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

Having lived through a romantic separation recently, I had the opportunity to experience many different emotional states I didn’t necessarily appreciate. Whether it was logging onto Facebook and seeing my ex with her new boyfriend or just dealing with the challenge of being alone, I needed to get a handle on my emotions. I found this to be especially important when I first began picking up my daughters on the weekends. In the first few moments we’d be together, I’d be trying to process the feelings of seeing my ex, knowing we were no longer together, and making my kids feel loved and comfortable in this new and foreign situation. It was a lot to reconcile all at once.

If you’ve been to 12-step meetings, you’ve heard people speak about their “disease” talking to them in the sound of their own voice or about the endless chatter and noise we have in our heads. Have you ever stopped and thought about what that noise really is? I have.

That noise is usually a ceaseless barrage of questions that we keep asking ourselves. That’s essentially what thinking is in the first place, only with the alcoholic and addict brain, the thinking and the questions we ask ourselves are not terribly helpful. Take, for instance, my recent breakup.

The noise in my head was an endless loop of What’s wrong with me? Why does she find him sexier than me? Is this guy going to try to replace me as my kids’ father?

Here’s the tricky part, though: it doesn’t just come right out and ask those questions. I, like most people, have a huge ego, and because of this, the noise often comes disguised as Screw her! They deserve each other. I can do better, anyway.

But when you peel away all the hubris and bluff, the questions are more sensitive and vulnerable. Either way, when we find ourselves looping the same crappy thoughts over and over, we are basically interrogating ourselves like hapless detectives trying to find answers to questions that have none.

I heard self-help guru Tony Robbins tell a story about a Holocaust survivor named Stanislavsky Lech that forever shaped how I view the questions I ask myself when I am in bad situations. This guy Lech was a prisoner in a Nazi camp, and as he witnessed all the other prisoners around him dying, he noticed that these other guys spent the whole time asking themselves how God could do this to them or why they were in such a horrific situation. Obviously, this was very understandable. If you know much about history, you know that the persecution of Jews by the Nazis was one of the darkest periods of world history.

What Lech was able to figure out, as time went on, was that if he asked himself a different question, he could survive. So, he changed Why is this happening to me? to How can I get out of here? Now, he was in a concentration camp that was heavily
guarded by armed soldiers, so there was no easy answer to this question, but waking up every morning and closing his eyes at night, he kept just repeating that question over and over. Inevitably, he was one of the very few who made it out of that situation alive.

What that story taught me was that the brain is a magical vital organ. We will always get output when we feed it input, and the quality of the output is based primarily on the quality of the input. That’s just a fancy way of saying that if we want something good to come out, we need to keep putting good in. So, in my case with my ex-girlfriend, as soon as I realized I was getting trapped in a funk, I began to change the questions I was
asking myself, just as Lech did. So, in those first few moments on the weekend when I’d pick up my children, I would change my questions to How can I make this a good day? and What might be positive about their mother and me not being together anymore?

There was a reason I left that relationship. If I didn’t think it was going to improve the quality of my life in some way, there’s no way I would have done it. All in all, I was able to get through the hardest days, and like most things, it got easier as time went on.

Pushing Against Resistance

A second useful technique for gaining control over our emotions is, of course, how we use our bodies, or our physiology. I understand that seeing your ex walking down the street arm in arm with your best friend can make it difficult to smile and walk with a swagger in your step, but hear me out: you have to try to do it anyway. When you experience less-than wonderful circumstances, the first thing you want to do is slump your shoulders, put a scowl on your face, and walk like you’re headed to the electric chair in one of those old movies from the sixties. Unfortunately, when you allow your body to mourn like that, it only perpetuates more misery. You wind up in a loop of feeling bad and then worse, until you’re so far down, you start looking for unhealthy ways to get back up.

So, try this out. Walk around like you’re on top of the world, especially if you feel just the opposite. Hold the door for someone, and smile at them, like “I got this” — and guess
what, soon you will have this. Put your shoulders back and take a deep breath. Keep doing it. Then do it some more. Get up and move around. Moving your body will move your mind. A friend who taught second grade told me that when the kids were stuck on a math problem, she encouraged them to get up and march beside their desks, to switch their brain patterns. You can switch your brain pattern by moving around at any
time. Use your body to take you where you want your brain to go — forward.

As difficult as it may sound, you need to push against the inertia of your own sad emotions. Easy? No. Important? Without exaggeration, it is as important as it is to feed yourself and breathe. I’m sure, if you’ve been to more than one 12-step meeting,
you’ve heard the cliché “Move a muscle, change a thought.” I’ll be honest: I wanted to punch my sponsor the first time he said that to me. That was not the advice I was looking for, if I remember correctly. All these years later, I finally understand the wisdom in that trope.

One of the most perplexing secrets of life is that the answers we are all looking for are usually in those simple clichés we hear and quickly shrug off, with an “I know” or “No kidding.” How do I know this? I used to do the same thing. For decades. When I finally found the secret to making my life incredible, I realized it was because I put all those simple and overused expressions into practice.

I cannot stress this enough. Everyone knows the only way to succeed is to never stop trying, but how many people actually keep trying to accomplish the same thing every morning they wake up — day in, day out for weeks, months, and even sometimes years? Not that many. Just the famous ones you read about in biographies and newspapers.

This is somewhat puzzling, too. I have listened to some of the greatest people of our time give incredible commencement speeches — Jim Carrey, Denzel Washington, J. K. Rowling,
Steve Jobs — and the message is generally always the same: Do. Not. Ever. Give. Up. Unfortunately, it’s one thing to know something on an intellectual level and another thing entirely to put it into practice. As Edgar Allan Poe mused in his famous story “The Purloined Letter,” sometimes a secret hides in plain sight.

The Choice to Be Happy

Finally, what we choose to focus on will ultimately determine our emotions. My experience with finishing this book turns out to be a useful example. January and February in the Hudson Valley region of New York can be somewhat brutal. As hard as I push against it, by the middle of February, my mood and morale are almost always dark. It feels as though winter has been going on for an eternity, and more often than not, I even get some kind of bug that puts me down for a few days. Not this winter! This winter I had an entire book to write, and January and February kind of slipped by without my notice. They could have been April and May for all I cared. I was too immersed in what I was doing. It almost makes me feel as if I should probably try to write a book every winter.

This is no small thing. I used to dread winter. This year I went to work whistling every day. Snowstorms, icy roads, scraping off my car after work — none of it affected me. I was usually lost in thought about what I was writing, what I had written, or what I was going to write. Now that I realize I have a choice, I will most likely never experience winter the same way again.

I am telling you this not as some great authority but as someone who has just experienced this magical fact firsthand: what we choose to focus on, how we communicate with ourselves, and how we use our bodies will dictate our feelings and, ultimately, the quality of our lives.

We get to choose. Our circumstances are not that important. They never have been. When you realize this on a visceral level, you, my friend, will have some Kickass Recovery!

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.

I have a job I love, but lately I've been feeling paranoid at the office. It seems like someone is trying to cause problems for me. I can't exactly put my finger on what's happening, it's more of a feeling. I realize that I could be obsessing over nothing, but I have always been somewhat intuitive, and have never had a feeling this strong. I feel like I shouldn't ignore it, but usually I am able to clarify what a hunch means through meditation or my dreams. This time it's very hazy - I'm just left with this general feeling of uneasiness. Is there some way I can figure out what this means and what I should do about it?

Mary

Dreamchaser:

In a nutshell, you are paranoid to a point. Whenever you work in an office-type setting, there will be someone causing problems for someone else. Not everyone is going to get along with everyone else in ANY situation, be it school, church or work.

There are also those jealous people who will start trouble just because they want what someone else has. Ladder climbers will step on your head to move up to the next rung of success. That is to be expected and dealt with when it happens.

I feel there is no one directly causing problems for you. You have not been shown any answers via your regular methods of "enlightenment." You have come up empty when you asked the Universe to show you what's wrong, so is it possible that your answer is "all is well?"

I do not in any way mean to offend you or hurt your feelings with the following statements, but you have always been the type to look for problems. If you do not have one, you will find one. If there is nothing happening, you will make sure that something starts to happen. You find it very hard to live in peace and quiet.

You need to ask yourself why that is and how you can change - unless of course you LIKE living with all this drama and trauma. If that's the case, feel free to continue as you have been. I have a feeling you do not really like it, however.

You can let go of this habit, but you will need to do some soul work. I think this issue relates to you only getting attention when you were younger when you had a problem or issue. You learned that to get attention, you had to have something happening. When you were doing just fine, you would just blend into the background.

If you would like an easy way to combat corporate assassins, put yourself in the Bubble. I have written about this many times here, so you may already know how. Choose your favorite material substance and your favorite color, and then picture a bubble made out of that. Mine is purple water. (It used to be stars, but I changed it to water.)

Then picture yourself stepping into the Bubble and the Bubble sealing around you. When you are in your Bubble, it's like you've made a pact with the Universe: Your energy can get out, but no one else's energy can get in to you. It really does work well in situations where you feel paranoid or attacked.

It would work extremely well in this situation. You would not feel anyone's energy around you, and you could just work and mind your own business and have a great day inside your Bubble.

I wish you peace, harmony, contentment and joy in your everyday life, both at work and at home.

*****

Astrea:

From the dawn of time, all civilizations have left us evidence of affirmations and spells they used to protect their homes, families and occupations. Even hunters in caves drew drawings on the walls of the protective dances that were done before and after hunts.

These days, the wildest animals most of us face are encountered in the workplace! Whether someone is causing you to feel uneasy or you're imagining things, it never hurts to create some protection for yourself so you can feel at ease at work and at home.

For centuries, people have done affirmations to reflect negative energies back to their sources. I like this approach, and whether you do this mentally or employ actual mirrors, it works!

Go to the dollar store (we have five here in Snot, Texas) and buy four small mirrors. If there is a crafts store near you, they have tiny ones that work well. The mirrors should be round or oval-shaped. It doesn't matter how big they are, just that they are a shape without points on their sides.

Inscribe the backs of each with the runes eolh (Z) and is (I). This will charge your mirrors to deflect any negativity around you. You can invoke the divine protection of these "magic" mirrors whenever you feel the need to do so.

To initiate this protection, place one mirror at each compass or directional point around you, reflection side up. In a spray bottle, mix distilled water and four drops each of lavender and patchouli oils. Extend your hands over the spray bottle, forming a magic triangle with your thumbs and forefingers. Visualize a Divine Beam infusing this mixture with purifying, protective energy.

Sit in the middle of your mirrors. Mist the air around the mirror you placed at the northern point of the compass (that's the northern side of your house or wherever you're charging your mirrors). Mist over each mirror, visualizing your Beam shooting into their centers. Move in a counter-clockwise direction until you've finished all four.

Place the mirrors facing the appropriate directions inside your top desk drawer at work. (Sometimes it helps to glue them down so they don't shift all around). It doesn't matter if you put stuff on top of the mirrors as long as you're gentle and you don't break them.

When someone who doesn't want the best for you comes to your desk, the mirrors will automatically deflect the negativity that they are sending you BACK to them, whether you can see the mirrors or not.

I highly recommend that you place your mirrors when no one else is around, so that you can form your triangle/beam over each one for extra oomph!

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.