John Du Cane

Spark Your Day

Manipulation

By

“When it comes to controlling human beings, there is no better instrument than lies. Because you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated.”—Michael Ende

Most of us would agree that one of the most unpleasant feelings we can have is the feeling of being manipulated—taken for a chump, disrespected, deceived with charm and cunning. We feel soiled. We feel soiled because we are manipulated by what we most believe in—what we hold precious and dear to our hearts. The more powerfully we believe, the more powerfully we can be manipulated by a play on those beliefs. Yes, sure, we can be manipulated through our baser impulses—such as greed—but what hurts most is the betrayal of our trust, the crucifixion of our dreams…

In our using days, we took graduate courses in lying, cheating and manipulation. Getting what we wanted at others’ expense defined our MO. We figured if we just lied long enough and hard enough our lies would become the truth. We could assert with utter conviction that a banana was actually a sausage. Not only would we come to believe ourselves that a banana was not a banana, but a sausage—we would watch as others ate the banana and declared it to be the most wonderful-tasting sausage in the world. Hey, mission accomplished!

Manipulation

Fortunately, in recovery we revere honesty as a core and necessary virtue, to ensure we remain resilient in our program. The more we can get used to facing life without feeling the need to manipulate and deceive, the better chance we have to be serene and at peace. Lying, by its nature, weakens the links in the chain of our well-being. And the weaker any link, the weaker the overall program. Break a link completely and we enter dangerous territory…

Of course, old habits die hard—and “constant vigilance” is the catchphrase when it comes to manipulation. We self-correct when we see ourselves start to manipulate—and we call out others who would manipulate us. It’s an ongoing tango of respectful adjustment at its best. But left too long to fester, and we’ll find ourselves in a scrum, elbows out, kicking, pushing and shoving. And for those of us in recovery, the scrum is not a good place to hang out…

Today, let’s reflect on our progress with manipulation. How are we doing? Could there be a beneficial course correction we could make today—that would ease our lot and the lot of others?

Manipulation derives from “handwork”, so for today’s movement, let’s work those hands:

Stand or sit with good posture. Extend your forearms in front of and at right angles to your torso, with your elbows resting gently on your stomach. Circle your hands at the wrist joints making a full 360-degree rotation. One hand will be rotating clockwise, the other counter-clockwise. Reverse directions. Now, pull your hands up and back, moving only from the wrist joint. Then, bend the palms downwards, again only moving from the wrist. Do 24 to 36 rotations for each movement.

I liberate myself from the spider’s web of manipulative thinking—and enjoy the sense of ease this brings me.

For The Love of Discipline

By

“Discipline imposed from the outside eventually defeats when it is not matched by desire from within.”—Dawson Trotman

Discipline is a difficult word for most of us, because it has such a peculiar history. While discipline originally meant “to absorb knowledge”, its cultural baggage was weighted by three strong traditions.

First, in medieval times, discipline was frequently associated with self-scourging as a method of self-knowledge—beat yourself, to know yourself better.

Second, historically, the military has enforced learning through the “punishment of discipline.” Only by pain, shall ye learn!

Then, there’s the pedagogical and parental correlation of “disciplining the child” with “punishing the child.” Again, the implication is that only by some form of brutal coercion, will learning happen. Spare the rod, spoil the child…

So, let’s face it, it can be hard for us to approach the concept of discipline always with the love it may deserve. Those of  us in recovery, in particular, are in recovery not only from chemical abuse, but from the abuse of those who had power over us.

We would often react by rebelling against the strictures of the bullying authority. However, in the rebelling, we sometimes merely enforced the abuser’s power over us—while throwing our own lives into further shambles. We would use and abuse out of defiance. We would be deliberately undisciplined in reaction to the forced labor imposed on us by our parents, teachers, jailors, pimps, sergeant-majors, priests, police and assorted other authority figures. We ended up running afoul of our own selves—isolated, broken, fragmented, despairing.

Fortunately, in recovery we learned to strip away the punitive associations of discipline to appreciate the beauty of well-practiced discipline. We joined forces with others, because together we could achieve in friendly cooperation what had eluded us as individuals. We found joy in the discipline of a task accomplished together. For recovery is always finally a team effort, a fellowship of mutual commitment.

Discipline Alexander Piragis / Shutterstock.com
Alexander Piragis / Shutterstock.com

To fall in love with discipline, is to make an internal commitment to its worth. We have to see the point—and we have to want the outcome. We have to believe that there is salvation to be had from the consistent, determined, organized effort that it takes to triumph over any challenge. Discipline is always about sacrifice—small or large. We sacrifice our scatteredness in favor of a focused goal. We seek help, we link with others, we offer our services, we work together. With this attitude, in a fellowship of support, we can let go of discipline as punishment and embrace discipline as the creation of beauty.

Today, let’s “square our shoulders”, as a physical way to affirm our determination to face-up to discipline—and make it a joy, not a chore…

Stand with feet at shoulder-width, arms resting by your sides and your butt tucked gently forward. Circle your shoulders up, forwards, down and backwards, making a full 360-degree rotation. Repeat in the opposite direction. Do up to 20 repetitions in both directions.

Next, pull your shoulders back and down, bringing your shoulder blades together as close as possible. Keep the chest area as relaxed as possible. Tighten the muscles in the upper back and hold for five seconds. Relax. Repeat five to ten times. A

I welcome the serenity that discipline brings to my spirit.

Are We Responsible?

By

“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”—Sigmund Freud

The buck stops at our front door. Always has, always will. However, many of us are loath to pick up the buck and acknowledge that yes, we are responsible. Because behind that front door of ours lie one thousand excuses, stacked higgledy-piggledy in every room. The tired excuses, the lame excuses, the righteous excuses, the blaming excuses, the hangdog excuses, the shifty excuses, the aggressive excuses, the tearful excuses, the codependent excuses—they are all children of the same abrogation of responsibility. In fact, go into our backyards and we’ll most likely find the grass strewn with the garbage of our older, rotten reasons for not standing up for what in our souls we knew was right.

One of the more unfortunate consequences of addiction is the consistent flight from—and denial of—responsibility. When our only true loyalty was to our chemical of choice, we became increasingly reluctant to take a stand that might endanger our own self-centered interests. When we entered life, we entered a lush, verdant jungle teaming with promise and potential. Our addiction laid waste to that green fertility. Our landscape of opportunity became a desert of neglect—until just a few bushes of hope remained…

Responsibility

In recovery, we learned to take responsibility for our actions and behaviors. The fact that our addiction could be termed a disease only released us from shame and its attendant crisis of being. Recognizing that we had a disease for which there was help, we were emboldened to seize the opportunity to act—without using the disease as an excuse. We are what we support and align ourselves with. Support a cause? We are that cause. Support a belief? We are that belief. To take responsibility is to declare a set of values. What will we now stand for—and how strongly are we prepared to stand for it? When is silence and avoidance no longer an option?

So, in recovery, we began to take full responsibility for ourselves and our environment. We actively tilled and watered the parched lands. We planted fresh seeds—and tended the shoots until they grew strong. Slowly and with patience and with dedication we grew back what we had formerly allowed to wither away.

Let’s pause for a moment today and think about a perhaps-less-than-perfect position we might have taken in regard to ourselves, a behavior, another person or a cause. Could there be room for some adjustment? If so, then let’s contemplate that adjustment as we perform today’s movement…

Pick up a heavy object, any heavy object, bring it to your chest and squat down with it. Heavy is a relative term. Let the object be heavy for you, but a weight you can manage without injuring yourself in the process. Squat as low as you can go while maintaining good form and posture. Hold the bottom of the squat position for ten to twenty seconds, depending on your strength and determination. See the “hold” of the object and of the position as a “taking of responsibility.” Now, rise back up slowly. Repeat three to five times.

It feels so good to take full and complete responsibility for who I am and what I stand for, today.

The Death of Fun

By

“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…

Fun

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

By

“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.

Hurry

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.