John Du Cane

John Du Cane

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.

Pipe Dreams

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“Between thought and expression lies a lifetime.”—Lou Reed

We smoke our dreams in long, thin pipes and watch through half-closed lids as our plans disperse back into the darkness from which they were born. We sigh and lie back on our couch—and let another day pass unformed, unmade, unrealized…

Such, so often, was the script in the days of our affliction to addiction. So many dreams we dreamed, did we not? So many grandiose plans got hatched in a haze of jibber-jabber. So many slurred promises were made across the table to friends who didn’t care. We were the broken records, scratching out the same woulda-coulda-shouldas over and over and over again. If there was action to be had at all, it was the quest for more of whatever medication would prolong the dream. So we could prolong the dreaded moment where thought might become expression—and we made a difference in the world…

Pipe Dream

Today, let’s slide open the cabinet and flip through the files of our unfulfilled dreams. Let a dream pop out at you. One that you feel ready to juice with a dose of real world action. Pull it out, dust it off and open it up. Nice!

And now for the exercise to trigger your call to action:

Lie down on the floor. Consider the unfulfilled dream. Resolve to make the dream a reality. Get up. Stand up. Lie back down upon the carpet. Consider the unfulfilled dream. Resolve to make the dream a reality.  Get up. Stand up. Lie back down. Rinse and repeat a total of ten times.

You may be surprised at how challenging it is to get up smoothly from lying flat on the floor. In fact, whole books have been written and videos produced, teaching how to get up well from a prone position. Today, we are not offering you any pro tips on this primal movement. Just get up as best you can, perhaps experimenting each time with a tweak to make it more efficient. Notice how each time you complete the get up, your resolve to turn your unfulfilled dream into action has strengthened…

It feels so good to get up with purpose and turn a dream into action.

So Sorry

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“An apology can be a wonderful thing so long as it is infrequent and from the heart. However, beware of the person who justifies bad behavior with apologies. For them it is a means to an end, and quite often at your expense.”—Gary Hopkins

Saying we’re sorry is a good habit to cultivate, for sure. Because it implies we take responsibility for our behavior and feel remorse or regret. We may also be expressing a genuine feeling of empathy for another’s pain. However, it’s often the case that we say sorry, with no real intention to act differently in the future. Saying sorry becomes a shabby ploy to kick the can down the corridor. We can also say we are sorry about another’s pain, with utter insincerity—like the cashier wishing us a good day with dead eyes and a fake smile.

Caught in the throes of our addiction, saying sorry was at best a device to manipulate others into our own needy agenda. And we were generally way too self-centered to spare one dime of empathy for another’s difficulties. If we did feel sorry, we made sure to stuff that threat of other-centeredness into the deeper recesses of our reluctant hearts.

Sorry

When we moved into recovery we learned to back up our sorries with heart and with action. We made a concerted effort to track down those we had wronged and made amends, as best we could. Such efforts were often mighty tough in the doing of them, but a huge relief after the fact. Which is why it was recommended in the first place. However, many of those we’d wronged were, perhaps rightfully, suspicious that the leopard could really have changed his spots. Could this just be a cunning paint job—to mask the next duplicity? In our resolve to be strong in our recovery, we saw that a change in actual behavior was what was really going to make the difference.

Let’s reflect for a minute now, on an amend that we may not have backed up with a change in behavior. Is there something we can initiate on behalf of this amend that will put some real beef between the buns? We may get no further today than to trigger the first impulse toward corrective action—but hey, that’s already a whole lot more than we had before…

Speaking of leopards, let’s keep it simple today and just exercise our talons. Our hands have a massive—massive—neural connection to our brains, so exercising our hands is always beneficial.

Stand or sit comfortably. Rest your bent elbows on either side of your torso, touching just below the ribs. Hands facing down. Open and close your hands 20 times. Rotate your hands at the wrists 10 times in each direction. Move your hands up and down 20 times. You’ll be bringing healing juices into your wrist and fingers joints, which will help with mobility and pain-relief. Good, you’re done and dusted for the day!

I feel ready to imbue my amends with a healthy dose of action!

Proud To Be Me

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“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?

Proud to be me

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.