Control Yourself

By Kevin Griffin

I’ve noticed a pattern lately to the questions I get asked about meditation. People want to know how they can avoid pain in their bodies; how they can stop their thoughts; how they can keep from falling asleep. The pattern I see in all these questions, and others, is the fundamental wish to control your experience. This is typical of addicts who used to try to control their experience with drugs and alcohol. When they come to meditation, they bring these same habits.

But that’s not what meditation is about, at least not mindfulness meditation.

Mindfulness meditation is, first of all, about seeing clearly what is happening in the present moment. When our bodies hurt, mindfulness suggests we try to bring our awareness to what that exactly feels like; when our thoughts are washing through our minds, mindfulness says, notice what thoughts you’re having and see what patterns emerge—there’s important information there; when we are falling asleep we have the opportunity to see what fatigue feels like—it’s a trigger for addiction, so it’s wise to see it clearly.

It’s natural that people want to avoid unpleasant experiences, and of course people hope to have something more than misery come out of their meditation time. Mindfulness meditation can certainly bring us to a calm and pleasurable place at times, but that’s not the core goal of mindfulness. The greater goal is the search for truth and freedom. When we set those goals up over the goal of pleasure and comfort, we are on a spiritual path.

This is what Step Three is all about.

It’s important, then, as we adopt a meditation practice in recovery that we continue to practice our program. If we apply the principles of the program to our meditation, we will show up, do our best, and turn the results over. Whatever challenges come up during our meditation, we will consider to be opportunities to learn. We will apply the tools of mindfulness, paying close attention to our experience and, especially, to our reaction to our experience. And we will accept the results.

If we trust in this process, we will find that the calm and peace, the joy we seek, will come more easily. But it doesn’t come by our forcing it or trying to control what happens.

It’s so interesting that people who work a serious program and are able to turn it over in many aspects of their lives, when they come to meditation all of a sudden want to take back control.

Doing our best and then letting go of the results is one of the biggest challenges in recovery; it’s an essential element of meditation.

http://www.kevingriffin.net
A Burning Desire
One Breath at a Time

What I Learned from Kevin Griffin

What a great post Kevin!

I never really related "keep coming back" to so many other areas in my life but it really does apply. When I was attending a Christian meditation group we kept coming back to our word, our mantra. Like Kevin said the mind does wander and then I come back to my mantra.

One of the things I am working on is trying to keep a positive attitude when I go to work. When you are around others who may focus on the negative regularly out loud it is a constant battle to stay in a positive frame of mind.

What I learned from Kevin is I can "keep coming back" all day long in all my struggles. I can start again, forgiving myself for getting off the beam and commit again to being mindful of my intentions.

How I can make use of Kevin's post ~ use the mantra "keep coming back" throughout my day knowing this applies to all areas of my life.

Thank you Kevin!

Keep Coming Back

By Kevin Griffin
www.kevingriffin.net

Renewal is built right into 12 Step programs, and it’s a foundational aspect of meditation. Every meeting ends with the admonition, “Keep coming back,” a reminder that the process of recovery isn’t about passing the finish line, but about living life “one day at a time.” Recovery isn’t about attaining some state of pure spiritual bliss, but of learning to face life’s challenges without running to a bottle, a drug, to food or sex or gambling.

Of course, the initial step of getting sober or abstinent is difficult. At that point, “keep coming back” might be all we have to hang on to. Maybe we’re nuts and it feels like we can’t handle it, but those simple words tell us that it’s going to get better. And it does. Our addiction is healed. When that happens, a lot of other great things will often follow: our relationships get better, our work life improves, our emotional state brightens. It all takes work of course, and often years of showing up, but once we’re clean and sober, we start seeing the improvement and that inspires us to keep going.

But life doesn’t stop. The First Noble Truth in Buddhism, the Truth of Suffering, says that life is difficult, that there are ongoing inner and outer struggles. A new year is often a time to confront some of these struggles. The holidays are often stressful and may trigger underlying addictions, so that when January 1st comes, we’re ready to renew our inner and outer spiritual work.

This is, of course, a cliché, the new diet or exercise regime, the New Year’s Resolution; and the rest of the cliché is that the resolution doesn’t last long. But if we are committed to a spiritual path, resolution and renewal of commitment is something that happens year round. And it’s not that we’ve “failed” when we have to renew our commitment, simply that the Truth of Suffering, which says that everything is impermanent and ultimately unsatisfactory, is operating.

The first step in renewal is honesty: I’m backsliding and I need to get it together. The second step is forgiveness: it’s natural that I backslide, so I don’t have to beat myself up, just get on with my renewal.

This past year I lost 17 pounds through a program of mindful eating. This morning I found that I’d gained 3 pounds over the holidays. Time for renewal. Before I lost the weight I rarely weighed myself, not wanting to get the bad news. But one of the things I learned in mindful eating is that I have to stay current with my weight or it slips away. I didn’t want to weigh myself today; I thought, “I’ll just wait till after the weekend when I can get my eating straightened out again.” But I did it anyway. Then I thought, “It’s natural that I gained weight over the holidays, and I know how to lose it, so I don’t have to worry or beat myself up.” At the same time, at the corners of my mind were the whispers, “You’re piling it on; you’ll never be able to lose that weight.” But I knew that voice, the voice of failure and self-hatred, and I put it aside.

After forgiveness comes the commitment: I’m going to renew my mindful eating program. So I reviewed in my mind some of the basics that I’ve used to limit my calorie intake without creating a binge/purge cycle.

Keep coming back doesn’t just work for addiction. It works for meditation, too. One of the most basic meditation instructions is “keep coming back to the breath.” On the moment-to-moment level, keep coming back is how you meditate: first with mindful honesty that the mind has wandered; then with forgiveness, because, after all, that’s just what my mind does; then, renewal, bringing my attention back to the sensations of breath again.

Keep coming back applies to my daily practice as well: I keep showing up on my meditation cushion each day, whether I feel like it or not, and whether it seems like it’s working or not.

Both meditation and recovery take longer than we want them to. Especially for an addict who wants instant gratification, the slow process of healing our lives and the gradual process of deepening our meditation practice just don’t seem to work. We can’t see the results quickly enough, so we don’t think anything is happening. But real change takes time. This is one of the reasons we keep track of how long we’ve been sober. We gain perspective over the years, both by watching our own progress, and especially by watching that of others in the program. They might not notice the incremental changes in themselves, but we do.

As I meditated this morning for the last time in 2009, I felt anxious and started worrying about the future. I have a new book coming out and lots of teaching planned, and I started obsessing about it all. Then I caught myself and thought, “What other perspective can I bring to this?” and I swung to an absolute, “It’s all empty, nothing really matters” view. That brought a feeling of sadness and negativity. I caught that and realized how unhelpful that was. So I asked myself, “What would be a Middle Way,” and I thought of appreciation. My life is wonderful. I have had incredible opportunities and success in my life; I have a wonderful family and home; my work life is very satisfying. Ahh. . . The renewal of sanity.

This is the most important ongoing process of renewal that I do, trying to keep myself from falling into negative mental and emotional states. All my other work, my program, my spiritual practice, mindful eating, my relationships, exercise, making music, and the rest, is really about maintaining emotional balance. Ultimately, if I’m not happy, what’s the point of any of it? When I feel myself going in a painful direction, usually anxiety or depression, I remind myself to “keep coming back,” first to the most basic thing: mindfulness of my present-moment emotional experience. This doesn’t mean trying to fix anything or do anything about it, just be present with it, trusting that mindfulness itself will begin the healing process. Once I’ve grounded myself in the present moment experience, I can begin to address the causes and conditions behind the current state. Is there something I’m doing or not doing that’s creating this negative state? Is there some skillful response I can bring, or do I just need to “rest in awareness” of the mood?

Staying in the present moment with all my experience is the most fundamental “coming back” that I can do. Life happens here and now. Ultimately my addiction was an attempt to run away from reality. So, my recovery means not just coming back to meetings, but coming back to life.

What I Learned from Kevin Griffin

Read Kevin's Post
Setting My Intentions

I was one of the lucky ones when I came into sobriety, lucky because I was ready. The pain I felt took me to my knees and I was willing to try anything. Once I stepped into the rooms of recovery I received hope, something I had not felt in a long time. My intention was set when I cried at my first meeting.

Make Use Of What They Offer

What I can take from Kevin's post is something I can use every day. Like Kevin I can set my intentions for each day in the morning after my prayers. Whatever my character defect du jour, I can set an intention to work on it for that day.

It is always a relief when a writer gives us space to be human. Kevin states in his closing paragraph that we don't always succeed. Personally I need this reinforcement to be able to let go of any unrealistic expectations on myself and my spiritual practices.

So I learned when my intentions changed in the process of my recovery and how to set my intentions for each day.

Thanks Kevin Griffin for teaching us this simple step to include in our mornings to help with Step Six.

Gwen R~
TwelveBeads.com

It Starts with Intention

By Kevin Griffin

I was recently reading an article about the concern in the recovery profession of determining “outcomes,” whether treatment actually works. Of course, this has always been a question, and it’s a reasonable one for entities like governments and insurance companies that pay for these things to ask. But what immediately occurred to me is that what makes it somewhat unfair to judge a treatment’s effectiveness is the fact that recovery is more dependent upon the motivation of the addict/alcoholic than it is on the treatment itself. This isn’t to diminish the power and value of the tools used for recovery, but, unlike say cancer, the patient’s commitment is vital to recovery. In fact, the word “treatment” might not even be the right one. It’s not as though they put you on a gurney and roll you into the OR where they remove your addiction and after a few days you return home cured. In our case, we have to push our own gurney, lie there awake while we reach into our own guts and pull the monster out. The similarity with cancer is that if we don’t get it all, or if it’s already metastasized, we may relapse.

This brings me to Step Six, which says we “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.” This same readiness is actually implied in Step One in our “admission” of powerlessness. And in the history of AA it’s clear that the founders felt that hitting bottom, completely accepting the hopelessness of our situation was vital to recovery. That hitting bottom is actually the turning point when we make the decision to take on our problem, to try to change.

In Buddhism, this decision, the readiness to change, is called “Right Intention,” pointing ourselves in the direction of recovery, of healing, of spiritual growth. Unless we have this intention, and unless we maintain it as well, we’ll always be at risk of relapse because a part of us will always be looking for a way out. I don’t mean to say that we have to be fully committed to recovery to get started—few of us are—but over time, I do believe that a pretty strong intention has to develop.

Intention is a tricky thing as the saying “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” implies. Right Intention is not a superficial nod to doing the right thing. It is a deep inner commitment to live a loving and wise life. The Buddha said that intention is what conditions the results of our actions, that is, our reason for doing something has a direct effect on the results of us doing it. This means that staying clear about our intentions has a huge effect on our lives. It’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking, for instance, that we’re doing something out of generosity when in fact we are looking for our own rewards. Intention will often be mixed—when I teach meditation the main goal is to be of service, but I also make my living at it, so I am also motivated by a need for money—and we don’t have to beat ourselves up for not having a pure intention, but I do think we need to keep our priorities straight and put Right Intention first on our list.

If Steps Six and Seven are going to bring about real change, we need to be clear about our reasons for wanting to change. Are we seeking pleasure or authentic happiness? Are we looking for truth or quick fixes? When we have a strong intention to change, we become willing to go through the difficulties that inevitably arise when we face ingrained habits, be they chemical addictions or negative thought or emotional habits.

Each morning, at the end of my meditation, I set some intentions. These are often focused on particular issues I’m dealing with, ways I’m trying to change my behavior. I do this by combining the Buddhist idea of taking the Precepts as a kind of vow, with the Twelve Step idea of one day at a time. So, for instance, when I’m working on Right Speech, I say, “Just for today, I take the training precept to refrain from false and harmful speech. ” Then I list specifics like, “Just for today I will avoid criticism and judgment.” What I try to do then is during the day when the impulse to criticize comes up, I try to catch it. If I don’t catch it, I try to recognize that I’ve broken the precept. This is all a way to become more mindful. Taking the precept helps me to remember my intention which helps me to notice when I’m about to or I have just broken the intention. Setting an intention everyday has a powerful effect over time. Gradually the commitment becomes almost second nature. It’s not enough to make a New Year’s resolution because it will fade. But if you make a daily resolution, it stays with you.

Of course, we don’t always succeed at changing in the ways we’d like to. But if we stay mindful and keep noticing how our behavior causes us pain, the desire to change can often overcome the inertia and habits that resist change. Our intention will become stronger and stronger until we really mean it. And then, change becomes possible.