it and whether I’ll want to do it again. If I go scuba diving and have a miserable time, I’m not going to go again just because I think it’s cool to go scuba diving. If I go to yoga and it makes me feel good and I think it’s good for me in terms of my health, I’m going to go every day regardless of what people think.
Much of my self-awareness has come from doing the deeper work. I’ve tried every kind of therapy imaginable. I’ve gone to workshops for relationships and for getting more in touch with the authentic self. A workshop called Sage and Warrior I did with my ex-wife was so powerful it brought us to our knees and had us crying on the floor. It wasn’t abusive, everybody was safe, but the workshop was really hard emotionally. While there, I finally experienced living in my heart and not just in my head. I’m not talking about feeling love for somebody or feeling the presence of God. In this workshop I did actually move from my head to my heart. It was like nothing I’ve ever felt from a drug, love, sex, or anything else. It was the most profound, amazing experience of my life and lasted for about three weeks and then slowly faded away.
It might have been bliss. I felt as if I didn’t filter anything through my mind. I was completely present and totally conscious, experiencing life directly through my heart. There was nothing there but me. So I do know something better is possible.
Attaining this awareness of an authentic self is about getting rid of the nonsense that doesn’t serve you and diminishes your experience of life. That is what happens in 12-Step program meetings because what goes on in those meeting rooms is authentic and real, more real than most people ever experience in their lifetimes. But it’s only the beginning.
Critical to the recovery process is realizing you aren’t a victim in any part of your life, so you shouldn’t blame anything or anyone but yourself for whatever happens in your life, be it good or bad. This is the essence of taking personal responsibility and being accountable for how you live your life.
I slip back into autopilot periodically, even when it comes to my self-awareness. Patterns and behaviors and beliefs are impressed upon us from an early age, so it’s easy to return to them sometimes. As Gandhi framed the challenge for us—and I am paraphrasing—the man who changes himself is greater than the man who conquers ten thousand armies.
THE ROAD TO CONTENTMENT
Meditation has been an important tool in my self-transformation process because it brings me back to being in the moment. If I take the time to meditate, I get to go on pause.
Mindfulness techniques are as enormously useful to those in recovery as they are for “normies” who want better tools for navigating the pressures and chaos of daily life. These techniques facilitate the constant vigilance necessary to prevent relapse. If you mindfully pause before you respond or react, you can actually get more awareness in that brief interval.
The practices of meditation and yoga keep you in the present because of their focus on the breath. Yoga in particular got me through my battle with hepatitis C. Like meditation, yoga is about shutting off the mind. The quieter my mind is, the closer I am to my authentic self.
Before starting meditation and yoga I had no idea about breath or how important it is to health and well-being. If you’re just focused on the postures, you’re missing the point. The point is breath. Breath is everything. I used to smoke cigarettes and then cigars while in recovery. I cannot believe I did that, especially because of my awareness now about the importance of breath.
When I separated from my wife and kids and went through hepatitis C treatment, my acting career melted away. No Tom Cruise for me. All of that happened in about a year, and that is when I decided to write my first book. During that time, I attended yoga classes every day, meditated, and went to 12-Step meetings. I could have gotten drunk or even killed myself, which a lot of people do during hepatitis C treatment because it makes you feel utterly hopeless. Instead, thanks to the breath practices, this difficult experience strengthened my recovery. I said to myself, Okay, this is razor’s edge. I can drink or take drugs. I can kill somebody or kill myself. But that’s not going to happen. I made a conscious decision that this would be a transforming time for me.
During that dark period in my life I wrote my memoir, Symptoms of Withdrawal. It was cathartic and changed my whole life. I came away from that experience telling people that if you want to get closer to your authentic self, write your life story. I don’t care whether you publish it or trash it. Even if you just call it journaling. If you take it on, you’re going to find out a lot of revealing things about yourself.
When growing up, if you were a people pleaser, you may never have said what you really wanted or felt and always did what everybody wanted you to do. And you probably emerged a resentful and angry person. That anger has to come out somehow, someday. You don’t have to have been an addict, of course, to be a people pleaser, or to be at the mercy of the people who socialized you. But I’m here to tell you that whether you’re an addict or not, if you don’t learn how to serve your authentic self, you’re going to feel resentful, and this will affect all of the relationships in your life.
When people don’t know themselves, they have few, if any, boundaries. They’re confused, and it’s hard for them to get any kind of clarity on anything. When you begin to set boundaries, however arbitrary they are, it gives you a foothold for making a statement about yourself. Boundary setting is a huge deal in realizing who you are. It gives you a heightened awareness of what’s possible.
If you want to discover your authentic self, it’s important for your self-growth to try a lot of different things and do so fearlessly. Also critical for self-awareness is understanding that you may have a tendency to engage in contempt before investigation. A lot of times people come into recovery with the attitude of, “Oh, I don’t like that. No, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to talk about that.” They display contempt before investigating. For example, if you want to find out what you really like to eat, you’ve got to try a bunch of different foods. You can’t just say “I don’t like Thai food” if you’ve never really tried it. You’ve got to experiment and rid yourself of contempt and fear to ever discover who you are really capable of becoming.
Are the most authentic people, the ones most true to self, also among the happiest people? Not necessarily. But I do think the most authentic folks are the most centered, the most fearless, the most accepting. But are they happy? I think a more fitting word is “content.”
Though self-awareness isn’t necessarily synonymous with happiness, I believe that contentment is a possible outgrowth of self-awareness. Today, I know contentment. Are there still things that I’m not content with and want to change? Yes. I want to feel more peaceful and be less driven. Am I going to get around to that? Yes, but meanwhile I’m content.
If you’re going down this self-exploratory path, you must accept that it’s not going to be easy. You’ve got to be constantly vigilant to avoid slipping back into old toxic patterns of behavior. Whether you are in recovery from an addiction or not, the payoff is the promise of self-realization and contentment. The promise is the real you!
Dark Nights of the Soul
KRISTEN JOHNSTON is one of the most genuinely funny people I have ever known. She lights up every conversation with her disarming wit and candor. You may remember her as the two-time Emmy Award-winning actress in 3rd Rock from the Sun and as an actress in two of the Austin Powers comedies. She also authored the addiction-recovery memoir Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster. Here is what she had to say about the authenticity that can emerge from trauma and hardship:
“I’m convinced that the only people worth knowing are those who’ve had at least one dark night of the soul . . . Recovering addicts and alcoholics sometimes
