John Du Cane

John Du Cane

Beyond Gallows Humor

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“There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.”—Erma Bombeck

We joke about what most angers us. We joke about our secret desires. And we joke about what we fear most. Our jokes release us from the tensions and stresses and anxieties that lace our lives. Small wonder then, that both pre- and post-recovery we relished the ghoulish end of the spectrum when it came to humor. For we were the ones possessed by death, despair and self-loathing. As we recovered and the pain began to recede, then so did the gallows humor—at least to some extent.

However, there remains a risk attached to dark humor for those in recovery. The risk is around sabotage—self-sabotage and sabotage of others. We tread lightly on the shards of our past, so that they cut not our soles as we begin our new path… Humor can help lighten our steps, but the lightening may sometimes dishonor the gravity of our experience. We need the balance and the wisdom to discriminate between humor that dis-empowers and humor that celebrates our essential dignity.

Our dignity took a hammering—mostly self-administered—when we were using. Now that we are picking up the pieces, it’s important to be delicate and sensitive to the chinks in our self-esteem. We once liked to chop ourselves up, as a way to distance ourselves from our suffering. While being overly serious could be considered a dis-ease in itself, too much “cutting up” can discredit our real achievements in getting straight and staying straight, sobering up and staying sober.

We can seek to lighten another’s distress by making them laugh—releasing them from what may be a self-involved drama-fit. But let’s always be sensitive to the true dynamics. Is the humor hurtful or helpful? Damaging or restorative? Wounding or healing? Each of us needs to approach our humor in these situations like the helmsman of a sailboat. Is the wind blowing strong, is it gusting, or is it just a faint breeze? How tight we pull the sail in—or how much we let it out—has to be felt for and adjusted to in that very moment. Such are the skills we build as we navigate our recovery.

Humor

Today, let’s do an exercise that dramatizes this dynamic. We will call it the Squeeze and Release:

Stand with feet shoulder-width apart and maintain an upright, yet natural-feeling posture. Inhale through your nose. Now, squeeze both your fists as tight as you can. You call that tight? Come on! Tighter, tighter… ok, that’s more like it! Feel the induced tension irradiate up from the fists, until both arms are as tense as you can make them. Hold the tension for a few seconds. Exhale forcefully through the mouth and relax the hands and arms completely. Collect yourself and repeat for a total of ten times.

I squeeze and I release, I squeeze and I release—and I can feel the stress disappear from my body and mind.

Grace Under Fire

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“When you know in your bones that your body is a sacred gift, you move in the world with an effortless grace. Gratitude and humility rise up spontaneously.”—Debbie Ford

When chemicals aren’t racing and raging through our blood and brains, it’s somewhat easier to move with grace and elegance through our lives. In our using and abusing days, we cared not much a whit about such niceties as grace and elegance. We wanted the firestorm, the maelstrom, the surge, the burst, the jack, the hit, the bang—anything that would push us into an extreme of feeling. Or we wanted the great numbing—the opiate that would anesthetize us to any possibility of felt pain. We met stress with either excess or freeze-out. We fought, we ran or we froze.

In early recovery, the turbulence in our veins began to subside. Our shot and frayed nerves began to soften and re-sheathe themselves. The oscillations in mood, the energy swings started to level out some.  We found we had to be patient with the process. There is only so much toxic residue and upset that can be safely removed and defused in a certain period of time. And each of us is remarkably different in constitution and capacity when it comes to that cleaning practice. We found great solace in knowing that we were not alone in this journey of recovery. We had a new fellowship who could sustain us in our darker moments, our waves of discomfort and discouragement. We realized that the chemicals had bitten hard—and those wounds needed plenty of time and care to heal.

In recovery, we are acutely aware that the little user-beastie still lurks patiently within us—just waiting for a slip, so it can pull us back into our former insanities. Getting impatient with the recovery process—trying to force the healing too fast and hard—can boomerang back on us and cause a dangerous distress. Relaxing and taking it easy is the ticket, we learned, to a safe, steady and resilient recovery.

When we relax and let our bodies feel themselves, we have the opportunity to move with greater self-assurance. And from that relaxed acceptance, we can move with a more gentle elegance. We will feel more graceful to ourselves and we will look more graceful to others.

Grace

When our natural-born grace feels under fire, it’s good to have a repertoire of movements we can use to douse the flames and calm things down. Today, let’s practice one such move:

Stand with feet shoulder-width apart, arms by your sides. Knees slightly bent, butt tucked under, shoulders down and relaxed. Put your attention in your stomach. Simply swing your arms behind you with a moderate push to get things going—rather like priming a pump. Then let the swings rebound forward and up with a sense of effortless grace. Push back when the arms reach the top of their unforced arc. Do at least twenty repetitions, but anywhere up to one hundred would be great.

This movement is very calming indeed—and also naturally detoxifying—as it will help activate your debris-cleansing lymph system.

I move gently—and as I move, the grace descends upon me and fills my being.

The Cost of Kindness

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“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.

Cost of Kindness

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.

Of Mystery, Secrecy and Privacy

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“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”—Albert Einstein

Are you mysterious? Are you secretive? Are you private? Truth be told, most of us are a mix. But some of us carry one or more of these conditions to an extreme of either excess or dearth. Both extremes can be costly to our well-being. So, let’s explore the pros and cons of mystery, secrecy and privacy—and how they relate to the dynamics of recovery.

We hanker to be recognized and appreciated for who we are and what we’ve done. Mystery can be the great gilder of the attention-gold. Secrecy can protect us but can backfire as we get labelled furtive, untrustworthy and suspect. Privacy sets the boundaries for our public representation—the spin doctor for the story we want the world to hear.

Mystery

We can’t be helped if we don’t ask—and we can’t ask unless we reveal. No reveal, no ask, no help. In recovery, asking for help is crucial. So, in recovery we need to protect our vulnerabilities, yet be prepared to be treated for a festering wound. Recognize the sickness—and ask help of the healer. Trust the healer and let the wound begin its healing.

We wouldn’t want the flowerbed of our sensitive spirit to be easily trampled—thus we build barriers around that bed. But the private beauty may be the less in its allure—for the want of its sharing. Again, we need to balance our shifting needs for protective privacy and the healing power of feedback…

None of us want to be considered boring. We avoid being a bore by cultivating a climate of mystery around ourselves. Yet, too much effort at mystery can paralyze our expressive growth. We become so cool in our mysteriousness, that we become fearful of acting or being at all in the public view.

In our days of addiction, the furtive shawl of secrecy tended to be our favored dress. We hid stuff even when there was no apparent reason to hide. We hid by second nature. To hide was to glide—past the inquisitive, beady-eyed threats to our drunk, our stone, our high… We eluded and eluded, so we could suck yet again at the mouth of the bottle, welcome yet again the needle as it pierced our flesh, savor yet again the smoke from the burning blunt, snort up yet again the glistening crystals on the dirty mirror.

In the stresses of addiction, we ran our sensitivities and sensibilities into the ground. We lost touch with the natural mystery of life as it unfolds in all its wonder. Instead of engaging with the complexities of the mystery, we copped out and gave our game away to the scrubs and benchwarmers of our being. The dance of recovery is always the dance of balance—and balance is an ever-shifting target by its nature.

The more we can attain balance in the realms of the mysterious, the private and the secret, the healthier we can be. And the more resilient in our recovery. It is the willingness to respond to the ever-changing shifts that will help us grow in discrimination and wisdom.

Let’s complement our meditation on balance with movement that challenges our physical balance:

Stand relaxed with the heels close together, feet facing out at a 45-degree angle. Place the hands, palms up, a few inches away from your stomach. Circle both arms up above your head, spiraling the palms so they end up facing away from you. As you perform this upward circling movement of your arms, raise your left knee until it is at hip height. Pause momentarily, balancing on the right leg. Circle your arms down out and around until they arrive back at the starting point. As you lower your arms, bring the left leg back to the floor. Complete this set by raising your right knee up and balancing on your left leg, as your circle your arms above your head and back down. Inhale on the upward movement, exhale on the downward movement. Keep it slow and smooth. Repeat for a total of ten sets.

I celebrate the beauty and the mystery of life as I balance this way and that, this way and that…

The Object of Our Desire

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“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…

Desire

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.