How Mindfulness Ended My Fight With Addiction
Without this practice, I don’t think I ever would have found peace
This month I’m celebrating three years of sobriety. I’m proud of this fact, and there have been so many positive changes that have happened because of it. But my journey to sobriety started a couple of years before the last day I drank.
Five years ago I attended a 10-day silent meditation retreat. I had little to no experience meditating, and I jumped into 8 hours a day. It was intense, to say the least. But it started me on the road towards discovering who I am at my core. Without the anxiety, without the shoulds, without fear. With meditation and mindfulness, I started stripping back the layers of conditioning that had been placed on me by society, by my family.
I continued to drink for a couple of years after this experience. There was no lighting strike, it was a slow process. But through practicing meditation, and investigating my mind and my urges, things started to become more and more clear.
The simile of the cloth
There is a description I heard from the local Tibetan monks that I’ve studied with. They said that the Buddha described this process of purifying the mind as finding a dirty old rag on the road (this is your mind — they…
