The House that Sober Built

Hello Sobertown,

Our minds eye is an interesting thing. You can visualise anything. Try this, picture a bottle of alcohol, perhaps one you may have turned to in the past, picture it growing horns and little stumpy arms and holding a pitch fork, picture a devilish face growing out of the bottle, let your mind go wherever it goes with this, turn that bottle into a living, breathing demon bottle bastard running around causing havoc. Picture it chasing you around with its pissy little pitch fork trying to jab you in the ankle, hear its high pitched laugh as it chases you around. Picture yourself getting angry, really raging and grabbing a bat or a golf club (you choose) turning around and swinging away, smash! Exploding that little devil bottle all over the pavement with a satisfying connection and shattering everywhere.

You just ran a nice little short film in your mind. Probably while reading along too. Although you followed my words, what you actually visualised was unique to you and it would have followed only the main points before being morphed into your own version of the film. Nobody will ever see those images or be able to appreciate them in the exact manner you saw them. This inability for others to truly see what we see internally can be difficult, at times many of us wish we could simply cast our thoughts or visions outwardly to show others, rather than mashing them into the best string of words we ca find to be representative of our visions or thoughts or whatever is erupting at the time allowing for further distortion or sometimes a distinct reversal of what we were attempting to convey. Depending of course on your craftiness with the written word.

Within each of us we hold that which is dear to us within our very bodies, within our mind as real as we could reach out and touch them. Our passion unable to be felt by others but through our best attempt with the written word or visual media. We can see our loved ones faces fill the space behind our visual field, we hear their laughs and see their faces smile, we smell them, we feel them. We see our homes and our loved possessions, placed in our mind, perhaps even when we no longer own them or when our loved ones have departed this place, they reside within our body as a fictitious object or an entity, almost as real as the material object or the living, breathing person and often having no less emotional or visceral effect on us for being ‘pretend’.

When we reinvent ourselves as sober beings, we begin building. Brick by brick. Room by room.

We build a new home.

We build the home of sobriety and the longer we travel the sober path, the more we invest in the journey and more maintainence we do on this home, the sturdier it becomes and the more beutiful its contents grow to be.

This home might resemble your own real home, or perhaps it is something completely unique existing only within your own mind.

We fill this home with all of the beautiful things. We visit this home in our minds eye and we walk around it, feeling fabrics, greeting loved ones, appreciating possessions and feeling its warmth.

Walking around a home that sober built is what I consider a very real and helpful form of meditation in my life.

I am unsure if anybody else uses precisely this tool, but as with most things, I would be silly to presume nobody else does.

In my mind I have been building a home, for the past 11 months and this home has formed into a strong, tidy and well kept structure in my minds eye. My sober home resembles my home in my real life, this is where I love and feel safe. Once built, my sober home was initially empty. As time goes by I add to my home. I furnish the rooms and I see my most beloved people and possessions. I close my eyes and I walk around my sober home, my sober home is not as my real home is, not inside anyway. I walk through the door and I see my wife smiling at me with a warm cup of coffee in her dressing gown. I see my beautiful daughter giggling and putting her doll in its little high chair, saying hello daddy as I enter the room. I smell beautiful food cooking in the kitchen. Outside is cool and I feel the warm heat inside. I see the yard in all its green glory out the back, my pets running around happily outside, I see pets some past and some present. I walk to the back and look at my bikes, my beloved bikes, my tools of recovery, happiness and power. I see my bed, my warm inviting bed with my favourite books piled up on the bedside table with my earplugs and my glasses, all representing beautiful healing sleep. I see pictures on the walls, they are alive and show moving images of the incredible trips we have taken and memories we have created, not like a TV but like a swimming motion film that could be touched and felt viscerally. My sober home grows as new and positive things and people come into my life. My struggles, at least for the time I tread through my sober home are locked away, behind the fence unable to get in as though an invisible barrier will not let them even close to the house. My friends and some of you in Sobertown are walking by or leaning on the front fence ready for a chat. I return to my sober home in my mind and I feel its warmth and love, as I move through it in my mind, I black out all other thought I possibly can, this is easy some days, this is difficult on others, but either way I return to it most days and I add to it when I feel I am ready. This is one of my personal forms of meditation. This home has no place for alcohol or hangovers or pain, this home has no place for suffering, this is where I come to appreciate what I have and to revisit what it is I have worked for in sobriety. Some days, this home must simply sit in the back of my mind as I battle what needs to be battled on tougher days, but it will be there, ready to walk though when I am calm and ready. The contents of this home often come into existence gradually, some objects in this home might fade and then solidify depending on their importance on that day or week, the beauty of this home is that it is fluid and it changes day to day to reflect my mind at that time. This is ok, because it represents what I feel it needs to in that day. It represents that which I feel positive about, that which I feel helps me in my journey, that which I feel true passion for. You can get lost in your home and sometimes that is just what is needed.

Picture your home. Walk up to the front door, open it, walk into the first room in the house. Look around. See how incredibly distinctly you can picture these spaces? You can build and fill these spaces in whichever you you wish to. You can live in this place filled with positivity and revisit this place as often as you can muster the positive energy to do so.

If you close your eyes and you have trouble forming your rooms, or you are not yet sure where your passion truly lies. That’s ok, grab some paper, write down some points, write a list of goals, things you desire, people you love, possessions you treasure or desire, tools that help you in this journey. Close your eyes and picture these, place them around your home. If they fit, they fit. If they don’t quite go, let them fade. This is your home. Fill it with anything you know you love, you know you hold dear and you know help you move forward in life. If you have trouble filling the space on any given day, just take one single thing you love and focus on it alone, lie on your sober home bed and relax, take a deep breath in your mind as well as in real life. You don’t need a jumble or abundance of items filling your home every day, one positive item is enough if that is what comes to your mind.

I will defer to the beautiful words of Ken Follett as he writes about his character Ned Willard toward the end of the final book in his epic Pillars of the Earth saga, A Column of Fire, these words moved me.

“He did not look down at his book. He was happy with his thoughts. They were often enough for him, nowadays. His mind was like a house he had spent his life furnishing. It’s tables and beds were the songs he could sing, the plays he had watched, the cathedrals he had seen and the books he had read”. “He shared this notional house with his family, alive and dead”. “There were guest rooms for important visitors.” “His enemies were there too.” “Although they were locked in the cellar, for they could do him no more harm.” “The pictures on the walls were of the times he had been brave, or clever, or kind. They made the house a happy place. And the bad things he had done, the lies he had told, and the people he had betrayed and the times he had been cowardly, were scrawled in ugly letters in the outhouse. His memory formed the library of the house. He could pick out any volume and instantly be transported to another place and time.” “Strangely, the character of Ned that lived in those stories did not remain the same. It seemed to him sometimes that quite a different person had learned Latin, someone else had fallen under the spell of young princess Elizabeth, another character had stabbed a man with no nose in the graveyard of the church of St-Julien-le-Pauvre, and yet another had watched the fireships scatter the galleons off Callais. But of course they were all just different versions of himself, the owner of the house. And one day soon the place would fall down, as old buildings did, and then, quite quickly, it would all turn to dust.” (1)

Our past is our past, when we turn a corner we can look back upon the past as though we were a previous version of ourselves. We do not need to attach to this person or believe we can not separate from this person, just appreciate that although this was us, it was another version of us, as though in a different dimension, but they can not be erased, nor should be, they are them and we are now who we are. We are growing and as we grow, we build ourselves a sober home, we furnish it, we fill it, we feel safe in it and it does not exist in our life prior to leaving alcohol behind. We create beauty and positivity in this home and we visit it when and only when we are ready to embrace these thoughts and roll around in them.

My sober home changes, some days it has rooms assigned to different topics, fitness in one room, library in another and so on. Some days my sober home is more of a mish mash all mixed into various rooms together, it does what my mind does to it on the day. As long as I reserve this home for entry only to good thoughts and emotions then its contents placement mean little, my mind melds the rooms as it pleases. There may be a big hole hidden in the yard or maybe a cellar or side room reserved for the bad things, if negative thoughts come in to your mind and you need to clear them to roam the sober home as it was intended, visualise these negativities whatever they may be, visualise them and drag their ass to the cellar, lock them up and leave them there without another thought.

You may see this as wanky or nonsense, I would have too a few years ago, but how we can change. Wanky or not, this is what I now do, visualising and growing my sober home and using this place as a form of meditation. I no longer care what anybody thinks. Articles such as this represent my truth and this helps me. My hope is that it might help another or even multiple others. Perhaps you can build and visualise your sober home too?

So, maybe its time for some renovations?

Build on Sobertown.

Todd Crafter (Sobertown Resident)

AHPRA Registered Chiropractor/FA Registered Trainer

BAppSc(human movement), BHSc(chiro), MClinChiro

REFERENCE

Ken Follett: 2017. A Column of Fire. Penguin Books. Pg 745-748.

To contact the author please email soberaustralia@gmail.com

The Sobertown Blog articles and recordings are created as a means of assisting others in achieving and maintaining sobriety and freedom from alcohol. Experiences, entries, research and article content are that of the author and should be applied in a safe manner deemed best by the reader and applied safely, if relevant, with medical oversight. This is not medical advice and the author is not a medical doctor. No advice within is based on or crosses over with the authors profession or professional opinion as an AHPRA registered allied health practitioner or FA registered exercise professional.