Joy—Honoring your accomplishments while living mindfully and meaningfully
CHAPTER GOALS
• To learn to replace the superficial rewards of addiction with genuine fulfillment
• To track your successes
• To honor your accomplishments
• To practice what you value
• To create traditions and reasons to celebrate
• To discover joy
Purpose: If the consequences of addiction weren’t so destructive, you wouldn’t be on this journey to wellness; but before you ever experienced the consequences, you experienced the rewards of addiction. Yes, rewards. Imagine that every time you took a drink you skipped right over the part where you felt relief, relaxation, and inebriation and were, instead, socked with an instant hangover. You simply wouldn’t do it. Through addiction, we learn to expect instant gratification in the form of oblivion and euphoria, among other benefits. These are powerful, but fleeting, experiences. When enmeshed in addiction, however, we don’t recognize—let alone experience and revel in—the many rewards we are blessed with daily, just by living mindfully and meaningfully. This recognition is a crucial life skill to develop, because the reason you are making this journey is to move from addiction and into fulfillment. And reaping the rewards of your efforts is what it’s all about! Learning to replace the superficial, indeed infantile, rewards of addiction with the deep and abiding joys of freedom is the linchpin of your recovery. Doing so will reinforce your sense of momentum and your faith in your abilities, allow you to see how far you have come, and connect you with the joy and satisfaction of living according to your values.
Many of us gloss over our successes and milestones, perhaps believing that it would be unseemly to make a big deal about them or that it would be premature to go counting our chickens before they’re hatched. We may feel we don’t deserve to recognize achievements that should have been a matter of course all along (“Why should I celebrate cleaning out the fridge—normal people have clean refrigerators and don’t throw a party over it”) and that we shouldn’t start patting ourselves on the back until we can plant our personal flag on the moon. If this describes you (as it does, to some extent, all of us), perhaps it’s time to balance your perspective. Making note of your achievements and milestones is not just a trivial self-indulgence. It is a process that, first, ensures that you maintain your non-addictive path forward. Second, knowing how to recognize and celebrate your often hard-won successes is the essence of a joyful life.
In terms of The PERFECT Program, you certainly have come a long way! Let’s take a look back at where you have been on this journey and what you have accomplished so far, before you embark on your home stretch. You have, among other things:
• Achieved a realistic understanding of the nature of addiction and recovery
• Gained clarity on how addiction has manifested in your life
• Developed basic mindfulness skills that will support your recovery
• Learned to treat yourself—and others—with compassion
• Rediscovered your priorities: what brings meaning, value, and purpose to your life
• Implemented anti-addiction techniques in your daily life
• Started honing the life skills you need to navigate effectively in the world
• Created a vision for your future
• Set achievable goals in many different areas of your life
• Started taking action to achieve your goals
If you have not had the opportunity to absorb your accomplishments so far, please take a moment now to reflect on this list. And, if you feel you’re not where you should be—haven’t touched every base—I hope you will reassess your judgment with self-compassion. Remember that while the nature of a book requires that it progress in some logical order, your path out of addiction is uniquely your own. You may have to linger longer than you’d like in different phases of your recovery. It’s not a race. And remember, as I mentioned in the last two chapters, you can’t avoid obstacles and setbacks, but you can navigate them in a way that’s true to yourself and your vision.
PERFECT JOURNAL: Look back over your journey so far and make note of all the things you are proud of and all the steps you have taken, including meaningful shifts in perspective. Forget anything you think should mitigate or negate your sense of accomplishment (say you were abstinent for a month, but had a setback); just focus on every positive step.
Celebrating your successes means taking every opportunity you can to absorb and reinforce the sense of fulfillment you are striving for. Just as there is no sense in waiting to make a positive decision, there’s no reason to wait for some arbitrary milestone or ultimate fantasy to materialize before you can begin taking joy and satisfaction from your journey. That doesn’t mean you have to take out an announcement in the local paper every time you complete a task. It simply means recognizing and enjoying what you have accomplished—and of course, some accomplishments will warrant a much grander display. Making a habit of honoring yourself and your values—like everything else you have been doing—takes practice, since it may not be your natural impulse.
Tracking Your Progress
One of the most practical ways you can begin creating this new habit of joyous self-appreciation is by tracking your progress daily. I encouraged you to begin this practice in the last chapter because it is a powerful way of keeping yourself focused. At the same time, marking your progress also allows you to see, very concretely, how far you have come and provides the basis for experiencing a sense of pride in your advances. Tracking is an essential practice in that it offers a balanced and objective view of where you are. We often don’t recognize how much we are changing; instead, we take our current assets and grace as simply givens, or else miss them entirely. When you look at your chart, you can’t deny that you have actually done positive things—it’s right there in black and white!
There are many ways to track your progress. You might keep your goals chart next to your bed or on your desk, where you will see it every day. There are computer programs that allow you to do this; you can set such a program to open as soon as you turn on your computer. Many people find the very act of tracking enjoyable. You may get a lot of satisfaction from checking in on a daily basis and entering your facts and figures. Since we are all wired differently, the process might, on the other hand, seem painstaking to you. Don’t worry. There are as many ways of tracking as there are people, and you can find the one that jibes best with your personality.
You want to make sure that whatever method you choose is one you will actually use. If you enjoy keeping lists and charts, you may find that a free website like sparkpeople.com is right up your alley. It offers incentives to log on every day and track your goals—whether those are weight-, wellness-, or fitness-related—using an array of online tracking tools, including your own personal blog. But if you would feel overwhelmed by such an energetic and relentless tracking system, you might consider using Jerry Seinfeld’s famous “Don’t Break the Chain”* approach, which simply requires you to put an X on every day that you meet your daily goal, with the intention, eventually, of keeping the chain of Xs intact. You will be able to see in a quick glance just how many days you stayed on track and take satisfaction in seeing your chain lengthen.
You may also find that a dedicated notebook or calendar works well for you. For example, suppose you want to track your addiction, with the intention of achieving complete abstinence. You might create a simple chart for yourself that you can fill in daily, with headings that are relevant to your goals. For example, see Table 9.1.
You can create your own charts based on whatever addiction-specific goals you are aiming for. Even if you are not meeting your goals on the schedule you have set for yourself, remember to acknowledge your efforts—which are valuable in themselves—and to focus on your forward momentum. And, as with anything else I have discussed, take account of what works best for you. This isn’t an abstract program invented who knows where by who knows whom—it’s your life.
TABLE 9.1: Addiction Use Goals
Honoring Your Successes
How, exactly, do you honor your successes? What does that mean and what do you do? Say you have made some progress. What do you do about that? I’m not going to present a self-congratulations chart. But what you do and think is measured against the criterion that it enriches your life—including the idea of “joy.” Your journey is not about putting your head down and forging on like a martyr until you arrive at a certain destination, upon which you can finally put your feet up and relax. There is no such place. The sun always comes up; you always have challenges to meet, milestones to celebrate, and places to go. Fulfillment is not the end of the road. It is the road.
Say, for instance, that one of your goals is to lose a significant amount of weight (something I have done). You embark on a plan that really works well for you: You cut out desserts and begin a walking or gym routine. You feel much more energetic and alert because of your lifestyle change. But, when you step on your scale after the first month, you find that you have lost only six pounds, when you were expecting to have lost ten or more. In that one instant, all the self-esteem, enthusiasm, renewed clarity of mind, and joy you experienced from your daily walks deflate. You are left disappointed, maybe even hopeless. Your feeling of success evaporates, as if none of the benefits you enjoyed meant anything compared to an arbitrary figure on the scale.
This scenario is an example of the baffling ability we have to know and not know something at the same time. Surely, we can all see plainly how irrational it is to disregard our tangible experience of well-being in the face of not measuring up to a meaningless number! It’s possible that this experience is the result of conflicting values. You have tagged the number on the scale with some emotional meaning so that you feel that nothing matters until you reach your goal weight, when everything in your life will fall into place. That’s when you’ll really be able to feel proud of yourself and to participate in the world like a “normal person.”
What could inform a misguided belief like that? It may well be true that achieving a significant weight loss—or meeting any particular goal—will bring enormous benefits. However, it is important to delve into your belief that you don’t deserve peace of mind until you achieve that goal. The practical, self-change reason for exploring this issue is that if your journey toward your goal is fraught with self-recrimination you are less likely to retain your focus and to make that journey (as I showed in Chapter 5).1 Put simply, people don’t like bad thoughts, even when they are used to motivate good behaviors. The further, PERFECT Program reason for reassessing your disappointment and gloom is simply that life comes with setbacks and disillusionments. But you are alive here and now, and the moment is precious.
What could be the underlying belief that causes you, or me, to tie our sense of accomplishment to an abstract number on the scale rather than to real, important benefits we have already experienced? It could be that—as I discussed in connection with self-acceptance—you feel you don’t deserve to feel good about yourself unless you are a certain weight. The reason for your fixation with the scale number is that you aren’t following your true values and priorities. There are two deductions from this example if it applies to you: first, to recognize that you are not measuring yourself by or following your own values and priorities; second, to explore whatever underlies your irrational perspective. This mindfulness exercise adds to the information you need to realign yourself with what’s most important to you.
EXERCISE: When you consider your efforts to meet a goal or make a significant lifestyle change, can you remember a time when you were stymied or derailed by a setback? Why was that event so catastrophic? What were the underlying feelings that caused your extreme reaction? Do they seem reasonable in the light of day? What more genuine values of yours do they contradict?
Perfectionism
People—all of us—create perfectionistic goals that prevent us from really being who we can be and succeeding as best we can. Maybe it has even kept you from love, when you rejected a “non-perfect” relationship that was nonetheless loving and ultimately could have been highly fulfilling. At the same time, please keep in mind, reacting to an event like a possible “lost love” as a tragedy of unbearable enormity is a perfectionist response to the sin of perfectionism! If you have overcome the emotional pain and withdrawal of losing a love, don’t add this additional, perpetual longing and grief reaction. (These reactions are not uncommon, it seems. I once was stuck at a workshop where each person was obligated to go up to everyone in the group and whisper what they wished they had told someone, but didn’t. Every single person whispered in my ear: “I love you.”) Now that it’s done, carry on with your choice—there were, after all, reasons that caused you to choose as you did—and look for the love still available to you.
CASE: Willow ran an important nonprofit, inner-city agency. It had worthwhile goals, incredible challenges, and was underfunded and understaffed. Willow had never trained for a management position—she had started out as a volunteer. But soon her conscientiousness and commitment impressed everybody involved with the group—and she ended up heading the agency.
Willow was often depressed when she didn’t accomplish all that she had hoped to. Nor were her tremendous efforts always appreciated in the welter of the city’s and the agency’s affairs. But everyone agreed that her impact was tremendously positive—that the agency had never functioned as well and done so much.
Nonetheless, Willow was seriously considering leaving her job—it was simply too draining. One day, as she left the public school where her office was housed, one of the kids who participated in Willow’s program saw her leaving. He shyly came up to her, and said, “Miss ____. I have never been this happy in my life.”
Willow realized instantly why she put up with the trials and tribulations of her work—that in many ways she was a rare and fortunate person.
Experiencing here-and-now rewards
As you go through your day, pursuing your goals, make it your plan to stop and recognize where you are and what you’re doing that is different from what you would be doing were you still immersed in your addiction. For example, suppose you were accustomed to waking up with a painful hangover, piecing together details of the night before, but are now waking up refreshed. Take a moment before you get up to revel in the cozy feeling of being well rested and clear-minded in your bed, with nothing to regret. You may have farther to go. This period of sobriety may not turn out to be permanent. But allow yourself to realize that this is, indeed, a big deal, and how fantastic it feels. Meanwhile, don’t lose sight of the “practical, self-change” reason for practicing these techniques while celebrating your good feelings in the moment. As we saw in Chapter 5, such self-rewarding makes it much more likely that you will progress, while self-criticism or lack of self-appreciation does the reverse.
If what you’re doing during your day feels tedious—say you are filling out paperwork—acknowledge that you’re doing something that is necessary, perhaps even important, in service of your larger goals. And when you’re done, don’t just move on to the next thing, as if nothing had happened. Reflect on this small triumph just to feel good about your day. If, beyond this, you meet a major milestone at work or in your personal life, celebrate fully. And especially do so when it comes to your addiction. Did you successfully navigate a trigger situation? Did you go a month without a drink? Did you finally do something that your addiction had always gotten in the way of?
Of course, although there are occasions when it’s just the ticket, if you go out and buy yourself a present or treat yourself to a hot fudge sundae or a drink every time you accomplish something, this itself can be part and parcel of an addiction. But do allow yourself to revel in the satisfaction you derive from a job well done. Don’t waste any opportunity to experience a sense of satisfaction. If you get on the scale and you’ve lost six pounds, if you can now walk around the block five times where previously you could only do it twice, if you aren’t out of breath every time you climb the stairs the way you used to be—go with it! It’s not everything you wanted—the whole enchilada—but it’s a joy worth experiencing.
PERSONAL JOURNAL: When you go to bed, take a moment to list the pleasures, successes, and progress in your day. List at least five. Let the negatives take care of themselves.
EXERCISE: How many ways can you think of to acknowledge a success? For example, pausing to recognize it, calling a friend or supporter, or doing something special for yourself. Be as specific as possible, and try to practice these regularly. Make each a new habit, and even list these small celebrations on your tracking chart.
Honoring What You Value
Celebrating your successes is all about taking note of where you are at this moment and acknowledging how far you have come to get here. But there are valuable elements of your life that have remained constant, and recognizing those things on a daily basis (yes, you might call these “affirmations”) is just as important. Giving yourself opportunities to remember who you truly are can help keep what’s most important to you, and why you’re doing what you’re doing, in the forefront. This might include keeping photographs of people important to you where you can see them all the time—on your computer desktop, in your wallet, on your refrigerator. You might dust off the artifacts of your life that remind you of what’s meaningful to you and place them prominently in your home—an instrument you used to (or still occasionally) love to play, a memento from a special trip or time in your life, a gift or card from someone you love.
ACTIVITY: Clear a space somewhere in your home—on a table or shelf or corner, perhaps close by your meditation spot. Gather some items that represent the best of who you are and what is most valuable to your heart. These could be childhood pictures of yourself or pictures of or items belonging to your children. You could include plants, candles, diplomas, creative works, products, religious symbols—as long as each represents an aspect of you and your life that brings you pleasure and a sense of value. Arrange these items in the space you have cleared, handling and placing your items with the intention of holding what each one symbolizes in your heart. Use this little altar as a touchstone—return to it whenever you can, to remember and meditate on what is truly meaningful to you.
But avoid fetishes
Your “values altar” is meant to be a guidepost for your life. As with the example of not making a fetish of the “lost love” that would have made your life okay, here, too, I should caution about the shrines some people keep with photos of dead parents, spouses, or children or long-lost lovers (sometimes under candlelight or small bulbs), or their school athletic trophies signifying things they can’t do anymore and a kind of accomplishment and recognition they haven’t since had. This kind of display can reinforce a negative focus on the past, against which the present and future look all the more bleak (“my best is behind me”). It is in the nature of balance that virtually every recommendation in Recover! carries with it a need to see the dangers in taking it to an extreme—in this case honoring things or people morbidly—and to be clear about the difference.
Going forward in honor
What is most important is that you honor your values, commitments, and love going forward. If there are people whose company you have neglected—perhaps feeling unworthy of their love—reach out. Schedule time with your family into your calendar, or commit to a weekly activity with your children. Contact an old friend. Seeing pictures of people important to you is nice, but actually contacting them from time to time is even better. You may have burned bridges in the past, or the people you love may be wary of opening themselves up to you again. In those instances it’s important to respect their boundaries. Sometimes honoring someone you care about means giving them their space, while living in a way that reflects your feelings for them. Suppose, for instance, you have taken advantage of a good friend or a family member, and he cut you out of his life to protect himself from further harm. He or she plainly doesn’t trust you, and there’s nothing you can do about that (recall Harry and his daughter Anne in Chapter 5). Your decision to clean up your act does not obligate him to allow you back into his life, or even to hear your apology. You can still honor this person by changing your life and treating people the way you wish you had treated him.
Rituals, Traditions, and Celebrations
From the beginning of time, people have come together as families and communities to recognize and celebrate joyful or tragic events, rites of passage, milestones, harvests, the changing of seasons. Religious ceremonies, feasts, wakes, holidays, parties, rituals, and even more routine practices, like family meals, a kiss on the cheek before leaving the house, a weekly phone call, or a yearly block party are all part of the rhythm of life that makes us feel connected, part of something larger than ourselves. These events reinforce our human bonds, give structure to our lives, allow us to honor each other, our culture, and our humanity, and infuse our lives with meaning. This is yet another aspect of life that addicted people often neglect, opting out of gatherings where they won’t have an opportunity to indulge or in order to isolate themselves, feeling ashamed to be around other people (remember Rose missing her daughter’s party?), not feeling ties to their communities, or simply being unable to shift their focus away from the myopic and consuming involvement with addiction—and the empty rituals they share with fellow addicts.
Recognizing the profound importance of ritual can also be very personal and private, for instance, daily meditation or prayer or getting up early to watch the sun rise. Whereas previously your daily rhythm was driven by your addiction, you can now replace that frenetic, mindless activity with activities that draw you to life. Creating new personal rituals is a gentle place for you to start reconnecting. It allows you to enrich and fill your own life with a sense of reverence and respect for the world that surrounds you.
EXERCISE—CREATING RITUALS: Consider the ways you might begin introducing rituals into your personal or family life. Think about your daily schedule and what you can do to incorporate life-enhancing practices, like reading from an inspirational book or affirming your daily positives at bedtime; spending a few minutes mindfully exploring your values altar; or sharing an after-school snack with your child and talking about her day or reading to her in bed before she goes to sleep. Similarly, consider the more community-oriented rituals that you’d like to partake of, like joining a church or meditation group, attending community meetings, or walking with family or nearby friends after dinner. Begin making these occasions, these points of contact, a regular feature of your existence.
Traditions are family treasures. They are one of the touchstones that give us a sense of belonging and comfort. But, say, you are separated from your family or haven’t inherited or don’t practice any family or religious traditions. Then you can always start some yourself. For instance, some people volunteer at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving or Christmas. Some families pass down a special heirloom on a significant birthday. A tradition can be as simple as a monthly Sunday dinner or as elaborate as a family reunion. Make a list of traditions, family or cultural, that are important to you, or traditions you would like to start. Perhaps you have seen others practicing a tradition that you found meaningful. Go on—steal it!
Commemorating major events with a celebration or remembrance is how we honor and attach value to one another—even when you throw a celebration for yourself. What better way to honor your friends and family than by asking them to share your significant life event? There are so many opportunities to celebrate: graduations, wedding or baby showers, birthdays, holidays, work promotions—significant recovery anniversaries. (AA has something there, although from the perspective of this book, as time goes on, that should fade in importance as you come to have more substantial, positive accomplishments and milestones.) Don’t gloss over these events; instead, acknowledge them, whether by going out for dinner with a few special people, having a small party, or throwing a bash.
CASE: Richard had an ugly divorce, and his college-age son and adult daughter preferred being with their mother, who, after all, had always been the primary caretaker in the family. So Richard fiddled and fumed while he waited for his children to arrange get-togethers.
Once, as his birthday approached, it suddenly occurred to Richard that he could host his own party. He cleaned up his apartment, ordered some pizza and salad, and invited a couple of friends—along with his children and their dates. Although he was beset by anxiety about playing the unfamiliar role of host, the evening surprised Richard by being a resounding success.
As his son left, he told Richard, “That was great, Dad—let’s do it again soon!”
Similarly, take the opportunity to grieve with others or share the sorrow of tragic events like deaths and illnesses. Sit Shiva or attend a wake; spend time with a friend with cancer. Being there for people is a major way of ensuring that you remain in the midst of humanity and acknowledge the humility of our existence in the universe. To put it in starker terms, we’re all going to die. From The PERFECT Program perspective, appreciating the lives people have lived, their sheer presence on earth—which is the essence of mindfulness—gives your life a kind of immortality. In the words of John Donne: “Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
And while these ceremonies engage you with the people you cherish, they also impose on you accountability and responsibility to others, which is why it can be difficult for addicted people to participate in these activities. Anything that brings fulfillment to your life will push addiction away—and the flipside is also true: Neglecting these things will permit both the time and the psychic emptiness that invite vapid and destructive behavior. Rituals, traditions, and celebrations are not frivolous pursuits. They are essential, non-addictive links to your world.
Have you ever heard New Yorkers say they can always spot the tourists, because they walk around the city like rubes, with their mouths agape and their heads up, marveling at the sites and skyscrapers? For some reason, cynicism and world-weariness are considered admirable qualities in our culture, with “whatever” perhaps being the catchphrase of our era. Is reveling in a feeling of wonder a mark of lack of sophistication? I don’t think so. (Although, as a New York resident, I do think Madame Tussauds is a rip-off and going up to the observation deck of the Empire State Building a waste of time for adults. Sorry.)
I’m going to speak now to your inner rube—the aspect of you that has been waiting around for an opportunity to be completely blown away by double rainbows and tall buildings. The pleasures and rewards of addictive behavior will blind you to joys you might never have known existed—or that couldn’t hold your interest in the face of your addictive urges. How many opportunities to revel in something delightful have you missed? What beauty has escaped your notice? Now that you are headed down the path of your real life, you might feel as if you were blinking into the sun. Things you never noticed before might capture your attention and make you smile or marvel. I have written at length about linking yourself to the values that you know will bring joy and satisfaction to your life. Let’s explore at the same time recognizing and discovering new joys. You cannot find too many ways of replacing the superficial rewards of addiction with the genuine rewards you gain from living a life of freedom.
CASE: When Thomas stopped smoking marijuana, he felt that he didn’t know how to see and feel. After all, everything had been mediated by his being stoned—sometimes involving just staring at the wall! He found that there were two sides to this phenomenon. On the one hand, he had to immerse himself in appreciating every single aspect of every single day—including simply recognizing the passage of time, which being stoned hadn’t permitted him to do. On the other hand, for the first time in a while he had the chance to indulge mindfully in the simple, pure joy of unadorned sensation and perception. In a way, “getting high on the natch” (natural) was the greatest trip of all.
Mindfulness in the wake of an addiction
We have discussed mindfulness as bringing unnoted reactions, emotions, and motivations to the surface of present consciousness. Thus, Thomas’s story takes on a double meaning for mindfulness as a badge, a tool in recovery, particularly newly minted recovery.
CASE: At the time Liza quit drinking, after she had walked around in an alcohol haze for years, she really wondered what she was going to do with herself. Every single thing in her world had revolved around her drinking—every activity accompanied or was a precursor to drinking. In many cases, she had to learn for the first time the most basic aspects of having fun and filling her time—of living. After she had gotten beyond the miseries of quitting, she walked gingerly along the sidewalk, listening to the birds, watching the sun. It was a novel experience! She had to learn to be with people without alcohol, to go to the movies, to listen to music, and to do everything else stone cold sober. She began a list of things she could experience anew, some as simple as revisiting the supermarket. But there were also many new activities for Liza, like bike riding and cooking and sewing. She had plenty to choose from—it was as though she were a newborn.
Venturing away from addiction takes effort and focus—dealing with cravings, recovering after losing your footing, doing all these exercises, trying to be mindful. But even at the beginning of the journey, you may start noticing times when you’re feeling pretty good or enjoying something you never bothered with before. For instance, on a walk, you might focus on the movement of your muscles working and enjoy the rhythm of your body, rather than thinking about the slog and how much longer it will take you to get home. (These are sensations encouraged by yoga and Feldenkrais, which I reviewed at the end of Chapter 4.) If you’ve stopped smoking, surely you’ll appreciate the freshness of the air and your ease of breathing! Or, if you’ve given up drinking alcohol, you might notice how satisfying it is to down a cool glass of water. It could be that you never so much went to bed as passed out; now you are reminded of how good it felt to crawl under the covers as a child. There are an infinite number of ways to take pleasure in everyday life, and doing so is a choice and an exercise of mindfulness. In fact, if you pause right now, lift your head from your reading, you will surely be able to discover something that brings you some joy: perhaps you are feeling relaxed as you read or are sensing the sun on your skin, maybe there’s a cat purring on your lap, or the tea you have next to you smells lovely. What do you notice?
Mindfulness en route to joy
Simply noticing and appreciating pleasant sensations or beautiful surroundings is one way of discovering joy. Another way is to intentionally seek out such sensations and surroundings. Make the effort to venture out into the world to create experiences that will bring you joy: Go for a hike through the park for no other purpose than to look around; smile at the people you pass; sit under a tree. Visit an unfamiliar part of town or go to another town or city; linger at shop windows; read the paper at a cafe. Or, staying closer to home, simply go out onto your step or into your back yard on a nice day to breathe deeply and smell the air and enjoy the sunlight on the trees. Staying indoors, read a book (okay, an e-book), or put on some new music. One way or another, open your heart and mind and senses to the world around you and acknowledge those things that inspire a sense of wonder or contentment. And before you fall asleep at night, recall those new experiences in as much detail as possible—especially the new joys they have brought you.
***
Much of your progress through The PERFECT Program has been on learning to cope with difficult feelings by strengthening your core, or inner wisdom and free will, and by replacing what is superficial and mindless with purpose, value, meaning, and mindfulness. It’s a colossal effort, and the work you have been doing may bring you a real sense of satisfaction. One reason it may seem so hard to experience joy is our tendency to believe that we learn solely through difficulty and continuing trial. This tendency is strongly reinforced by the recovery movement mantra embodied by the white-knuckle phrase, “one day at a time.” Just a reminder: Recovery—living—is more than not succumbing to addiction.
I believe—and I tell addicts—that they have been improved by the suffering and hardship they have endured—even if it was self-induced. There are things you may know about yourself and life that you wish you hadn’t had to learn, but that make you a deeper, more complete person now that you have. The lessons we learn from hardship are abiding and true. But they are far from the only truths you are going to gain in life. Understanding that some of your wisdom is hard won shouldn’t make it harder for you to accept the wisdom that is earned through experiences of peace, satisfaction, fulfillment, and wonder. Shifting your perspective on this—toward valuing the insights you gain in joy as much as in hardship—is another way of bringing balance into your life. In short, knowing what works is even more important than knowing that addiction doesn’t.
Putting It All Together
I’ve cited cases of mindful recovery earlier in this book. I want to end this phase of The PERFECT Program (before turning to the aftercare element presented by Chapter 10) with a case where a woman stabilized her life around a serious addiction—a set of addictions, really. This woman, Nona Jordan (whose program for women’s financial self-management2 is a resource referenced in Chapter 10), describes how she took control of her life over the long run, instituting changes that brought her a permanent set of rewards that finally guaranteed that her addictions would never reappear. Nona narrates her experience in her own words. The title of her case is her own.
CHANGE Is for Everyone Who Wants It
Lots of people are content with their lives and have no desire to change a thing. I’ve never been one of those people. My very earliest memories are of wanting to be my very best, to express the most perfect version of myself during this lifetime no matter what I’m doing.
In my late twenties, I was working in corporate accounting. I was good at the job but didn’t really like it. I worked long hours and was constantly anxious about my performance. My favorite way of reducing stress was getting drunk at the local bar and smoking cigarettes until my throat hurt. Alcohol abuse is putting it mildly. Coming from a long line of alcoholics, I knew better—but it didn’t stop me.
My relationships were disasters. The men I dated were poor choices and my friendships were all based on drinking. Despite my active social life, I felt isolated. I hid my drinking, which was getting harder to do. I was overweight from all the drinking. Drinking the way I was isn’t cheap, either, and so I was in debt, even though I made a good living. I blamed others and my past for all of my problems.
It wasn’t a pretty picture.
All this time, all through the drinking, I had continued to study and practice yoga and meditation. They seemed to be having very little benefit, but, little did I know, these practices were seeping into my life.
My moment of clarity arrived as the sun was setting one evening. I had finished a 6-pack already and was feeling ZERO effects from the beer. I was reading a book about Buddhism, which emphasized the idea of avoiding intoxication in order to clear away the cobwebs and experience life fully. As a way to really love yourself and grow from, and into, your life.
I looked up and I looked inward—I clearly saw the huge chasm.
Way over to the left was my current life: drunk, lonely, bad relationships, overweight, in debt, dissatisfied at work, no prospects in sight. Way over to the right was the life I knew I was meant to live: clear and happy, connecting to wonderful people in good relationships, healthy, helping others, doing work I love, with endless possibility for growth and change.
That night, I knew I was ready. I wanted to bridge that gap.
A few weeks later, I was sitting in the office of a Buddhist therapist that a girl at work had casually mentioned to me. It was my second day of not drinking and I felt horrible. But I knew if I was going to get the most out of therapy, I had to recognize my feelings. I was walking toward the version of me that I knew, deep down, I could be.
That was the beginning of the most life-altering, challenging, and—ultimately—profound period of my life. I broke up with my boyfriend. I stopped working so many hours (although, today, I work just as hard, only at gratifying things that I love). I started investigating yoga-teacher training programs. I started working out and honoring my body. I lost 30 pounds, almost effortlessly. I meditated; I got on my yoga mat and practiced for hours.
And I sat with my feelings and cried a lot. I worked hard with my therapist to clear away the rotten thoughts and beliefs that were mucking up my mind and my heart. I volunteered; I sought out healthy friendships; I paid off my debt.
I realized, in my heart—no, in my bones—that my life was my own. Happiness was in my hands, and my hands alone.
That was eleven years ago.
As of today, I am a married to a wonderful man and I have a beautiful daughter. I am a CPA, a yoga teacher, and a master coach. I work with women who want to create success on their terms. I have the pleasure of supporting them in finding the peace and ease that comes with creating a life and a financial legacy of their choosing.
My life is better than I would have ever imagined on that dark night so many years ago. There have been rough spots—really rough spots. This journey has not been easy, effortless, or flawless. But every year, I can say without fail, I more deeply love the life I have created for myself.
It’s easy to say our situation is too hard, that someone else is holding us back, or that we’re too damaged, broken, weak, or poor. But it’s simply not true.
Life is what we make of it. Change is for anyone who wants it.
And that is the best news I can possibly give you on this fine day.
Moving Forward
You have learned the practice of The PERFECT Program for addiction, how to remove addiction from your life and replace it with genuine joy and accomplishment by homing in on your true self. You have learned to recognize and honor your success, to institute practices that reinforce and cement your ties to the things that make your life meaningful—your personal pleasures; your spiritual, familial, community, and cultural centers—and to cultivate new experiences of joy and wonder. Arriving at a place where you see the genuine value in celebrating your life in a way that is not narrowly self-involved and does not feel like a frivolous pursuit is a key stage in your recovery. This is this spirit that informs The PERFECT Program.
The following chapter is titled “Triage,” which means dealing first with critical needs or circumstances, with emergencies. This is the chapter to turn to when you are feeling at a loss, or trying to remember your priorities in an overwhelming or difficult situation. It contains ideas and resources for dealing with cravings, relapse, life’s curves, and other circumstances that require immediate guidance and perspective as you follow your new path.
* At the beginning of each year, Jerry hangs up a “year-at-a-glance” calendar; each day he composes new material he marks with an X. This is one way for creative people to impose structure and enforce self-discipline in a lonely form of work.