by Chris Grosso
Fuck. That’s so beautiful. I can’t say with complete certainty that if my family had said those things, I would have reacted differently, but the hopeful and optimistic part of me believes I would have. If nothing else, I can see how taking that approach shifts the conversation away from being accusatory and toward an attitude of compassion, acceptance, and unconditional love, and if there’s one thing I know, those are the most potently powerful things in life.
Gabor wasn’t blaming my parents. He recognized that they loved me and did their best. He was just showing me that there is something those who love us can do when we’re in the throes of addictive behavior. “Families also have to decide, can I have this person in my life, or can I not? If I want them in my life, there must be certain rules, like they can’t steal from me and so on, but if I can have them in my life, I must accept them exactly as they are, exactly where they’re at, and 100 percent accept that right now they’re using because they feel they need to. I’m not going to nag them, cajole them, advise them. I’m not going to say a thing that they didn’t ask me about. I’m just going to accept that this is who they are and I’m just going to love them. That’s a rational decision to make. It’s equally rational to say, ‘You know what? It’s too painful for me. I can’t handle it. I can’t stand to see you do this to yourself. It’s too stressful. I can’t be with that, so I’m sorry, I love you very much, but I can’t be with you.’ That’s legitimate, too.
“What is completely nonsensical—and unfortunately the pitfall for most families—is to try to be in the addict’s life and try to change them all the time. That’s the one thing you cannot do. So either accept or lovingly distance yourself, but don’t try to stay in there with the intent of altering the other person. To the addict, that signals only one thing: ‘They don’t love me the way I am.’ That’s my advice to families. I do believe that addiction in a person can be a healthy wake-up call for them and for everyone in their lives.”
PRACTICE
Mahasati Hand Meditation
Mahasati hand meditation is a practice that can be particularly useful during times of excessive stress or emotional upheaval, or when our minds just won’t shut the fuck up no matter how much yogic breathing or how many rounds of mantras we’ve done. And yeah, I speak from experience.
I learned this practice at my most rock bottom of rock bottoms. I was at a rehab facility, three days into a seven-day stay in detox from alcohol. My body was still squeamish, my brain still racing, my hope nonexistent, and my self-loathing at an all-time high. As I lay in bed aware of the physical battle going on between withdrawal and the benzodiazepines I’d been given to help relax me and keep me from having a seizure, my thoughts raced—I’d just lost my job, my car was about to be repossessed, I had a court date and jail time awaiting me, and last but (definitely) not least, I was going to miss my brother’s wedding, the one where I was supposed to be his best man. Yeah, I was in rough shape.
Later that morning I stumbled into our group session, where a young, prayer-bead-wearing, bald-headed man announced we were going to practice meditation. Grunts and grumbles filled the room, and the corner I’d staked out as my own was no exception. I’d been meditating for several years already and knew that I was in no place mentally or emotionally to sit quietly and let my mind cause me even more trouble than it already was.
In all fairness, yes, those are often the times when meditation can be extremely beneficial. I’m all about gently and compassionately leaning into the pain and allowing it to teach us what it can, but I also believe that there are times in life when the pain is too great and it’s counterproductive to lean into it. There’s no such thing as a spiritual superhero; no trophies are awarded to those who can endure the heaviest shit, so please, honor what you can and can’t do in the moment and go from there. Only you can know for sure, so be honest with yourself.
That being said, I find a nice side effect of meditation is that we become much more in harmony with our intuition, so you shouldn’t have much of a problem knowing what’s right for you in the moment. I love the Buddhist example of a musician tuning the strings on her instrument. If the strings are too tight, they’ll break; if they’re too loose, no sound will come out. Our meditation practice should be like those strings: not too tight, not too loose, and right in the middle. What I like about Mahasati hand meditation is that it’s an excellent middle ground between states of excessive mental and emotional pain and fostering attention and compassion. So that’s where this young, bald-headed Buddhist counselor at the detox came into play.
After the objections quieted down, he said he’d be teaching us a fifteen-part hand meditation. Admittedly, my curiosity was piqued—I’d never encountered a hand meditation in my years of practice. The counselor went on to tell us how he’d learned this technique while studying with a monk who had lived in a cave in Laos for many years, and that it was one of the root practices they had worked with. He had my attention.
Knowing that many of us were in bad shape in that detox, he went easy and had us practice for only five minutes, but once those five minutes were up, I knew that this was something I’d carry with me for a long time. The beauty of the experience was that as he led us through the fifteen hand movements (described in detail below), we were forced to pay attention to what we were doing (well, those of us who participated, anyway). While you are doing Mahasati, a core part of the practice beyond just the gestures themselves is focusing on the slow and rhythmic pattern of your hands and arms as they move, which was exactly what I needed to help me get out of my head, if only for five minutes. After I had the order of movements down, a process that takes about a minute, I could bring my full awareness to the practice. I wasn’t thinking about my hands or arms, nor was I thinking about all the other shit that had been bouncing around in my head. I was simply there, aware of my arms and hands, though that’s not even quite accurate. The experience was more of a knowledge of motion; my hands and arms weren’t even mine anymore. Just movement and awareness, awareness and movement, and it was beautiful . . . though brief.
The next day we did Mahasati hand meditation for ten minutes, and I had another powerful experience. But the times between sessions were still terribly rough. I would periodically do the practice on my own in my room, and it helped, but it was hard to keep myself sitting upright for very long. The sedatives I was being given were powerful and left me in a groggy state, one in which I was just awake enough to be cognizant of my incessant thoughts about the total nightmare my life had once again become. Despite everything, I finished my time in detox, then finished my time in rehab, and life got better. Much better. In part, I believe, because of this practice, which I still use frequently and hold dear.
The intentional practice of the hand movements described below helps facilitate that awareness in our daily lives. What follows is the formal version, but the practice can be engaged in any time we’re aware of what we’re doing or simply present in the moment.
Here are a few things to know before starting:
• When practicing, sustain a steady motion or flow with your hands—motion and pause, motion and pause.
• You can close your eyes, but if you keep them open, focus on something that won’t distract you. The floor approximately three feet in front of your gaze works well.
• While moving your hands and arms, be aware of your body in space.
You can sit in any position that feels right for you—on the floor, in a chair, or even standing up or lying down.
• Whichever body position you choose, do your best to allow the movements to be natural, performing one at a time while being aware of each as you’re doing it.
• Be comfortable and relaxed. Try not to go into this practice with expectations for results.
• The joy is in the doing and the being. Try it out and see for yourself.
1. Rest your hands palm down on your thighs.
2. Turn your right hand onto its side, with the awareness of what you’
re doing. Make the movement mindfully and slowly, then stop. Do not think about turning your hand but rather be aware of the movement as it happens.
3. Mindfully raise your right hand up. Stop.
4. Lower your right hand down to your abdomen, allowing it to rest. Stop.
5. Turn your left hand onto its side Stop.
6. Raise your left hand up. Stop.
7. Lower your left hand down on top of your right hand, which is resting on your abdomen. Stop.
8. Move your right hand up to your chest. Stop.
9. Move your right hand out. Stop.
10. Lower your right hand onto its side on your thigh. Stop.
11. Turn your right palm down. Stop.
12. Move your left hand up to your chest. Stop.
13. Move your left hand out. Stop.
14. Lower your left hand onto its side on your thigh. Stop.
15. Turn your left palm down. Stop.
3
GOD IS NOT YOUR BITCH
CONVERSATION WITH LISSA RANKIN, MD
My explorations led me from potentially mind-bending psychedelic journeys to another pioneering practitioner of medicine, my longtime friend and mentor Lissa Rankin, a doctor I’ve found to be inspirational through her real and raw approach to transformational work. We discussed how stress becomes normalized. Before I got to my questions about the mind and its addiction to certainty, and how understanding this can help us to begin removing our self-defeating behaviors, I wanted to talk about stress and fear. In her book The Fear Cure, Lissa wrote, “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 80 percent of visits to the doctor are believed to be stress-related.”1 Stress in its many forms—fear, anxiety, and worry—is often the excuse we give for addictive behaviors.
Lissa had some great things to say about this. She maintains that we’ve normalized stress to the point where it has become almost a badge of honor in our culture, as well as a defense. To say we’re stressed is to put on a suit of armor that makes us feel more socially acceptable, because now we’re important, contributing, productive. Lissa shared an example from her life. “I’m probably the only person you’ll meet who winds up in therapy with friends and lovers within three months of meeting them. I was in therapy with one of my friends, and we were the perfect trigger for each other’s core wounds. Me being me would trigger his mommy issue, because Mommy put him in an orphanage when he was nine, and him being him would trigger my daddy abandonment wounds from when my dad died ten years ago. What our therapist said was, instead of going into a triggered state of anger, blame, criticism, judgment, whatever, we could recognize the moment when the energy of that trigger is coming up in us and have the presence to say ‘I’m scared.’ Then it can de-escalate. We started doing that and discovered we could feel threatened instead of responding to the threat. Instead of going on the defensive, we could go into the vulnerability of ‘I’m scared . . . scared you’re going to leave.’ If everybody could say ‘I’m scared,’ then we could have compassion instead of lashing out in petty and even horrific ways. She helped me see that underneath all our posturing, there’s a tremendous softness in our wounded child. We can begin to heal if we access that place.”
Man, did that ever ring true for me: I get scared and act out in my own unskillful ways. Before my last relapse, I had a moment when I was deciding whether to drink. Something had shifted within me. It was as if an old version of Chris appeared and I lost the conviction to care for myself. That’s when I went to the liquor store, bought a bottle of vodka, and drank it all down, fully cognizant of the ramifications it would have on my life, my loved ones, my everything, yet still saying “Fuck it!” because I couldn’t have given less of a shit in that moment. (It’s what twelve-steppers call “playing the tape through,” but I’d pressed the mute button.) It was as if a force had come over me, and that force was propelled by fear. No matter how much I knew a part of me didn’t want to drink, it felt like that force greater than myself had taken charge. Why do we respond to fear in that way? Our bodies are naturally equipped with what’s known as either the acute stress response or the fight-or-flight response. The phrase “fight or flight” has been around for a while; it’s used to describe how our brains prepare our bodies for action in reaction to a stressful or potentially dangerous situation. Walter B. Cannon, a physiologist, brought this term into the vernacular in his book The Wisdom of the Body, which was published in 1932.2
This made me think about a connection between flight and using. Was there a connection between self-destructive actions and this physiology of fear? In other words, getting drunk, bingeing on episodes of The Walking Dead, or burying our emotions in salted caramel ice cream are also a kind of flight, a running away from whatever it is in front of us (or within us) in the moment that we don’t want to face or deal with it. And so for many of us, we engage in the behaviors that make us temporarily high, from sugar to sex to heroin, to take us out of the unpleasantness of the moment and give flight to our feelings . . . until they crash to earth in a burning mass of regret and dysfunction.
When I once spoke with an old professor of mine who specializes in addiction, she mentioned how there can be a strange wisdom for an addict when he or she picks up drugs or alcohol, because there is a safety equated with those substances—a way to take flight, if you will. She wasn’t saying relapsing or using drugs or alcohol is the right thing to do, but that there is a strange wisdom. There are many paths to healing.
Lissa seemed to agree with this, and illustrated her understanding with another story from her therapy experience. “I was in a session with my friend, and he was coming at me aggressively. I knew he loved me. I knew I was safe. But my physiology went into full-on fight or flight. I could feel it. I could feel everything in my body wanting to flee, because I’m not a fighter, I’m a fleer. My nervous system felt threatened, like there was a tiger coming at me. In retrospect, if I examine the thought, it goes back to the wound of my dad dying, feeling like my safety got shattered and how I would be at risk. If this friend left, I’d be unsafe. It’s in my physiology. It’s in my body. When I rationalize and pull out all the mental tricks, like questioning my thoughts, it doesn’t do a thing for my body, because my body is in full-on fight or flight. What happens is that when fear is triggered, it activates the amygdala in the limbic brain, flipping on the sympathetic nervous system and activating the stress response. The limbic brain overpowers the rational mind every time, so we can argue with our limbic brain, but our body is still in that state. The limbic brain is not rational. It’s the primal lizard brain, and it can’t tell the difference between a thought like ‘He’s going to leave’ and one like ‘A tiger is about to eat me.’ ”
She likened it to a light switch—either on or off. When we flip the switch to fear, the body has a physiological response, which is “the stress response, or fight or flight, or the sympathetic nervous system. A whole cascade of stress hormones gets triggered that puts you into that recognizable adrenaline rush that threatens your relaxation response, which is the parasympathetic nervous system, the kind of homeostatic, peaceful state of the nervous system.
“In The Fear Cure, I talk about true fear versus false fear. We want true fear. The spiritual teachers might argue that we don’t even need true fear, but true fear is there to protect the survival of the organism, so true fear is what you feel when the tiger is coming after you, or you’re standing on the edge of the cliff looking over it and thinking, ‘I’m afraid to jump.’ True fear is there to keep the physical body safe. Some children have disorders where they’re born with no fear; they don’t last very long. They’ll walk out into the street right in front of a car because they’re not afraid of anything. Survival mechanisms are there for a reason, but our nervous system and our brain, our limbic brain, have not caught up with the evolution of how we live our lives and how our minds work. The problem is that we’re in stress response about 70 percent of the time in modern culture. I was up at sixteen thousand feet i
n the Andes with the Q’ero tribe in Peru and discovered that this is not the case for them. Society is so different there, but in our culture, we’re in stress response more than fifty times per day. You can call it fear, anxiety, worry—whatever it is, it’s triggering that same thing in the nervous system, and it can’t tell the difference between an anxious thought and a tiger attack.
“False fear is what I call an imagined fear. You’re imagining you’re going to run out of money or your wife is going to leave you or your friend is going to abandon you. Those things may happen, but they’re not definitely going to happen, so until there’s a threat to the survival of the organism, it’s not technically a true fear.”
The key is to distinguish between false fear and intuition. How do we go about doing that?
A lot of it is working through our misconceptions. Lissa explained that “we think we need false fear to protect us. We think that we need to be afraid of running out of money to make sure that we don’t run out of money. We think we need fear to keep us from drinking, to keep us from overspending, to keep us from cheating, to keep us from doing things that will get us in trouble. That’s how our culture operates. Look at the media. Many of the messages are fear based, and our society uses fear to control us. It’s damaging our health, our longevity, our quality of life. When I talk to people about fear, I always have to overcome the resistance that people have, the idea that ‘I need my fear, because if I’m not afraid of losing money, then I’m going to go broke.’ ”
That’s when Lissa brings in the idea of intuition. “What about the part of us that isn’t afraid at all, but is here to guide us? It’s here to protect us, here to give us insights and epiphanies and to help us make aligned decisions without fear. We don’t have to trigger the nervous system into stress response to have a dropped-in download that says, ‘Here’s a good financial plan for this year.’ It doesn’t have to come from fear. Intuition feels different in the body. It’s very calm. It comes in as a very neutral thing. I’ve come to recognize that it has a flavor. It tastes like basil. Like, once you know what basil tastes like, it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s basil.’ And it’s different from paranoia or the fear thoughts.”