Larry Jones, 1986
I have a positive memory from my early years in twelve step recovery. The year was probably 1986. I had maybe seven or eight months sober. My sponsor was Larry Jones, who passed away a long time ago now. Thick glasses, thick blonde hair, probably about thirty five years old. I was sixteen.
The Fourth Step
Larry had me write a fourth step. In twelve step recovery, that's the suggestion to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself, which really just means writing out your life story, the events that got you to where you were. How thorough can you be with that kind of writing when you're newly sober. How much do you really know about yourself at that point. I don't remember the exact contents of my first fourth step, but it confirmed for me that I was, in fact, a drug addict, and that I had emotional problems. I didn't even know to what extent anxiety had shaped me, because that wasn't a word I used back then.
The God Question
The fifth step suggests reading that writing to another person. Somewhere further along the steps, you ask God to remove your shortcomings. What if you don't believe in God. What if you do believe in God but don't think God removes shortcomings the way a vending machine dispenses a candy bar. God gave you a brain, but God doesn't seem to be granting that particular kind of wish, and that opens up a whole set of existential questions. If God could grant the wish of removing my shortcomings, what was he waiting for. Why not just help me avoid the shortcomings in the first place. Does God wait for us to ask. Is that the theory.
What I Actually Use From That Step
That step never sat well with me. What if the actual power in that ask wasn't divine removal at all, but the willingness to work on yourself. Not "God, please remove my shortcomings" followed by waking up cured. Nobody actually believes you reverse years of psychological damage overnight. If that worked, it would be the ultimate hack, and everyone would be talking about it, and atheism would basically be extinct, because all you'd have to do is ask and feel better, and only a fool would resist that. It took me about twenty five years to make peace with what I could actually use from that step. I do think the act of asking yourself to work on yourself is effective. I just wanted it to make sense. I wanted it grounded, not magical. One of the real laws of the universe is that everything happens as cause followed by effect followed by another cause. You have to do something to change your circumstances.
Trading One Addiction for Another
My something was staying sober. Going to therapy. Reading constantly. Trying to live a better life as best I could, without realizing I'd simply shifted my addiction from drugs and alcohol to constant busyness, to avoiding boredom and restlessness, the two real triggers underneath everything. I made my life extremely dramatic so I could forget, so I could feel powerful. I spent a decade skydiving. A decade in combat sports, fighting competitively for a few years, training rigorously for seven more after I stopped fighting. When I wasn't doing that, I immersed myself in work. And underneath all of it, without knowing it, I had a hidden obsession that finding a girl, falling in love, would set me free. What I was actually chasing was dopamine. I didn't have a real concept of intimate love yet. My version of intimate love was attraction and sexual charge. Those things might spark a connection, but they don't reflect any depth of the heart. Since 1991 I'd been cycling through obsessive, compulsive relationships, always on the rocks or in ruins somehow. I never blamed my partners, and I still don't. We had complementary emotional damage, both of us from traumatic childhoods, both unconsciously trying to work it out inside the relationship, which meant there was always conflict where there should have been relaxation.
Looking Outside Myself
I always looked outside myself. Food, substances, spending money, nice things, bragging about my life. All instant dopamine. All pattern. I wouldn't say I was imploding, I was relatively happy. I was just living out the long term effects of childhood anxiety, the kind that quietly shapes every adult pattern that follows. And underneath that, the basic mysteries everyone carries just from being human. Who am I. How did I get here. What's going on. What happens when you die. All of it translating into a low hum of angst, sometimes dread. I didn't have a clue what any of it was about. Not because I wasn't willing to do the work, I was. I had real passion for learning. I was just studying the wrong material, because you don't know what you don't know until you stumble into it.
Yoga, the Early Years
Around 1992 I started practicing yoga casually. If I'm being honest, I probably understood that in early nineties New York, if you wanted to meet interesting women, yoga studios were the place, so why not get some fitness in at the same time. Being sober, spirituality appealed to me too. By 1995 I'd found Chinese philosophy, and I was reading about Australian Aboriginal cosmology, which fascinated me, but I was missing the mark by miles. It wasn't until 2019 that I really immersed myself in yoga. It felt more natural in my late forties to get what I needed from mat work instead of body battering fitness. I went to the regular studios, downward dogs, vinyasa, the usual rotation of teachers saying spiritual, lofty things. I was skeptical of anything metaphysical the whole time, and I still am. Not skeptical in the dismissive sense, just clear that there's no magic. The word metaphysical mostly describes what humans don't yet understand. In time, understanding usually arrives, and the mystery melts away. Humans still need to believe in gods, spirits, souls, miracles, and I think the current shape of our brain can't fully break free of that without serious habit change. We have to learn new things and unlearn old ones. We have to learn to talk about the nature of reality without drifting into fiction and wishful thinking.
The Accident That Started Everything
Anyway, I digress, as usual. The breakthrough didn't come from any philosophy. It came from the physical experience of a style of yoga I fell into by accident. I wanted to take a class in a small town, and the only thing available was hot yoga, so that's what I did. First class, I set my mat up front row without hesitation, because I figured, how hard can this be, I was a decent athlete, I could handle hard postures. It was a Saturday morning, packed room, the owner teaching with a heavy French accent. If you've ever taken the twenty six posture Bikram series, you know the monologue is dense, fast, built to hold your attention the entire class. Instruction after instruction after instruction. The teacher sounds like an auctioneer, but there was something hypnotic about it, exact enough that you could just lock onto it and follow. And she kept bringing us back to the breath. The breath was what regulated an overloaded nervous system in a hundred and five degree room.
What I Learned About Breath
I wasn't hooked from class one. I just wasn't scared of it. The heat didn't bother me much, and I got through most of the harder postures, not elegantly, but I got through them. Then came five or six years of just going, consistently enough that the effect never wore off. I started having my own breakthroughs, separate from anything I was collecting as teaching. The first thing I understood for certain, if you hold your breath in any form of yoga, the yoga is over. You're back in your regular anxious patterns. Holding the breath is its own form of anxiety, a different lobe of the brain running the show.
Presence of Mind, for the First Time
I could see clearly how the teacher's monologue, the focus, the mirror, the concentration on shape and posture, and especially the long, slow, full breath cycles, all worked together. I already understood breathing from experience, not from books. Running, Thai boxing, anaerobic sports all demand good breath patterns or you exhaust yourself. I learned that the moment dread shows up in class, or a lack of confidence, dizziness, exhaustion, all I had to do was bring my attention back to breath. Slow, deep inhalations, and I stayed in the game completely. I even relaxed. The longer I practiced, the less it was ever really about the yoga, or the heat, or the strain. It became about how to relax under pressure. How to breathe. Presence of mind was something I'd never understood, never even really heard articulated. I'd missed it completely through all my years of recovery. I never read the Yamas or Eckhart Tolle. Never listened to Alan Watts or any real spiritual teacher. I wasn't drawn to it. I was technical, physiology and psychology, and if I read philosophy at all, it had to be short and clear.
Paul Simon and the Nature of Mastery
About five years in, my mind started opening. I immersed myself in lectures that put me on the path toward being more present in my own body, and I want to give you an example that might land.
I was watching a clip of Paul Simon being interviewed by Dick Cavett. Cavett asks how "Bridge Over Troubled Water" came together, and Simon picks up a guitar and walks through it, the small things he'd absorbed and started fusing, a melody in his head that was barely there, something he caught listening to gospel music, a few borrowed words, and suddenly the tune existed, a masterpiece built from fragments. I clicked over to the next thing in my feed, the same interviewer talking to a great jazz pianist, except now I was watching someone react to that interview, breaking down the genius behind Cavett's questions, how he drew out deep concepts of music that even a non musician could start to grasp. I kept watching experts explain their craft, and what I realized is that mastery isn't really an accomplishment in the way we frame it. It's luck, having the gift, then the luck of being able to develop it through practice, and somewhere in there, recognition. Jimi Hendrix once said he hated compliments because they embarrassed him, nobody sees the work and the mistakes behind the moment, they only see the solo. I took that as real humility. And I realized that even though Hendrix was emotionally damaged, a serious addict, no judgment, he'd still become enlightened through his instrument, the same way Ravi Shankar was enlightened through the sitar. Not final mastery, there's no such thing, you can always go another level if you stay alive, but mastery the way ordinary people would recognize it.
Finding My Own Mastery
I started thinking about sculptors working marble, carpenters who were just great with wood, every possible category where someone goes deep enough, stays with it long enough, that it becomes a portal into something larger, a deeper understanding of existence, or at the very least, good music, good furniture, a well painted house. I felt lucky in my own life to be decent at a lot of things, happy being a jack of all trades. It wasn't until my early fifties that I decided I wanted to master something specific, writing intricate self help work I'd discovered on my own. Authentic work. Not fiction. Not some imagined future version of myself. I was writing about what actually got my mind in check over the years, and anywhere I found myself out of my depth while writing, I'd put the page down and go work on that exact thing in real life. That's how every book got finished. I'm proud of them, for myself, because reading them back reminds me what I figured out, if I ever start to forget. I want to do good in the world. I don't want to cause harm. I want to help people. I want to be loved for that. Maybe that's selfish, maybe it's a little childish, but it feels like the right path. It gives me a sense of purpose, and accountability to keep showing up and writing.
Why I Write the Way I Write
I don't need to hand you my deepest, darkest emotions, that stays personal. I'll share some of it, but mostly what I want to give you is the solution, how I actually worked through things you'll probably relate to. I wrote three books on addiction, and if you read them and you see your own patterns in there, you start learning a little neuroscience without needing to pass a test or perform brain surgery. The brain leaves most of us in the dark, so when we hear something brain related, nervous system, anxiety mechanisms, fight or flight, hormones, chemistry, we tend not to absorb it, it's outside our scope. But once you actually understand the mechanics, you can integrate the takeaway. Everyone knows we have a brain, that's first grade material. What I came to understand on my own, watching my own mind closely, and watching the minds of hundreds of people I've encountered over the years, is that the human condition runs in something close to a constant anxiety state. That state is an elevated heart rate, even slightly elevated. It's the release of specific hormones built for strength and alertness. And the real issue is how, even in a minor version of that state, we become easy to trigger, so when something real comes along, not imagined, not just a negative thought loop, the system's already primed.
The Dial, Zero to Ten
Think of your anxiety circuitry as a dial running zero to ten. Zero is sleep. Mind relaxed, system shut down, gone into the unknown. Sidebar, think about kids who hate going to sleep, not just fear of the dark or being away from a parent, but the idea of shutting the mind down at all. I watched this closely in my youngest daughter, trying to make sense of why she fought sleep so hard, even with her mother and me right there beside her, still tossing, turning, fidgeting, talking. I asked her once what she was scared of. She said she didn't know. I asked if she was scared of turning her mind off. She said yes. That told me everything. The mind is a mechanical machine built to think, and it thinks constantly, reviewing old tape, projecting future outcomes, running every sense that keeps us alert to the outside world, the noise, the stimulation, the traffic, the deadlines, the bills. We're bombarded from the inside by our own chemistry in any given moment, and from the outside by everything else, and that's before you even get to what's already recorded on the hard drive. What you believe about the world. What you believe about yourself. What emotions you're carrying. What's blocking you. What system of thinking keeps you from sensing the world as it's actually happening, instead of how you've been trained to interpret it.
Mapping My Own Mind
It was a rough job trying to map all of that out without writing it down, so I changed what I was writing about, and started trying to map my own mind instead. What I realized is that we're all running roughly the same structure. Different content flowing through, different thought patterns, different bodies, different memories, but the same basic framework underneath, which means there's far more similarity between us than we tend to think. I'm not the only person carrying anxiety. My real take on anxiety now is that there's no reason to feel shame about the word, it's the most universal trait among creatures with brains. The word itself might just be too small. If I had to rename it, I'd call it something closer to incredible alertness to the fact that we're alive and trying to stay that way. Where the word does earn its keep is in the context of addiction and suffering. If anxiety is normal, then regulating it ourselves should be normal too, except in humans it isn't instinctual, it's taught. So we walk around carrying loads of it without knowing how to regulate, and we go looking for distraction instead. Anything that numbs us, or makes us feel more alive. Shopping. Taking the boat out. Carving wood. Shoveling snow. Baking. Writing. Talking. A movie. A date. Reorganizing the closet, for God's sake, anything to keep from going bonkers, while the mind just keeps doing what it was built to do, after thousands of years shaped by trial and error, by societies that collapsed under bad leadership, warfare, natural disaster, starvation. The human brain has been under hyper intense stress for a very long time.
What's Actually Going On
I hope that makes the point clear. What's actually going on. How we react. What's vibrating through the nervous system, because the nervous system is nerves, spinal cord, brain stem, brain matter, lobes, neurotransmitters, neurons, skin, tongue, eyes, ears, nose, memory, and prediction. It's programming. It's habit. It's a lot of things. But one thing it is, for certain, is history, encoded in each of us, a long pattern of psychological trauma and fear passed forward. It follows us first through our parents, who were carrying their own damage while raising us, doing their best, and still leaving plenty behind, just as their parents' history followed them, and on and on. That's just life. Life is hard. Animals get snatched up by other animals constantly. Natural disasters. Lack of food. Existence is difficult for most living things, not easy, and so we've each developed our own mechanisms to cope, to regulate, and to find a deeper understanding of what regulation actually means.