We all have inner demons to fight.
A few years ago, I had a revelation that would change my life completely.
Everything you want to be is behind everything you are lazy or don’t want to do.
Back then, my soul was darker than oil.
My life consisted of smoking and drinking like the characters in Westerns (half a bottle of cheap whiskey a day and no less than 60 Luckie Strikes) and eating like latter-day Elvis (disturbing amounts of carbohydrates day and night).
Everything about me was excessive. I was practically addicted to everything (sex, too).
I have already said it, sometimes, but I could have been, ideally, Victor Mancini, the protagonist of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Choke.
In short, I was f*cked up.
I just knew I wanted to change. But I didn’t have the resources to go to therapy.
When I hit rock bottom, I didn’t even have enough money to buy a small Starbucks frappuccino.
What I did
I had the typical crazy stoner thought.
It occurred to me that if I had a Catholic moral system installed in my head since I went to school as a child, maybe that moral system would act like an antivirus program in my mind’s computer and clean out all the Trojans that lived there.
Long story short: it worked.
And I discovered that 2000 years of Christian thinkers who invented, among other things, the modern university may have something wise to teach you.
So, I saw the teachings of this spiritual tradition as if they were archaic technology, a kind of primitive psychoanalysis. I did the so-called spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Lollola and started to purge all my shit.
I should have done it with the faith of a devout Christian. But I didn’t.
I did it like someone who goes to a healer to have his aura cleansed or the evil eye removed with tobacco smoke and spitting rum at the spirits.
In other words, I did it like a mundane person who does what he is told, even if it seems like bullshit.
And it worked.
In particular, a meditation in which you had to visualize the worst of your sins committed against someone and put the face of Jesus on it (it is also possible to put the face of your mother or someone you love very much).
After doing this, I felt so disgusted with my past life that I started to change.
It was like rubbing hot chili pepper on my nails to stop biting them.
The domino effect
After that, I started trying to limit my smoking, my excessive food intake, and stop consuming porn.
Little by little, this attitude interrupted the cycle of self-destruction.
One sin leads to another, like dominoes falling in a domino set-up.
- By cutting off my excesses, I cut off gluttony.
- And by cutting with gluttony, I cut with lust.
- By cutting with gluttony and lust, I stopped needing so much money and stopped being greedy and miserable.
- By cutting with greed, I stopped feeling sad after hoarding things and consuming them, so I regained joy and the will to live.
- When I left my sadness and hopelessness behind, I stopped being irritable and angry with the world, so I cut with anger.
- By cutting my anger, I started to feel like getting involved socially, and that ended my laziness and idleness.
- By actively doing things for others, I cut vanity and pride.
After seven years of fighting against all my addictions and inner demons, I can tell you that I no longer have inside me all that hatred against myself and the world that was destroying me.
Takeaway
When you feel resistance or refusal to do something you know you have to do to save yourself, do it.
Because it is precisely overcoming that resistance that is the path to your personal salvation.
Laziness is a virus that eats you from the inside and kills you if you let it.
I also want you to know that when you get out of addictions and order your affections as they should, life changes for the better infinitely.
For example, when you are contaminated by all kinds of low passions, you see people with lust, but lust is incompatible with love.
And without love, no relationship can last because we all age, and physical attraction cannot sustain the relationship when the physical deteriorates.
Building relationships on love instead of desire and lust changes life completely; you understand that there is a little piece of heaven, a bit of universal consciousness within each person, regardless of their physical attractiveness, and that is wonderful.
See you on the other side.
A virtual hug
AG
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