Recovery For Me

Written by Kensei

I see folks that drift into my sphere of awareness on various social media platforms talking about how many days they’ve been sober. Some of them express gratitude for making it X number of years without using. All of them are very proud of their achievements.

And so they should be. Recovery is freakin’ hard.

Just making it one evening without giving in to that pesky little voice that says the night is young and you’ve got plenty of time before you have to get to sleep and you’ll make sure that you only have one gin and tonic because you have to work tomorrow but three is actually okay tonight because I’m a big boy is a major accomplishment. Sometimes I give in to that little bastard and I tell myself that its fine because its not like I’m in recovery or something like that.

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering just what it means to be in recovery here recently, beyond the assumption that recovery is strictly limited to intoxicants. Where does it start? What am I recovering from? Always backtracking down the timeline searching for the primary causation that put me in this moment/situation that I find myself in.

So I play out the karma from past lives, the lives of my ancestors and from that thing that happened at work the other day. Buddhism teaches about the chain of causation, that cause and effect are immediate and are inseparable. The current moment is what it is because of how it was a moment ago, because of how I reacted to the previous moment. It’s easy to point a finger backwards and place blame for how things are on something else but none of that really matters. Those are things that happened that caused me to be right here right now. What does matter is that I recognize that whole line of thinking and start right now to take responsibility for this moment and choose my action with a bit more wisdom and insight than I had a moment ago.

Sometimes I get it really wrong. Sometimes I get sidetracked by the story I’m telling myself and get out the blame finger and start waving it around at stuff. Sooner or later I realize that I am way off the rails and need to get back to taking responsibility. My zen teacher used to say that the moment of real practice comes not when I am deeply immersed in the practice but at the moment that I realize that I have drifted away. I keep at it until I get it right - its a “practice” after all. Part of the idea is that each time I choose a more beneficial path in this moment, the easier it is to choose healthy responses in the next. If I’m paying attention, I see that the options that I have to choose from keep improving. But I still fuck it up. Despite all the meditation, I am still a human.

So it seems that I am actually in recovery after all. I’m in recovery from that thing my mom did when I was a kid. I’m in recovery from getting really hammered one day in high school and throwing up all over the bathroom. I’m in recovery from my inability to maintain stable love relationships over the years. I’m in recovery from the less-than-optimal choices I made twenty minutes ago. I am in recovery from whatever it is that I allow to take over the reigns and drive this apple cart into the ditch.

I am learning to shower myself with love for noticing that I did something stupid instead of kicking myself for doing it. And then I fix it. That is a really important part of this. I need to own each action, good or not so good. Correct the fallout of my actions with sincerity and love. Carry that love into the next moment and act with deep compassion for myself and for all beings that I interact with. Make good choices. Reach out and ask for help when I need to.