eight step recovery

Interview with the co author of Eight Step Recovery – Using The Buddha’s Teachings to Overcome Addiction

Most of us either know someone who has suffered from some form of addiction or have suffered from addiction ourselves. Why do you think it is so common?

Suffering is Universal. Human nature has an inbuilt tendency toward addiction. I would say that the main reason why we become addicts is that there is some dis-ease deep in our minds, and I think most of us can relate to that experience. Our addictions are usually misguided kindness towards ourselves – we’re trying to take care of something difficult that is arising in our minds. The problem is that in doing that we keep reaching for our addiction until it becomes so habitual that we’re not even aware of our behaviour. Many addicts will say ‘But I didn’t have a choice’, and once upon a time I would have said the same to you – it was almost as if someone had jumped inside me and driven me into the shop so I could buy my fix. But when we begin to slow down and step onto the path of recovery, we can actually see more clearly what we are doing and realize that we do have that choice.

So would you describe stepping onto the path of recovery as taking back control over our lives?

Well I think the first step towards recovery is not so much trying to take control of the situation but just slowing down and becoming more aware. Our addictions are actually often bound up with issues of control. My main addiction was food, for example, (I was diagnosed an extreme bulimic anorectic) and I spent so much time trying to control my body and what I put into it but of course this didn’t work because I wasn’t in control; none of us can ever be completely in control.

Instead of trying to control my life, actually what I needed was to do was to become more aware of my thoughts – not to control my thoughts but just to become aware of them. And when I started to put the emphasis and the energy into this, I began to see that I didn’t have to believe in my thoughts – my thoughts weren’t truth.

So I think that when you are suffering from addiction it can actually be really important to acknowledge that you are not in control. Rather, the first step towards recovery is just to slow down and become more aware.

And this is where meditation comes into the picture. Can you talk a bit more about the benefits of meditation for those who are in recovery?

Meditation is such a powerful tool that in the long term it can completely transform people’s lives. I look back at my life I think ‘God, is that me?’ I don’t actually recognize that person who I was, and that is fantastic.

In the shorter term, what meditation offers is sobriety of mind or peace of mind. Meditation can begin to calm our mental proliferation – the voices and stories which go on and on and around and around in our heads.

Saying that, often people who meditate for the first time come back to me and say, ‘I can’t meditate because it’s too hard for me to concentrate – I’ve got so many voices in my head!’ And what I say to these people is, ‘That’s meditating!’ When you can see all of the chatter in your head, you have started to meditate, because often we’re not even aware of that chatter. Then if, with practice, you can just keep coming back to the breath and get a couple of seconds of stillness, that’s huge!

So don’t tell yourself, ‘I can’t meditate because meditation must be calm, it must be peaceful’ because it might be really challenging when you’re sitting in the chair or on the cushion, but once you come out your formal meditation, you will begin to see the impact of that practice on the rest of your life.

So for someone who is starting this process, what are some simple meditations that they could try?

There is an acronym called AGE, which is something that’s used a lot in the Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy world. AGE is a thee-minute breathing space, and each letter stands for something. ‘A’ is awareness – one has awareness of thoughts and feelings. ‘G’ stands for gather – gather the breath and become aware of the breath on your upper lip or inside your nostrils. Then ‘E’ stands for expand, expand the breath throughout your whole body, from head to toe. And this is something that you can do in three minutes or even in just a minute – you can do it at your desk or when you’re walking down the street, for example. You just need to stop and take a pause.

You say in your book that ‘The Buddha was in recovery’. What do you mean by that?

Well we know that the Buddha came form a hedonistic background – he led a princely life with all the material pleasures he could wish for, but still he wasn’t content. So he tried to find contentment by going to the other extreme and becoming an ascetic, using self-mortification practices and eating just one grain of rice each day. All of this, of course, is quite harming, and in the modern west the Buddha could be locked up or considered an anorectic. When Shakyamuni became a Buddha (hence woke up to the truth of reality) he went beyond recovery. He then shared his recovery with the rest of the world. It is possible for us to go beyond recovery too. We all can wake up and see things as they really are.

So after engaging with these ascetic practices, the Buddha realized that actually they weren’t the answer either; the answer was the Middle Way. And in his first discourse he makes it very clear that the path to the end of suffering is about freedom from craving, from addiction. So in a way, I believe that what the Buddha’s life story is telling us is that what the Buddha offered was his recovery to the world – he offered the Noble Eightfold Path as a way out of suffering.

So do we need to believe in a higher power, like the Buddha or God, to recover?

I don’t think that we need to believe in a Buddha or a god in order to recover, but I do believe that higher power is there for us whether we believe in it consciously or not. The breath, for example, is higher power – we all believe in breath unconsciously because if we didn’t we would be dead, and we believe in impermanence (which is another of the Buddha’s key teachings) because without it we wouldn’t have the confidence that we could grow and develop; we wouldn’t have the motivation to carry on living. So although some people aren’t aware of higher power working in their lives it is always there for us to tap into, and it is wonderful when we can become conscious of it.

Your book is called Eight Step Recovery. Are the Eight Steps to your book the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path or are they referring to the Twelve Step Program?

Steps have a venerable tradition in Buddhism. The Dhammapada an important text in Buddhist literature, means steps of the dharma, or verses of the dharma. The rupa, statutes of the Buddha is a contemporary representation of the Buddha. In the Buddha’s day it was two foot prints, that represented the Buddha stepping out into the world. If you are familiar with Buddhism there are many lists. And so it seemed fitting to call these teachings eight steps. We have used aspects of the Noble Eightfold Path but our book draws more widely from Buddhist teaching as well, so the Eight Steps don’t just refer to the Eightfold Path. Neither do they refer just to the Twelve Step Program; we would like our book to be used as an alternative to the Twelve Step Program, or in conjunction with it.

We believe that through writing this new book we are adding to the canon of recovery. Actually I think that we’re in a very exciting time now, because at one point the Twelve Steps had the monopoly on recovery – there was nowhere else that people could go – but now there are other options for people who would like to recover from their addictions.

I’m one of those people who didn’t clean up in the Twelve Step Program – I cleaned up in the meditation rooms – and I wanted to write a book offering my recovery to the world as well. The Buddhist teachings changed my life, so through this book I hope that I can bring these teachings to more people and help change their lives for the better as well.

Eight Step Recovery is out now: Eight Step Recovery – Order your book now

Or try a free sample – For a free sample chapter of Eight Step Recovery – Using The Buddha’s Teachings To Overcome Addiction please email: eightstepsrecovery@gmail.com

Christmas is behind us and new year has unfolded for many in all, sorts of interesting ways. How many of us made new year resolutions? And how many of us have broken them already?

I remember as a child being told promises are made to be broken. And soon realized how hard promises were to keep. It was because while I was enthusiastic about a promise and had all intentions of keeping it, I forgot the most important thing: my plan. Promises are only made to be broken if we don’t make a plan.

How many of you have made a plan? A plan is essential for recovery. Without it we will be like the hamster running around on the wheel frenetically and falling off, and in the next breath jumping back on for dear life, then and falling off again.

In Buddhism we have a practise of confession. We tell a trusted person our unskilful actions or behaviour. Somebody who we know will not judge us. This could be confessing in front of a Buddhist image or picture, and then to a trusted human being. We then have healthy remorse and commit to not performing the same behaviour again. And then we tell the trusted person what we are going to do to help us keep that commitment. This is what we call the plan.

We can ready many books, listen to many talks and be inspired to change. But nothing much will change if we don’t make a plan. Calling it confession ritualizes our recovery. It is most definitely not Catholic confession. It is most definitely not about guilt. In recovery there is no room for guilt. Guilt will sabotage sobriety, peace of mind and abstinence.

Let go of guilt and take responsibility for your recovery. Act now and make a plan. My New book Eight Step Recovery will help you do just that. It’s out now: Eight Step Recovery – Order your book now

Or try a free sample – For a free sample chapter of Eight Step Recovery – Using The Buddha’s Teachings To Overcome Addiction please email: eightstepsrecovery@gmail.com

On the 17th of November 2013 I will be releasing the 21 Day Meditation Recovery to listen to or download free. It’s a short course in meditation to accompany our book, Eight Step Recovery: Using the Buddha’s Teachings to Overcome Addiction, which will be published in January in the UK and in March, North America.

For a free sample chapter of Eight Step Recovery – Using The Buddha’s Teachings To Overcome Addiction please email: eightstepsrecovery@gmail.com

Each meditation is about 15 minutes long. It’s a bite-sized length – perfect for people with busy lives who find it hard to make time or if some of you struggle with longer meditations. The meditations cover a range of topics including mindfulness, loving-kindness, ethics, wisdom and mantras. All the meditations have some background music which can help you to stay focussed on the subject of the meditation.

These meditations are special because friends donated there time, creativity and expertise as a gift of generosity to make these recordings free. When you register you will learn who the people were who made these meditations possible.

I asked a few friends: ‘Why meditate?’

‘First and foremost, I’m a simple recovery guy and it is the focus point of the 12-Steps. What ignites me each day to practice, is meditation encourages me to stay awake and be present for my life, which is enough, which is everything.’ Tom Catton, author of the Mindful Addict

‘I meditate for many reasons but above all I meditate for insight, guidance and direction into the nature of mind; it’s a sort of spiritual SatNav pointing to the path away from suffering,’ Vince Cullen, Founder of Meditation for Abstinence and Recovery – www.5th-precept.org

‘Some people meditate for a purpose—for stress reduction, anger management, physical and mental health, enhanced athletic or artistic performance, or whatever the reason might be. And that’s totally fine. Meditation can be very beneficial for all of those things. But what I would call true meditation is not a doing. It has no purpose, no goal, no use. It is simply being here now. Not being here now in order to achieve something or get somewhere or get rid of something or change something, but being here now with no agenda. Meditation is simply awareness. It allows everything to be just as it is, without chasing anything or pushing anything away. Meditation is a kind of open looking and listening rooted in a spirit of curiosity, interest and love. It can be done in an intentional way, which is how we usually think of meditation, as deliberately sitting down and meditating. In that case it is a kind of simplified space where we stop all the usual doing, the “sound and fury” of daily life—and we sit relatively still, without talking, turn off the TV and the stereo and the phone and all the various devices, put down the books and magazines, and simply BE, Here / Now, awake and present. We allow what we often overlook or avoid to come into the light of awareness. We see patterns of habitual, conditioned thought that we hadn’t seen before, and we discover the open, spacious aliveness of bare being. In simply being present with no goal or purpose, a space opens up where nothing is lacking. Stories that have seemed so real dissolve into silence and what remains is beyond words. ‘ Joan Tollifson an author of several books, who uses her personal experience to explore non duality and awareness

‘I meditate because, while profound change can potentially happen anywhere and anytime, meditation offers the best set of conditions for that to happen. There are times when it seems I don’t want or need to meditate, but I simply have never found a better alternative.’ Satyadhana, a Sanskrit and Pali scholar

‘Only the meditation pillow grows sweet calm and clear insight’ Bhikkhu Samahita – Theravaden Monk – founder of https://What-Buddha-Said.net

‘I meditate to step into the vastness that is always there.’ Florence Caplow – Zen Priest and editor of Hidden Lamp:Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women

‘I recognize meditation as one of the most direct methods for growth and working with tendencies. Right now my body feels charged with a happiness that makes me feel like laughing…. Ed Cooper, Going For Refuge Mitra in the Triratna Sangha

‘I meditate because I love to be reminded that love and openness are always just there.’ Padmadharani – Meditation Teacher and Writer

I hope some of these quotes inspire you to take part in the 21 Day Meditation for Recovery – and Busy Lives. It has been said it takes 21 days to change a habit, so how about creating a new habit, 15 minutes of mediation daily. What was the Buddha doing when he became enlightened? Meditating. This answer says it all. Meditation is revolutionary and continues to revolutionize my life.