Defeating Addiction with Meditation

The Benefits of Meditation in Recovery

I have found out the hard way the importance of meditation for my recovery. If I let things slip there is a noticeable difference in how my mind operates. I am more easily irritated and my thinking becomes a bit cloudy; the real problem is that I don’t even notice this until after I get back meditating again. I am always surprised by the sensations that come when I sit down to practice after a missing a few days; it is like dipping my brain in warm bath.

I think a difficulty that many mediators have is that you just don’t notice progress while you are practicing regularly; at least I don’t anyway. Meditation can sometimes seem like a waste of time and I wonder why I put myself through it; then I stop and life becomes harder to manage. I firmly believe that there are great payoffs from meditation but you just can’t rush them. Striving in meditation really seems to be counterproductive. I think the best idea is to not expect progress in meditation as we don’t need to get anywhere.

I began meditating in my mid-teens and would return to the practice during my sober periods in the years that followed. Near the end of my drinking I would try long meditation retreats in the hope that this would fix me. Instead of helping me though, these intensive meditation courses would make me feel worse. I remember going on a month retreat in the North of Thailand one time, and the last seventy-hours of this month long retreat involved constant meditation. This brought my mind to new levels of clarity, but I drink again two days after leaving the temple. The shift of my mind from being so free to being back in the midst of addiction was a horrible experience; the effects lasted for months afterwards. In a more important way though meditation saved me; it allowed me to experience a free mind.

Meditating my drink problem away didn’t work they way I had intended. The practice is a lifetime pursuit and not really a quick fix – at least not for me anyway. What it did though was give me an appetite for recovery. Throughout my drinking years I would often think back to my life before alcohol when meditation would bring me such peace; I’d yearn to get that back. It was no surprise that when I finally did escape alcohol that meditation would be an important part of my recovery.