breathing

The Death of Fun

February 10, 2018 By John Du Cane

“Contemplate for a moment the possibility of living without the constant need to be entertained, to be satisfied, to be pampered, to be stimulated, or to be in a state of perpetual bliss.”—Wee Peng Ho

Can we have fun without being drugged up? To some folk, that might seem like a silly question. But to those of us self-declared addicts and alcoholics, the question was all too loaded. Was it really possible to have fun without being blitzed out of our noodles? It seemed incomprehensible to us that fun could be had without some sort of chemical stimulation to fire it up. No drugs, no sizzle, no fun, we thought. The sizzle would fizzle when the stash ran out.

Once upon a time, when the dose on the label said one teaspoon, we would add at least one zero and pour ourselves a glassful. If the indication was one cap per day, we would spill six caps into our palm and gulp them down. And if not enough fun happened within half an hour we would reach back and amp the dose a second time. Hey—as addict-wisdom had it—if one’s good, then ten has got to be a whole lot better, right? This would be too funny, if it wasn’t so true… But we were the little child—who hugged the rearing predator, oblivious to the risk…

Eventually, of course, the hungry lion roared and pounced. Some of us died outright. Some of us were terribly mauled, dragged to safety by our friends. Others of us escaped with some slashes and gashes—just enough to wake and shake us up. We, the wounded, entered recovery. Slowly we healed. But where, oh where, had all the fun gone? The cravings would be slow to subside. We begged to be relieved somehow, someway… It was a dicey time, was it not?

The discovery, it turned out, was that fun could still indeed be had—if we would only stop chasing so hard to grab it. There were safe places with safe people we could hang with. Slowly, we let fun seep into our bones without pushing for more and more and more. The nice surprise was that the more we relaxed out of neediness, the more fun could join us in our lives.

Here’s a very simple, pleasurable way to feel delicious quickly, without having to be aggressive about it (works like a charm):

Stand in a relaxed posture, with your arms by your sides. Close your eyes. Circle your arms up in a wide embracing movement, until your palms are facing your forehead. Keep the shoulders down and relaxed, elbows down. Inhale as you bring your palms toward your forehead, until they are a couple of inches away. Use your attention to bring the energy gently into your forehead. Rotate your palms so they are facing away from your forehead at about a forty-five degree angle. Exhale as you move your palms away from your forehead. Turn your palms towards your forehead and repeat.

When your palms come close to your forehead on the third iteration, turn the palms to face the floor and move them to mid-chest level. Inhale without any physical movement. On the exhale, rotate the palms to face out at a forty-five degree angle and move the palms away from the chest. Rotate your palms to face your chest and as you inhale bring the palms and energy toward the center of the chest. Repeat another two times.

When your palms come close to your mid-chest on the third iteration, turn the palms to face the floor and move them to stomach level. Inhale without any physical movement. On the exhale, rotate the palms to face out at a forty-five degree angle and move the palms away from the stomach. Rotate your palms to face your stomach and as you inhale bring the palms and energy toward the center of the stomach. Repeat another two times.

You have completed one cycle now. Complete as many cycles as you care to.

I relax out of neediness today and enjoy the gentle tranquility of feeling complete as I am right now.

Missing The Moment

February 9, 2018 By John Du Cane

“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste, they hurry past it.”—Soren Kierkegaard

Our eagerness to be anywhere other than where we are now, robs us of much immediate beauty. Particularly in our using days, we sprinted and hurdled toward a hoped-for high rather than relax and appreciate the pure pleasure of being alive to the moment before us. Impatience would rob today’s open till —and we’d often then face our next opportunity with empty pockets.

There’s an apocryphal anecdote beloved in Tai Chi circles: an elderly Chinese man climbs into a rickshaw. The young buck of a rickshaw driver lurches off into the traffic, as if his life depended on arriving yesterday. After a few close shaves, careens and shouted curses, the old man cries out, “Slow down, young man, I’m in a hurry!” Indeed, there’s nothing like impatience to gum up the works with over-eager pushiness. As users and abusers, we most likely had a history of impulsive, compulsive haste that often left us high and dry in the results department.

Now that we are in recovery, we may or may not have learned to modulate our eagerness for the next burst of pleasure. Often, we just redirected our energies into a series of speed-dates. We rushed from one escapade to another without really pausing to savor any one of them. We might be practicing “safe recovery”, but we had a reckless disregard for the subtleties of each experience. And where is the real joy in that? In fact, our joys were often tossed aside like rag dolls, when a fresh new prize was glimpsed across the way…

Today, then, let’s hit the pause button and contemplate what shows up on the frozen frame that—oh by the way—happens to be who and what we are, in our entirety, at this very moment.

Speaking of a pause, let’s pause our breath in the following fashion:

Sit comfortably. Inhale deeply through the nose and exhale strongly through the mouth 20 to 30 times. On the final exhale, pause and hold your breath for as long as you can manage without straining. While your breath is paused, put yourself into a state of “choice-less awareness”. That is, simply contemplate what you are feeling—physically, emotionally and spiritually—without commentary. When you are ready, take one deep inhale and hold that inhale for just a few seconds. Exhale and relax.

This is a powerful method, with many health benefits, physical and otherwise. One cycle is very fine. However, feel free to repeat for a number of cycles if you wish. Take care not to overdo it, to strain in any way. No rush, right? Time to put the joy back into enjoy!

I pause. I contemplate. I am what I contemplate.

The Cost of Kindness

February 6, 2018 By John Du Cane

“Your acts of kindness are iridescent wings of divine love, which linger and continue to uplift others long after your sharing.”—Rumi

Sometimes, in the throes of use, we were too busy with ourselves to be kind to others. Such was the life of a practicing addict. We were intent on more important things than kindness, we thought—like the next score. If we were kind at all, it tended to be a duplicitous kindness. We had a hidden agenda. We mimed kindness, in order to extract the wanted goodies from the unsuspecting mark. And we weren’t only misers in kindness to others. We doled out meanness to ourselves just as readily as we doled out meanness to our relatives, friends and colleagues.

Yet kindness extended on a rubber band is no kind of kindness at all. As the band snaps back against our hand, we sting from the rebound. And a frown will pass across the face of the one we just betrayed, a grimace, a look of hurt. The cost of fake kindness can be measured by the cupful… Conditional kindness is bitter in the giving, bitter to receive. And nobody is finally fooled. Such unrepentant caginess may have appeared to serve our short term needs as practicing addicts, but the formula fell apart when we entered recovery.

We learned in recovery of a more noble path—the path of unconditional kindness. And the path began in our own hearts. We learned to be kind to ourselves, first. Because we came to understand that there can be no genuine kindness given to others from an unloved heart. When we shower our own hearts with acts of kindness, those hearts respond by radiating kindness back. We learn to feel good about ourselves that we may be authentic in feeling good about others.

For today, let’s commit an act of kindness with our own hearts as the recipient.

Sit or lie in a relaxed position. Put your attention in your heart. Breathe gently for a moment, just being aware of that beating heart. Put a gentle half-smile on your face. Inhale through the nose as slowly as you can manage without strain. As you inhale, imagine you are drawing in a sense of benevolence from every direction and let it be naturally attracted toward your heart area. Exhale slowly through the nose, smile some more and feel all that benevolent energy condensing in the heart. Repeat ten times—or more if you want. Feels pretty transcendent does it not?

It feels so comforting to feel my heart accept my own kindness.

The Object of Our Desire

February 4, 2018 By John Du Cane

“Any object of desire is bound to bring frustration. Any expectation is bound to turn into frustration. Expectation is the beginning of frustration, the very seed.”—Bhagwan Rajneesh

Ah, those shiny objects of desire that we pursued with our brains tucked away beneath the bed… How easily we could be lured by the glittering ball to reach out in expectation that this time, this time would be different. This time, we would embrace and merge with that object of desire and our souls would be satisfied. This time, the yearning would stop. This time, we would reach peace. This time, we would feel utterly fulfilled. This time, this time…

But the universe was just playing its usual trick on us. The peace rug would be pulled from under us and we would slip back into craving and dissatisfaction. Our life force has been hard-wired to take a beating and keep on ticking. And as practicing addicts, we became masters of the rebound. It didn’t matter how many times we got sucker-punched, we’d just dust ourselves off and charge off in the direction of the next object—an object that was already eyes-a-glitter, knife beneath its cloak… There was no such thing as a lesson learned—just a need to repeat and repeat the same old outcome.

Finally and fortunately, there was some kind of intervention and we were stopped in our tracks. We learned to look inside ourselves. Communion begins inside. There’s no communion to be had with others, while there’s no communion with ourselves. We learned that solace begins with self-acceptance. As we accepted that our desires were simply pulling us away from the simplicity of our center, we relaxed into a new kind of calm. From that calm place, we could transform our desire into love. Instead of attempting to possess objects and people-as-objects, we gave to the world in a spirit of appreciation. The obsess to possess became the sharing of our gentler selves.

Let’s reflect for a minute on a shiny ball we may still be chasing across that receding field. Can we let go right now of that anxious, grasping, wanting, hungry feeling? Can we do that together?

Attentive, intentional breathing is a wonderful way to let go of that anxious impulse when it descends upon us:

Sit comfortably in an upright posture. Close your eyes. Inhale slowly into your stomach. As you inhale through the nose, let the image of your desire ride on that breath deep into your interior. Hold your breath for about ten seconds without straining. Contemplate that object of desire as it sits there within you. Smile at it. Now exhale slowly through the nose, allowing the object of desire to float out and away from you, dissolving as it floats. Repeat this a few times, until you feel complete.

It is so liberating to close my eyes and feel that right now I am complete just as I am.

Proud To Be Me

February 1, 2018 By John Du Cane

“One may be humble out of pride.”—Michel de Montaigne

Pride is such a multi-faceted emotion. Is pride a deadly sin or a healthy virtue? Can we be proud and humble at the same time? Is pride a strength or a weakness? Does pride always precede a fall? Are there shades of pride? Is pride a beautiful, noble thing—or something loathsome, this way crawling? Should we strive to be proud—or flee it like the plague? Can we admire pride in others? Can we admire pride in ourselves?

The peculiar power of pride is that we can answer Yes to every part of every question we just asked about pride. Because the condition of pride runs the gamut from the most benign to the most malignant. Pride can be a magnificent thing. And it can be a nasty, slithering thing… We may lock in on one end of the pride spectrum only to find ourselves torn off and pushed toward the other end. As with so many of our loaded terms, it’s easy to fixate on one of the definitions, at the expense of the full richness of its meanings.

In our using days, we were in quite the pickle when it came to pride. Because really, in those days, our pride was in tatters. Or, more truthfully we had no pride. We would beg, borrow and steal—sometimes even kill—to secure our chemical stash. Pride of any kind was not a factor. At best, we would have a kind of false pride in what bad people we were—but that shallow pride did little to fill the hollow within us.

In early recovery, the spokes of false pride would keep turning for a while—like the wheels on a crashed bike. Some of us felt so worthless, the best we could do was to brag about our addictive excesses. But over time, a new kind of pride grew in us. Pride in our recovery. Pride in the fellowship. Pride in those who had given us a selfless, helping hand. We started to stand tall again—be rightfully proud of the being we had become for today. Proud to be of service. Proud to contribute. Proud to love. Proud to be a friend to others. Proud to be connected.

Once upon a time, we hid ourselves for fear of being seen for who we thought we were. Now, we have the confidence to display ourselves with grace to an appreciative world. The more we display with grace and elegance—like the proud swan—the more we will be naturally appreciated for who we are…

Today then, let’s literally stand tall—in body, mind and spirit:

Stand with your feet at hip width, hips tucked under, feet facing straight ahead. Sink down about three inches. Raise your arms up to mid-chest height, as if hugging a person. Nice, rounded arms, with the palms facing toward your chest. Take care to relax the shoulders. Breathe gently through the nose. Hold this simple (but not easy) position for three to five minutes.

As you continue to hold, some of your muscles may start to complain. The complaint will show up as undue tightening or tension. Visit each complaining muscle in turn, with your attention. While you are visiting with a particular muscle, inhale then exhale into that muscle and imagine it dissolving into liquid. Repeat a couple of times then move on to the next complainer.

Frankly, the longer you hold the better—however it takes quite a while to build up the strength and skill to hold for extended periods. If you feel some tingling, burning or shaking when standing in this position, that is a good thing! An old adage about this method is: “First you shake, then you ache, then you bake.” Fun, right? Enjoy!

I stand tall in myself—and am proud to be me, just as I find myself today.