The Downward Spiral of 2008, Part III: Severe Tire Damage

“My will is disappeared
Now my confusion's oh so clear
Temptation, temptation…”
-Tom Waits

I was in a perpetual state of purge ‘n’ splurge since the breakup. That meant, liquid-only juice feasting interspersed with at least a bottle of wine per day and a few beers, mixed with excessive marijuana smoking and high-carb pig-outs.

Low-level alcohol and pot are the two vices I have been addicted to in my life. I thankfully never got into hard alcohol (I had some high school puking experiences that turned me off pretty badly the first times I tried any liquor), nor have I ever got into any of the real destructive addictive substances such as coke, speed, or heroin. But wine/beer and pot I saw as doable, as in, I could accomplish my day AND have a rockin’ good time. At least that was the idea. But as we all well know, pursuit of that alluring ideal of having your cake and eating it too, inevitably ends in some kind of backlash that usually increases in severity and intensity as time progresses.

Severity and intensity can be on the heavy side, where there’s an arrest made and there’s potentially irreparable damage done, or it can be light such as causing one to sleep an extra hour in the morning, and maybe take a little siesta in the afternoon. I’ve certainly engaged in my share of destructive alcoholic behavior, the semi-heavy stuff occurring between the ages of 28 and 30. I have a DUI under my belt where I was caught in a speed trap in Upstate NY doing 40 in a 30, and subsequently busted for blowing a .14. I fell down a staircase drunk at a party once and severely sprained my ankle. But I’d say my most prevalent semi-extreme drunken behavior over the years was getting into a deeply personal conversation with someone and having it spin out of control due to some kind of absence of tact and/or compassion. I can be wickedly sarcastic, and I tend to easily step over the line into rude, especially if the person is annoying me. Or I can just be a clueless wasteoid and say the wrong thing at the wrong time- I have a knack for that. Either way I found myself all too often apologizing the next day for saying something that I was so drunk I didn’t even remember saying. This level of alcoholism quickly became intolerable to me and I am proud to say that I haven’t had any extreme drinking behavior like that since I was 30. I turn 36 in May 2009.

Between ages 30 and 33, my level of substance use/abuse was low as far as intoxication goes. However it was steady and continuous. If you drink almost every day, even if you can “handle” your alcohol, it takes a serious toll on the body over time. It ages you quicker than you realize, and you need that hour or two of extra sleep to get by each day. Combine that with smoking Cali pot several times a day, and the occasional all-night psychedelic dance party, and you had a life that was filled with way too much recovery time. I developed the iZO Cleanze program in an effort to rid myself of a lifetime of toxins through the most effective and nutritionally supportive cleanse possible. I pulled together the best ingredients and products out there and for the next 18 months cleanzed my butt off! It was amazing. I looked different to people, and I felt different to me. And over time, I had largely rooted out my substance habit patterns to the point where there were basically no habits. But with the traumatic derailment off my last cleanze, I fell back hard into these severely taxing behaviors, more amplified than ever. Oh, but that didn’t matter- I was going to be finishing up the 100 day cleanze starting next week!

Yes, that’s what I kept saying to myself last February. “It’s ok, you’re just taking a break from that 100 day cleanze, and you’ll be back right where you left off on Day 64 next week, and you’ll finish out your 100 days in glory.” What a crock of toxic self-deceptive bullcrap.

There’s an anecdote of Yogi Bhajan, the man who introduced Kundalini Yoga to the West that I heard via the great Sikh Minister of Dharma, Guru Singh during class at Yoga West in Los Angeles. Guru Singh was talking about the transformational path and how unusually tragic it can be if, after a person has chosen to elevate themselves by going down the path of ‘right behavior’, they instead fall backward down an exacerbated path of their old negative behavior. He said, “There’s a sign in every parking lot in America that encapsulates this thought: ‘DO NOT BACK UP, SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE!” I was backing way da f@#!# up, doing things I knew were not in my highest interest, and in doing so, I was doing severe damage to my body and potentially the reputation of iZO. I was living a lie, and that’s the worst thing that anyone can do, I think.

The realization of all this hurt so much. It was unbearably shameful. “How can I possibly be a leader and inspiration for people if I’m doing the very things I’m telling them not to do? More than anyone else, I should know better than to do these things.” And so I nullified that pain by ingesting more crap, and more wine, and sometimes even crappy wine. But there was always that ultimate ‘light’ excuse at the end of the tunnel- “I’m getting back on the cleanze in a few days.” By this point, I was clearly disrespecting the power of the iZO Cleanze, trying to use it as a quick fix and excuse for bad habits, instead of as a mechanism for deep, intensive healing. I would unintentionally eat while on it, I would never drink the iZO Chinese herbal teas which were essential, and I never followed the carefully laid out schedule anymore. Yet, the cleanze was the justification and even inspiration for that very negative behavior I was trying to combat. Cleansing had become toxic for me.

The problem was that my will power was so burnt out from having over-cleanzed during all my detox experimentation of the past two years, that at this point I could hardly handle a full day of the cleanze, nevermind five days. I would start the cleanze in the morning with the intention of going all the way, but by 4 or 5 in the afternoon, I’d be munching on some food I hadn’t cleared out of the house, and by 8, I was eating pasta or pizza. I basically re-started the 100-day cleanze on what I was calling ‘Day 64’ and then stopped and then started again, and then stopped, over and over and over again. Sometimes I would get three or five days, but never more than that. And that’s how I manifested an eating disorder. I call it macrobulimia, binging and purging on a large scale, where the purging isn’t necessarily too bad – it’s not puking, it’s cleanzing. But the binge end of the equation is so damaging to the overly-sensitive pure, cleansed body, that eating the kind of crap I ate actually did make me puke in the end. Not cool.