Stefan Neff
The Courage To Be Sober Chapter 22
How Many Tries Did It Take To Succeed?

Have you ever heard of try try try again, that was how I looked at smoking pot! I smoked pot on a regular basis starting as a youth. When I was twelve years old I was introduced to the working of marijuana which they call the gateway drug to the hard stuff well, that is a myth in my mind no matter what any doctor or professional says I made a choice to smoke and move on to cocaine and then drinking alcohol. The gateway is created to scare teenagers to simply not ever touch drugs. Is smoking and drinking cool by any standards of how we live our lives NO it's a personal choice to mask our pains from the environment we live in. It is how we are brought up the things we see on TV to how our parents treated each other. It goes back even as far as how our grandparents treated each other. What we feel around us creates a thought of how we are to live our life. Take my influences from when I was growing up?
My parents didn’t really like each other by any stretch of the imagination. My father hated his past living in an age of death from world war TWO living in a concentration camp as a young boy to seeing his father murdered by the Germans. But did that give him the right to be mean and abusive towards people around him?
No that was his way of expressing his feelings of pain towards his family. My mother's dreams were all about what I call a focus on individual passion towards her childhood dreams of owning a farm as she was brought up as a city girl always wanting to grow veggies. But that was her father’s dream for her. I believe that the job of parents is to create their own happiness within. With a passion for living their purpose in life without showing disapproval of what their children are doing in life.
My gateway to success wasn’t what I saw as a child. My path to success isn’t written as a script towards what I had seen but what I imagine it to be. I had so many dreams as a child but I stopped them from coming true, not my parents. I just used my parents as an excuse for my failures in my life. I believe we all make choices in our journey towards what we want in life. When I stopped making blaming an option for failure. I started to realize something very important.
Life isn’t determined by anyone else besides yourself.
We make our own decisions in life no one can force us to do something we don’t want to do. We have the freedom to say no or yes to things we have in front of our lives. I had a choice to smoke my very first joint. It also was my choice to stop smoking. Was it easy, No! Was it my pains from the past, Yes!
Did I create my past feeling, Yes! Do I have the choice to change my future, YES!!
What Did I Learn From My Past?
1. I create my path toward my future
2. I create everything 100%
3. Stop blaming others for my life
4. Take 100% responsibility for my life
5. I am a product of my own feeling
6. Live my passions towards what I want in life
7. Use my past as a learning opportunity for growth
8. Expanded my vibrational energy towards what I want not what I don’t
want in my life
9. Give up my poor me attitude
10. Stop living in the past