Goce Gocevski


The first time I tried Marijuana was ten years ago. Since then, up until three years ago I was smoking it everyday. For me, that was a different, alternative way of living that was keeping me from the mediocrity of the surrounding and at the same time was bringing me into higher states of consciousness. Two years later I started taking heroin. The main reason for starting on heroin was the fact that we were completely uninformed about what that substance is. For me, as well as for my friends, at that time heroin was something like marijuana only a little bit stronger. We simply had no idea what are we playing with. I took heroin for 4 to 5 years. After a year and a half of consuming heroin everyday, I ran out of ways of finding money, when all of the lies were already told, stolen everything that can be stolen and the trust lost, I decided to go in the daily hospital for addicts, Kisela Voda to register for their well known therapy with methadone. My goal was, of course, to get free drugs - methadone. At that time, i.e. around 1995 I can freely say about 80% of the patients that were registered in that hospital were actually there only to consume methadone - only to get stoned on the account of the State. What I saw in the hospital came to me as a shock and made me think about if I wanted to end looking like those faces in the hospital. Unfortunately, or better to say fortunately, the doctor that received me proposed some other kind of experimental therapy with neuroleptics, antidepressives and some other medicine that I no longer remember. I've decided to accept the proposition in order to cure myself faster so that I did not end like the patients I saw that day. I was taking the therapy for three days and after this time may parents and I decided that I should stop with it because for those three days I was unconscious all the time, in other words I was starting to become a Zombie. After that I started buying methadone illegally and started conducting the methadone-therapy by myself. I was taking the therapy for 21 day - a time span that was needed to solve the physical addiction - as it is done everywhere in the world. After this therapy I had a period of three months without heroin after which I started again taking heroin because I had the same friends- same company, trying to convince my parents that it is not important who your company is, that I am strong enough and that nothing from outside can influence my consciousness. Unfortunately I was fooling myself as well as all my friends did, and I believe that this archetypal behaviour exists even today among the addicts.
It was the influence of those around me that was of great importance - something I unfortunately did not understand at that time. In the next 2,5 years I had around 100 attempts to quit taking drugs - all of them ended unsuccessfully. After a while I became so addicted to methadone that I started consuming under the excuse that I was taking it as a medicine. That period lasted until the day I visited a course of the Love-Erotic Therapy. I took the course because I was searching for a new, alternative way of life, life different from the one I lived at that time, in order to learn and make conscious my own potentials which at the time were at a minimum. During the course, while one of the techniques took place - the love meditation, which I was practising with the author of the Love-Erotic Therapy - Aba Aziz Makaja, now my spiritual teacher and friend, I had a strong experience. I saw before my eyes a movie of my life, and what I saw was not pretty, it was an unpleasant period in my life - I saw every time I took drugs, every time I lied, stole anything or hurt anyone. This experience lasted for about 30 seconds and I came face to face with myself. I quit taking heroin immediately after that meditation without any medicine and the practising of the meditation afterwards took me to the very reasons for which I started taking drugs.
A great contribution in that was the way the people in Komaja were treating me. Not even once I was looked at like an addict, but on the contrary, was completely accepted with love as a completely normal young man. I experienced this nowhere else, from not a single doctor, specialist or institution. This was one of the key factors that helped me the most. I was not labelled as "one more addict"; there was no doctor-patient relation, but on the contrary, I got unlimited support and love. My relationship with my family got better immediately, my parents started believing that their son can live without drugs and that he can be healthy and happy. My father, who was ashamed to say he had a son, today is proud of me and is a true friend of mine. For four years I have been living a clean, healthy life with no drugs and stimulants. I need no outer medium to feel happy and fulfilled. I am employed in a international governmental organisation where I have a responsible post and recently I was named the main co-ordinator of the activities of the Komaja Community in Macedonia which I experience as a acknowledgement for the way I live my life now and a complete change into a healthy and a normal person. The states of higher consciousness and immeasurable happiness that I had in the past with marijuana, ecstasy and LSD, today I am experiencing through meditations, sports and through living a life of a virtue. What I believe as essential for a complete cure of a young addict is the finding of something bright and strongly inspiring in his life for which he will hold onto tightly until his complete recuperation. In my case it was Komaja and the virtue as a life principal.