{"id":120215,"date":"2018-01-30T18:30:23","date_gmt":"2018-01-31T02:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=120215"},"modified":"2019-06-23T15:58:01","modified_gmt":"2019-06-23T23:58:01","slug":"where-do-you-get-your-power-from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=120215","title":{"rendered":"Where Do You Get Your Power?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/zUzcY-zn56A\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve had a lot of good ideas over the course of my life. I&#8217;ve had grand visions. I&#8217;ve had big dreams. But when I started to do the things I had to do to make my dreams come true, I often found that I was short of power. <\/p>\n<p>I noticed in high school that I kept taking courses that were expressly named for the year below me (as a Junior, for example, I would take Sophomore Literature). I just wasn&#8217;t planning and executing right and I kept feeling behind. I think that started when I first entered school &#8212; second grade, at age eight. The other kids had been in school for years and were better socialized than me.<\/p>\n<p>As I stumbled along, I found things that gave me fleeting power. I loved reading books. I loved dreaming dreams. I loved blissing out. I loved checking out into my fantasy world. <\/p>\n<p>I took up jogging, eventually completing five marathons at age 12. Occasionally, I&#8217;d get an endorphin high and the miles would rush by and I&#8217;d feel strong and powerful. I knew I could conquer the world.<\/p>\n<p>At times, I&#8217;ve been attractive to women, and my power came from my hold over them. At times, I&#8217;ve been on TV and in newspapers and on magazine covers, and that gave me a temporary boost.<\/p>\n<p>When I fell in love with Judaism at age 23, that powered me, on and off, for decades. I was joining God&#8217;s Chosen People! Finally, I had made it. <\/p>\n<p>I moved to Los Angeles in March of 1994 and I loved my new city. I had dreamed for at least 15 years of living here and the beauty of the women and the beauty of the climate gave me inklings of power. I told myself that the whole world wanted to live in LA but I had pulled it off.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve had a gift for making and maintaining friendships and these connections gave me power. I knew I often lacked commonsense and so when I could take guidance from the wise, my life ran smoother. At times, families would adopt me and I&#8217;d feel connected and whole. <\/p>\n<p>I spent ten years in psycho-therapy and the clarity I gained and the tools I was given empowered me. yet my life didn&#8217;t substantially improve. I kept finding intermittent hits of power, but nothing worked for long. I came to age 44 and my life wasn&#8217;t working and so I started going to 12-Step programs and I tapped into the power that comes from a genuine relationship with one&#8217;s Creator, the power that comes from taking a fearless moral inventory and taking responsibility for the harms I&#8217;ve done others and taking steps to right my wrongs and as I faced up to who I was, &#8216;fessed up to what I had done, stepped up to clean my side of the street, then my life started motoring.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to working the 12 Steps, going to meetings, making and receiving outreach calls, and being of service to others, I found tremendous power from this one 5:30 a.m. phone meeting that for 18 months I let sponsor me (as real sponsors were hard to come by in this program). Every meeting I&#8217;d come away with one or two insights to put into practice that day, or to journal on that night, but it wasn&#8217;t primarily the information conveyed in the meeting that powered me, it was the vibration that came from listening to strong clear people share their individual messages of recovery. They&#8217;d allude to a little bit of the mess but their focus was on the message. It wasn&#8217;t the words they said that primarily moved me, it was the power behind their words that pushed me along. It was a power greater than them, greater than the group, it was the Power and by listening on the phone, I got a charge that would often last all day. <\/p>\n<p>Here are things that give me power:<\/p>\n<p>* Specificity<br \/>\n* Accuracy<br \/>\n* Planning<br \/>\n* Goals<br \/>\n* Race, blood and soil<br \/>\n* Religion<br \/>\n* Community<br \/>\n* Friends<br \/>\n* Accountability<br \/>\n* Exercise<br \/>\n* Meditation<br \/>\n* Alexander Technique<br \/>\n* Knowledge<br \/>\n* Mastery<br \/>\n* Family<br \/>\n* God<br \/>\n* Cleanliness<br \/>\n* Organization<br \/>\n* Inspiration<br \/>\n* Music<br \/>\n* Literature<br \/>\n* Art<br \/>\n* Service<\/p>\n<p>Here are things that drain my power:<\/p>\n<p>* Fuzziness<br \/>\n* Losers<br \/>\n* Ignorance<br \/>\n* Numbing out<\/p>\n<p>Plenty of people who want into my life are downers. The more I interact with them, the worse I feel, and it doesn&#8217;t really matter how many limits I set or how honest I am about what they&#8217;re doing to bring me down. Plenty of people will just suck the life out of me if I let them, so I have to build walls to keep them away. At times, I have to be cold and brusque. I&#8217;ve tried to be of service countless times to these lost souls and it has always been useless. It&#8217;s apparently done them no good and me great harm. <\/p>\n<p>As I progress in my recovery, people are less mysterious. I find that if I am doing my 12-Step work and other people confuse me, it is because they are trying to con me (consciously or unconsciously) and so I need to keep my distance from them. As I recover from my emotional addictions, I find it easier to speak up when other people invade my boundaries. As I grow up, I take steps to preserve my sanity and my power and I stop letting sickos drain me. I have to have power, man, and now I know where I can get it. Information can be powerful, but power isn&#8217;t purely informational. It&#8217;s not purely rational. It comes from the great beyond. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve had a lot of good ideas over the course of my life. I&#8217;ve had grand visions. I&#8217;ve had big dreams. But when I started to do the things I had to do to make my dreams come true, I &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=120215\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26369,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-addiction","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=120215"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":128069,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120215\/revisions\/128069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=120215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=120215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=120215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}