Growth in recovery – body, mind and spirit
“Spirituality is a lot like health, we may have good health or poor health, but it’s something we can’t avoid having. The same is true for spirituality: every human being is a spiritual being. The question is not whether we ‘have spirituality’ but whether the spirituality we have is a negative one that leads to […]
A good friend of mine recently posed this question to me in an email: Sometimes you can be around people and continue to feel alone, like nobody understands. So hopefully that doesn’t happen to you. If it does, what does that mean? Mis-perception? I ask this question honestly because trauma can do weirdness to perception. […]
I believe that addicts who hit bottom and reach out for help have one thing in common: the way they are living runs against their most cherished values. Choices and actions run in opposite directions to what matters most to them. How often do we hear in recovery the story of how an addict has […]
Everyone needs something to lean on sometimes. As a recovering addict, I definitely need some sort of power greater than myself to stay sober and to quell the self-destructive rebellion in my mind. Fortunately, that power doesn’t need to be outside myself. The nature of pure awareness Thoughts, ego, personality–and desires and cravings–are all aspects […]
Two words loaded with religious undertones (and overtones!) are magic and miracle. My goal in writing this piece is to demystify the two terms and ground them in the secular context of addiction and mental health. Sounds weird, eh? Well, I have some help from a book I read a little while back, and I’d […]
I was in a recovery workshop group yesterday, and the facilitator was asking participants for their understandings of the word ‘hope’. I struggled with that one. I have a difficult relationship with the word. I’m not even sure what it means. It’s probably one of those words that people toss around assuming it means the […]
The Peace of Wild Things 