"My first glimpse of Sasha, I was waiting for my girlfriend. I saw this guy, and he was really loose and had long hair and a weird Beatles look, whereas everyone else had a uniform, and I thought, why doesn't he wear the uniform? He must be important. My internal connected with his external. There is nobody like this in my circle of friends, but I didn't talk to him. But then at the stadium when he talked to me, I was too shy and I already had a boyfriend in a different neighborhood."

​

Later that day, my friend and I went to a stadium. Sasha (age 15) was drinking beer with friends and noticed an interesting creature sitting on the bleachers some distance away from everybody. "My sex instinct did not turn on as it usually did when I was drunk and saw an attractive female. This girl was different. I approached her and introduced myself." They started talking, and he invited her over to play music because she said she played violin. "There was something about Olga that I was attracted to – a free spirit hidden under a regular girl’s appearance." He says. "He was like nobody else." Olga says. "He had a different look than anyone I'd ever encountered, and had an energy of "This is my life. I know what I'm doing, and I'm doing it with fun and pleasure."  He made me laugh so hard he made me pee my pants. He was so funny. He made up poems on the go. Neither of us were into each other as romantic partners. We met a few more times as friends and he wanted me to be with him but I was with this other guy. 

​

Olga agreed to visit "one day" and a few weeks later, she finally did (bringing along a friend for protection), "and I didn't like my boyfriend so much anymore - he cheated on me and kept giving me STDs." "We played music together." Sasha says, "By that time, I had learned to play heavy metal on the guitar and knew a couple classical pieces. It was fun! She was so alive and real. I fell in love with her."

​

"I kept coming to his house. He had a small apartment, but it felt safe. He felt safe. Poor, but safe."

 

After a few times Olga came to visit, Sasha offered her some weed. She had never tried it before and wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. Her dad was a lieutenant colonel in KGB – a Russian FBI service – and wouldn’t approve. Sasha told her that was propaganda, and that weed would expand her consciousness and she would feel the world at a different level. She trusted Sasha, tried it, and fell in love with him and weed. "It opened my consciousness" Olga says. They smoked as much as they could though weed was illegal and hard to get. Olga started playing keyboard in Sasha's band. They played concerts locally and in some former Soviet Union cities. Life was like an adventure movie, and they were the lead characters.

​

"Sasha was sent to me by God. When I smoked the weed I opened my eyes and saw Sasha and he looked like Jesus to me." She had been beaten and raped and her boyfriend wouldn't do shit. "I understood that I was saved. Sasha was the only person I felt safe with. God sent him to me. I respected him first, then love came later. It was impossible to not love him because he was so funny and cool and safe. My mom always said you have to respect a man and he has to have respect for you, and if you have that your relationship will be great. I thought you had to have passion but not the other things, but I learned better. I started dating Sasha but was still dating the other guy I was so co-dependent, but I eventually left to be with Sasha." 

​

One evening, their lives changed. Someone snitched on Sasha and the drummer selling weed, and the newly formed DEA police broke into the band's rehearsal space and arrested everyone. They were locked up in a psych ward at a local hospital and interrogated. Sasha got lucky because he'd had nothing on him, but the drummer wasn’t so lucky. "I visited Sasha in the psych ward because I already felt I wanted to be with him." Olga says. Sasha met new friends in the psych ward and from then on, Sasha and Olga's lives took a sharp turn downward. They started using heavy substances (courtesy of Sasha's new friends), and in less than 2 years, they were wrecks - like shadow people. Olga's parents didn’t know what to do, and neither did the best doctors in the country; addiction was something Soviet doctors hadn’t dealt with much.

​

Immigration

Luckily, right around this time, Sasha's dad sent him an invitation to immigrate to the US where he had moved a couple years prior. So Olga and Sasha left their friends and family behind and with $170 in Sasha's pocket, they embarked on a new journey – to conquer America with music! They were 23. This geographical change helped them break their addictions for a while, but Olga was in very bad shape. Sasha was lost and scared, blaming himself for her condition since he was the one who had introduced her to drugs. He found a good psychiatrist in the Russian community who helped her get on the right track.

 

Olga and Sasha's new motherland turned out different from what they had imagined it to be (or what they saw in Hollywood movies). Being musicians in a country of show business was not easy. They naively thought that one day a rich producer would step into one of the local Chicago clubs and offer them a million-dollar record deal. No sir! They played dozens of shows with their newly-formed band, but no producers discovered them. They felt discouraged. Back home, they had never needed to work to afford the bare essentials - the Soviet state had provided those; here in the US they had to spend most of their days making a living and paying bills. A year went by, and they still weren't rock stars. One day, a bright idea crossed Sasha's mind: “Let me smoke some weed to take the edge off.” He had completely forgot what drugs had done to him and Olga, thinking,“Weed is a plant. No one has died from it. I can quit anytime I want. As long as I don’t use heroin and meth, I’ll be fine.”

 

Chasing The American Dream

As soon as Sasha learned to speak English fluently, he signed up for college to study music composition, while all the time continuing to play shows in and around Chicago. Their band got really good, and a local Russian entrepreneur offered them a gig opening up for a famous Russian rock band. Then they got another gig like that, and then another one. They were becoming famous in the Russian community, dreaming of fame and a lot of money. What neither of them knew at the time, was that drug addiction is a chronic, progressive, and fatal disease. Their weed smoking progressed to snorting cocaine, shooting heroin, and eventually doing crack. Sasha lost my job, ran up a huge credit-card debt, and came to the brink of being evicted from their apartment.

 

Hitting Bottom

Seeing what shape Olga and Sasha were in, their entrepreneur friend canceled their future shows and told them to seek treatment if they ever wanted to work with him again. One morning, sheriffs came to their apartment and they were asked to vacate the premises. Olga was six-months pregnant with their third child, their two older sons (Sava and Stephan) were being raised by Olga's mother back home in Belarus, and they had no friends left who would have anything to do with them. Sasha's inventive (addiction-blinded) mind was saying, “Don’t worry. You and your pregnant wife can live in your tent for now. Then you’ll figure something out.” Sasha found a secluded area in a local park and set up the tent. But then Olga started going into labor. It was too soon! Throughout her pregnancy, Olga had never had the courage to go to the doctor to check on the baby in her belly, but now it was time. From all the possessions they had accumulated since their move to the US, they had two bicycles, a couple of blankets, and a set of clothes left (plus the tent), so they got on their bikes and rode to the nearest emergency room where Olga was promptly admitted because the baby was about to come out prematurely. Four days later, their baby-boy Nikolai, was born at 28 weeks. He was our savior.

 

Turning Point

The social worker in the suburban hospital (where Nikolai’s life was being maintained by the machines and skilled nurses) didn’t know what to do with Olga and Sasha, since she had never had a couple like this. She reported to the Department of Children and Family services (DCFS) that Nikolai had been born with drugs in his system and waited for further instructions from a caseworker there. A nice DCFS lady came over the next day and offered Olga and Sasha two options: 1. give up their baby and continue their lifestyle or 2. check into rehab and have a chance at having full custody of their son as soon as they could prove that they were financially stable and drug-free. Sasha was ready to give up Nikolai because he didn’t know how he could raise him in the condition he was in, but Olga’s maternal instinct told her to keep the baby, so she did everything that the DCFS lady told her to do, and in three weeks, she was living in a facility for recovering mothers with babies. Sasha left the hospital and lived in an old acquaintance's house for a week and then in a homeless shelter for a couple of weeks until he decided that he couldn’t continue living like that anymore. He was completely bankrupt – financially, emotionally, spiritually. 

 

The New Beginning (Lesha Poretsky’s prediction)

Penniless, hopeless, exhausted, and desperate, Sasha checked himself into his last detox center. From there, he was referred to a 28-day program in the middle of one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago. He rode his bike there, went through an intake process, made it to his bed in a room occupied by 4 other men, and collapsed into a 20-hour sleep. "Thank God they let me do it. I badly needed it. In the past 8-9 months I had barely slept more than 4 hours. Withdrawals wouldn’t let me." He was woken up by a voice yelling “Group time!” Feeling a bit better but not fully recovered, Sasha thought, “What can they possibly teach me? I know more than those Americans. I have a Soviet education.” But he was, in a way, a ward of the state, so his choices were either to go to that group or back on the street. 

 

That’s where the message of recovery started slowly but surely penetrating Sasha's stubborn mind. As drugs and alcohol were moving away into the past, his body and mind were coming back online. "I finally began hearing and then listening to my counselors, and on Day 20 of my stay at the rehab, I surrendered. I admitted that it was not “them” who were wrong about everything - it was me who needed to stop fighting the “I’ll prove you wrong” war and accept the reality and the people in it the way they were." At 5:00 a.m. that morning, as his four roommates were still sleeping, he was visited by a Guest - a Force that cleansed his brain and soul and freed him from the obsession to use drugs and alcohol. "All I needed, as it turned out, was to call upon IT and admit that I couldn’t do life by myself. Waves of warm energy descended upon me, going through and through, renewing my body, covering my skin with goosebumps, and letting my tears roll freely down my cheeks. Not once since then have I thought that I needed drugs to solve my problems or to make me happier."

 

Spiritual Journey

Upon my discharge from rehab, I was a changed man, ready to serve my mysterious Guest (or “God of my understanding” as we call Him/Her/It in 12-step Programs) and do everything I had been suggested to keep my sobriety. Olga and I spent 9 months in different institutions before we were able to move back in together. Our baby Niko was officially given back to us, and our case at DCFS was closed.  Inspired by all the positive changes in our lives, we actively began building a sober community around us. A  year later, we started the first Russian-speaking AA group in Chicago. My mysterious Guest kept showering us with blessings - I was hired as a writing tutor at a community college, and a year later I was an adjunct faculty teaching English as a Second Language. Olga found a job at a flower shop, we brought both of our older sons back from Belarus and relocated Olga’s mom to the States after she had lost her husband in a car accident. We went on vacations as a full family every year and restored relationships we had damaged in our drug-using days. When I was four years sober, we went to Toronto to  visit our friend with whom we used to hang out back in Belarus. He had seen us at our worst and was one of the first people who helped us get back on track. Seeing how I had changed, he said, “Sasha, you need to be a life coach. You and your experience can make a real difference in people’s lives.” I didn’t know then what life coaching was, so I took it as a compliment and forgot about this conversation soon after we left. Life was beautiful although at times not easy, but the principles of 12-Step recovery programs helped us overcome the difficulties. 

 

When the Student is Ready…

At nine years of sobriety, I started feeling with increasing intensity that something was missing from my life. It was too peaceful for an adventurer like me. I yearned for a change and began looking for adventure in the wrong places, which resulted in painful scenes at home and loss of Olga’s trust. It was the summer of 2013. A guy I was sponsoring in AA suggested that I attend a weekend seminar at Wright Foundation for the Realization of Human Potential (formerly Wright Institute). He said it would help me sort things out and understand more things about myself. I didn’t really want to attend thinking that I already knew everything I needed to know about myself, but Olga insisted that we participate together. So we went. What happened there was another miracle similar to the visit of the Mysterious Guest at the rehab. I felt I was on a verge of discovering something magnificent. Olga and I started attending various courses at Wright transforming ourselves almost every day. I began to feel like I was a child again, learning things about the World, being curious about the things and people around me. My emotional self was being awakened!

​

Here and Now

As a result of going to Wright, I am a certified life coach helping people find the way back to their true Self. By turning our lives into a daily adventure, we have learned (and keep learning) the fullness of human existence, sharing our experience as a married couple, as recovering addicts, as parents, as two souls navigating the Maze of Life together!