Paul Garrigan's Blog, page 13

Mindfulness with Compassion is Where the Real Magic Starts to Happen

I’m putting together an eBook for people interested in using mindfulness to overcome addiction problems. I’ll share the chapters on here as I write them. Here is part nine in the series – you will find links to earlier posts at the end of this one.

Did you ever consider the possibility you spend way too much time focused on yourself? I remember feeling offended when a therapist asked me this question – how dare she – but it wasn’t until I started getting over my obsession with self that I could move my life in a better direction.

The words ‘self-obsession’ and ‘narcissism’ are often used interchangeably, but they are not necessarily the same thing. For many of us addicts, self-obsession is fueled by self-hatred rather than self-love. It is our sense of being damaged goods that keeps pulling our focus inward and it is this that cuts us off from other people.

As a young child, I had an open and trusting nature, but as I got older, it felt necessary to create barriers to protect myself from the bad stuff. It meant that by the time I reached adulthood, I didn’t feel close to anyone – even those who I claimed to love.

My efforts to protect myself came at a huge cost because the truth is we can only experience love to the extent that we are willing to risk being hurt. The barriers I created to protect myself pushed other people away and imprisoned me in the limited world of self-obsession. The saddest part looking back is I didn’t even realize how much of the good stuff in life I had forsaken.

The Miracle of Thinking about Other People

The therapist who suggested I might be a tad self-obsessed talked me into doing some voluntary work. At the time, I was living in a dry house (second-stage rehab) in London. I’d been sober five months, but I’d become stuck, and it seemed like only a matter of time before I would relapse.

I began spending time with a local lad who had profound learning difficulties – I would push his wheelchair around Catford Park or take him to Pizza Hut. Paul shared the same name as me, and we were both the same age, but compared to the challenges he faced in his life, mine was a picnic.

I remember the first time I returned to the dry house after visiting Paul. The other guys kept asking me “what the fuck happened to you?” I was visibly beaming, and it was obvious to everyone that something had shifted inside me. Those two hours of thinking about another person had benefited me more than six months of intensive therapy.

I now know the secret to mental well-being is thinking less about myself and more about other people. In fact, my level of self-obsession is an accurate barometer of my how well I am doing in life. If I’m spending more time worrying about other people, it means I’m doing great.

Mindfulness and Compassion

“Compassion and kindness towards oneself are intrinsically woven into it. You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.”

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Self-obsession is one of the most powerful forces behind mindless behavior. It means more attention is given to the stories inside of my head rather than what is actually happening in this moment. It is like being in a relationship where we ignore the other person – the universe doesn’t seem to like being ignored, and it kicks our ass for doing it.

Some people associate being mindful with a cold and artificial relationship with life – as if the goal is for us to transform into Mr. Spock from Star Trek. This is not my perception of being mindful. I approach this moment from a place of curiosity, wonder, and compassion. Observing this wonderful experience called life with an uncaring attitude would not be progress for me – it is what I tried to do with alcohol.

The great benefit of mindfulness is it greatly improves our ability to be compassionate towards ourselves and other people. It is doubtful that anyone reading this is a psychopath, and the ill-will we have developed towards ourselves and others is generated by fear – we don’t want to be hurt again. Mindfulness allows us to see these defenses are unnecessary and that the inner-ease we have so long yearned has always been there waiting for us.

Socrates famously proclaimed that an unexamined life is not worth living. Perhaps he was right, but it is compassion and not our ability to think deeply about our problems that is going to allow us to develop serenity. It sounds like a cliché, but I doubt many people spend their last moments of life wishing they had spent more times obsessing about themselves.

Check back soon for the next post in this series – How to Develop Self-Compassion and Improve Our Relationships

Other Posts in This Series

Part 1- The Mindful Path from Addiction to Serenity

Part 2 – Why Mindfulness Makes the Perfect Replacement for Addiction

Part 3 – How Mindfulness Works

Part 4 – Mindfulness versus Addiction Cravings

Part 5 – Mindfulness for the Ups and Downs in Recovery – Part 1

Part 6 – Mindfulness for the Ups and Downs in Recovery – Part 2

Part 7 – How to Mindfully Find Your Life Purpose – Part 1

Part 8 – How to Mindfully Find Your Life Purpose – Part 2

Legit Mindfulness Rehab Program in Thailand

It is now six months since I began working at Hope Rehab Thailand as a mindfulness coach. I’m proud of the program we have created there, and it’s exciting to be part of a team that appreciates the potential of mindfulness as a recovery tool.

A Mindfulness Rehab Program for Everyone? – Well… Almost

Mindfulness has been my main recovery tool since giving up alcohol almost nine years ago. By the end of my drinking, I just wanted the pain to stop, but my life has improved in ways I couldn’t have even have imagined back then. I now experience a steady sense of inner-okayness (this doesn’t mean I’m happy all the time) that I once believed could only be found at the bottom of a bottle. Mindfulness has played a huge part in getting me to this point.

There is this scary evangelistic urge within me to promote mindfulness as ‘the’ miracle cure for addiction, but I know this would be unreasonable and unrealistic. It can certainly be a useful tool for almost anyone, but perhaps in most cases, it works best when combined with other approaches such as CBT, 12-Steps, or SMART (especially in early recovery). There is probably only ever going to be a minority of us who make mindfulness our primary path.

Curse You Kwai Chang Caine

I began practicing mindfulness as a teenager in the eighties before I fell into addiction. I was introduced to it as part of my martial arts training, and from watching the TV show ‘Kung Fu’. I so wanted to develop the tranquil mind of a monk/warrior because it seemed so much better than my own headspace that was full of anxiety and self-loathing. I began meditating for hours every day, but despite plenty of wonderful mediation experiences, I didn’t transform into my hero Kwai Chang Caine.

Of course, the real reason I didn’t make much progress with mindfulness as teen was I completely misunderstood what I was trying to achieve. The goal was never to escape to a constantly blissful mind, but to be at ease with whatever is happening in this moment. As the hippies used to say in the sixties – you can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.

When I first started drinking alcohol, I hoped that this too would fast-track me to a mental Disneyland, and there were moments in those early days when it almost seemed to be working. I replaced my enthusiasm for meditation with enthusiasm for drinking, and this was enough to get me into rehab by age 19. It took me another 16 years to finally accept that accept that alcohol was the problem, and it could never be the cure.

I made so many wrong turns on the mindfulness path, but I never loss faith that there was something to it. I kept on going back to the practice on my sober days, and it helped me deal with cravings. The real turning point came 12 years ago at a temple called Wat Rampoeng (see How I found Mindfulness in Thailand) when I experienced the mental freedom I’d always been looking for. I drank for another painful two years after this, but once I’d got a taste of that thing I’d always desired, there was no turning back.

Somebody clever once said that the best subject to teach is the one you most desperately need to learn. It is my hunger for mindfulness that puts me in a good position to teach it to other people. I also know the experience of doing mindfulness wrong for over two decades is as important as my experience of doing it mostly right for the last nine years. It means I have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t.

I can only share my story here, but the other members of the team at Hope Rehab have had their journeys of recovery too. It is these experiences that allow us to create something of value for those who are behind still us on the path. We are lucky to have Simon Mott as a head of our team because he is open-minded and innovative enough to make the most of our experiences.

You can click here to find more details of the mindfulness program at Hope

Can I Mindfully Use Alcohol or Drugs?

In my role as a mindfulness coach for people with addiction problems, I often get asked about the possibility of using alcohol or drugs mindfully. This was a question I obsessed about myself for many years, and it led to a great deal of unnecessary suffering. In this video and podcast, I discuss the reasons for why I think it is not possible to use these substances mindfully.

Press play to watch the video. You will find the podcast of this edition below.

Press play to listen to the podcast.

How to Stop Treating Life like Fight You Need to Win

It seems so obvious to me now that most of my struggles in life have been completely unnecessary. I was like a delusional person sitting on an airplane, and frantically flapping his arms to keep the craft flying – these efforts are not only useless but they ruin the experience flying for everyone involved. In this video and podcast, I discuss how to stop treating life like a fight you need to win.

Press play to watch the video. The podcast edition of this episode can be found below:

Press play to listen to the podcast

How to Mindfully Find Your Life Purpose – Part 2

I’m putting together an eBook for people interested in using mindfulness to overcome addiction problems. I’ll share the chapters on here as I write them. Here is part eight in the series – you will find links to earlier posts at the end of this one.

What is Your Life Purpose?

What if humans are kind of like sunflowers? What I mean by this is that perhaps our only purpose in life is to blossom. In my experience, the key to feel fulfilled has just been to allow this blossoming to occur? I do this by getting out of our own way so the good stuff can rise to the surface.

“If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.”

Abraham Maslow

The Tyranny of Expectations

One thing that has gotten most in the way of my own blossoming has been my expectations – I’m referring here to the stories in my head about what the future should be like. Despite my lousy history of ‘knowing what’s good for me’, I can still get completely carried away by these stories. It is only when I let go of these expectations that I can enjoy what life is delivering up to me in this moment.

It is the unexpectedness of my journey since giving up alcohol that has made it so wonderful. There have been so many twists and turns along the way, and I would never have guessed that things could be like they are now. My life today is far superior to what I had thought possible at the start of my journey, so I’m grateful to have escaped the limits of my expectations.

When I look back over the last nine years, almost none of the good stuff originated from my own expectations. I wanted to become a monk who lived alone in a cave – it sounds nice, but for me it would have been just more running away from life. I never planned to become a father, a husband, a writer, or a mindfulness coach, and these things would never have happened if life had gone according to my plan.

I remember when I was going through detox at Thamkrabok, one of other clients told me he wanted to write a memoir about his experience. I was extremely sceptical and suspected of him of having delusions of grandeur – he might as well have been telling me he was planning to fly to Mars. The idea that I would one day write a book about my experiences wasn’t even worthy of consideration, yet this is what I went on to do.

So much of my identity exists in spite of me and not because of me. Unexpected opportunities have appeared in my life, and all I had to do was take advantage of them. Almost all of my best decisions (e.g. starting this blog) were suggestions that came from other people – I probably wouldn’t have done them otherwise.

Every time I’ve tried to force my own expectations on reality, it has ended badly. This is because it meant living from a script in my head rather than what is actually happening in reality. Expectations are just stories about the future. I’m lousy when it comes to prediction, so my stories are almost always at least partially wrong.

Whatever Happened to Paul Garrigan the World Famous Author?

A good example of how my expectations led to unnecessary suffering would be my brief stint as a world famous author. It was other people who suggested I send off my writing to a publisher, but I latched onto the author identity with an enthusiasm only an ex-addict could muster.

Reality didn’t deliver the fame and success I was expecting, and so I felt incredibly disappointed. I did get to go on a book tour, attend book signings, appear on TV and Radio, but none of that mattered to me because it wasn’t happening according to my script.

One of my dreams as a kids was to one day be able to walk into Easons in Dublin (a large bookshop) and see my book on display. This dream did come true, but by then my expectation were on a much grander scale that it no longer really mattered – my expectations took most of enjoyment out of what should have been a wonderful experience.

Expectations about my future are something I try my best to avoid now. I love working as a mindfulness coach, but I know that building too many expectations around this identity is likely to blow up in my face too. It is much better for me to approach the future in an open way. I can’t predict the future, but I trust it because the ride has been so rewarding up until this point.

“Adults envy the open-hearted and open-minded explorations of children; seeing their joy and curiosity, we pine for our own capacity for wide-eyed wonder.”

Gabor Mate

It is expectations that robs us of our ability to approach life in an open-hearted and open-minded manner. Mindfulness is all about letting go of expectations – it means dealing with what is there and not what we thing should be there.



The Importance of Faith

Letting go of expectations requires a leap of faith. It feels counter intuitive to those of us who have approached life as a battle where we struggle to reach our goals. We may worry that if we hold our expectations with less ferocity, it will mean we become apathetic and less able to achieve anything.

We need to be clear that letting go of expectations does not mean we become passive and uninvolved in planning our future. It just means we focus more on taking the right action and less on the outcome of this action (which we can never really know). Letting go of expectations means we let go of the belief that the universe should behave according to our internal script. It means learning to appreciate the quirkiness and unexpectedness of life because we get is often a lot better than what we originally wanted.

Part 1 – The Mindful Path from Addiction to Serenity

Part 2 – Why Mindfulness Makes the Perfect Replacement for Addiction

Part 3 – How Mindfulness Works

Part 4 – Mindfulness versus Addiction Cravings

Part 5 – Mindfulness for the Ups and Downs in Recovery – Part 1

Part 6 – Mindfulness for the Ups and Downs in Recovery – Part 2

Part 7 – How to Mindfully Find Your Life Purpose – Part 1

Mindfulness, Autopilot, and Endless Thinking

Even the most intelligent, witty, and likeable companion would become unbearable if I had to listen to them talk for a few hours. Yet, when it comes to the endless chatter coming from my brain this somehow manages to keep me hooked – even though it is often unintelligible, boring, and irritating. In this video and podcast, I discuss how mindfulness has helped me become less enthralled with this endless thinking.

Press play to watch the YouTube video. You will find the podcast of this episode below:

Press play to listen to the podcast:

How to Mindfully Find Your Life Purpose – Part 1

What if the reason your life is difficult is because it is not the life you were meant to lead?

I’m putting together an eBook for people interested in using mindfulness to overcome addiction problems. I’ll share the chapters on here as I write them. Here is part seven in the series – you will find links to earlier posts at the end of this one.

Recovery Means Finding Your Path

Fear of death, guilt over my bad behavior, and the regret over lost opportunities were never good enough reasons to get me to quit alcohol permanently.

Why would I fear dying when there were already so many days when I wished I was dead? Why would I care about lost opportunities when ‘normal’ living seemed utterly pointless to me? How could guilt be a good reason to quit when being sober only meant facing all the mess I’d created?

All of my attempts at quitting alcohol were doomed to failure until there was a compelling enough reason to choose this path. Alcohol was my coping medicine, so I was never going to let go of it easily. I needed a purpose for being sober. Change just wasn’t going to be possible so long as recovery appeared like any type of sacrifice.

I underwent my final detox from alcohol at Thamkrabok in 2006. On my first day at this Thai temple, one of the monks (Phra Hans) explained his theory of addiction to me. He believed people turned to alcohol or drugs because their life lacked a sense of purpose – they have somehow lost their way, and this is their only way of coping.

How We Lose Ourselves to Fit In

Gabor Mate provides an interesting theory as to why so many of us lose our sense of purpose at a young age. He suggests we humans have a deep yearning to be authentic, but this need is often suppressed as we attempt to fit in with our family, our friends, and our society. In other words, we sacrifice our true identity in exchange for human attachment.

I came to the realization at age seven that there was something wrong with me. Unlike my older cousins, I didn’t care about football, and I asked question that other people found wired and annoying (e.g. how do we know we are not dreaming? Why can’t I travel back to yesterday?).

I needed to fit in, so I tried to suppress those parts of my personality that bugged other people. I made more of an effort to act like a ‘normal’ seven year old. Later on, when things would go wrong for me (like my parents noisy breakup), I made further changes to my behavior and persona in an attempt to protect myself.

I tried so hard to become a person other people would like, yet it just meant I felt more like an outsider than ever. It’s hardly surprising that by my teenage years, I began to experience a profound lack of purpose from living a stranger’s life. After years of attempting to fit in, I no longer even remembered my authentic self. I needed alcohol so living this false life felt bearable.

“It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.”

Gabor Mate In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

What did you sacrifice to be accepted?

Is it possible this whole mess began when you started to sacrifice your authenticity in exchange for some approval? What if the reason your life is difficult is because it is not the life you were meant to lead? Could the key to escaping the nightmare of addiction be awakening to who you really are?

In the beginning, alcohol numbed the pain of not having a purpose. I didn’t believe in an afterlife, yet I saw life as being similar to being stuck in a departure lounge where I needed to get drunk to pass the time. If I gave up alcohol, it would just mean a longer, more boring, and less comfortable wait until someone got around to turning off the lights.

Recovery is a Return to Authenticity

The monk at Thamkrabok promised that if I gave up alcohol, I could once again find my purpose in life. I would do this by becoming mindful and seeing through all of the bullshit that hid my authenticity. This work could never be done while I was still drinking because intoxicants reduced my awareness and prevented such insights.

Check back soon for the next post in this series – How to Mindfully Find Your Life Purpose – Part 2

Part 1 – The Mindful Path from Addiction to Serenity

Part 2 – Why Mindfulness Makes the Perfect Replacement for Addiction

Part 3 – How Mindfulness Works

Part 4 – Mindfulness versus Addiction Cravings

Part 5 – Mindfulness for the Ups and Downs in Recovery – Part 1

Part 6 – Mindfulness for the Ups and Downs in Recovery – Part 2

Mindfulness for the Ups and Downs in Recovery – Part 2

Part Six of the Mindful Path from Addiction to Serenity Series

I’m putting together an eBook for people interested in using mindfulness to overcome addiction problems. I’ll share the chapters on here as I write them. Here is part six in the series – you will find links to earlier posts at the end of this one.

My behaviour during those years of addiction reminds me of a turtle hiding in his shell. It felt safe to be tucked away inside my drunken fog, but it also meant missing out on the joys of reality. Even during the happiest period of my drinking, there was still an uneasy feeling of missing out on something.

Like a curious turtle, I would sometimes get the courage to stick my head outside of my shell, but this meant feeling naked and unprotected. It usually didn’t take long before I would be hit full-blast with negative emotions such as sadness and loneliness, and this would be enough to have me scurrying back inside of my fortress walls.

A return to addiction can mean devastating consequences, but it is no real mystery why it happens. Being back at the mercy of negative thoughts and emotions is an uncomfortable way to live, and it can easily lead to the logical conclusion – if I’m going to be feeling this bad anyway, I might as well be getting drunk or high.

It is reasonable to expect that any path away from addiction is going to involve effective strategies for dealing with the raw emotions of early recovery. If you are going to be a brave little turtle, and stick your head out of your shell, you need a way to protect yourself. People who relapse don’t do so because they are wilful, weak, or stupid but because they left their shell and weren’t able to deal with what they experienced.

Get Hit with Two Arrows for the Price of One

I used to believe that I couldn’t handle my emotions and that is why I got drunk all the time. This was a misunderstanding. The problem was never with my emotions but with my thoughts about these emotions. I would experience a feeling like sadness, and this would trigger the idea that ‘I shouldn’t be feeling this way’ – it was this resistance to reality that was the real source of my suffering.

Buddhists describe this “it shouldn’t be this way’ reaction to negative emotions using the metaphor of the two arrows. When I would experience a feeling like sadness, this would be like being hit by a single arrow. This single arrow of sadness would be no big deal because it only involved some temporary low mood and maybe a lack of enthusiasm.

I struggled with emotions because I developed the habit of reacting to negative feelings by trying to resist them (i.e. ‘I shouldn’t be feeling this way’). This was like being hit with a second arrow, and it more than doubled my discomfort. The second arrow was completely avoidable – as the Radiohead song says “you do it to yourself and that’s what really hurts”.

Resisting feelings is the same as struggling in quicksand, and it can quickly turn a mild irritation into a total mental shit-storm. The urge to fix the situation is driven by magical thinking – the silly idea that our expectation on how we ‘should be’ feelings has any effect on the way we are feeling in this moment. What’s there is there.

The secret to dealing with the ‘emotional rollercoaster of early recovery’ is to accept what you are feeling and understand that it is just a temporary visitor. Life is a banquet of emotions, and we can only experience real joy if we are willing to face sadness.

The amazing thing is that once we begin to experience our emotions more mindfully, we start to see how we have been judging them way too harshly. The problem was never the emotion but our thoughts and subsequent reaction to it.



“This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all.”

Rumi

Make Some Breathing Space

Mindfulness is a skill we need to develop through regular practice and it takes time. If you have just recently given up alcohol or drugs, your level of mindfulness may be too low for you to easily be objective around your thoughts and emotions. Luckily, there are some tools you can use at this stage and one of them is called ‘Breathing Space’.

The real danger with negative emotions is you can so easily slip into auto-pilot mode in response to them. This can mean you blindly wander back to the comfort of addiction because you are now been driven by unconscious impulses rather than rational thinking. It is vital that you avoid this decent into auto-pilot mode, and Breathing Space is one technique that can help you do this.

Breathing Space is a simple mindfulness technique created by Mark Williams who is a professor of psychology at the University of Oxford. It involves three steps – each of which take approximately one minute. Any time you start to feel overwhelmed by your emotions, you can use this technique to take a step back and see things more objectively.

You will find audio instructions for using Breathing Space on Mark’s website Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World, but here is a basic description of what you need to do.

1. Notice what is going on in your body right now including sensations, thoughts and feelings

2. Pay attention to the rising and falling of your breath in the abdomen

3. Expand your awareness to the whole body again

You need to get into the habit of using this technique so that you can easily do it when feeling under pressure.

An Emotional Recovery

If quitting your addiction wakes you up to this amazing opportunity called reality, you are likely to one day look back on the pain of addiction as a blessing. The sad reality is most people seem to walk through life in a half-asleep state but it never gets so painful that they feel the need to wake up.

Waking up to reality is the greatest gift you could ever give yourself – it is well worth the initial discomfort as you adjust to experiencing your emotions. This life may well be a ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity, so it would be a shame to miss it. Perhaps you will accuse me of speciesism, but a turtle who never leaves its shell has never really lived.

”The tragedy for too many of us is not that our lives are too short, but that we take so long before we start to live them”

Mark Williams et al The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness (Book & CD)

Check back soon for the next post in this series – Mindfully Find Your Life Purpose

Part 1 – The Mindful Path from Addiction to Serenity

Part 2 – Why Mindfulness Makes the Perfect Replacement for Addiction

Part 3 – How Mindfulness Works

Part 4 – Mindfulness versus Addiction Cravings

Part 5 – Mindfulness for the Ups and Downs in Recovery – Part 1

How Mindfulness Helps You Lose Your Fear of Social Situations

Some of my earliest memories involve feeling uncomfortable around other people. I always felt so insecure in social situations, and I’d regularly walk away from conversations feeling miserable and full of self-recrimination (e.g. why did you say that?). In this video and podcast, I describe the method that has made it possible for me to feel entirely comfortable in all social situations.

Press play to watch the video below, and you’ll find the podcast further down the page.

Press play to listen to the podcast

Mindfulness for the Ups and Downs in Recovery – Part 1

Part Five of the Mindful Path from Addiction to Serenity Series

I’m putting together an eBook for people interested in using mindfulness to overcome addiction problems. I’ll share the chapters on here as I write them. Here is part five in the series – you will find links to earlier posts at the end of this one.

Recovery Meant Waking Up My Assholishness

One of the benefits of referring to myself as an ‘alcoholic’ was it provided me with a handy explanation every time I messed up – which was a lot. I truly believed all the stuff wrong with my life would automatically be put right if I just stopped drinking. I now find such naivety kind of hilarious given how things actually turned out.

My life definitely did improve once alcohol was removed from the picture, but I didn’t automatically transform into the ‘great guy’ I predicted I’d become. Truth be told, it soon became obvious that I was an even bigger asshole than I’d ever imagined.

This awakening to my assholishness was disturbing until I understood what was happening. It was like my first attempts at meditation when I became more aware of my thoughts. It felt as if I’d pressed a switch, and my thinking had moved up 10 gears, but this wasn’t what was going on at all – I’d just become more aware of what was happening inside of my head.

It’s highly unlikely that I’m going to be able fix a problem until I’m aware that it is a problem. The real gift of quitting alcohol wasn’t that it made my life perfect, but it opened my eyes to all the stuff that needed fixing. Being an asshole wasn’t the problem, it was being an asshole and not knowing I was one that was the problem.

What if recovering from addiction is just another way of saying waking up to our assholishness?

The word ‘asshole’ may sound offensive to you, but I think it is a fair description of the majority of our species (I’m talking roughly 99.999%, but it could be more). I certainly don’t mean my use of the word to be used as fuel for self-hated. Let’s be honest with ourselves though, we mostly live in a half-asleep state where we are constantly hurting ourselves and other people in our attempts to be happy – if this isn’t being an asshole, what is?

I know it is my assholishness that divides my world into ‘us and them’, puts conditions on my happiness (I’ll be happy when I’m earning better money), and teaches me to avoid feelings as a way to deal with them. It is this same assholishness that encourages me to believe my own thoughts are somehow superior to the nonsense in the heads of the other 7 billion nutcases on the planet.

How Substance Abuse Sustains Assholishness

The thing that made alcohol such a bad tool for achieving happiness was it greatly incresed my blindness towards my own assholishness. I’m not saying that I didn’t have plenty of excuses for beating myself up back then – I certainly did- but these were all just part of my blindness. My lack of awareness meant I was constantly colliding with reality, but I had no real insight into why it was happening. Alcohol did bring some additional problems into my life, but the main harm it caused was by drastically reducing my awareness.

One of the five main precepts in Buddhism is to ‘avoid intoxicants’. This recommendation isn’t there because Buddhists are puritans or because they hate seeing people having a good time. The reason alcohol and drugs are discouraged is the affect they have on our awareness. It is lack of awareness that causes most (if not all) of our problems in life, so it shouldn’t be hard to appreciate why using a substance that reduces this faculty so dramatically is a terrible idea.

Waking up Can be a Painful Business … But it doesn’t Have to be too Painful

Unless you choose new ways of avoiding life, your awareness is going to increase when you quit your addiction. If you commit to a regular mindfulness practice, this rise in awareness will be boosted even further. The giant boulder that kept you stuck for years has now been removed, but you are only at the start of your awakening.

The transition from being mostly numb to your thoughts and feelings to finding it almost impossible to ignore them can be intense and disturbing. In the recovery community, they commonly refer to this adjustment as the ‘emotional rollercoaster of early sobriety’.

In part 2 of this post, I’ll explain how to deal with this awakening so you can survive the ups and downs of early recovery

Part 1 – The Mindful Path from Addiction to Serenity

Part 2 – Why Mindfulness Makes the Perfect Replacement for Addiction

Part 3 – How Mindfulness Works

Part 4 – Mindfulness versus Addiction Cravings