Barry came to an Intensive because he didn't know where else to turn. He had already tried to kill himself once and he knew that it wouldn't be long before he tried again. This time, he said, he would succeed.

Barry was a very frightened and unhappy man. He was terrified of emotional pain and had spent much of his adult life using any addiction he could to avoid pain. Mostly, he drank, and his liver was a mess. If he didn't kill himself with sleeping pills - as he had tried to do last time - he would die from cirrhosis of the liver. He had a gastric problem that caused much pain when he drank, but he preferred physical pain to emotional pain.
 

Yet no matter how much he drank, he still ended up in emotional pain.

At this point in his life, at the age of 52, there was no escape.

As I worked with Barry, it became apparent that much of his pain was about deep feelings of emptiness, insecurity, and purposelessness about his life. As a graphic artist, he had achieved enough success to be comfortable. He had no complaints about his marriage. Yet he saw no reason to live.

Barry could not figure out what life was about. He had no idea why he was on the planet. As a younger person, achieving success and getting love had been his goals. His sense of purpose was completely external. He believed that if he had enough money and enough love, he would be happy, yet here he was, miserable.

Barry had believed the formula for happiness that he had learned from his family and society: work hard, make money, get love and approval. When he had achieved all this and continued to feel anxious instead of secure and happy, he turned to alcohol to numb out his emptiness.
 

Barry was suffering from a false belief that plagues many people in our society.

He believed that life was about getting love rather than being loving to himself and others. His emptiness and insecurity stemmed from his self-abuse. In not being loving to himself, he had no love to share with his wife and friends. No matter how much his wife loved him, it never filled the empty and insecure place within him.

It had never occurred to Barry that life was about being loving rather than getting love. It has never occurred to him that how he treated himself and others created his happiness or unhappiness, rather than how he was treated. It never occurred to him that inner peace and joy were an INSIDE job.

In the Intensive, Barry was shocked to realize that he was the cause of his own pain.
 

He realized that his pain was being caused entirely by how badly he was treating himself and others.

He saw that most of his behavior was an abandonment of himself - of the beautiful soul within him. He saw that as long as he abandoned himself by ignoring his own feelings and instead turning to alcohol, his inner child would feel alone and worthless.

He started to realize that his purpose in life was about evolving his soul in his ability to love himself and others. As Barry practiced Inner Bonding and learned to open to his spiritual guidance and bring love to himself, he discovered the joy of sharing his love with his wife and others.

As long as Barry's sense of purpose was external regarding what he got, he could never get enough. He could never feel the fullness that comes from opening to the source of love. For the first time in his life, Barry felt the fullness of being that comes from being loving - to himself and others - rather than trying to get love.

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