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In my experience as an addict, the best we can hope for is to arrest the symptom – albeit use of the drug of choice, while we treat the underlying cause. In the 12-Step world, this underlying cause is a spiritual malady–the main problem centers in the mind, rather than in the body. The difference between the treatment I recommend for addiction and the common cold is that as 12-Step Buddhists we don’t just treat the symptoms. 
As addicts, we’ve spent our lives deep in attachment to our drugs of choice, whatever they may be. Sure, Buddhism addresses attachment. But in the case of the addict it’s more like Attachment Gone Wild. For this we need a serious, specific form of medicine. For me, it’s the 12-Steps and my Buddhist practices. As a 12-Step Buddhist, I’m fully aware of this need to know the condition at a deep level because failure to stay in that knowledge almost cost me my life—more than once. It’s about knowing what the condition is and the condition is samsara. Part of what keeps us stuck in samsara is attachment. We just won’t let go, no matter how bad it hurts. 
In the old days of my 12-Step recovery, they used to say that if you were going to make it in sobriety, you had to learn to “get naked.” I mentioned this in a meeting recently and got a strange reaction. What they meant was that we needed to drop our rock, join the parade, and become emotionally vulnerable with another human being in our 5th Step, “We Admitted to God, to Ourselves and to Another Human Being the Exact Nature of Our Wrongs.” In recovery, our sponsors were about the closest thing to a guru that most of us ever had. 
The teaching began with the notion that all beings, even a dove, have a seed of compassion, as in the example of a dove’s sympathy for it’s offspring. In trying to make the distinction between sympathy and empathy, we learned that it’s really about both, and is very difficult to discern one from the other in the translations. That’s regular compassion, the seed of sympathy or mercy that all beings have at least a tiny bit of. |
Portland Recovery Meditation Groups
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Sun Valley Wellness Festival
On the way to Sun Valley Idaho to speak at the festival there. Will be having dinner with some other authors, including Bob Thurman! Sun Valley Wellness Festival