Paul Garrigan's Blog, page 14

Eight Step Recovery – Using the Buddha’s Teachings to Overcome Addiction – Book Review

The Buddhist tradition contains wisdom that can benefit those of us who have struggled with addiction. Mindfulness is just one example of what this path has to offer. Eight Step Recovery is a book by Valerie Mason-John and Dr Paramabandhu Groves that combines Mindfulness-Based Addiction Recovery (MBAR) with other useful teachings from Buddhism.

The Buddha in Recovery



“The Buddha offered his recovery to the world. His teachings can release us from the sting of suffering, so we do not need to self-medicate or push away the reality of life.”

Eight Step Recovery

Siddhartha Gautama (the man who became the Buddha) may never have experienced alcohol or drug addiction directly, but his spiritual journey was fueled by a deep desire to overcome suffering. He realized it was a craving to avoid reality that was source of his inner-turmoil, and his recovery began when he awoke to this truth.

The Buddha understood how the stuff we often do to avoid suffering can so often make our situation worse. In Eight Step Recovery, this is referred to this as ‘deluded self-help’. I remember when I first began drinking, it did seem to be easing my suffering – it took a lot of pain before I could accept how this behavior was making things much worse.



“The act of turning to addictions for recovery from pain or difficult situations is deluded self-help. We are looking in the wrong place for happiness. This misguided kindness toward ourselves perpetuates a cycle of pain.”

Eight Step Recovery

The problem with abusing alcohol or drugs isn’t that this behavior is evil or stupid but that it can’t do what we want it to do. It just doesn’t make us happy in the long-term. There is a better way, and Eight Step Recovery offers one potential path.

Eight Step Recovery

I don’t refer to myself as a Buddhist, but the teachings of this tradition have been a great help to me over the years. One of the nice things about this book is it takes some of this wisdom, and divides it into actionable steps to improve our life following addiction. This may be of help to those who just don’t have the time or motivation to deeply investigate Buddhism and are looking for some practical advice. These Eight Steps can also be a useful guide for practicing Buddhists who want to apply these teachings more fully in their recovery.

Step One: accepting that this human life will bring suffering

Step Two: seeing how we create extra suffering in our lives

Step Three: embracing impermanence to show us that our suffering can end

Step Four: being willing to step onto the path of recovery and discover freedom

Step Five: transforming our speech, actions, and livelihood

Step Six: placing positive values at the center of our lives

Step Seven: making every effort to stay on the path of recovery

Step Eight: helping others by sharing the benefits we have gained

A chapter in the book is devoted to each of these steps, and there are also plenty of personal stories to demonstrate how they work in reality. The program can be combined with something like the 12-Steps, but it is also designed to be used on its own.

Eight Step Recovery – Using the Buddha’s Teachings to Overcome Addiction is available to buy from Windhorse Publications. It can also be found on Amazon Eight Step Recovery

How Mindfulness Works

I’m putting together an eBook for people interested in using mindfulness to overcome addiction problems. I will be giving this book away for free on my website. I’ll also share the chapters on here as I write them. Here is part three in the series – you can start with part one and part two if you have missed them.

I’ve just come back from a walk beside the sea. During my first year living here in Rayong, I would go for long hikes every day without fail, but now I’m lucky to manage it once a week. The novelty of living beside a tropical beach has worn off, and I no longer have the same level of enthusiasm to go there.

When I used to come to this part of Thailand on holiday, it all felt so much more wonderful. Unfamiliarity meant I was fully engaged in my surroundings, and this is what made my visits so enjoyable. My brain found novelty around every corner, and this naturally increased my level of mindfulness.

The claim ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ might sound a bit extreme, but I have no doubt that familiarity leads to mindlessness. I would define this mindlessness as a lack of enthusiasm for what is right in front of me.

“When there’s always biscuits in the tin, where’s the fun in biscuits?”

Gary Strang – Men Behaving Badly

Mindlessness means I’m functioning on auto-pilot. It happens when I’ve lost interest in my current environment, and my thoughts are directed elsewhere. This loss of contact with the present moment explains how I can go walking on a tropical beach and hardly have any memories of the experience afterwards.

A study by Daniel Gilbert suggests we spend up to 50 per cent of our time functioning in auto-pilot – this number is going to be much higher for those of us who are caught up in addiction.

Anything I do mindlessly is inherently dissatisfying. It means I’m rejecting the present moment because I feel it is lacking in some way and that it doesn’t deserve my attention. This process of familiarity turning to mindlessness not only makes walking on a beach less satisfying, but it sucks much of the pleasure out of being alive.

So what does living on autopilot have to do with addiction?

The more disconnected I am from reality, the less satisfying my life becomes. My initial enthusiasm for alcohol was driven by a desire to escape reality – although I now see the problem was never actually reality but my expectations of what reality should be like.

Choosing to live more on autopilot does feel comforting in the beginning. I remember during those early years of drinking, how much I welcomed the feeling of being numb to the world. I felt like I was getting away with something, and I didn’t see how I was being cheated out of my life. Ignoring reality also put me on a collision course with it.

The seduction of living in autopilot is that it can feel like a solution to dissatisfaction with life. The horrible irony is this dissatisfaction arises due to dealing with life on autopilot.

When I make the effort to go, I still enjoy my walks on the beach, but there can still be an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the experience. The problem is I have these ideas about what walking on a tropical beach should be like, but the reality never lives up to these expectations.

When my experiences don’t match my expectations, I feel disappointed, and this is where impulse for me to reject reality comes from. I become so focused on the mismatch between the story in my head, and the reality of what is there that I don’t even bother to investigate what is actually there in front of me.

What reality delivers is often better than my expectations, but my obsession with the stories in my head means I can easily fail to see this.

Every time I reject reality, I slip into auto-pilot mode. It means my behavior is not governed by what is happening in this moment, but by the stories in my head. To me it still seems as if I am making choices, but it is my stories that are pulling my strings.

Mindfulness is when I experience reality without the shit in my head getting in the way. Instead of looking at life through ‘I’ve seen it all before’ eyes, I’m fully engaged in what is happening right now. Rather than walking through life like a robot, I wake up to the wonderful gift of life.

Sometimes mindfulness happens naturally, but these moments don’t come frequently enough unless I make a deliberate effort to encourage them. Mindfulness practices are designed to train my mind to encounter this state more frequently.

There are various definitions of mindfulness practice but I like this one by Jon-Kabat Zinn:

“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”

Wherever You Go, There You Are

I used to believe the process of familiarity leading to mindlessness was just the way humans are wired, but this is not true. When I go for a mindful walk on my local beach, I re-experience the joy of being there like it was the first time.

Every moment is packed full of enough novelty to keep me in a state of permanent wonder. Things are in a constant state of change, and it is only the stories in my mind that are stale. Such thinking is generated by a scared inner voice that wants to protect me from reality, but it is this voice I need protection from.



“Mindfulness is neither difficult nor complex; remembering to be mindful is the great challenge.”

Christina Feldman

Mindfully walking on the beach might sound like a bizarre thing to do, but it is completely natural. All I do is notice things in my environment that I’ve never noticed before, there are always millions of new things to see, and it is like I’m seeing the beach with fresh eyes. When I do this, I’m focused on what is there and not the stories in my head. I can apply this same technique to every area of my life.

I’ve found having a formal mindfulness practice also helps increase my general level of mindfulness. I try to meditate at least twice a day for 20 minutes each time. I don’t view meditation as some sacred spiritual practice – it is just a practical tool for me.

I once believed giving up alcohol would mean the end of most of problems. This didn’t happen, and the reason so many people relapse is it doesn’t happen for them either. Life is what is and ‘being good’ is not going give us a free pass.

Mindfulness means we are no longer adding to our pain through resistance or misunderstanding. It gives us the ability to not only deal with life but to do so from a place of growing equanimity and serenity. This level of comfort is what I was looking for when I turned to alcohol and maybe it was what you really wanted too.

Check back for the next post in the series – Mindfulness versus Addiction Cravings

Lesson on How to Have Yourself a Mindful Christmas

I always develop an uneasy feeling at around 4pm on Christmas Day. It is triggered by the realization that the event I’ve been looking forward to for weeks is almost over. Even though I rationally understand it couldn’t be any different, there is still the nagging thought – ‘Is that it?’

Christmas is my favorite time of year, and it’s even more enjoyable now my son is around. It’s a cultural thing for me rather than a religious event. This holiday is where many of my cherished memories of childhood originate, and for most of my adult life, I used it as an excuse to allow my alcoholic tendencies to go into overdrive.

Christmas isn’t officially celebrated here in Thailand. My son’s school is open, but we allow him to take the day off. Some of the larger department stores do put up Christmas decorations, and there does be festive music in supermarkets like Tesco/Lotus. Still, it is easy to completely ignore the festivities completely here, and I once made it until the early evening before remembering it was Christmas Day.

Even though I love Christmas so much, I stopped celebrating it for a couple of years. This was after I just go sober, and I was living in rural Thailand. The fact that I didn’t drink anymore meant there didn’t seem to be any point to getting into the festive mood. Then my son was born, and it became a big deal again. Timmy is now 7 years old which is probably the best time to appreciate Christmas – although there can be awkward questions about why Santa comes to him and none of his friends.

I downloaded a Christmas countdown app for my son at the end of November, and I’ve been almost as excited about the days ticking down as him. It’s hard to believe it is Christmas Eve already.

Christmas offers me a powerful lesson in mindfulness. That discomforting feeling I expect to experience tomorrow afternoon is due to a mismatch between my expectations and reality. Christmas Day could never be as good as my ideas about what it ‘should’ be like so disappointment is guaranteed.

Suffering occurs when there is conflict between my expectations and reality. The further my thinking moves away from reality, the more this inner pain increases. Mindfulness practice is all about waking up to what is really there, and this is why it reduces suffering.

I enjoy the build-up to Christmas enough that I’m willing to accept a bit of disillusionment on the day. The difference is that this is a choice, and if those uncomfortable feelings arise, I’ll be able to recognize them immediately for what they are. As I said, I love Christmas, and I’ll hopefully a few mindful moments tomorrow so it can be even more special.

Why Mindfulness Makes the Perfect Replacement for Addiction

I’m putting together an eBook for people interested in using mindfulness to overcome addiction problems. I will be giving this book away for free on my website. I’ll also share the chapters on here as I write them. Here is part two in the series – if you haven’t yet read part one, you can start here.

There are lots of theories to explain why some of us become addicts. Genetics or faulty wiring in the brain may have put me at higher risk, but my decision to abuse alcohol was tactical. I felt overwhelmed by life, and I needed something to help me cope.

The thing I loved most about drinking was how it made me feel numb to the world. It meant I experienced life like a dream so everything appeared less threatening. This numbness calmed the turmoil inside my head, and I couldn’t understand why everyone else didn’t appreciate the benefits of intoxication.

I became a serious drinker at age 16 because it offered me an easy escape. I was in pain, and I didn’t have a better solution. It never crossed my mind to question the nature of my discomfort – I became so obsessed with running away, I didn’t bother to investigate what it was I was running away from.

Imagine spending decades of your life on the run from some terrible monster only to discover that there was never anybody actually chasing you. Imagine travelling the world in search of some precious object only to find that it was in your pocket all the time –duh. That’s what happened to me.

My life felt unbearable because of one mistaken belief – ‘it shouldn’t be like this’. It was this thought that sent me on a quest to fix something that wasn’t broken. I had all these expectations about what my life should be like, and the fact that life wasn’t like this became the source of my suffering.

What if your addiction problems are basically the result of a similar misunderstanding? Choosing intoxication is always a rejection of the present moment – you choose to medicate your brain to make the present moment better– but what if there is nothing actually wrong with the present moment?

I suspect the real reason many of us turn to alcohol or drugs is we have a low tolerance for the ups and downs of life. It’s not that we are weaker or less capable than others, but we just interpret these challenges in an unhelpful way. Our sense of ‘it shouldn’t be like this’ means we feel threatened, and when reality continues to behave contrary to our expectations, we feel overwhelmed.

Of course, it isn’t just addicts who suffer because of a mismatch between their expectations and reality. It is just that our coping strategy is particularly unhelpful. We use alcohol and drugs to mask our disillusionment, but this only further separates us from reality.

The more out of touch I become from reality, the greater my suffering. It means I’m swimming against the tide and so more likely to bump into stuff. Drinking alcohol was a rejection of reality, but it was not something I could ignore for long. The comfort of intoxication became harder to achieve as my escape route became my prison.

I don’t believe alcohol is evil – it’s just incapable of providing the sense of inner-calm I yearned for so deeply. Substance abuse is a Ponzi scheme that will leave us completely bankrupt unless we waken up to the danger in time.

I would have gladly accepted ill-health, and dying a few years early, if alcohol could deliver what I once thought it could. It might even be unreasonable to expect us to give up our favorite drug if it actually did make us happy.

In 2004, I went on a 26 day meditation retreat at Wat Ram Poeng in Chiang Mai. I turned up on the first day still in withdrawals (not something I’d recommend), but I was able hide these symptoms enough so the monks allowed me to stay.

The program at this temple was intense. By the end of the first week, I was meditating 12 hours per day – alternating between sitting and standing practice. Every few days, the head-monk would increase the number of hours he expected me to sit for. This was all building up to what they call a ‘determination’ – 72 hours of constant meditation with no sleep.

I experienced some bizarre mental states during my time at Wat Ram Poeng, but it was the long periods of mindfulness that affected me most profoundly. The serenity I had always yearned for was there in the one place I’d never thought to look – the present moment. The world appeared more vivid and something as simple as an ant on the footpath filled me with wonder.

The most surprising thing was how this experience of mindfulness felt so familiar – it was just like coming home. There was also this huge sense of relief because I no longer felt the urge to escape.

It should have been obvious that this mindfulness was the answer I’d always looked for, but I still didn’t get it. Once again, my expectations started to pull me away from reality. I experienced periods of bliss as a result of my intensive meditation practice, and I assumed that this was the real fruit – mindfulness just felt too simple to be the solution.

I drank again after Wat Ram Poeng. I was on such a post-retreat high that I felt invincible – I wanted to prove to myself I had beaten alcohol can could now drink safely. Obviously, it didn’t work. The pain of being a drunk felt so much worse this time because I’d tasted mental freedom. It took me 2 more years for me to quit for good, but this experience with mindfulness was the turning for me.

I didn’t need to go on a meditation retreat to become mindful. This experience is always available to me, and it is always there for you too. You don’t need to spend years meditating, and it is not a reward for good behavior. Mindfulness is just a choice – you are always either mindful or mindless – but it is too easy to forget we have this choice.

Buddhism is credited with creating powerful mindfulness techniques, but the Buddha didn’t invent mindfulness. It is a natural state that all humans have experienced at one time or another. It is something that comes easy to use as children, but we can experience it less and less as we get caught up in our beliefs, expectations, and judgments.

Back in the eighties, I met an old man who was a wonderful example of the power of mindfulness. This guy lived in rural Ireland, and he probably knew little about Buddhism or mindfulness practices, yet he had still managed to tap into this well of serenity. Just being around him was calming, and I knew from the moment I met him, he had something I wanted.

The way this old guy behaved with his family gave me hope. I was fifteen years of age and distraught by my parent’s breakup. I’d started to profoundly distrust people because I knew they would all let me down eventually. But the interactions between him, his wife, kids, and grandkids, showed me how a family be completely at ease in each other’s company.

I only got to have a few chats with him, and it was the first time I’d felt really listened to in my life. He didn’t seem to have any strong opinions about anything but appeared genuinely interested in what I had to say. I walked always walked away from our conversations feeling calm and optimistic, and I bet this is the effect he had on others as well.

The thing that surprised me most about this old man was that he had once been an abusive alcoholic. I was just starting my journey into addiction, but he was someone who had come out the other side. I often thought about him during the years that followed, and he reminded me there was another way.

Perhaps you think I’m being illogical to credit this guy’s serenity on mindfulness. You may even wonder if he was putting on some type of act. I can never know for sure, but it just felt so obvious to me that he was living in the moment and at complete ease with the world – this for me is what mindfulness is all about.

Mindfulness doesn’t mean you get to live happily ever after. Life is a banquet of emotions and experience, and you don’t get to choose just the stuff you like.

What mindfulness can do is change your relationship with the universe, so you no longer feel as threatened by the bad stuff. It will help you see that you already have everything you need to able to embrace life fully and experience a sense of serenity in your life. It’s not a miracle cure for addiction, but the results can be miraculous.

Coming Soon – Chapter Three – How Mindfulness Works

The Mindful Path from Addiction to Serenity

I’m putting together an eBook for people interested in using mindfulness to overcome addiction problems. I will be giving this book away for free on my website. I’ll also share the chapters on here as I write them. Here is part one

What is the Point?

If you don’t have a good enough reason to stay sober, you are always going to find doing so a struggle.

Perhaps the fear of losing your job or destroying your liver will be enough to convince you to quit in the short-term, but if life without drugs feels meaningless, even the fear of death might not be enough to keep you on track.

I tried for almost two decades to quit drinking. I could stop for a few weeks or months – I once even went two years – but these attempts were repeatedly sabotaged by this simple question – what is the point?

My escape from alcohol was always going to be precarious until I had a good response to this question.

I’m going to assume you drink or use drugs for a reason. There is a purpose behind your choices even if you struggle to understand how things ended up so messy.

It isn’t that you are mad or bad. I bet the drugs seemed to do something wonderful for you in the beginning – just like alcohol did for me.

I doubt you would have chosen this path if things felt suitably satisfying – why would you? Something has been missing from your life, and it was this that drove you to look for a way out.

Quitting an addiction isn’t that difficult. I’ve done it hundreds of times, and I’m sure you have had at least periods where you clean/sober for a day or two. It’s not the stopping that’s the problem but the staying stopped.

Even ‘normal ‘people can struggle when it comes to making major changes to their lives. You need a compelling reason to make these changes – it needs to be more than just fear of negative consequences.

I bet if your new life is full of purpose and meaning, you won’t have any reason to get intoxicated. If you felt comfortable in your own skin, you would no longer have any need to escape.

You would have your compelling answer to the question – what is the point?

How I Found the Point of Staying Sober

The thing I loved most about alcohol was how it made me feel numb to the world. It meant that I could escape the mess in my head – all the fear, self-loathing, and disappointment.

I wasn’t wrong to want to escape this inner-turmoil as my life felt pointless because of it. I had good intentions when I started using alcohol, but this chemical just wasn’t capable of giving me with what I needed.

But even after it became painfully obvious that alcohol was no miracle cure, I reasoned that it was still better than nothing.

I lost a lot because of addiction, but I still struggled to stay sober for as long as I didn’t have a better strategy for dealing with my thoughts and feelings.

I hit my first rehab at age 19, and I was still trying to quit sixteen years later. In-between, I’d had mental breakdowns, ended up homeless, destroyed friendships, and lost countless opportunities.

Despite having so many good reasons to quit, I just couldn’t make it happen because being sober didn’t offer what I needed back then.

It wasn’t until I made mindfulness a part of my life that I was able to break free of addiction for good. It gave me what I’d been looking for all along, and there is no longer any need to drink alcohol.

I want to share with you my experience of replacing addiction with mindfulness. The difference it has made to my life is miraculous and perhaps a similar transformation could happen with you too.

Mindfulness for the Emotional Rollercoaster of Early Recovery

“The good news is you get your emotions back – the bad news is you get your emotions back”

Unknown

Your awakened motions can be a blessing and a curse in early recovery. In a matter of seconds, you can swing from a joy that makes you want to hug strangers to feeling so low even the slightest hint of criticism can have you sobbing like a baby.

The term ‘emotional rollercoaster’ is an accurate description of the mood swings you can experience at this stage. There are a number of reasons for why it happens.

Substance abuse can mean you have been numbing your emotions in years, so you experience them more intensely as they start to awaken.

The emotional rollercoaster can also be due to the stresses of rebuilding your new life. Most humans struggle when it comes to making major changes, and giving up an addiction is particularly challenging.

Another contributing factor to these mood swings can be post-acute withdrawal symptoms. The worst of your withdrawals should pass within a couple of weeks, but there can be some symptoms that linger a bit longer such as tiredness and difficulty concentrating – both of these can leave you feeling a bit moody.



How Mindfulness Helps with the Emotional Rollercoaster

On Tuesday, a client wanted to know when he could expect his bad moods to go away. I tried to break the news gently, but I had to tell him that I doubted this would ever happen. Sure, the emotional rollercoaster should settle down over time, but fluctuating mood is a part of life.

Life is an emotional experience – it is as reasonable to expect bad moods to disappear as it is rainy days. In fact, a life without the different flavors provided by a range of emotions would be incredibly dull.

Mindfulness helped me understand that negative emotions are not my enemy. I discovered that it wasn’t so much the low moods that caused my suffering, but my reaction to these low moods.

The thing that made low mood unbearable for me was that it triggered so much negative thinking. I would beat myself up with thoughts like ‘I shouldn’t be feeling this way’ or ‘I knew it was all going to go to shit again’. It was these thoughts that caused my suffering and not the low mood.

It has always been the labels I put on my emotions that made them easy or hard to deal with. I started to just experience my emotions without the labels, and I found that they were incredibly easy to deal with. It was like I’d spent years running away from a monster who turned out to be a little puppy dog.

The emotional rollercoaster of early recovery doesn’t have to be a threat to your sobriety. If you can just experience all your emotions without resistance and judgment, you will notice how they are all temporary visitors – the happiness doesn’t last forever but neither does the sadness.

I usually find it easier to just focus on the physical sensations associated with each mood – for example, if I’m feeling low, there will usually be a sensation of heaviness in my body. I just try to observe this heaviness until it passes away. Every time I notice how my mood is triggering negative thinking, I just acknowledge this and bring my attention back to the sensations in my body.

Low mood used to cripple me, but this was because of the negative thinking it used to trigger. I would get caught up in a downward spiral where the sadness would generate negative thoughts which would then increase the feeling of sadness. These days, I can function more or less as normal even when I’m feeling sad.

“…emotions persist because we have emotional reactions to our own emotions that actually keep them going.”

Mark Williams - The Mindful Way Through Depression

It isn’t only low mood that makes the emotional rollercoaster dangerous. If you become too high on life, it could encourage you to behave a bit recklessly. Mindfulness is useful here as well because it helps to keep you grounded.

Find Meaning with Mindfulness After you Quit Drinking or Taking Drugs

If you your life lacks a sense of purpose after you quit your addiction, it is going to be difficult to feel committed to this new life. As soon as things get tough, you will be faced with the question ‘what is the point? If you don’t have a good answer to this, you will likely return to alcohol or drugs because even the fear of death might not be enough to keep you sober if your new life feel purposelessness.

In this video, I discuss how mindfulness gave my life meaning after I quit alcohol. You can find the podcast of this edition below:

Press play to listen to the podcast:

Why Mindfulness is a Better Recovery Tool than Distraction

The Precious Ones Who Fall into Addiction

My low tolerance for discomfort has meant I’ve spent most of my life trying to distract myself. When I worked as a nurse, we would jokingly refer to the particularly sensitive patients, the ones who had low tolerance for discomfort, as ‘a bit precious’ – I now can see that I’ve always been a bit precious.

We humans differ greatly in how we respond to mental and physical discomfort – this difference exists because we all interpret discomfort differently. Those of us who are more accepting of our discomfort, will end up suffering much less because of it.

One of the most dangerous ideas in the modern world is that our normal state should be happiness. If we buy into this myth (it seems most of us do at least partially) we will start to view any discomfort in our life as abnormal – something that needs to be avoided or fixed.

Physical and mental discomfort is a part of life, and there is no getting away from it. There are things we can do avoid unnecessary pain, but it is not going to be possible to be constantly happy. It is the idea that we should be trying to avoid or fix all of our discomfort that gets us into trouble.

The 3:00 A.M. obsessing over the state of our lives . . . the self-criticism for our “weakness” when we feel ourselves slipping into sadness … the desperate attempts to talk our hearts and bodies out of feeling…the way they do-all are mental gyrations that lead nowhere but farther down.

Mark Williams The Mindful Way Through Depression

What if most (all) of us who fall into addiction are just a bit precious? What if it is our low tolerance for discomfort that is driving us to choose extreme cures? What if we could learn to treat our moods and discomforts like the weather, would we still need to waste so much time trying to distract ourselves?

Why is Mindfulness Superior to Distraction?

One of my clients has been struggling to understand why mindfulness might be better than distraction for dealing with drug cravings. Keeping his mind off things has worked for him in the past, so why would want to try something different?

I agreed with him that distraction could be an effective short-term strategy for cravings, but what if it was this strategy that drove us into addiction in the first place? The problem with always trying to run away from things is it only strengthens our fear of these threats – perhaps by choosing distraction, we are reinforcing the idea ‘I can’t handle this, and I need something to fix me’.

The thing that makes alcohol or drug cravings so hard to deal with is the though ‘I shouldn’t be feeling this way’. I know from the past that if I just sit with a craving without resistance, it will always pass without half-an-hour – usually a lot less than this.

I’ve also found that every time I’m mindful of a craving, it becomes weaker until it stops visiting altogether. I haven’t had a single alcohol craving since I quit in 2006. I doubt this disappearance of cravings would have happened if I had just relied on distraction – I know this because I stopped drinking for 2 years during the nineties, and the cravings never really went away (check out my post on mindfully dealing with addiction cravings).

I can’t think of a single scenario where distraction would be a superior solution to mindfulness (please leave a comment in you can think of one). This is not to say that I’m always able to choose mindfulness when the shit hits the fan, but I know that the more I make this practice a part of my life, the bigger the challenges I can apply mindfulness to.

I’m no longer as ‘precious’ as I used to be, and my increased hardiness is thanks to mindfulness. I suggest that if you try replacing distraction with mindfulness, you will become hardier too. Perhaps you’ll start to see that it isn’t our discomfort that is the enemy but our desire to always escape it.

Mindfulness for Addiction Cravings

My inability to deal with addiction cravings meant I repeatedly broke my promises to myself and other people. The urge to drink would just become too much for me, so it was always only a matter of time before I caved in. Mindfulness gave me the ability to manage my addiction cravings so they no longer had any control over me.

“…an urge is like an ocean wave that grows bigger and bigger as it approaches the shore. As it grows, there’s the desire to just give in, but if you do, you’ll reinforce the power of the addiction.”

Alan Marlatt

I talk about my experiences with using mindfulness to deal with addiction cravings in this video (you will find the podcast version below).

Press play to listen to the podcast of this episode:

Useful Resources for Mindfully Dealing with Addiction Cravings

Urge Surface Relapse Prevention

Surfing the Urge (Inquiring Mind article)

How Mindfulness Helped Me Find My Purpose in Life

Phra Hans was a Buddhist monk who helped me give up alcohol (I say ‘was’ because he died a few years ago). At our first meeting, Phra Hans promised me if I quit drinking, I would find my purpose in life, and the need to get drunk would disappear completely.

I wanted to believe what Phra Hans was telling me, but it all sounded too good to be true. If I hadn’t felt do desperate, I would have dismissed his promise as fanciful nonsense.

Ideas like ‘life purpose’ sounded a bit too New-Agey for my liking. Anyway – I’d already stopped drinking for two years once before, and despite believing that I’d found my life purpose during that time (I became a nurse), I still ended up drinking again.

Phra Hans suggested I had turned to alcohol because I had lost my purpose in life. This lack of meaning created inner-discomfort that I self-medicated by getting drunk. What he said did make sense to me – I used to call it my ‘fuck-it’ button.

This explanation for why I drank isn’t just a Buddhist idea. The psychologist Abraham Maslow talked about a hierarchy of needs with self-actualization is at the top. Maslow once said:



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

I was desperate enough to believe what Phra Hans was telling me. I put my faith in his claim that my life purpose would reveal itself so long as I stayed sober.

I knew the Buddhist idea of giving up intoxicants wasn’t simply about me becoming a good boy so the universe could shower me with goodies. It wasn’t that alcohol was evil, it was just that it prevented me from being mindful.

What Phra Hans was really telling me was that my life purpose would reveal itself if I became more mindful.

I’m not sure there is anything supernatural about mindfulness. It was just a way for me to escape the habitual patterns that were fucking up my life. It also calmed the raging storm in my head just enough so that insights and creative thoughts could be heard above the din.

There is all this potential trapped inside all of us and mindfulness releases it – it doesn’t happen overnight, but once this stuff starts to surface, life becomes full of purpose and meaning.

The things Phra Hans told me that day turned out to be true. I got sober, and my life became full of purpose. The need to get drunk disappeared.