This is a book about recovery, my recovery from addiction to drugs, specifically cocaine. But, as anyone with the mind of an addict knows, my addictions didn’t stop there. I was addicted to filling the bottomless pit of my broken heart and hungry soul with any and everything external to myself, drugs, love, men, food, social media, shopping - you name it, if it gave me the temporary illusion of feeling whole and complete, even if only for an instant. I was even addicted to depression and feeling bad.
My wants knew no end. Those wants nearly destroyed me and my child many, many times over.
But I rose like a phoenix from those ashes. I rose to claim my true power. And God responded. Call it the Universe, call it Spirit, call it whatever, I am referring to that great and all-knowing power that has created us all.
My name is Ester, and I am a powerful, magnificent, whole, perfect and complete expression of Spirit. That has always been my true identity. And no matter what your name happens to be, what you've done or where you came from, it is also your true identity.
But I forgot. It’s easy to forget.
My early upbringing taught me that I was powerless, unworthy, not enough - and I bought it. The fear, unworthiness and shame I felt were so much a part of my identity that it was as if they were in my very bone marrow. I couldn’t tell where these feelings left off and I began. I couldn’t separate myself from the fiction I had identified with for so long. That story had been repeated over and over until it seemed like it was true. But it wasn’t true. It never was.
Just getting off the drugs didn’t stop the patterns that were distorting my vision. Getting clean didn’t heal my crazy, obsessive thinking. The issues that had led me to the drugs in the first place were still running my life, even after I got sober.
So what was missing?
As much as I had recovered, I was still the walking wounded, bleeding from the inside out as if slashed to ribbons by the fearful thought patterns and beliefs I had taken on as my reality.
I want you to get this, because this is at the heart of your healing, too. The keys to your Soul’s recovery go deeper than just getting clean and sober, abstaining from binge eating, and any other dependent behaviors you might be suffering from.
Even after over a decade of sobriety and working the 12 Steps with the desperation of a dying woman, I still had trouble accepting that I was worthy of good, even when amazing opportunities like appearing on The Oprah Show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show and The View were happening in my life. Why was I still broke when I was earning more money than I had ever imagined? Why was I still looking - no begging for love in all the wrong places? Why was I still filled with fear about everything?
The answer was that I hadn’t healed my self-worth.
The 12 Steps got me as far as they could take me. They got me to sobriety and for that I will be eternally grateful. But I wrote this book because I believe there are layers of our wounded thought patterns and beliefs that the 12 Steps are simply not designed to heal.
In the beginning of the recovery process, we are all like infants - learning to roll over, stand up and walk.
The purpose of the 12 Steps is to stand us up and prepare us to meet our true selves as expressions of God.
I am a living testament that the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are extremely powerful. They were the steps I required in the immediate crisis of drug/alcohol and food addiction. But there came a time in my healing when the Steps were no longer enough for me. I needed to take the power greater than myself out of the sky, the churches and AA meetings, and connect it to myself in a more tangible way.
The 12 Steps brought me to the realization that I was powerless and that my life was unmanageable, in order that I could be humble enough to truly listen, grow and find a new direction.
After years of practicing the principles I learned in the 12 Steps, turning my life over to God and experiencing a direct connection to that power, the strangest thing happened: I realized that the power of God was not greater than me.
I realized that it was me.
Oh, what a revelation; what a breakthrough! I couldn’t continue to affirm my powerlessness according to the 12 Steps because I no longer believed I was separate and apart from the source of Life itself.
The ideas and the practices I developed from that point on are what inspired and birthed what I now call Soul Recovery: 12 Keys to Healing Addiction. It is a process designed to access the incredible inner power that resides in all of us.
When you are consciously connected to your inherent power, you are restored to balance, harmony and order. Cravings and out-of-balance behaviors simply dissolve in the face of it, because you are no longer operating at the “vibrational frequency” of powerlessness. You are operating in concert with the highest vibration that there is.