Meditation and Addiction
If you are breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong.
Recently, there has been an explosion of research into using meditation to help improve a lot of physical and emotional problems. There is also huge evidence for its use in improving productivity, creativity and peace of mind.
The evidence for meditation helping with compulsive behavior and particularly with addictive behaviors has been especially compelling. Addiction often stems from being unwilling to abide unpleasant thoughts and feelings. Meditation trains the mind to choose which thoughts to think. Even people recovering from horrible trauma can retrain their thoughts around that trauma and relieve the stress and pain that the trauma causes.
Immediate recovery from addiction often requires medical or psychiatric intervention, depending on the addictive substance. After that, the stress of life itself kicks in as does the wish to escape from the painful emotions that the drug or addictive behavior was meant to eliminate.
Meditation can help with all that. It is a tool for recovery and also for just a better, happier life from day to day.
Mindfulness meditation
When I talk about meditation I mean mindfulness-based meditation. Let’s start with what that looks like.
Sit in a comfortable position with your eyes open or closed. You probably shouldn’t lie down, that signals your brain and body to fall asleep. That can be nice, but its not the project.
So while sitting upright on the floor with legs crossed or in a chair with feet on the floor and back relatively straight: bring your attention to your breath.
Your breath is portable. It’s always with you. If not … you don’t have to worry about any of this. Jon Kabat-Zinn once said “As long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than there is wrong...”
So focus on your breath. Feel your chest rising and falling and follow the way the air feels as it comes up and out of your nostrils and the way it feels when you pull the air back in again.
Once you get settled doing this, your mind will get bored and wander off to something more interesting, maybe you start to plan what you’re going to do for lunch.
When you notice that that has happened, label the lunch plans “thinking” and refocus your attention on your breath.
The 3-Step Process
That 3-step process is your goal. You did not fail when your mind wandered — that’s what minds evolved to do!
You succeeded when you noticed your wandering mind.
The three steps are: 1. You notice your mind wandered; 2. you label that line of thought “thinking”; and 3. You return your attention to your breath.
The goal here is not to have a blank, empty mind. The goal here is to notice that you are thinking. That is the work you are doing and every time you complete those three steps you have achieved a victory.
The essence of mindfulness is noticing.
There is no such thing as good or bad thoughts. There are helpful and unhelpful thoughts. Skillful thoughts and thoughts that are not skillful. They all weigh the same and have the same lack of solidity.
When you discover that no thought is more real, solid or true than another, it gives you the freedom to decide what you want to think about.
Most people mistake thoughts as realities. The thought “I am a screw up” feels true, real and solid. The thought “I am valuable” seems like it belongs to someone else.
The unhelpful thought (I am a screw up) has no real solidity in the world. Labeling that idea as “thought” will, over time, help you to see that the thought is not you. It is just another puff of breath blowing through your mind.
Meditation trains you to notice that you are thinking and not just “being.” It trains you to detect thinking and give it its proper label. It provides you with the skill you need to tell a thought from reality, and to turn away from an unhelpful thought and rest your attention on your breath.
“Thinking” — what does that have to do with addiction?
No thought that floats through your head is more important than any other thought. The thought “what’s for lunch?” has exactly the same amount of weight and substance as “I am miserable and I want to get high.”
Obviously, the second thought has more emotional resonance, but the thought itself is the same passing breeze.
When you practice becoming aware of all thoughts and labeling them as just thoughts you give yourself the option of choice.
Meditation is relaxing — it is famous as a stress reliever. The reason it is relaxing is because, embedded in the act of labeling a thought as just a thought and letting it go as you turn your attention back to your breath is the option of choice.
Practicing that 3-step process when life is going okay and nothing particular is going on, gives you the skill of noticing that you are thinking and letting thoughts go. You practice letting thoughts of lunch go so you have the skill to let go of the thought “I want to get high.”
“I want to get high” is a thought like any other. If you are standing on a noisy street corner and you think “I want to get high” your breath is there with you (or you would be lying on the pavement and not standing). Therefore you can label that thought “thinking” and focus your attention on your breath.
You can do it over and over. It costs nothing and it’s always there with you.
The world can be frantic, terrifying, crazy and just way too damn much. But “frantic, terrifying, crazy, and too much” are just thoughts. Practice letting them go. Over and over and over.
Success!
This point right here, right now, where your breath is, is a quiet and intimate spot. Perhaps terrible things have happened to you in the past. Perhaps awful things will happen in the future. But right here, in the place where your breath is, is peace and safety. That is what you can choose to pay attention to, not the unhelpful thoughts.
Of course, it doesn’t happen the first time you try it. You will struggle at first, everyone does. But victory is there in your breath which is always with you. You merely have to return again and again and each time it gets a little easier. Eventually you discover there is a peaceful and safe place in the present moment where you let a wandering thought go — however, important or frightening that thought may seem — and take your next breath.
Letting that thought go and returning your attention to your breath is not a path to success. It is success.
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