The Sober Life

  So we are heading for the runway. It feels like time to leave. Yet if we leave now without exploring the island I have a feeling we will end up here time after time. We need to venture into the heart of darkness. Lets see what lies at the heart of Fuming Island. All our thoughts have some sort of positive or negative bias. Our consciousness has a bias that seems to notice the negative ones more than the positive ones. This gravitational pull towards negativity is spoken about by Eckart Tolle in The Power Of Now.  He describes “The Pain Body” as the search for more suffering by the same force that created the suffering in the first place. As it swells it grows in power. Anger is the build up of unreleased negative energy. Unreleased energy traps us in a place of opposition to the world. It is a defensive position that requires more and more recruits.  There are complicated emotional triggers and deeper feelings that are recruited. Until we learn to be conscious of the ac...

  I am sitting on top of my next-door neighbour. He is trying to squirm away on the cold concrete floor outside my front door.  My arm draws back ready to release a punch. Holding me back is his adult son. He is about twenty-five and pretty strong. He is trying to put a stranglehold on my arms from behind. Off to the side my wife is on all fours searching for her glasses in the wet grass. This isn’t the wild west, this is a semi-detached house in Stockport, it's dark, I’m shoeless and wearing yoga pants.  Six months of sober self analysis, introspection and learning and I am about to get violent. What was all this for if this is the result?  It is a torrid and sad tale of a boundary war that has been on a back burner for over six years . We inherited the setup of our house and gardens and have done nothing really to change it since moving in. We have only continued to maintain what was previously there. Next door has never really spoken to us and they try to avoid ey...