My Practice (Part 1)
Progress, not perfection.
As I discussed in my last post, the first step of any recovery journey is removing the substances and/or behaviors that have been causing you pain. Once you have made the decision to quit these habits, the journey of recovery begins. Since these habits have likely been ingrained for many years, it is natural that the mind and body will crave them and try to convince you to fall back into using them. For the first few days or weeks or even months, it might feel like your mind is screaming at you to go back to “normal”. Because even if the habits you have created are unhealthy or not considered “normal” by other people, they are your normal. They feel familiar, and therefore safe.
So the most important thing to develop right away is new habits. Healthy habits that you can use to replace the unhealthy ones. And a daily practice that helps you solidify these habits into your lifestyle. At first, this will feel monumental, which is why it is so important to make your daily practice manageable. Start with small changes. Once a small change has been integrated, you can add another. And then another. And eventually, you will look around at your life and hardly be able to recognize it from the one you once had.
Getting a new habit to stick
The practice that I consider a daily non-negotiable now is meditation. I had tried to develop a daily meditation practice for many years before I got sober, but I wasn’t able to make it stick until I stopped drinking and using drugs. And still, during the first few months of my recovery, it was hard to stick to a daily routine. It was hard to get up early enough in the morning to give myself enough time to practice. I was exhausted and anxious and sad and scared. I wanted to change my life completely because I was so unhappy and felt so unhealthy. I tried to cut out sugar and change my diet and start exercising again and start meditating in the mornings. All at once. Naturally, this plan wasn’t sustainable. And my mind was already constantly screaming at me for ditching my security blanket.
My cravings started to hit me harder after a few weeks of trying to do it all. So I took the advice I had been hearing from my community and from a fantastic book by Dr. Nicole LePera and finally gave myself permission to start small and slowly gain traction. In her book, “How To Do The Work”, Dr. LePera says to make one small promise to yourself and add it to your daily routine for 30 days before adding on any new goals. The first promise I made was just to get up just a little bit earlier and have time to sit and drink my coffee before I went to work. Once I was able to get that habit to stick, I committed to practicing meditation after my morning coffee.
At first, I gave myself permission to just do 5 minutes of meditation each morning. Sometimes, I would hit snooze and not allow myself enough time to practice. So I practiced when I got home from work. And I talked to myself kindly, rather than beating myself up about not following through on my promise that morning. After a couple of months, I wanted to do more. I increased my meditation to 10 or 15 minutes, depending on how much time I had. Now I usually meditate for 20 minutes each morning, and even 30 if I have enough time that day. I often turn on a body scan or yoga nidra meditation before bed or to wind down when I get home from work, too (I’m writing more about these practices to share in my next post).
Some days, I only have time for 5 or 10 minutes. And that is fine. Because it is a practice. And consistency is what matters. As the common AA saying goes, “progress, not perfection”. The most glorious feeling is that now I can drop into my practice almost immediately and, when I don’t have time for a longer session, I feel the desire to sit on the cushion for longer. It doesn’t feel like a burden or something I “have” to do. It feels like home. Like the sweetest and most nourishing part of my day.
Why practice formal meditation?
Any activity can be done mindfully, in the spirit of meditation. But it is very tricky to practice attention and gentle awareness while doing another activity. So the idea behind sitting on the cushion (or, lying on the floor, or in whatever position works best for you) is to create a calm, safe space for you to practice observing your breath and your body and bringing your mind back into the experience of the present moment over and over again as it tries to run away with the thoughts that naturally arise. I can’t remember where I heard this first, but it’s like training a puppy to walk on a leash. It doesn’t help to pull the puppy around and force it to walk by your side. When the puppy gets distracted, you gently re-engage its attention and bring it back to the path. Using treats helps with training your puppy, too. And the treat of meditating is peaceful breathing. Bringing the mind back to the pleasant sensations of sitting quietly and breathing in a relaxed way is an incredible reward. And the more you practice, the easier it gets to come back to the present. And the more enjoyable it becomes to just be and release the need to follow every thought that crosses your mind.
Practicing meditation consistently allows you to develop this awareness in everyday life, too. So you can begin to notice the mind’s tendency to run away with thoughts in all different situations. You can use your walk to work as an opportunity to observe your body moving and the scenery around you rather than going over all the things you have to do that day or worrying about how the day will go. You can use the time you spend washing the dishes to enjoy the feeling of warm water washing over your hands and experience gratitude for having a sink to wash dishes in and food to make them dirty, rather than wishing the task could be over so you can move on to the next one.
Developing mindfulness changes your entire outlook on life. It can make even the most mundane tasks pleasant. And it can stop a negative thought in its tracks. Mindfulness helps you learn to “hit the pause button” and notice when cravings or aversions are arising and stop jumping to satisfy the urge. It helps you sit with big emotions as they arise and not immediately run from them. This is a practice, one that must be committed to on a daily basis, and recommitted to, so that you eventually become more skilled at letting emotions pass and not carrying them on.
Emotions are temporary
Another wonderful lesson I learned from Dr. LePera is that emotions only last for about 90 seconds. Our thoughts about them are what make them continue. When we spend an entire day feeling angry about something that happened on our drive to work, we are the ones choosing to continue that anger. The anger was only present for a moment, but our thoughts about that moment continued. We cannot avoid emotions. They will happen to us no matter how much we practice meditation. But we can choose how long we dwell on those emotions. We can choose to notice the emotion, allow it to wash over us, and then let go of the thoughts that could continue it throughout our day and drive us to make harmful decisions.
As you continue to practice, it will become easier to feel into the depth of the emotion and realize that there are others buried beneath it. And there are causes that we may have forgotten about that created the habit loop that we fall back on when we experience certain emotions. Committing to a daily meditation practice has allowed me to start peeling back the layers that I have developed through the years of avoiding my emotions and soothing myself with destructive habits. I am starting to be able to step back and watch my mind run down its familiar paths, then gently tempt it back to the breath and observe what emotions started that train of thought. I am getting better at simply identifying without judging myself. And through that process, I am starting to understand why I act and think the way I do and how to choose more supportive and kind thoughts and actions.
Another practice that has been vital to my recovery is mindful movement, which is why I got certified as a yoga instructor. But that is for the next post! Make sure to subscribe to receive the next post in your inbox, in which I will guide you through some of my favorite ways to incorporate a yoga practice into your daily life.