“The wise man does not lay up his treasures. The more he gives to others, the more he has for his own.”—Lao Tzu
In our using days, we tended to be hoarders and takers. We weren’t too famous for our philanthropic acts. When our lives were dominated by the bottle or the needle we were less into “sharing is caring” and more into “finders, keepers.” To give, felt dangerous. We would be risking our safety net. We would be leaving the door wide open—to be stolen from blind. Or so we thought.
What we discovered as we hit bottom, seemed counter-intuitive. The more we tried to keep, the more we lost. We were a fist tightening around sand—watching the grains spurt out from our grasp, the harder we squeezed.
In early recovery, we—perhaps rather grudgingly—accepted the gift of support and care from our new fellow travelers. As we grew in our recovery, we became ever more capable of reciprocating that care. We learned to love to give—for the sheer pleasure of the giving. And a magical thing started to happen for us: the more we gave freely from our hearts, the more we received back. A process we might once have dismissed as a spiritual cliché, became a self-evident truth… A remarkable and wonderful change.
As addicts, we would often write checks against our bodies that we could barely cash. We would rip off our own adrenals with the same negligence and disregard that we would rip off our friends and loved ones. We stole from our own energy with reckless abandon—depleting ourselves and putting our resilience at risk. In recovery, we need to give back as generously to own bodies as we now do to others. Here’s a squat variation that will help to energize and restore those depleted adrenals:
Stand about three inches away from a wall, feet facing forward and about six inches apart. Exhale as you slowly sink down into as low a squat as you can manage, while keeping your back relatively straight. The wall is in front of you to make sure you don’t lean forward too much while performing the movement. Inhale as you come back up.
According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, if we put our attention at the bottom of our feet and run our attention up our legs as we rise up, we will help enliven our kidney/adrenal energy. Our bodies can be considered as a series of ever-more-subtle hydraulic systems. When we perform this Wall Squat we are pumping the various levels of our hydraulics, be it the blood, the lymph or the chi… We influence the pumping by brute physical action, by breathing and by guiding the chi with our attention. The more you practice the attention part, the more natural and potent it will become. Just like the persistent activity of giving to others…
It feels so satisfying to be restoring my body by giving it the care and attention it deserves.