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Mindfulness of Breathing – ten-minute meditation on turning toward difficulties |
Begin by bringing your attention to the contact with the ground. Allow a sense of being supported by the ground. Now bring attention to your contact with the cushions or chair, and allow them to take your weight. Bring awareness to the top half of the body, the torso, perhaps rocking it back and forth slightly to find a point of balance. Similarly, rock the head slightly to find a point of balance. Take awareness to the shoulders and arms and relax. Allow your hands to rest supported in your lap or a blanket. Now notice that you are breathing; feel the chest and perhaps the belly expanding and contracting.
Without trying to change your breath in any way, allow yourself to follow the movements of the breath in and out of the body. As best you can, take interest in just what the breath is like: whether it is deep or shallow, long or short, smooth or irregular.
From time to time your mind will wander off. That’s fine; just notice where your mind has gone, then return to the breath. If you find that your mind keeps getting caught up in the same thing, or you are experiencing something painful or difficult, then choose to turn toward it. Turn toward it by noticing which part of the body is most affected by what is going on. Perhaps there is tension in the shoulders or churning in the belly or maybe there are painful sensations in the back.
Using the breath to guide your attention, “breathe into” the difficult sensations. As best you can, notice just what the sensations are like – where they are, whether they are dull or sharp, how long they last. As best you can, bring a quality of friendliness, curiosity, and acceptance to whatever is happening. Allow and open to whatever is there. If you find it helpful, say to yourself: “It’s okay, whatever it is, it is already here, let me feel it.” When you have spent some time with the difficult experience or notice that it has changed, return to just following the breath.
When you are ready, gently bring the meditation to a close.
Staying with difficult experience – avoiding misunderstandings
It is important to become aware of our mental and emotional responses to what happens in our lives – what we sometimes call our mental–emotional support system (MESS).4 The things that hinder us or sabotage us can be part of the MESS that gets in the way of our recovery. We need to work at making our MESS healthier, stronger, and more resilient. We do this by learning not to blame ourselves or beat ourselves up every time we make a mistake, have a slip or a relapse. This is a trap our minds can make for us, which only adds more suffering. We learn to become aware of what is going on in our minds and let go of it. This means realizing that we are not our thoughts or our habits.
Sometimes we need to allow ourselves to break down so we can choose different bricks to build ourselves back up. Breaking down can be part of staying with a difficult experience and part of letting go of old hurts. Becoming aware of our MESS, the obstacles that get in the way of recovery, is a healthier way of breaking down.
Our addictions can also bring us to a place of breaking down. This is sometimes called hitting rock bottom. Reaching this place can wake us up and make us take action. However, all too often, once we have recovered, we forget that awful experience and revert to our old behaviors. Awareness of our mini-breakdowns is important because they can shake us up and make us want to change our lives. Breaking down does not have to mean reaching a catastrophe.
Do we need to hit rock bottom to start our recovery?
The lightbulb may have already flashed on. We may feel inspired by what we have read, and feel ready to make changes in our lives. So what are we waiting for? Rock bottom? The place where we feel so desperate that we have to do something or we will physically, emotionally, or mentally die from our addiction? We need to beware of waiting for this kind of experience, because we will be broken and will have little strength and few emotional resources to work at our recovery once we are out of the crisis.
When some of us hit that broken place of rock bottom, we are motivated to get out of the hell of addiction. But once we have risen from the destruction of our addictions and are back functioning in the world, we can easily forget where we were and return to our old habits. Many people hit rock bottom over and over again and still do not recover. And for those who do get recovery, rock bottom is very different from what it looked like five years earlier.
Yes! It seems we do have to suffer to make great changes in our lives, but we don’t need a life-or-death emergency in order to change. There are other painful places we can reach before crashing to this lowest point. We must also beware if we are still able to function in the world, keeping our lives and work together. We can delude ourselves and think: “I haven’t lost my job, my home, or my family, so why bother changing? I don’t owe anything. I haven’t stolen to pay for my addiction.” This thinking can keep us in our addictions. Our lowest point may not be a matter of life or death, but there will be other places of suffering in our lives if we are honest.
Adi’s story
Adi believed that she performed much better in a crisis. Her childhood had been full of high drama. She was the eldest daughter and often left at home to feed her four siblings for weeks at a time. When her mother came home, she often brought abusive men back with her. Adi was drinking and smoking dope offered by her mother’s boyfriend at the age of ten. While high, she had to learn to protect herself and her siblings from sexual abuse. She did well at school and managed to finance herself through university. She believed that she performed much better in chaos. So she often created chaos in adult life when she needed to achieve something important.
When Adi came into recovery from living on a cocktail of antidepressants, she told us that the only way for her to get better was to get completely wrecked so she could begin picking up the pieces. She would go on an alcoholic binge, clean up for one week, and go back on the bottle and her antidepressants again. Adi was searching for the lowest point of suffering to cure her, but it never came. Yet she had her children taken away from her, lost her home, and even lived on the streets.
Adi had to accept that the place of suffering she was waiting for was here in this moment and progressing in different ways. She didn’t have control over her addiction; it had control over her. Her old coping methods were no longer working. In her recovery she began to see that the binges just made her frail and unwell, and once she was feeling strong again she could cope with going back to her addictive habits.
When she learned to slow down in the Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention course, she came into relationship with her chaotic life. She realized that she did not need to create more crisis; she needed to attend to what was going on in her life. She accepted that creating crisis had been her way of avoiding the pain and stress in her life. She began to see clearly that she needed to do something urgently or she would die. Only this time, she was not physically and emotionally frail. She was robust, and could begin to slowly make changes in her life.
A low point of suffering can be a spiritual crisis. It could simply be realizing, like the Buddha, that we will age, get sick, and die. Alternatively, it could be reflecting on the question: “What is the meaning of life?” A reflection like this can bring about a crisis. Of course, a low point or crisis can be triggered by someone dying, by losing everything we have, or by accidentally overdosing, but we do not have to wait for such catastrophic moments to arise. If we look deeply we may be able to see that the reason we are distracting ourselves with our addictions is to move away from an emotional or spiritual crisis.
Slowing down
Often we run our lives at a hectic pace, or simply don’t give ourselves the space to notice what we are really experiencing. In order to learn to see how our minds work, what the triggers for our addictions are, how we create more suffering in our lives, and how we start to change those habits, we need to slow down.
Take a few deep breaths now and pause. Find moments in your day when you can slow down the movie of your life. Practice AGE throughout the day. Stop and pause for three minutes.
Another way to slow down is to pay mindful attention to simple routine activities that you perform during the day. When you wake up, you could mindfully clean your teeth, watch yourself squeeze the toothpaste onto your brush, slowly brush your teeth in circular movements, become aware of the taste and spitting out into the sink. When you are in the shower, you could choose to pay attention to the sensations of the water. Instead of just letting your thoughts run off and planning the day, you could keep coming back to how the water feels on your body, noticing the temperature and the sensation of soap or shampoo. You could choose one meal a day to become aware of each mouthful, your chewing, your swallowing, and how full you feel after each bite.
When we next try to move away from that uncomfortable feeling, we could become aware of what we are about to reach for, of when the thought arises and we make the decision to pick up our quick fix. Our thoughts can feel so strong and believable that they can cause a relapse. In the moment that we have a thought telling us to pick up, if we identify with it, this thought will overwhelm us and facilitate a relapse or lapse. Let’s see if we can step back, take a breath, pause, and try to tell ourselves a more helpful thought. This will help us make a new decision.
So if we become aware of when we make that decision, we could make a new decision not to pick up our fix. We could lean into the uncomfortable thought. The potency of recovery is in slowing our lives down, being mindful of every moment and everything we are doing. When we speed our lives up so much, we are often not even aware of how we got into a binge. Slowing down sounds simple, but it is not easy. It goes against our belief that, if we distract ourselves from our minds, we will be able to cope with our lives more efficiently.
Reflecting on why we create more suffering in our lives
Why do we keep creating more suffering in our lives? It’s a question that everyone could benefit from reflecting upon. We can stop digging that hole we keep falling into. We can put the shovel down at any time, and walk away from the hole. It sounds simple, but we know from experience it’s not that easy. If it were easy, we would probably not be reading this book. Our habitual behavior patterns make it hard.
Blame keeps us on the path that leads to more suffering. Many people blame their past. Although our past affects us, it does not have to determine our future. With awareness, we can choose how to respond to what is happening in our lives now. By actively choosing our responses, we take responsibility for our lives. We take our lives into our own hands. When we blame our past, we stop taking responsibility for our actions today. How can we blame our parents for what is happening in our lives ten, twenty, or thirty years later? They are not responsible for the way we choose to live today. Some of us have had tough childhoods, but never became overwhelmed with an addiction, and made different choices in our lives.
Ignorance keeps us on the path that leads to more suffering, because we can deny our addiction or pretend everything is OK.
Habit keeps us on the path that leads to more suffering. As the saying goes, if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got, and you’ll always feel what you always felt.
Delusion keeps us on the path that leads to more suffering. Some people at the beginning of their recovery think they can do all the same things, go to all the same places, and not sink back into their addiction.
Not seeing the bigger picture keeps us on the path that leads to more suffering.
When working with this step, try what we suggest and see for yourself. Taking the risk to try for yourself is the only way you can know. Try it out several times before you throw it out. Here are some questions to help you explore this step. Prepare yourself by practicing the three-minute breathing space, AGE. Several authors, including Deepak Chopra, David Richo, and Dyan Yacovelli, talk about the importance of cultivating more attention, affection, appreciation, and acceptance in our lives. All of us need to connect to these four basic needs of the heart.
Become aware of how you create more suffering in your life. This is not about hating yourself, but simply becoming aware of the way things are, without reacting. Our breath is a helpful ally in this reflection. Watch the breath. Everything in life is like the breath arising and ceasing. Your breath is your best teacher. It will warn you when you are panicking; it will tell you when you are at risk; and you will know when you are calm.
Here are some questions you could ask yourself. Be gentle. The object is not to give yourself a hard time. It is to see suffering clearly in your life and recognize how you create it. Perhaps write your responses down in a journal.
| • | What does my suffering look like? |
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| • | How do I create more suffering in my life? |
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| • | What have I gained from creating more suffering in my life? |
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| • | What has creating more suffering in my life cost me? |
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| • | What do I need to do to lessen the suffering in my life? |
You might wish to plan some changes you would like to make in your life.
Give yourself a time frame. State where you would like to be in one year’s time.
Then backtrack, and state where you would like to be in nine months, six months, three months, and one month.
Set yourself a goal for each of these time periods.
Visualize your recovery.
If you wish, write yourself a small script and record it several times so you can play it to yourself daily. A script could read like this:
Now that I realize that I create more suffering in my life, I can easily lessen my suffering. I am learning that my thinking can cause me great harm and trigger me to self-medicate. Now that I see this, I am easily letting go of my harmful thinking and actions. I am now allowing myself to sit with the discomfort, trusting that it will change and cease. I don’t need to pick up my fix anymore. I am using the power of my breath to calm my thoughts. I am using the power of slowing down to keep me sober and abstinent. I am enjoying my life much more now. I am feeling so much happier. I continue to develop and grow.
This is particularly important when we are trying to change our habits and engaging in the difficult task of learning to stay with unpleasant experiences. The four basic needs are: kind attention, affection, appreciation, and acceptance. Often we look outside of ourselves for people to notice us and give us attention. Some people become addicted because deep down they want to be noticed; they desperately need affection; they need to be appreciated and accepted. And so they turn to their choice of stimulant to be their friend, their lover, their confidant. However, we all need to look within to be fully nourished. We have to learn to meet these basic needs in ourselves if we are to lessen our suffering.
Recap
In Step Two, we realize that we create more suffering in our lives. Every time we move away from pain, we multiply the suffering in our lives. We need to learn to sit with the pain calmly. We begin to do this by identifying the things that trigger us, and the high-risk situations that may bring about a relapse. We must also remember that our thoughts are not fact. We do not have to believe our thinking. We can create space whenever we feel at risk of reaching for our addiction, or overwhelmed by the intense feelings of craving, by practicing the three-minute breathing space, AGE. In this space we can learn to do something different.
This is a gentle reminder for us to pause at the end of Step Two, and take a three-minute breathing space.
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For the next ten minutes, sit or lie down and begin to get in touch with these four needs of the heart.
First bring attention to your breath. As you breathe, imagine your breath carrying kindness, like a beautiful, warm light, filling your body with kindness and well-being.
Kind attention: with this sense of breathing kindness, give yourself some attention. Visualize a photo you like of yourself and take a good look at yourself without judgment. Then notice your physical suffering and let it go. Notice your psychological suffering and let it go. Notice your existential suffering and let it go. In essence, just notice what you are thinking and feeling and let it go. Cultivate more loving-kindness in your life, by just paying more attention to yourself.
Affection: give yourself some affection. Look at yourself with warm eyes. Imagine yourself as a tiny baby, and as yourself today; you are holding that tiny baby and looking at it with warmth. Notice yourself. Squeeze that tiny baby into your being and give yourself a literal or metaphorical hug. Cultivate more compassion in your life by looking at yourself, with all your pain and difficulties, with loving eyes.
Appreciation: give yourself some appreciation. Appreciate yourself right now for having the courage to open this book and begin reading it. Go on to appreciate yourself for having the courage to continue your journey of recovery. Cultivate more sympathetic joy in your life, by telling yourself: “Well done.”
Acceptance: give yourself some acceptance. Accept yourself right now in this moment. Let go of the past. And let go of the future. Let go of the judgments, the critical voice. If they arise, just say to yourself: “Let it go.” Cultivate more equanimity in your life, by saying: “I am at peace with who I am right now in this moment.”
We all need some pauses in our lives. Practice this when you are walking, working, or in the middle of something. If you have been triggered, or are feeling at risk, allow yourself to stop in your tracks and give yourself three minutes to pay attention to yourself, while giving yourself some affection, appreciation, and acceptance.