It is always good and helpful to hear the basics of the Dharma expressed through the voices of authentic practitioners, and especially ones who know the depths of human suffering first hand, as these authors do – and who equally know the very real potential, as well as the daily challenges involved, for us humans to free ourselves from such suffering, especially when it is engendered and sustained through craving of one kind or another, as is virtually always the case if one looks deeply enough.
The human and economic costs of craving and of addictions of all kinds worldwide are staggering. Yet the statistics barely scratch the surface of the suffering that drives people to addiction in the first place and keeps them there once ensnared. In the face of this multidimensional global epidemic that destroys lives, families, and large segments of communities and nations, any effective inroads are not only welcome, but absolutely necessary. As Chan Master Venerable Ben Huan of Hongfa Temple, Shenzhen, China, age 97 at the time, said to me during a 2004 conversation about bringing mindfulness in the form of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) into the mainstream of medicine and health care,
There are an infinite number of ways in which people suffer. Therefore, there have to be an infinite number of ways in which the Dharma is made available to people.
The program offered in Eight Step Recovery is one of those ways, one that is credible, creative, and inviting. The authors, on the basis of their own experience, have chosen to shape their path explicitly around Buddhist teachings, while following a framework based in large measure on a more mainstream mindfulness-based intervention, what they are calling Mindfulness-Based Addiction Recovery (MBAR).
This revised edition includes a great deal of helpful new material to support those who are drawn to replicate this program in their communities. It offers mindfulness/heartfulness meditation practices and their applications to the cravings and addictions that are common to all human beings and that are particularly valuable to any of us who are in the grip of their most toxic, imprisoning, and life-destroying clutches. Liberation through one’s own efforts to cultivate intimacy and kindness with the workings of one’s own self-imprisoning mind and behaviors is indeed possible, as the authors point out, echoing the teaching of the Buddha’s third noble truth. Indeed, the entire program is presented in the context of the four noble truths, explicitly bringing the liberative heart of Buddhist meditation practices and teachings to bear on the mind that is imprisoned in its own nightmarish and self-destructive habits by cultivating other, healthier, usually unknown and undreamed of aspects of that very same mind and heart. These teachings and the container of the MBAR program are offered as both a refuge and a practical curriculum for this hardest of all journeys back to the well-being that is our birthright as human beings, and which is, paradoxically, already here and already ours for the developing. The basic message from the authors is that reclaiming your life and what is deepest and best in yourself is not only possible but actually workable if you are willing to engage in a certain kind of interior work on yourself, and to give yourself over to this intrinsically kind and trustworthy invitation to heal your own life and heart and relationships.
May this MBAR program prove to be just the door you need to open, and if so, then enter, enter, enter, and give yourself over day by day, thought by thought, moment by moment to this reliable and profound form of nurturance and healing.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
January 2, 2017
Northampton, Massachusetts