Starting up the blog again

Hello dear reader. I have decided to start up this blog again after coming across it randomly while surfing around on the web last night. I realized that it is good not only for organizing my current thoughts and ideas, but also as a reference point for me to look back on when I'm older. It's fascinating to read what I wrote several years ago and see how much I have changed and which traits resonate with my current self. One thing that doesn't really appeal to me about the writing on this blog so far is my tendency to launch into little explications of Buddhist philosophy in a way that, looking at it now, doesn't seem totally authentic or genuine. I admire many of the thoughts my former self has recorded here, but much of the Buddhist overlay seems artificial, more like the recounting of dogma then genuine sharing of experience. I still consider myself Buddhist, and I do want the revamped blog to be a venue for me to talk about my experiences and struggles in this area of my life, but I aspire to make this more genuine and try to lay my soul bare to all including myself. Encountering life issues and responding with mini-sermons (to whom exactly?) is not a good way of dealing with the rawness of life.

The other main theme of this blog has been my struggle with addiction to alcohol. Reading over my posts, this seems to be a place where I have been able to genuinely open myself up in a healthy and sustaining way. Since I stopped posting in the blog, I started and stopped drinking a few times. It was an ongoing process. At times I felt like things were okay and at times I felt miserable and desperate to quit. After one serious incident I asked a Buddhist teacher who is a friend and mentor to me for advice on Buddhist techniques for dealing with alcoholism. He responded by mentioning Genyen vows, which are vows lay practitioners can take. Most of these (there are five) are relatively straightforward, like not killing, but the one that was of most interest to me was the vow to not imbibe intoxicants. At that point, I decided I wanted to take the vows. I asked my guru for the vows, and twice he was not able to give them to me, and actually in the mean time I started drinking again. However, during a retreat at the monastery, while deep in the middle of a spell of meditative clarity, I gave birth to the renewed idea that I wanted to take the vows. While in this state of clarity, I examined the idea and saw no negatives, and I asked Rinpoche for the vows within a state of mind where I had absolutely no reservations. I have been sober now since April 2013, and it is a very different kind of sobriety than what I had experienced previously. It is almost effortless, and I think is part of the blessing of the vows and of Rinpoche.

 This is not to say that my life has been effortless or that I have not experienced problems. In fact, I have been wrestling with significant problems, such as a kind of pervasive ennui, but they aren't related to drinking at all. Or rather, my drinking may have been a form of self-medication, and now that it is no longer there, raw problems emerge from my psyche that need processing. In future posts I will surely touch on what has happened to me over the past several years and some of the journeys that I went on and some of the issues that I currently face. However, I don't want to tackle everything all at once right after restarting my blogging, so I think I'll leave it at that for now. I actually have no idea if anyone will be reading this. I had about five readers when this blog was formerly live, most of whom were family members. Even if the number is zero, I still think these posts will be beneficial to me.