But getting healthy was far more important to me than holding onto my dark secrets, and gradually I began to unearth the real me beneath the garbage. I began to realize that I was a victim of alcoholic thinking. I was an obsessive compulsive who needed to know exactly where everything was in order to feel safe. I wanted order in my life, but my behavior was anything but. When I drank too much I was convinced I was an alcoholic. But as you know, a real alcoholic cannot live without a drink, and I have always been able to do that. Controlling how much I drank in one sitting and then feeling bad that I'd overdone it again, was my biggest problem.

It took me 5 years to see that my enslavement was the way I think about myself when I drink. I was not my father, or my mother, or anyone else for that matter. It was key to the whole issue. It had to change. And it did. I changed my relationship to alcohol and to behavior that occasionally is not good for me. I like a glass of wine or two and on occasion three or four, but I know how to stop nowadays and what's better, I chalk it up to having had a really good time and I'll recover the next day. I'm a Fearless Fifty now because I can face the demons and give them a name. I choose not to allow the demons to enslave me anymore. I choose to live life on my own terms.

But there are always things in our lives that we are enslaved to.

We find it in our work, our relationship to money, to debt, a style of life we can't afford, a relationship that's not working, health that isn't perfect, too much sex, not enough sex, endlessly trying to please, too much eating, drinking, obsessing about things that are out of our control, habits that are destructive.

In the Passover story we speak of the ten plagues that afflicted the Egyptians as a punishment for their oppression of the Israelites. They include the Nile being turned into blood, frogs, massive hail stones, cow disease, lice and locusts, and the death of the first born child.

What are some of the plagues that afflict us today? I can think of a few. Aids, SARS, Mad Cow disease, wars ravaging Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Sudan, Sierra Leone and many others. The distrust and conflict that separates Israel and Palestine. The economic oppression in Russia. All of these are conflicts of the soul and of the heart. All are a source of oppression.

We would like to think that we have moved on from the dark days of slavery, but that's not true. Think of the young women from Eastern Europe who are forced into slavery as sex slaves throughout the world. The children in Asia who are forced into child labor and sex. Even here in New York today there is are hundreds of sweat shops and underpaid workers. At the restaurant Saigon Grill on the Upper West Side the food is good, the prices reasonable. But they pay their workers $1.61 an hour to work there. Most are illegal immigrants with no way to retaliate. Now that's slave labor. It's a small thing, but I will not return to that restaurant.

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