“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
— Rumi
Learning Separation
We are born innocent. There is no desire to find or to cause pain in some corner of our hopes and dreams. We make our first connections from a place of wonder. The smell of grass, the way the earth feels under our feet after a rain, the sound of snow whispering down through a nighttime sky—all are verses from the song in our hearts. Watching clouds pass through a summer sky, we are neither judging nor wishing things were different. Then we are taught to separate this from that, you from me. Before we know what has happened, we are labeling things and reacting to our labels. Penny is a cat, Max is a dog, Steve is a boy, you are a girl. The smells, the sounds, the breeze on our skin belong to a world we must find ourselves in. A blissful we becomes an anxious me.
I became an anxious me before my first memory. I have had to reflect, to put the pieces together, to understand what it was like to have an unfiltered experience. I have no memory of a time before the adults around me were filled with fear and anger. Life’s beauty was something I glimpsed like the sky through prison bars. Our country was in a war of unimaginable ugliness. Our society had been driven mad by the belief that some people were “black” and others were “white,” my parents were trapped in a life that didn’t work, and as if these challenges weren’t enough I had been adopted into an alien culture that was not sure I was really human. There was no peace, no belonging, no time when there would be.
I had a place where I could go to escape the overwhelming feelings that filled my days. When I watched television, I entered a world that welcomed me unconditionally. The characters I met there became the charming friends my heart ached for. The heroes offered a different sort of grown-up. These grown-ups lived without fear, often with great kindness. I found a home for myself in this world. I chose my relationship to TV over homework, friendship, family. There were consequences, but whatever “trouble” I found myself in faded into the background as I entered a world of laughter and adventure.
There is a scene in Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, one of my children’s favorite movies, in which the heroes find themselves in the mythic land of the lotus-eaters. Our heroes are in Las Vegas. The casino they end up in is actually owned and operated by the lotus-eaters. For several days they dance and gamble in timeless bliss. One of them gets wise to the situation and alerts the others. As they wake up, they are faced with a dilemma: Is reality really better than an endless party? As a child, I did not have to spend any time on that one. On TV, there was always a place for me.
People like me find people like me. I sat in the back of the class with the other boys who had wounds they would never talk about or heal from. We did not listen, we did not cooperate, we did not care. In fourth grade during standardized testing, I got some questions wrong on purpose because I did not want to lose my identity. The wounded children were my tribe. Eventually they let me know they were smoking pot. One of my best friends started in sixth grade; I started in eighth. The first few times I got high, the experience was okay, but what I really loved was what the process gave me. From the start, getting high made me a part of something. I had found my way.
Learning Surrender
In Percy Jackson, the victims of the lotus-eaters live out their doom at an eternal party. In my version of the story, I had to live out my addiction in a Newtonian world of consequences. Life requires an abundance of wisdom and energy, and using robbed me of both. By the time I was 26 years old, I was several years past done. There had been coaches and teachers who had tried to help me with my wrestling or with my studies, but these had never been my problem. There is a saying that if you ask the wrong questions, you’ll get the wrong answers. Until I found myself talking to an addictions counselor, I had never been asked the right questions. The counselor asked me if I would go to a 12-step meeting. It was the right question. I gave the right answer.
I was taken to my first meeting by a man who had survived four tours in Vietnam. He explained the nature of my illness and the experience of recovery. I was distracted by the emotional agony of dying an alcoholic death, but I got the point. I went to the meeting with him, brought home the book they gave me, and followed the instructions I found within its pages. The book’s authors suggested that they were people like me. They said people like me need to pray for help. I tried it. It worked. On May 21, 1990, I prayed for help. I have not needed to drink since.
As the sober days began to add up, I learned that the change in my life was called surrender. I had stepped back and let go. Surrender creates a space for something new to enter your life. I was living in the presence of something new. It started as a good night’s sleep. I was coming to my senses. Colors, sounds, tastes, even laughter was happening in a new way. Within just a couple of weeks, I began experiencing waves of empathetic joy for the people around me. I was deeply moved by their struggles, their courage, their victories. My heart began to speak to me very loudly. I cried a lot, tears that felt like waking up. The biggest change was the way the suffering of my active addiction had been replaced with a sense of communion with a divine energy that resonated through every aspect of my experience.
I had hard work to do. I went to rehab, I walked sober through the process of letting the world know I was an addict, I made amends. Much of my first year or two of sobriety was spent in dread of going back to drinking, but there was never a moment when I did not feel the presence of the divine. I was a wave that had forgotten the ocean. The act of surrender had allowed me to remember.
Learning Service
Nine months sober found me living in Boston with roommates, going to meetings every day, and “working a program.” Working a program of recovery meant that I was applying the spiritual disciplines suggested at 12-step meetings. The people at the meetings combined humility with courage in a way that felt utterly compelling. The ones who inspired me the most had found a way to dedicate their new sober life to the betterment of others. When I heard someone speak of this in a meeting, I knew I was listening to the reason for my existence. The difficulties of active addiction, the challenges of active recovery, the losses, the sorrows, the uncertainty, the disappointments, the humanity—all had prepared me to be of service.
From the start I did what I could. I made coffee at meetings. I helped newcomers get to meetings. I went to sober parties, weddings, funerals. Most of all I tried to treat those around me with the kindness I was learning in meetings. As the days turned into years, I learned that the combination of “working a program” and helping others created a self-sustaining dynamic in my life. Serving others reminded me of the beauty of a sober life, and living sober inspired me to serve others.
Learning Stillness
Once you put the drink down, you have to deal with the person who drank in the first place. In my case, what was left after the drinking was someone whose life had been defined by trauma the way a glass defines the shape of the water it holds. Recovery from addiction is a redefinition. The story of addiction becomes a story of recovery. The story of loss becomes a story of forgiveness. The story of trauma becomes a story of resilience. This transformation unfolds across the landscape of our relationships. I joined a community, I found friendship, I learned to work for others, I learned to work with others, I found love, I made my peace with life on life’s terms. I was able to accomplish all of this without actually befriending myself. The human will is strong. I wanted to heal, and I did it the only way I knew how. When I needed to deal with myself, I found a distraction, a desire, an aversion, a delusion. I had never sat with myself or spent any time feeling what it was like to be me here now. I did not know how that would help.
As I healed, the intimacy of my relationships intensified. My friendships in early recovery had a tumultuous quality. It seemed everyone wanted the best for one another but had no idea how to make that happen. I had what amounted to zero sense of how I was showing up in relationships. This was exacerbated by the fact that I could not see or feel the intensity of the expectations I was putting on the people in my life. In spite of myself, I made progress in my career and found someone who would marry me. This only intensified the requirement that I develop the capacity to deal with my inner life while staying true to the commitments I had made in my outer life. It was a capacity I had no ability to cultivate without significant guidance and support. The final nail in my coffin of suffering was the fact that there was not even a word, let alone a language, in my world for what I needed next. All I could do was feel the pain of lack.
If a colleague, a friend, a client, or my partner behaved in a way that I found difficult, I would react. Twelve-step work had given me some valuable resources in those situations, including the ability to be clear about my intention, the desire to live nonviolently, and the commitment to take responsibility for my part, but I faced these situations without the ability to live skillfully in my own body, my own heart, my own mind. I sought out yoga and meditation without any hope that I would be able to use them to gain the skill I lacked. All I wanted was relief. I wanted a place to go where I could drop the weight off my shoulders for a while. Where I could feel safe. Where I could remember the love with which the divine held me. What I found was a group of people who had been like me and had found a solution.
For the second time in my life I had come up against a problem I could not solve, only to stumble into a room where people were solving it. The meetings where I learned to live sober had been held in humble and gritty rooms, places where the grandiosity of the addict is abandoned in favor of connection with other human beings. The classrooms where I learned to be still in the presence of love smelled great, had soft lighting, and possessed a palpable presence of the sacred. The chaos of an unexamined inner life was abandoned in favor of a life of self-awareness within the sanctuary of my own loving-kindness. It is a magnificent invitation to meet myself on sacred ground among those who are dedicated to the purity of their heart’s intention. This is what I found when I needed it most.
I am writing this book a quarter century later, looking back on the way yoga and meditation have made possible the life my young, sober self yearned for. It is my hope that all those who are recovering from the disease of addiction will find what I have found in these practices. It is my hope that this book will be a support to you as you make it so.
Learning to Remember
It is said that a teacher reminds the student until she remembers. The daily reflections format offers us a chance to glance at a line or two before we head out into our day. The idea is that we are already committed to a path of recovery but may need a little support remembering what that means. I organized these reminders following the Buddha’s instructions that the path to freedom possesses a basic logic.
On the path to freedom, we will need to remember:
View: The nature of addiction, recovery, and living free
Intention: The willingness to go to any length to live our recovery one day at a time
Truth: The cultivation of an honest effort in service of an honest life
Action: Non-violence in thought, word, and deed
Service: Giving it away to keep it
Effort: Finding the middle between doing and being one breath at a time
Mindfulness: Choosing to be present without attachment one breath at a time
Concentration: To be of one mind—one heart—one purpose
These reminders form a path that is a circle. We can enter it at any point. We can choose any direction upon it. The destination will always be home.
Learning to See
For the past couple of years I have been teaching at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, where I have been a student for many years. It is a way to give back to a community that has given me so much. During a recent spring retreat, I got to have series of breakfasts with Bhante Buddharakkhita, Uganda’s first Buddhist monk. For a few quiet mornings, I had this superb teacher to myself. He began his teachings by reminding me that a human being is a verb, not a noun.
We are a process
Life is a process
This book is a process
The purpose of this book is to help. It travels down the Buddha’s eightfold way to the end of suffering. The wisdom it reflects comes from the Yoga Sutras, 12-step programs, and from the Buddha himself. These three perspectives on finding freedom combine the way instruments or voices combine to create a melody.
Whenever you find yourself listening to this melody, remember that you are a verb, not a noun. You are a process that has called forth this teaching for this day. This teaching will not be new to you; rather, it will be reminding you of what you already know. Reminding you of who you already are.
May it find you safe
May it find you healthy
May it find you happy
May it find you free
Namaste,
Rolf