How do you define ‘recovery’? What does that mean in the way you have written about it?
Recovery is a drama of many acts. In the sense that I’ve conveyed it through this story, recovery refers to the phase of non-identification with one’s fixation or pathology as a form of self; addiction and anxiety are both sustained by a person’s belief that ‘this is who I am’ or ‘this is what I do.’
In this specific sense, healing and recovery are two different processes, which are nonetheless mutually inclusive. In healing, one experiences the truth of oneself beyond the scope of illness or fixation, which is often momentary and spontaneous. Recovery, which follows on from healing, is an intentional and focused process of changing one’s way of life beyond the fixation: it is the living journey that integrates healing as a way of being in the world, a recalibration of one’s thoughts, words and deeds beyond the limits imposed by the fixation.
Recovery is the fulfillment of the promise of healing; the healing happens, by accident or miracle, allowing a glimpse to the patient of a state of consciousness in which one’s fixation, pathology, or wound is no longer experienced as a form of suffering. When suffering becomes a way of life, it is like the water in which the fish is swimming; it is normal to suffer, it is normal to struggle throughout one’s days, it is normal to be afflicted by pain on a constant basis, and therefore the behaviour that supports suffering is sustained. No recovery is possible until one has experienced, firsthand, the truth of non-suffering which is augured first through the miracle of healing.
Like all miracles, a significant moment of healing may be doubted or overlooked, in which case no pathway opens up towards eventual recovery. Healing requires of the patient, above all, receptivity and a recognition of healing as a truth and fact of existence. The 12-step groups talk about surrender to a higher power; this creates and opening to and availability for healing to happen, for once a person is ready for healing then the moment comes, sooner or later, when the miracle happens to them.
Healing, in that sense, requires no effort; as I described in ‘Awakening,’ the realisation of the truth and power of Love happened spontaneously when I found myself in a moment of suitable receptivity. Recovery, on the other hand, requires constant and diligent effort over many years to alter one’s way of life — and indeed to become a new person entirely — once the fixation has diminished and dropped away from focus.
As recovery is a non-linear process that takes place over a prolonged period of linear time, it often seems as though one is backsliding when — sooner or later — the old feelings of attachment and suffering begin to assail one. For example, one has lived free from anxiety for a number of years, but then certain preconditions and events in one’s life lead that person into a period of days, or even weeks, of sustained anxiety and its comorbid symptoms (mania, self-doubt, etc).
But this only happens because a new layer of understanding is emerging, and the dross of the fixation is still peeling away from the psyche; one learns to experience such episodes from a space of detachment, disassociating those feelings from the truth of oneself. With practice — cultivated through meditation, per the instructions of the Buddha — the old emotions grasp one less and less, emerging only to shine deeper light upon the truth that abides in the timelessness of one’s nature.
Recovery is the renewal of this process, re-affirming the healing on deeper levels of experience, until finally the journey of recovery comes to fruition: suffering is no longer possible. There is no longer any identification with one’s fixation or pathology, and accordingly, no suffering arises in the scope of experience.
I have experienced this state, temporarily. There was a period of about two years in which no triggers whatsoever moved me into a state of anxiety; indeed, the possibility of feeling anxious was effaced from the scope of consciousness. My brain had re-programmed itself, and I moved through life in a state of ease and freedom, feeling creatively inspired and joyful. I felt sad sometimes, when sad things moved me, and angry sometimes, when that felt appropriate, then passed through sadness and anger into a space of compassion and empathy.
That phase ended with the birth of my first child, for the gift of children (as I’ve experienced it) is a pathway that leads firstly to a deeper stage of attachment, and ultimately, through surrender, to a deeper stage of freedom. Stress and anxiety and despair and frustration are par for the course when you are a new parent, and once you have a second child and there are more people in your life to deal with and care for then the remembrance of meditative detachment pre-family becomes a somewhat impossible spectre.
But even in that phase, the invitation is to live through the feelings of suffering as they emerge, and reconcile them through devoted service to others as a pathway to deeper love, understanding and compassion. Recovery is still happening as long as there is suffering of any degree at any level of experience. The renewal of the healing process and reconciliation with the truth of non-suffering is truly the art of authentic living. This, I would suggest, is the true object of recovery.
There seems to be a link between Melbourne and anxiety, could you explain that?
There is a lot bound up in this question — for place and identity and pathology are very intimate counterparts, closely bound up in each other. For who you are (or who you think you are) comes down to where you live and what you do with your time; place is the container for one’s sense of self, and when a certain place that one has existed in since childhood is tied in with a pathology or fixation that originated in childhood, then that place triggers all sorts of behavioural cues that prompt a relapse back into old habits that one might wish to break free from.
I will give an example. My beloved friend struggled with a heroin addiction for nearly a decade in Melbourne - detoxing, relapsing, withdrawing, then returning to his habit with greater intensity. Finally he went to a rehabilitation centre out in the countryside for 9 months, which was one of those programs that kept its patients busy and active all day long doing all sorts of different things. It worked — he trained his brain to ignore the relapse cues, and moved overseas to start a job in a new place, giving him a new start.
He returned to Melbourne after more than two years clean, but avoided old haunts, knowing only too well the risks he courted as a recovering individual. He knew his old self, his addicted self, and was still struggling with it. One long weekend, it became too much: when a person’s routine of recovery is interrupted by a change of pattern over a long weekend, and they don’t have a plan of support in place ordered by a sequence of wholesome and productive activities, it is very easy to relapse in a dramatic way.
My friend overdosed and was taken to the hospital. They induced him into a coma from which he never awakened. For a week, his loved ones congregated in the hospital to gaze at his sleeping body and pray for him, with him. But I was not there, because by then I had already been gone from the city for a very long time.
To sustain my own recovery it was required of me to live in a different place and do different things and become, ultimately, a different person. I lost not only my old life but a lot of old friends in sustaining that choice. In the time it took me to become a different person, Melbourne also became a very different place. We outgrew each other, in the same way that one grows apart from a boyfriend from school days.
So when I speak of a Melbourne, it is a lost place of which I speak, a city that is remembered and written about as a part of myself that is now lost. So why go back there, even in memory? I can’t say why, exactly. For a long time I have avoided reflecting too much on the past, for the present chapter of my life is captivatingly filled with all sorts of different things.
But there is some kernel of truth in the struggle I faced there, and that seemed relevant to share; for me, to tell the story about something is the easiest way to bring about its finality. This, perhaps, is merely a gesture of goodbye to a relationship with place that has long since ended.
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