Russell Brand Recovery Quotes

The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope.

Amy [Winehouse] increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that YouTube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions, or death.

We have been taught that freedom is the freedom to pursue our petty, trivial desires. Real freedom is freedom from our petty, trivial desires.

I have no power at all over people, places and things, and if I ever for a moment mistakenly believe that I do, and act as if I do, pain is on its way.

Addiction is when natural biological imperatives, like the need for food, sex, relaxation or status, become prioritised to the point of destructiveness. It is exacerbated by a culture that understandably exploits this mechanic as it's a damn good way to sell Mars bars and Toyotas.

You can never quench your spiritual craving through material means.

The instinct that drives compulsion is universal. It is an attempt to solve the problem of disconnection, alienation, tepid despair... the problem is ultimately 'being human' in an environment that is curiously ill-equipped to deal with the challenges that entails.

We crave connection, but so much of the time we are not alive, neutralized. Who are you when you’re listening to the radio in traffic? You are not you, you are on standby. Mostly we are free-floating and disengaged, lost in the spectacle.

If we all feel that we are alone, how alone are we?

You need only allow gentle hope to enter your heart. Exhale and allow hope, and give yourself some time. This is a process of change that requires a good deal of self-compassion, which is neither stagnant nor permissive. We can just start by being a little kinder to ourselves and open to the possibility that life doesn’t have to be bloody awful.

Sell me phones and food and prejudice, low cost and low values, low-frequency thinking. We are in a cult by default. We just can’t see it because its boundaries lie beyond our horizons.

What was so painful about Amy’s death is that I know that there is something I could have done. I could have passed on to her the solution that was freely given to me. Don’t pick up a drink or drug, one day at a time. It sounds so simple; it actually is simple but it isn’t easy; it requires incredible support and fastidious structuring.

there is no freedom without forgiveness.

Spurred by Amy’s death I’ve tried to salvage unwilling victims from the mayhem of the internal storm and am always, always just pulled inside myself.

Yes, people made mistakes but that’s what humans do and I am under no obligation to hoard these errors and allow them to clutter my perception of the present.

Part of that change is forgiveness and the willingness to look at our lives and the world differently. Ask yourself ‘Do I really want to change or do I just want to justify staying the way that I am?

Change is hard, that’s why we can’t do it alone and why it is vital that we have a foundation of hope.

A theist is a person who has seen through the material and mechanical world and doesn’t commit suicide’.

A counsellor at the treatment centre where I got clean, herself a woman in recovery, surprised me when she said, ‘How clever of you to find drugs. Well done, you found a way to keep yourself alive.’ This made me feel quite tearful. I suppose because this woman, Jackie, didn’t judge me or tell me I was stupid or tubthumpingly declare that ‘drugs kill’. No, she told me that I had done well by finding something that made being me bearable… To be acknowledged as a person who was in pain and fighting to survive in my own muddled-up and misguided way made me feel optimistic and understood. It is an example of the compassion addicts need from one another in order to change.

The condition in extreme is identifiable but the less obvious version of addiction is still painful and arguably worse because we simply adapt to living in pain.

I cannot control the past but I can control the present through forgiveness.

A pain in the leg means ‘don’t put pressure on this leg’; a pain in the mind means ‘change the way you live’.

I live in negotiation with a shadow side that has to be respected.

stop justifying our story. We stop clinging to the past. We recognize that if we want to go forward we will need to change.

Plus how much time have I given over to watching TV or staring out of windows or pursuing pointless relationships or looking at my Twitter mentions? Those hours all add up and are sadly deducted from the overall life total. They are not a break from life, these ‘harmless’ distractions, they are life. They are life and they are death.

What is a belief really? A thought, in your mind, that you like having. If you like having it, it must be of benefit, it either improves your life or helps you to rationalize how bad your life is. I can’t think of another reason to have a belief.

Me and the plan just need a bit more time’, I used to think, a bit more time and a bottle of wine, a bit more time and one more pipe, a bit more time and a slice of cake, a bit more time and a threesome, for luck.

The feeling you have that 'there's something else' is real. What happens when you don't follow the compulsion? What is on the other side of my need [...]? The only way to find out is to not do it, and that is a novel act of faith.

In a sense we re-write our past. We change our narrative. We reprogram ourselves. There is no objective history, this we know, only stories. Our character is the result of this story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the process of inventorying breaks down the hidden and destructive personal grammar that we have unwittingly allowed to govern our behaviour.

It is commonly understood that the opposite of addiction is connection. That in our addictive behaviours we are trying to achieve the connection. Think of it: the bliss of a hit or a drink or of sex or of gambling or eating, all legitimate drives gone awry, all a reach across the abyss, the separateness of ‘self’, all an attempt to redress this disconnect.

now believe addiction to be a calling. A blessing. I now hear a rhythm behind the beat, behind the scratching discordant sound of my constant thinking. A true pulse behind the bombastic thud of the ego drum. There, in the silence, the offbeat presence of another thing.

This is an invitation to change. This is complicated only in that most of us are quite divided, usually part of us wants to change a negative and punishing behaviour, whereas another part wants to hold on to it. For me Recovery is a journey from a lack of awareness to awareness. Let

Even having identified Lust as a ‘defect’, a negative and problematic trait, we don’t automatically discard it. ‘Lust is natural, I’m entitled to lust, if she had sex more I wouldn’t look at porn’, all these justifications are obstacles to change. In justifying our misery we recommit to it.

That’s why we call this process Recovery; we recover the ‘you’ that you were meant to be.

Crisis is almost a blessing providing cessation of a kind, and with it, the opportunity for change.

Most people in the West belong to a popular cult of individualism and materialism where the pursuit of our trivial, petty desires is a daily ritual.

This manual for Self-Realization comes not from the mountain but from the mud. Being human is a ‘me too’ business. We are all in the mud together.

Consumerism and materialism are creating a culture of addiction. We are all on the scale somewhere because we are kept there by the age we live in.

Being human is a ‘me too’ business. We are all in the mud together

Whatever I endure in recovery, I need never again suffer the indignity of active addiction. The despair and hopelessness. The inexhaustible cycle of incremental self-immolation. I am reminded of how far I’ve come, of the miracle that, with help and humility, I can, one day at a time, live free from drugs and alcohol.

We live in a society in which we all, as individuals and as nations, compete for resources. We are told this is nature’s way. My nature cannot long abide it. I become too lonely, locked within my skin.

Behind our damaged perceptions there is usually a fear that pertains to a core belief. This core belief is a key line in the code of our personal misery: if we expose, address and alter it, we can be free.

I don’t wake up in the morning and think, ‘Wow, I’m on a planet in the Milky Way, in infinite space, bestowed with the gift of consciousness, which I did not give myself, with the gift of language, with lungs that breathe and a heart that beats, none of which I gave myself, with no concrete understanding of the Great Mysteries, knowing only that I was born and will die and nothing of what’s on either side of this brief material and individualized glitch in the limitless expanse of eternity and, I feel, I feel love and pain and I have senses, what a glorious gift! I can relate, and create and serve others or I can lose myself in sensuality and pleasure. What a phenomenal mystery!’ Most days I just wake up feeling a bit anxious and plod a solemn, narrow path of survival, coping. ‘I’ll have a coffee’, ‘I’ll try not to reach for my phone as soon as I stir, simpering and begging like a bad dog at a table for some digital tidbit, some morsel of approval, a text, that’ll do

Limitless consciousness, source of all light and love, please lay aside for me doubt and prejudice and give me willingness to believe that you can solve this problem, too, the way you have solved other problems.

the material world is an illusion and its treasures all too temporal. That doesn’t mean you have to live as a monk, although that is one way out of it, it just means you can never quench your spiritual craving through material means. Gratitude for where you are and what you have is one important coordinate for retuning our consciousness. Similarly acceptance.

I believe that what the 12 Steps and their encompassing philosophy, which I will lay out for you in these pages, will provide is nothing less than a solution to the dissatisfaction of living, and dying, to anyone with the balls to do the work. And it is work. Indeed it is a personal rebirth and the journey entails all manner of uncomfortable confrontations with who you truly are.

The very idea that you can somehow make your life alright by attaining primitive material goals – whether it’s getting the ideal relationship, the ideal job, a beautiful Berber rug or forty quids’ worth of smack – the underlying idea, ‘if I could just get X, Y, Z, I would be okay’, is consistent and it is quite wrong.

I always felt I was rather too clever for something like a ‘program for living’, certainly one that had any religious overtones. It’s not that I thought that religion was ‘the opiate of the masses’, if it was, I would’ve had some, I loved opium. It’s that I thought it was dumb. Drab, dry, dumb, shouty, hysterical, dumb. Small-town dumb. Foreign dumb.

Divine Power, Supreme Truth, love within and without, guide me to a new way of being. Help me to put aside all previous thoughts and prejudices that I may be open to a “New Way”. I ask the creative power deep within me to guide me towards the person I was always meant to be, to seek out relationships and experiences that will move me closer to this Truth.

Don’t make excuses for your behaviour’ and ‘Let them speak’ would’ve made a world of difference.

Because I have a program of recovery I recognize that I must when in crisis: 1. Acknowledge it. 2. Believe it could improve. 3. Ask for help.

This is complicated only in that most of us are quite divided, usually part of us wants to change a negative and punishing behaviour, whereas another part wants to hold on to it.

later examination of these principles revealed that self-centred, egotistical thinking is the defining attribute of the addictive condition.

Are there things about yourself which you have never told anyone? Way back upon the creaky floors of your childhood, in your solitude, the shadows of your private mind, the things you’ve done and said and thought that compound and contain you: shameful things, sexual things, often solitary acts, but sometimes not, sometimes agonizing stabs of cruelty you’ve inflicted on people you love, or the moments where reality itself seemed to tear as they looked into your eyes and told you ‘you are nothing’. And for a moment you stand there adjusting to the pain, the pain that someone could say that to you, and what that must mean about who you are.

The unmanageability at its heart means that there is a beast in me. It is in me still. I live in negotiation with a shadow side that has to be respected. There is a wound. I believe that this is more than a characteristic of addiction. I think it is a part of being human, to carry a wound, a flaw and again, paradoxically, it is only by accepting it that we can progress.

Porn is a clear example of how our culture is feeding the disease of addiction. The natural impulse to have sex becomes a compulsion to masturbate. The attraction to connect is culturally translated by pornography into a numb and lonely staring strum at broken digital ghosts. The most physically creative thing we have, reduced to a dumb shuffle that’d embarrass a monkey.

If you’re chugging through life in a job you kind of dislike, a relationship that you are detached from, eating to cope, staring at Facebook, smoking and fruitlessly fantasizing, you can sit glumly on that conveyor belt of unconscious discontent until it deposits you in your grave.

I learned that I had no need to feel ashamed, that I could make amends for the wrongs I had done, that I could address the fear I had always fled, that I could re-evaluate my feelings of worthlessness.

A theist is a person who has seen through the material and mechanical world and doesn’t commit suicide’. I like this quote. To see that it is all bullshit and not to clock off, that requires faith. Only faith will do. Only faith. Even if you’re double certain that there is nothing but space and dumb molecules out there, clattering about into symphonic and faraway futures, if you believe that’s all there is and don’t check out, you are hardcore. You must really love football or fucking or money or something and be okay with those things being only what they explicitly are, without implicit power, with no unravelling flag blowing behind them in limitless wind, back to before some unknowable moment of creation when this universe’s heart first began to beat.

knowing only that I was born and will die and nothing of what’s on either side of this brief material and individualized glitch in the limitless expanse of eternity and, I feel, I feel love and pain and I have senses, what a glorious gift!

Step 1 invites us to admit that we are using some external thing, a relationship, a drug or a behaviour as the ‘power’ that makes our life liveable. It asks if this technique is making our life difficult. By admitting we are ‘powerless’ over whatever it is, we are saying we need a new power, that this current source of power is more trouble than it’s worth.

Here is a postcard from the other side: fame, luxury items and glamour are not real and cannot solve you, whether it’s a pair of shoes, a stream of orgies, a movie career or global adulation. They are just passing clouds of imaginary pleasure.

Making a decision to ‘turn your life and your will over’ means you have acknowledged that your previous attempts to run your own life have failed. That you have had to resort to addictive behaviour to cope and now you cannot stop on your own steam. In making a decision we are conceding mentally and, hopefully, spiritually that we cannot do this alone anymore. That for me was the beginning of humility. To say ‘I need help’ is not an easy thing for many people, we’d prefer to manipulate people into meeting our needs or struggle along without them.

fetishization:

The woman knows how to play and how to be in the moment and what fucking relief there is in that.

am able to alleviate fear through prayer and meditation, the continuing knowledge that my life is not just my engagement with external phenomena.

buy a book on healthy eating or meditation and that’ll be enough, I will use the social tool of ‘consumerism’ to satiate a need and leave the matter there.

The reason I continue to is because they have awakened me to the impossibility of happiness based on my previous world view: that I am the centre of the world and that what I want is important.

That I am just another human being dealing with life. If we all feel that we are alone, how alone are we? If we all feel worthless then who is the currency of our worth being measured against? Perhaps this program is a personal and social tool that illuminates the truth that religious people have long known and physicists have proven: all the energy that has ever existed has always existed and will always exist. Form and separation are temporary. We are all one.

Wow, I’m on a planet in the Milky Way, in infinite space, bestowed with the gift of consciousness, which I did not give myself, with the gift of language, with lungs that breathe and a heart that beats, none of which I gave myself, with no concrete understanding of the Great Mysteries, knowing only that I was born and will die and nothing of what’s on either side of this brief material and individualized glitch in the limitless expanse of eternity and, I feel, I feel love and pain and I have senses, what a glorious gift!

There is humility in confession. A recognition of flaws. To hear myself say out loud these shameful secrets meant I acknowledged my flaws. I also for the first time was given the opportunity to contextualize anew the catalogue of beliefs and prejudices, simply by exposing them to another, for the first time hearing the words ‘Yes, but have you looked at it this way?’ This was a helpful step in gaining a new perspective on my past, and my past was a significant proportion of who I believed myself to be. It felt like I had hacked into my own past. Unravelled all the erroneous and poisonous information I had unconsciously lived with and lived by and with necessary witness, the accompaniment of another man, reset the beliefs I had formed as a child and left unamended through unnecessary fear. Suddenly my fraught and freighted childhood became reasonable and soothed. ‘My mum was doing her best, so was my dad.’ Yes, people made mistakes but that’s what humans do, and I am under no obligation to hoard these errors and allow them to clutter my perception of the present. Yes, it is wrong that I was abused as a child but there is no reason for me to relive it, consciously or unconsciously, in the way I conduct my adult relationships. My perceptions of reality, even my own memories, are not objective or absolute, they are a biased account and they can be altered. It is possible to reprogram your mind. Not alone, because a tendency, a habit, an addiction will always reassert by its own invisible momentum, like a tide. With this program, with the support of others, and with this mysterious power, this new ability to change, we achieve a new perspective, and a new life.

The cult that told me that I’m not enough, that I need to be famous to be of value, that I need to have money to live a worthwhile life, that I should affiliate, associate and identify on the basis of colour and class, that my role in life is to consume, that I was to live in a darkness only occasionally lit up by billboards and screens, always framing the smiling face of someone trying to sell me something. Sell me phones and food and prejudice, low cost and low values, low-frequency thinking. We are in a cult by default. We just can’t see it because its boundaries lie beyond our horizons.

Are there things about yourself which you have never told anyone? Way back upon the creaky floors of your childhood, in your solitude, the shadows of your private mind, the things you’ve done and said and thought that compound and contain you: shameful things, sexual things, often solitary acts, but sometimes not, sometimes agonizing stabs of cruelty you’ve inflicted on people you love, or the moments where reality itself seemed to tear as they looked into your eyes and told you ‘you are nothing’. And for a moment you stand there adjusting to the pain, the pain that someone could say that to you, and what that must mean about who you are. Or what it means to be cruel, to have hurt someone, to feel the cords of love that bind, split and flail and to fall away, into yourself, engulfed but absolutely alone. And you do what humans do: you accept and you adapt. You build the pain into the story of who you are until it isn’t pain anymore, it’s just another piece of who you are.

A life of bucolic wonder can become Apocalypse Now inside my mind. Even in my idyllic life with my dog Bear. Bear is enthusiasm with claws. We have a rowboat and I heap Bear in. The river is so alive with light and dark. On the surface light dances like spilt heaven and if you put your feet in, the sludge and slime feels like the ooze that we crawled out of. The whole spectrum is there, the river is the whole road, the beginning, the end, ever changing, ever present.

I regularly keep the company of other recovering drunks and addicts, as I learn a lot from those with more time clean than me and more still from those with less. People with more time tell me how they continue to cope with an external world that will not submit to their imagined demands and an ego that is defined by its insatiability, this restless demon that forever wants more, that lingers like a tapeworm at the gateway to the soul, devouring and rejecting according to its needs. From those that stagger in with fumes on their breath, stains on their teeth, and fear in their eyes, I learn the most important lesson, gratitude. Whatever I endure in recovery, I need never again suffer the indignity of active addiction. The despair and hopelessness. The inexhaustible cycle of incremental self-immolation. I am reminded of how far I’ve come, of the miracle that, with help and humility, I can, one day at a time, live free from drugs and alcohol.

As a man in recovery I must remain in serenity, clean and serene; I’ve spent enough time jazzed, wired, buzzing, and gouching. Serenity is the first thing people with addiction issues are instructed to request: God, grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference. Junkies and alkies and bulimics and gamblers and sex addicts and love addicts and people who can’t stop shopping, smoking, loving, fighting—whatever it is, there’s someone out there who’s doing too much of it—and for those people there’s a solution and sanctuary, and in those places of sanctuary, this prayer is recited. The first thing is serenity. The agitation has to end. The itchy irritability, the restlessness, the wanting. So do the lows, the self-loathing, wretched, heavy-hearted, lead-gutted, teary-eyed, dry-mouthed misery. The pain. So do the highs. The wide-eyed, bilious highs, the cheek-chewing, trouble-brewing highs, the never-stopping-till-I-touch-the-sky highs, the up-at-dawn hitting-the-pipe highs, chasing, defacing, heart-racing highs, gagging, shagging, blagging highs. All the things we do to change the way we feel, the way the world looks and tastes: It’s all got to go. So courage is necessary. Courage to change yourself, the one thing you can change. Your attitude and actions. Neither the serenity nor the courage are available to you on your own; if they were, you would’ve found them by now—you’ve been pretty fastidious in your research. God, however you conceptualize him, will have to grant them to you. And whatever you conceptualize God as, with your human mind, your individual brain, made up of instinctive responses, training, and memories, however you conceptualize a power that’s beyond you and the decisions you’ve made so far, your conception will be extremely limited. Likely as limited as my cat’s conception of the Internet. The invisible network of interconnected portals that communicate data are beyond my cat’s comprehension. My cat’s inability to comprehend does not impede the Internet. The World Wide Web (which is incidentally quicker to say than “double-you, double-you, double-you-dot”) will continue to exist, regardless of my cat’s awareness. Pray, then, for wisdom, wisdom to know the difference between things we can change and things we can’t. Likely this will be a lifetime’s work, undertaken one day at a time. Which, for humans, is the way time happens