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An Excerpt from Kickass Recovery:
From Your First Year Clean to the Life of Your Dreams,
by Billy Manas

I opened the notebook and began to plan a perfect life for myself with the premise that anything was possible — because that is exactly how I felt. My first idea was that I would take the hazmat endorsement test at the Department of Motor Vehicles, so I could be eligible for getting a higher-paying union trucking job. These jobs were the best because they paid hourly instead of by the mile. Not only that, but they offered time-and-a-half
overtime pay after eight hours on any given workday.

My second plan was to start writing and publishing articles in all my favorite online magazines. I knew that if I got enough of a readership, it would be easier to get a publishing deal for the book I wanted to write. I also wanted to get myself a great
life coach to help keep me on track and turn these goals into reality.

A part of me felt like I had no business making such far-reaching goals for myself. I was in my forties, unemployed, and paying child support on three kids. If I had thought about
those hurdles at the time, I would never have written those things in that notebook.

This proves what I am saying. A universal intelligence helped me find a path to what I needed to focus on. This stuff really does work.

It took a month before I had my hazmat endorsement. That test was not easy. Six weeks later, I landed that union job. Again, not easy. They rejected me the first time, but I called their corporate headquarters to find out why. That was a really good idea, because they had incorrect information on me, and when I corrected this, they invited me in for an interview.

There’s a really important lesson here. In the past, it would have been my style to think, You don’t want me? Yeah, well, I don’t want you, either. I believe that this is an endemic anthem for the addict. Had I taken that usual approach, nothing that is currently happening in my life would be happening. Chances are, you wouldn’t even be reading this book. Looking back, I was doing so many things that I normally wouldn’t be doing,
and getting such incredible results. The whole thing snowballed, in a good way. One good move — the notebook — led to another, which in turn led to another.

As all of this was happening, I was playing the movie The Secret on my laptop every night as I went to sleep. I realize this sounds like total insanity, but to this day, I am sure the ideas in that movie became embedded in my subconscious, and allowed me to believe that anything was possible.

Within six months of getting my first article accepted by the magazine Elephant Journal, I was writing for them regularly. Some of my articles were even going viral — a lot of them reaching 30,000 to 40,000 views. I was so excited to be alive that after a while, I was waking up hours before work to write and exercise and meditate. My health problems disappeared as if they had never even existed in the first place.

No one could ever convince me that our minds don’t control our bodies. Ironically, my union job supplies me with the greatest health insurance available, and I haven’t had to use it.

Let’s cut to the chase: I am sitting in my apartment — a bigger one now — writing this book because my literary agent helped me get a deal with a publisher. Every single thing I imagined for myself came true because I left that notebook open on my kitchen table and read that little essay every morning. I drank my coffee and let myself get emotionally attached to the dreams I’d planned for myself.

I managed to bounce back from getting fired and found a job that far exceeded the position I lost, and there was no reason in the world why I couldn’t accomplish everything else on that page. Now I have. All I needed to make it come true? An overwhelming sense of certainty that it would.

So, let’s summarize, shall we?

1. The law of attraction is as real as life on Earth.

2. The quality of our lives is directly in line with the quality of our thoughts.

3. If we can control our emotions, we can control our thoughts — and thereby control our lives.

So, now we are left with the very real question: How do we control our emotions? If you are in recovery, or even just know you need to be, then it’s clear that you already know how to control your emotions.

As a matter of fact, every single person in the back of an ambulance getting pumped full of Narcan tonight, every belligerent drunk getting beat up in a back alley, and every lonely person staring at a laptop and masturbating knows how to control their emotions.

The challenge with all these poor people is that their methods are either fatal or just plain awful. Hopefully, this all changes after we get into recovery and begin to live differently. Instead of using substances, alcohol, or porn, we learn to call our sponsor or a friend or read recovery literature.

Usually, any of these methods will work for us. However, it is also important that we learn how to change our state when none of these options are available. Personally speaking, there have been times when I’ve been faced with uncomfortable feelings and I couldn’t get to a meeting, no one was picking up the phone, and reading was out of the question. In these moments, we cannot afford to allow ourselves to be swallowed up by
negativity.

Here’s a four-step technique that will work:

1. Figure out exactly what you are feeling. If the first thing that pops into your mind is “pissed,” stop for a second. “Pissed” is an umbrella term for a lot of different feelings. You’ll want to isolate the exact feeling as best as you can. Did your boyfriend
say something to you that made you feel inferior or less than? Did your boss insult you and cause you to fear the loss of your job and your income? Get quiet for a second and figure out exactly how you feel.

2. Honor the emotion. Fear is not a useless emotion. It is a signal from our brain that informs us we need to be prepared for an upcoming challenge. Guilt isn’t useless, either. It is a message that we have violated something important inside ourselves. If you
take a second and think about why you are feeling what you are feeling, it will give you a great opportunity to get to the root cause. That will, in turn, make it that much easier to get past it.

3. Decide what you’d like to feel instead. You might be thinking, Happy, stupid! Expand on that a little. Do you want to go from anxiety to a state of calm? Do you want to stop feeling sad and feel joyous instead? It’s a good idea to focus on what it
is you are trying to accomplish. It’s obvious we’d all like to feel better. The real question is: Better how?

4. Take action. The final step is action. What the action should be depends on what the negative emotion is. If you felt rejected by your girlfriend, let her know how you feel. If you don’t have your rent and you are stuck in anxiety, go talk to your landlord and get it handled. These suggestions sound so obvious, but just because a thing seems obvious doesn’t mean we always pay attention to it. I know even I get overwhelmed sometimes and feel so paralyzed, I forget to do anything about the problem. That makes the issue fester and get worse.

Using this technique regularly will help you stay in a place of love, gratitude, and joy — and as I said, these emotions will keep your thoughts where they need to be in order to attract all the good things into your life.

Billy Manas, author of Kickass Recovery, is a regularly featured columnist for Elephant Journal, a contributor to Good Men Project and The Fix, a published poet, a working musician, a full-time truck driver and a dad to three daughters. His journey from Adderall-chewing, methadone-swilling, pot-smoking maniac to speaker/author with over nine years of sustained recovery is, as is so often the case, fraught with excitement and a few valuable anecdotes. These anecdotes have found their way into his many talks at jails, detoxes, rehabs, and his new “Kickass Recovery” workshop. www.BillyManas.com

Excerpted from the book Kickass Recovery. Copyright © 2020 by Billy Manas. Printed with permission from New World Library.

A week ago while visiting my husband's mom in Virginia, a strange thing happened to me. On this particular evening I was reading the book "Phenomenon" by Sylvia Brown, and was about to turn in for the night. I bookmarked my page and noticed the next chapter was entitled "Astral Travel." Though I was excited to read about it, I couldn't keep my eyes open, so I went to bed thinking I would read it the next day. I drifted off to sleep in a matter of minutes, and then suddenly I felt myself leaving my body. (I felt sort of half awake at this point). It began with my hand and arm leaving my body, and then it was as if I was moving at a thousand miles an hour in a black, swirling hole. It scared me! Then Slam! I felt as if I was thrown back into my body with a great force. I woke up frightened and unsure about what had really happened. Was I dreaming because of the book I was reading, or did I actually have an experience where "my body" caught my spirit leaving and then freaked out? Any thoughts or advice would be really helpful. My date of birth: 6-4-70 - Karen

Dreamchaser:

Over the years, I have mentioned this very subject over and over in this column. I am glad to talk about it again, however, because it happens so frequently to people.

When we go to sleep, our soul leaves our body and goes to where it most needs to be in order to fix whatever happened today and prepare for tomorrow. Sometimes it works very hard, and sometimes it just plays by itself or with other souls.

Dreams, by the way, are the journeys that our souls go on every night. Sometimes we remember our soul work, and sometimes we don't. Either way, our souls DO leave and travel and learn every single time we are asleep. Scientists have yet to prove why our bodies need sleep; it's because our souls must have time to do their work when our human mind is not in the way.

What happened in your case was that your mind was not fully asleep yet. Your logical, human mind was still relatively conscious of what was going on around you. When your soul lifted off, your human mind was aware of it.

Usually our souls wait until REM or deep sleep to lift off. When your soul realized that your mind was still active, it jumped back into your body. That was the SLAM you felt. When you woke up, your human mind was searching for a "logical" explanation as to what had just happened.

This can also work in reverse, by the way. Our souls can wake our bodies sometimes before our minds kick into gear. Have you ever woken up and not known who you were, where you were, what was going on, etc.? Then it took a little while for you to shake out the "cobwebs" and come back to reality? That is when your soul pops back in before your human mind is awake, clear and ready to be cognizant of what is happening.

Your mind was running on high gear because you had been reading new information. You were learning and growing and evolving, and it was exciting for your mind to filter into your soul and back up. The cycle was working, but you were too tired to stay awake and read more.

Your human mind was ready and wanting to learn about astral travel. Your soul was saying, "Go to sleep so we can integrate what you have already learned." Part of you was ready to sleep and part of you was ready for more exploration. The two were running on conflicting schedules, and you caught it happening. So in a way, the book caused this, but it happens on a nightly basis anyway. Because you were conscious, you just happened to catch it happening this time!

You can learn how to astral travel while you are awake. Keep reading! I wish you many more conscious experiences with astral travel!

*****

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.