar alcoholic, saw the need to get me through the steps as fast as possible, so we started meeting more frequently and working on the steps. Step Four saw me write out a moral inventory of myself, my resentment and harms committed. And step five had me share all of this, my secrets and wrong doings with my. Sponsoring God. Step six and seven had me become ready to have these defects of character removed. Then pray to have God remove my shortcomings. It was for Step seven, my sponsor told me to go find some somewhere beautiful in nature and take my prayers to God. I was driving home from a meeting that morning, and I saw a pretty Creek under a bridge in the under the road, so I stopped and walked down to the creek to make my prayers. I remember being very sincere in my prayers when I looked up at the end, I remember seeing the wind blowing through the Aspen leaves and gasping, oh, there you are. There you've been all along.
I was overcome with the knowledge that I was experiencing God and it was in everything and everyone, including me, and a sense that deep down, all there was was love. This was the psychic change the steps had promised, and it made it possible for me to continue with the next difficult steps, steps eight and nine had become willing to make amends to all I had harmed, and then make those amends, amends that previously I had been dreading, some of which I was sure I could never make, especially those that had also done me a perceived harm, like my father. But now we're facing all these amends. My only concern was not to further harm anyone in the making of them. This process helped me move forward into my new self. I can't stress stress enough. How this changed me for sure, there are habit forces that stuck around and I wasn't washed as clean as snow, but the willingness and drive to do better and be better was there. I was suddenly much less interested in material gain and more concerned with the with living life, with living a life of service. I realized, if I wanted to be forgiven or forgive myself for all the things I had failed at. I had to forgive others. This was especially true when it came to my dad and being a father of myself, the psychic change promised by the steps that occurred. The meetings had given me hope, but the steps had given me freedom, freedom from my old self and freedom from alcohol. For me, the final three steps are all about how I keep this freedom. Step 10, continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it. Step 11 sought, through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for his will for us and the power to carry that out. And Step 12, having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs. Meditation, or specifically Zen practice, is the bedrock of how I keep this freedom. It keeps me open and honest, first with myself through awareness, and then to others in right speech and right actions. Not long after completing my steps the first time I went on my first seshin a two day. I can't remember who was leading it, but I do remember who I met there for the first time. Soon as I walked through the front doors of the retreat center, I was met by a woman who asked if I was ready, I replied, As ready as I'll ever be, to which she left. It was with that laugh, smile and kind eyes I fell in love. That woman, of course, was Leela. That seshin was very hard for me, not just the physical pain, but mainly being alone with myself and my mind for two days in silence. I didn't really like myself, and certainly didn't like being in my own company. It was uncomfortable and painful being aware of my thoughts. There were, however, moments of space that practice created, and feelings that arose of contentment and gratitude, feelings I was not familiar with. I found practice this path and this Sangha and there was hope. I remember thinking, These people are crazy. This is crazy. I can't wait till this is over. I'm never going to do this again. I. But by the time it ended, I was hooked and couldn't wait to sign up for my next one. I've only missed a handful of seshin since. They were always hard, and I hated a good portion of them, but something kept me coming back. I don't think it was just leela, although that certainly helped to begin with. With the hope of seeing leela, I start coming to Arnold park as well as Chapin Mill to volunteer and participate in the sittings. I just wanted to be at the center and involved as much as I could, because around this time, my dad became sick with multiple myeloma.
She's a cancer of the plasma cells. He'd married an American woman when he was over on one of his early visits to me, and lived with her about an hour from me. When he got sick, she wasn't capable of looking after him, so he came to live with me at the cabin. This was a pretty crazy time in my life. I was in my second year of sobriety, looking after my dad, trying to sell my business to an employee. I was working two to three days a week, volunteering a couple of days a week at the Zen Center and starting a new relationship with leela, all while raising Eloise 50% at the time, Sarah was great about organizing our shared time with Eloise around the Zen Center sesshin schedule, but it was a lot. My dad tenaciously hung on to life for another year and a half, bitterly not accepting what was happening and what the doctors were trying to tell him he was dying. I I
eventually had to sit down with him and bluntly tell him that he was going to die. Once he accepted this, he was like a different person. It was a lightness and calm and a kindness that returned to him. I remember, in my eulogy for him, I remember saying that although we had had a difficult relationship, I wish I had spent more time thinking about how I could have been a better son to him, instead of focusing on how he could have been a better father. This was a sentiment I couldn't have had without the steps I'd spent so much of my life, resentment, resentful and angry with him. It was so freeing to be at peace with him and to have him pass away at my house. The following year, Leela and I got married at Chapin Mill. It was around this time that I told Roshi I wanted to become a priest, and you wouldn't be able to come on to staff until Eloise was out of school, and therefore it'd be years before I could ordain. But this was my intention. He told me that maybe there was a way I could work a modified schedule while I was raising Eloise, he knew I was serious and committed to the center. Selling the business terrified me. Had spent years building it up, and didn't know if I could get by without it financially, but I just couldn't do it anymore. It wasn't my path and my heart wasn't in it anymore. So in the beginning of 2020, I sold the business and came on staff at the Zen Center. Two years later, Lila and I were ordained as priests. Today, I wake up every day, excited by the day, even today, I love my job and thoroughly enjoy the work. I love my weekends with my family, and most of the time, feel like a good father. Depression is not something I struggle with anymore, although I have low episodes, they don't take me down like they used to. I don't have to listen to the negative self talk anymore. It's just bullshit in the brain. I'm something I've never been before. I'm content and grateful. I hope I get surface center. I
and this Sangha for the rest of my life. Thank you. Thank.
