"Peace

"Peace is just another name for the integrity of being which enables
man to respond to life without inner conflict."

A mind which is in pieces cannot be a mind at peace."

"Peace is just another name for the integrity of being which enables
man to respond to life without inner conflict. A mind which is in
pieces cannot be a mind at peace." -- B. Phillips

I read about someone that has been going though tough times with
relocating some horses she owns and can't look after them properly.
She has posted about it a few times and I can see how these horses are
robbing her of any hopes of peace in her life. Sometimes we get
involved in something and it becomes apparent that we have gotten in
over our heads. Some of these things cannot be undone easily or
quickly. In such cases all we can do is to do our footwork within our
personal and program limits to repair the damage and learn from our
mistakes to avoid them in the future. This experiential education is
the best way to learn that all our actions have consequences and that
many of these actions are producing consequences that rob us of inner
peace.

Once we get on track with this type of peace awareness we can ask the
question of what we can comfortably have in our lives and what we
cannot comfortably have. When I mentioned this "comfort" factor one
time, a fellow on a Debtors Anonymous list piped up to argue, "Hell,
it is comfortable for me to not pay the bills and lounge around all
day." Another fellow on an AA list laughed at me and said, "If I want
to make myself comfortable I'll just pick up a bottle." This is not
what I mean. To perpetuate more sickness by making yourself
"artificially" comfortable through drugs, alcohol, debt or fat will
ultimately make you more uncomfortable down the road. To define this
comfort quotient in clearer terms, define it as what you can
abstinently, soberly, solvently and peacefully have in your life on a
sustainable basis. The concept of "comfortable sustainability" is very
important for the addict to realize.

This is how we build real self worth by making amends, repairing the
damage and continuing to live our new life "right size" as the 12 and
12 mentions on pages 122-125 . Once we do this, we will have the
possibility to find inner peace in our lives. For me it took more than
a decade to change my life so peace could be found again. From the
position of an impartial observer I can see many peace busters in the
lives in the various stories I read online. Being mindful of who and
what destroys our peace can be a very good practice for the addict to
develop. When I first read of her plight with these horses, it
reminded me of a couple of stories told by Thich Nhat Hanh in a
lecture on peace.

The first story is about the Buddha and his monks who were sitting by
a road when a distraught farmer wanders by and asks them if they have
seen any cows. The farmer goes on to say how miserable he is and tells
the men his sesame crop has failed and now all of his 10 cows have
wandered off and without them he knows he will die. The Buddha tells
the farmer that they have not seen his cows and to look in another
direction. When the farmer leaves, the Buddha tells his monks, "See
how lucky you are that you have no cows? Otherwise you would be
suffering and in much pain and misery as that farmer." The second
story is one of comparison. Thich Nhat Hanh mentions that the Buddha
is many times pictured as sitting on a lotus blossom as a sign of
peace and serenity. Whereas most people are sitting on burning coals
from the lives they have created for themselves and wonder why they
can't find peace?

These lessons from the Buddha reinforces in me to be happy "as-is" and
to not put too many demands on my happiness and contentment. When we
put too many demands on our happiness, we are sure to fail sooner or
later. When we realize that happiness is our God-given right and we
have the potential to be happy as-is, with no outside demands, we are
surer to find it. Or, as Thoreau said: "I am grateful for what I am
and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contended
one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence." When we
have an engine that is too complex and has 1000 working parts and 1
part goes bad...the whole engine shuts down and 1 thing kills the
other 999. So it goes with too many demands we place on ourselves for
happiness and contentment...1 thing kills the other 999. Voluntary
simplicity or simple living helped me build a less complex engine with
fewer parts to break down. Instead of 1000 parts, I now have only a
handful of parts.

Finding peace is very important if we ever want to let go of our
addictions. Without coming to a place of peace with addictions, we are
always in the white knuckle category and hanging on by a thread. Once
we have this clarity of thinking we can start to evaluate
circumstances the best we can as to their peace destroying qualities
and we can then start to choose how we "spend" our peace. The biggest
effect on my addictive impulses throughout the day, as to whether they
take shape or not, is the condition of my internal peace. If my peace
and serenity becomes lost, then these impulses start to take on more
important forms. This is how I balance working 8 - 12 step programs -
I put peace first.

Now, only a blissninny would claim to being peaceful 100% of the time,
although who knows, maybe there is such a creature in the world?
Personally, I am at peace about 80% to 90% of the time in my life *if*
I work a good program. And, if I do not work my program, my peace
declines to almost nil and my old friends the addictions start calling
my name. As a peace dividend from working a good recovery program
many things that used to in the "peace buster" category now have
little effect on me. The following quote is a good reminder that as
human beings we all come under natural law and we all have limits that
are personal and fit each of us uniquely. (Quote used with
permission)

"I have a brother who: is married, has 4 children, has a full-time
medical practice, and has been going half-time to law school, all at
the SAME TIME. Now, there is a guy who is high cap. I am not he, I
never will be, I may as well get used to it right now. What he can
do, has nothing to do with what I can do.

I'm a sensitive person, an artist, introverted. I cannot go from one
activity or noisy session with people, to the next, and the next,
with no downtime. I become frazzled, unhappy, and fragmented. This
is a fact.

It is at those times when, frazzled, worn down from trying to be
high cap, I spend $ or eat in order to give myself more energy to
carry
on, or to try to keep up with the high cap people, or to just soothe
my pain."

Contemplative time or meditation time or down time or relaxation time
is very important to fostering peace in our lives as this person is
starting to realize. A lot of the addicts I read about live lives of
constant doing and running with no time for such useless things as
sitting around to relax or meditate. Workaholics usually put little
time in self actualization. They may think that workaholism provides
all the financial benefits they need to live a happy and fulfilled
life, but while putting all effort in this one area they are bankrupt
with the area of their inner peace and contemplative needs.

When we are not self aware of our real needs it is the same as not
having controls in our car that tell us the internal condition of what
is going on. We cannot tell how fast we are going without a
speedometer, nor can we tell if our car is overheating until it its
too late without a temperature gauge and without a gas gauge we will
be left stranded with an empty tank. All these instruments give us
feedback as to the internal condition of things and so does this time
spent with ourselves when we look within. Without writing a book on
the benefits of relaxation or meditation let me tell you of two
immediate positive effects such a practice will have for you when you
invest some time in yourself.

First, relaxation or meditation will give your body some time to
dissipate all the stress chemicals you have been producing in over
abundance. Adrenal steroids (cortisol) secreted when a person is under
stress reach the brain and over time can affect the very structure of
the brain. When stress hormones, intended for a fight or flight
situation remain switched on for an extended period, they can slow the
growth of nerve fibers in the areas of the brain responsible for
emotions and other brain functions such as memory. Unfortunately,
with the way most of us live we fight survival daily and produce too
much of these chemicals. We also produce cortisol from any other
stressors the body perceives, whether it is physical stress, such as a
sickness, injury, surgery, or temperature extremes as well as
psychological stress that we and the world put on us. Each of us has
produces a different amount of these chemicals and has a different
sensitivity to them and this might be the missing link as to a part of
the question as to why some of us are high capacity and other lower
capacity with how we each produce and react to these stress chemicals
differently.

Second, you will have some quiet time to not only quiet your brain but
to take a personal accounting of the direction your are going in and
what needs to be changed in order for you to get a new life. You will
finally be getting some feedback from your internal instruments that
have been out of commission for so long do to your excessive busyness.
Addictions are great distracters from living life and waste much of
our time. When I freed up the time I used to waste dealing with the
addiction issues and drama I could now put that newfound time to use
in many more productive and healthier areas in my life. As you will
see in the latter part of this post, contemplative time or meditation
played a large part in the success of my own recovery program.

I once read about an addict that disliked spending any contemplative
or introspective time on herself to become self aware. She claimed it
just promoted being more "self obsessed" and she wanted to spend less
time thinking about herself and not more. Well, all this has to
balanced up, but without giving the question of "who I am and what are
my real recovery needs" some thought, I would not have the recovery I
do today. And this self inventory is needed every day on a continual
basis, as each day has 1440 minutes in it and it only take one of
these minutes, or even less sometimes, to suffer a slip. I seek the
middle path and have to accept I need some introspection time as well
as some non-introspection time in my life. Just work toward balance
and work in the direction of not over doing your self awareness and
insight or under doing it as well.

Don't ever expect perfection either with this balance of self
awareness and self obsession. If you see things getting out of hand,
reign things in some. I don't run perfect programs by any means, but I
run successful ones as long as I work towards perfection but am not
upset if I never get there. If you want to be a "perfectly recovered"
addict then shoot for perfection in an area where it is possible such
as perfect abstention from alcohol, drugs, gambling, etc. If you an
overeater, compulsive spender, sex addict or clutterer shoot for 80%
to 90% perfect as 100% perfection in these later mentioned areas is
nearly impossible over the long term. This is how I work my programs
in these areas and found much peace through this acceptance of
realistic perfection rates and living within the 80% to 90% recovery
goal which allows me to reach good recovery as well as find peace with
the addiction.

Why do I counsel you to not be perfect with such things like
overeating or spending and possibly sex? Just ask an NA to use drugs
once in while on a controlled basis or ask an AA to take one drink a
day and then stop! You know how far they would get. The addicts that
have to participate in their addictions, such as eating, sex and
spending have to realize their addictions are also part of living and
they will have a hard time finding peace when they make the tiniest of
mistakes with their program. They cannot perfectly abstain as their AA
and NA and GA brethren can, so they need different tools for their
peace mission. These addictions we participate in daily require
"judgments" to be made and whenever judgments have to be made mistakes
are also a possibility. Cushions or "recovery space" is important in
certain of my programs to allow for some mistakes in judgments. This
does not mean I use these cushions as a license to practice my
addiction guilt free. When setting such cushions we have to realize
that if we are too strict we will have no peace and if we are too
loose we will have no recovery or peace as well.

I also use trend analysis for some of my addictions for instance: is
the Fat, Clutter, Debt or Sex Compulsion growing, declining or has it
been frozen? One nice thing about freezing an addiction is it can only
get better from here. This gave me much comfort with my clutter
recovery work. I knew if I did not add to the clutter it could only
stay the same or go down and it took 8 years to get it down by 98%.
This concept is what gave me hope and comfort to keep working all
those years on it. This philosophy of looking at certain addictive
trends is much more helpful to me than having too strict a set of
rules to follow by the letter such as: did I eat an extra apple and
now have to beat myself up over that 70 calorie apple and now I am no
good because I ate that apple. If I eat an extra unneeded apple
between meals I will take it off the next meal or tomorrow's meal or
the day after if I feel like it. In the big picture an extras 70
calorie apple only translates to 1/3 of an ounce of unneeded fat, so I
am not going to ruin my programs peace over that.

Now, if I am eating an extra 2000 calories a day, this will put on
about 4-1/3 pounds of fat per week on my body, so this is a different
case and requires much attention as to why I have to pacify myself
with all this unneeded overeating? The answer to this question usually
lies in how I am living my life and it usually is because I am not
accepting and living within all my comfortable means. For all those
that do not know, when you eat 3200 unneeded and unburned calories it
produces 1 pound of fat on your body. Four sticks of butter equals a
pound of fat or 3200 calories. SCA uses gray, black and while to
distinguish these areas and I find this system very helpful to finding
peace with my recovery programs. The gray areas are allowed, but not
desirable actions and are signposts to back off some. The gray areas
are where the "cushions" are located in for me. Now, some addictive
behaviors don't come under this trend theory, they just blow my
program altogether, so I have to know when to apply trends and when to
throw in the hat and start over.

Let us not forget that even normal people overeat once in a while,
normal people have sex too much once in a while and normal people
spend too much money once in a while. So, normal people make mistakes
in judgment as well. While we are not normal, we must realize that we
should not beat ourselves up for putting ourselves on a higher
standard that normal people are on when we seek perfection with
playing with our addictive area each day. The big difference between
normal people and addicts is that normal people can stop when they see
they have gone too far with their actions and their actions produce
unhealthy consequences. Whereas addicts will continue with the
unhealthy actions no matter what.

With sex needs, these can vary from person to person as to what is
needed for happiness and peace, so we cannot say sex is a necessity of
living for all people. But, whether the feelings are of sexual desire
or for hunger of food, these are all natural desires and I see much
guilt in the programs when addicts have these natural feelings. Since
addicts have abused these areas for so long they become super
sensitized to anything dealing with them and it can be hard to be
objective. How many times do overeaters feel guilty for eating even a
carrot stick? Anything that goes into their mouth now becomes
evil...we still have to eat to live, but it must be done in a balanced
way.

Here are few examples of how we can go to extremes to destroy our own
peace when we work an unbalanced recovery program that puts peace
last. I recall one fellow in SA beating himself up for looking at a
woman while eating lunch at a mall. He said he faces a wall now while
eating lunch for fear of seeing a woman. He had terrible guilt and you
could hear the pain in his voice as he asked himself "What is wrong
with me - I am a man - Why can't I look at a woman? " This fellow was
not a child rapist or sex killer, he was married and had a decent
life, but got hooked on a little too much internet porn and his wife
complained. But, from a place of zero peace with internet porn he goes
to the other extreme of zero peace because he can never look at
another woman again.

Another fellow said he trashed his computer, TV and VCR and forget the
pool or beach, he is afraid to go out of his house for fear of seeing
a woman. A third fellow mentions how he literally pounded his head
with his fists to punish himself for catching a glimpse of a woman
getting out of a car, yelling at himself "What the hell are you
looking for?" Well, looking at women produces pleasure chemicals in
the brain of man, so it was a simple question to answer - he was
looking for pleasure that is what he was looking for...all natural
desires. Nothing different from getting excited over a glimpse of cake
or ice cream or excited over the next compulsive purchase. We all are
visual people and through the senses addicts participate in their
sensation addiction one way or another. Running a program where you
feel ashamed or guilty for having natural feelings is not a program
that you will ever find any peace in.

On the other hand, "if you abuse it ~ you lose it," so if we have to
play with our addictive area each day, we have to develop a program
that allows us to participate in these areas in a balanced and
recovered way or we lose the privilege to participate in it as most
AA, NA and GA addicts must do with 100% abstention. Some of us can
find a semblance of balance with certain addictions that must be
participated in on a daily basis, otherwise the ones that can't find
an acceptable balance point have to eat lunch facing a wall all their
life and are fearful of leaving home. Always remember, there are
triggers all around us but we ultimately have to pull the trigger
ourselves. This trigger pulling is usually dependent not on the
thought but on the emotions behind the thought. Changing programs
helped my peace development with sex. I dropped out of SA a few years
ago and joined SCA where they view sex as a God - Nature - Higher
Power given gift and not a shameful desire. I still enjoy looking at
women periodically, but I had to scale back from my previous "looking"
life quit a bit otherwise I would be producing too much brain
chemicals for recovery - if nothing changes, then nothing changes.

Now when I enjoy a woman's beauty I also send a metta blessing her way
to help remind me they are not just objects but people - "may any pain
or suffering you bear be lessened." The use of this blessing gives
back something to them in exchange for them providing me with their
visual beauty. If I start looking a little too much then a "vacation"
from looking so much needs to be taken. This is what I mean when I
talk about balancing recovery program and only shooting for 80% to 90%
perfect. To make things clear with the 80% to 90% rule. I am not
referring to cheating on my wife only 20% of the time and calling that
good recovery. I am referring to the small things that addicts beat
themselves up over and seem to destroy their hopes of finding peace
with. In SCA they term these areas as "gray" areas that are signposts
or danger boundaries to be aware of. The other choice is to hammer my
head and face the wall. So, if there are a choice of recovery programs
for your addiction try them all out to see what fits you best.

With some of my addiction abstention standards I hold myself to a
similar level of perfection that a normal person might obtain and with
some other addictions I use a lower standard for my program. It just
varies from program to program and what fits me best. My main concern
in setting such standards is to find a place that gives me the
recovery and peace results I want. If the recovery I strive for is too
harsh and unrealistic and is not sustainable for me then I will find
no peace while living with these addictions that must be participated
in on a daily basis. The only way I could be at peace with taking
drugs, getting drunk and speculative gambling was with not
participating in those areas any longer and have found peace with
accepting that is how it must be.

But most of the other addictions requiring judgments and daily
participation are a constant battle of balancing the addiction and
balancing my peace. Yes, peace is foremost in what I expect from my
recovery efforts. Peace is a wonderful signpost if you learn how to
use it. When your peace is disturbed so goes your programs. Anyway,
this is how I work my recovery programs with certain addictions that
require judgments, so if you can benefit from this method fine, and if
not, then I hope you find a method that works for you.

In my old life, peace used to be very elusive, really it was
nonexistent but once I started changing the direction of my life I
could get a taste of how this restructuring was changing my ability to
find inner peace. It is a funny thing with most of us. We find no
peace or happiness and think our problem is not having enough
complexities and sickness so we lump on some more problems on our
backs and when that doesn't fix things we dig our hole even deeper. It
never occurs to us to change directions and start removing
complexities and headaches from our lives? But, once we get a taste
for something that really works we can have faith in our recovery
efforts and then we can work calmly with the thought that someday our
efforts will pay off as we will be enjoying a new life. It all starts
by taking one step in the other direction that we have been going all
our lives.

Here is a short recount how I changed direction in my life. My own
peace started getting destroyed each morning around 3AM - 4 AM and I
could use this insomnia meditation time laying in bed to recount how I
had destroyed my life and made such a mess for my family. In my own
clutter recovery work I had long since learned that "everything you
own takes a little peace ~ peace of you." A lot of my problems came
about through "attachment" and the excesses of "clinging" as the
Buddhists call it. There are many flavors or sects of Buddhism around
the world, but almost all share the "3 pillars" as a foundation. These
pillars are:

1) mindfulness or meditation for personal insight

2) the liberating wisdom non-attachment or non-clinging and accepting
impermanence

3) The development of compassion for others.

As you can see, these pillars have nothing to do with believing or not
believing in God, so they are open for all to use irrespective of
religious affiliation as well as the atheist and agnostic. I didn't
have to wait for Buddhism to tell me that excessive attachment causes
pain. But once I started to study Buddhism a few years ago, it
supplemented what I had learned with my hands on experience through
the painful education of recovering from my addictions. With dealing
with such problems and looking for a way out, it is good to backtrack
and start repairing the damage and deal with the wreckage of the past
at the source in this backwards mode. Once we start to clear up the
wreckage of the past, the future will clear up as well. I did as
Theseus did with the cord he laid down to help find his way back out
of the Minotaur's Labyrinth. He backtracked via the cord as a guide to
get out of the problems he had created for himself. In this case, I
backtracked to develop a credo that would have gave me a different
life *if* I had lived by those words from the start.

I was blessed with working a mindless job so I could use much time for
"working meditation" and could meditate on my life and how to change
things or accept them. This working meditation paid off big and within
6 years I was able to develop a credo that I live by even to this very
day: "Each day I work to live within my means, comfortably fit within
my space and gratefully accept my current position in life." By year 9
of working meditation, supplemented with my early morning insomnia
meditations, I was able to develop a very high grade program of
grateful acceptance. With this ability to practice gratitude and
acceptance I was finally able to be at peace most of the time. By this
time a lot of the wreckage of the past had been cleaned up and I could
start getting some sleep...sometimes till 8.30 am.

People also get attached to stressful situations from not knowing any
other way. This stress is the number one killer for addicts. They say
resentment is a big one for the addict, but resentment just causes us
stress - so go to the source and work on lessening your stress if you
want peace. For me, stress comes about whenever I live beyond my
means. To most people this "means" refers to money, but when I refer
to means, I am speaking about all of them; whether they be financial
means, spiritual means, capability means, energy means, mental or
stress means, caloric means, health means, comfortable space means,
time means and most important my recovery program means. You see there
is much more to living a serene, happy and balanced life than mere
money.

When we invest excessive time and energies in acquiring or building
attachments these attachments become veritable extensions of our being
and come to define us for ourselves as well as define who we are for
others. When these attachments take on this role we become susceptible
to pain via these extensions. If the person, place or thing we are
attached to gets rebuked it is a personal rebuke on us, if they get
damaged or defaced so goes the defacement and damage to our very
being. Now, I am not going to tell you I am a total renunciate and am
attached to nothing and removed all stress and problems from my life.
But, I did have to give up lots of things associated with the old sick
life in order to get a new one. Doesn't it make sense that we cannot
recover from a sickness if we continue to take more of the poison that
is making us sick?

What we have to be mindful of with such renunciations is to always
seek balance in our decisions. The life of a renunciate or monk or nun
is not the best choice for all of us either. Imagine a life where the
entire world was composed of monks and nuns that begged off each other
for foods, did not work and only meditated and never had sex and
reproduced? This goes against the "flourishing" aspect of natural law
theory, so for all of us to live such a life is not good for our
species. But, for a small percentage of society to practice this way
of life does not hurt the species but may in fact help it. Buddha
said to always seek the middle road and this is what I try to do with
my recovery work - I seek balance.

The Buddhists caution us to not get attached to ideas themselves so
they say to guard against clinging or attaching to the doctrine of
attachment itself or any of the other Buddhist teachings as well. I
will say that if you can get attached to a successful recovery program
by investing your time and energies and this program is ultimately
expressed as an extension of your self and it becomes to define
yourself, then you will be mindful of anything that starts to chip
away at this extension and feel it as an injustice to your very being
when it happens.

The hard-core Buddhists would not approve of such an "attachment"
idea, but few Buddhists are perfect anyway and addicts definitely
cannot afford to be perfect, so I mention it as a recovery option.
This is how I do it, my investment in building recovery and in
building a strong and healthy body defines who I am to myself and I am
keenly aware of anything that affects it. This idea is not an end all,
it is only one part of the whole. This idea of investment and
definition must be coupled with working the 12 steps as well as
repairing the wreckage of the past and living within our comfortable
means, and is just another part of my program that I build upon.

But, underlying any attachment I may have is the realization of this
doctrine of impermanence. I also moderate my attachments and stressors
through practicing a program of voluntary simplicity. I practice
grateful acceptance as the serenity prayer tells us. and, I make good
use of step 11 - praying only for God - Nature - Higher Power will and
the power to carry it out. Step 11 does not mention my will, but
require me to release all to God - Nature - Higher Power ...if I want
peace. You see, peace is almost always our own choice. We can choose
to cultivate peace by living our life in a direction to promote peace
or choose the opposite direction for living our life which destroys
our peace. When I choose to go beyond my means I start to feel stress
and my addictions start to call. If this "trend" continues too long
then the slip will come - when I put my wants over my programs wants.
I shouldn't complain if this happens. It would be ridiculous to think
I can have my old sick life as well as keep recovery intact?

Yet, addicts do it all the time. They think they can live life with
impunity just by applying the 12 steps to a crazy and spiritually sick
life. If that was the case, the 12 and 12 would not mention living
"right size." I accept it as a tradeoff that is needed for a new life.
I can have the new life, but have to give up the old life to get it
and once I accepted I could not have it both ways, it became possible
for me to find some peace in my life. You see, 12 steps or not, we all
have to answer to natural law. Within the boundaries of natural law is
where stress chemicals come from within us and as addicts I believe we
are super sensitized to these chemicals and we seek relief though our
various addictions. If I ignore natural law and force my will over my
comfortable abilities, then I would not have much success with my
recovery efforts.

I don't know if the lady with the horses will find a new owner of not,
but hopefully she can let them go in peace if she has to and realize
that this desire to own horses does not seem compatible with fostering
peace within her - at least for now. Ultimately, the person, place or
thing itself will always be the final judge as to what we can
comfortably have or not have in our life and our recovery program ...
as long as we are open to listening to the truth. Always remember,
what we think or anyone else thinks about an issue means very little -
but what our program thinks about it means everything to us. Our
recovery program always has the final say when it comes to our peace.
We can always have hope for the future, but for success, we must
accept how things are in the here and now. As the famous late Buddhist
lecturer Alan Watts said, "It is not what you think, it is not what
you hope ... but what IS."




Take care,


V (Male)

Agnostic Freethinker
Practical Philosopher

A mind which is in pieces

"Peace is just another name for the integrity of being which enables
man to respond to life without inner conflict. A mind which is in
pieces cannot be a mind at peace." -- B. Phillips

I read about someone that has been going though tough times with
relocating some horses she owns and can't look after them properly.
She has posted about it a few times and I can see how these horses are
robbing her of any hopes of peace in her life. Sometimes we get
involved in something and it becomes apparent that we have gotten in
over our heads. Some of these things cannot be undone easily or
quickly. In such cases all we can do is to do our footwork within our
personal and program limits to repair the damage and learn from our
mistakes to avoid them in the future. This experiential education is
the best way to learn that all our actions have consequences and that
many of these actions are producing consequences that rob us of inner
peace.

Once we get on track with this type of peace awareness we can ask the
question of what we can comfortably have in our lives and what we
cannot comfortably have. When I mentioned this "comfort" factor one
time, a fellow on a Debtors Anonymous list piped up to argue, "Hell,
it is comfortable for me to not pay the bills and lounge around all
day." Another fellow on an AA list laughed at me and said, "If I want
to make myself comfortable I'll just pick up a bottle." This is not
what I mean. To perpetuate more sickness by making yourself
"artificially" comfortable through drugs, alcohol, debt or fat will
ultimately make you more uncomfortable down the road. To define this
comfort quotient in clearer terms, define it as what you can
abstinently, soberly, solvently and peacefully have in your life on a
sustainable basis. The concept of "comfortable sustainability" is very
important for the addict to realize.

This is how we build real self worth by making amends, repairing the
damage and continuing to live our new life "right size" as the 12 and
12 mentions on pages 122-125 . Once we do this, we will have the
possibility to find inner peace in our lives. For me it took more than
a decade to change my life so peace could be found again. From the
position of an impartial observer I can see many peace busters in the
lives in the various stories I read online. Being mindful of who and
what destroys our peace can be a very good practice for the addict to
develop. When I first read of her plight with these horses, it
reminded me of a couple of stories told by Thich Nhat Hanh in a
lecture on peace.

The first story is about the Buddha and his monks who were sitting by
a road when a distraught farmer wanders by and asks them if they have
seen any cows. The farmer goes on to say how miserable he is and tells
the men his sesame crop has failed and now all of his 10 cows have
wandered off and without them he knows he will die. The Buddha tells
the farmer that they have not seen his cows and to look in another
direction. When the farmer leaves, the Buddha tells his monks, "See
how lucky you are that you have no cows? Otherwise you would be
suffering and in much pain and misery as that farmer." The second
story is one of comparison. Thich Nhat Hanh mentions that the Buddha
is many times pictured as sitting on a lotus blossom as a sign of
peace and serenity. Whereas most people are sitting on burning coals
from the lives they have created for themselves and wonder why they
can't find peace?

These lessons from the Buddha reinforces in me to be happy "as-is" and
to not put too many demands on my happiness and contentment. When we
put too many demands on our happiness, we are sure to fail sooner or
later. When we realize that happiness is our God-given right and we
have the potential to be happy as-is, with no outside demands, we are
surer to find it. Or, as Thoreau said: "I am grateful for what I am
and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contended
one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence." When we
have an engine that is too complex and has 1000 working parts and 1
part goes bad...the whole engine shuts down and 1 thing kills the
other 999. So it goes with too many demands we place on ourselves for
happiness and contentment...1 thing kills the other 999. Voluntary
simplicity or simple living helped me build a less complex engine with
fewer parts to break down. Instead of 1000 parts, I now have only a
handful of parts.

Finding peace is very important if we ever want to let go of our
addictions. Without coming to a place of peace with addictions, we are
always in the white knuckle category and hanging on by a thread. Once
we have this clarity of thinking we can start to evaluate
circumstances the best we can as to their peace destroying qualities
and we can then start to choose how we "spend" our peace. The biggest
effect on my addictive impulses throughout the day, as to whether they
take shape or not, is the condition of my internal peace. If my peace
and serenity becomes lost, then these impulses start to take on more
important forms. This is how I balance working 8 - 12 step programs -
I put peace first.

Now, only a blissninny would claim to being peaceful 100% of the time,
although who knows, maybe there is such a creature in the world?
Personally, I am at peace about 80% to 90% of the time in my life *if*
I work a good program. And, if I do not work my program, my peace
declines to almost nil and my old friends the addictions start calling
my name. As a peace dividend from working a good recovery program
many things that used to in the "peace buster" category now have
little effect on me. The following quote is a good reminder that as
human beings we all come under natural law and we all have limits that
are personal and fit each of us uniquely. (Quote used with
permission)

"I have a brother who: is married, has 4 children, has a full-time
medical practice, and has been going half-time to law school, all at
the SAME TIME. Now, there is a guy who is high cap. I am not he, I
never will be, I may as well get used to it right now. What he can
do, has nothing to do with what I can do.

I'm a sensitive person, an artist, introverted. I cannot go from one
activity or noisy session with people, to the next, and the next,
with no downtime. I become frazzled, unhappy, and fragmented. This
is a fact.

It is at those times when, frazzled, worn down from trying to be
high cap, I spend $ or eat in order to give myself more energy to
carry
on, or to try to keep up with the high cap people, or to just soothe
my pain."

Contemplative time or meditation time or down time or relaxation time
is very important to fostering peace in our lives as this person is
starting to realize. A lot of the addicts I read about live lives of
constant doing and running with no time for such useless things as
sitting around to relax or meditate. Workaholics usually put little
time in self actualization. They may think that workaholism provides
all the financial benefits they need to live a happy and fulfilled
life, but while putting all effort in this one area they are bankrupt
with the area of their inner peace and contemplative needs.

When we are not self aware of our real needs it is the same as not
having controls in our car that tell us the internal condition of what
is going on. We cannot tell how fast we are going without a
speedometer, nor can we tell if our car is overheating until it its
too late without a temperature gauge and without a gas gauge we will
be left stranded with an empty tank. All these instruments give us
feedback as to the internal condition of things and so does this time
spent with ourselves when we look within. Without writing a book on
the benefits of relaxation or meditation let me tell you of two
immediate positive effects such a practice will have for you when you
invest some time in yourself.

First, relaxation or meditation will give your body some time to
dissipate all the stress chemicals you have been producing in over
abundance. Adrenal steroids (cortisol) secreted when a person is under
stress reach the brain and over time can affect the very structure of
the brain. When stress hormones, intended for a fight or flight
situation remain switched on for an extended period, they can slow the
growth of nerve fibers in the areas of the brain responsible for
emotions and other brain functions such as memory. Unfortunately,
with the way most of us live we fight survival daily and produce too
much of these chemicals. We also produce cortisol from any other
stressors the body perceives, whether it is physical stress, such as a
sickness, injury, surgery, or temperature extremes as well as
psychological stress that we and the world put on us. Each of us has
produces a different amount of these chemicals and has a different
sensitivity to them and this might be the missing link as to a part of
the question as to why some of us are high capacity and other lower
capacity with how we each produce and react to these stress chemicals
differently.

Second, you will have some quiet time to not only quiet your brain but
to take a personal accounting of the direction your are going in and
what needs to be changed in order for you to get a new life. You will
finally be getting some feedback from your internal instruments that
have been out of commission for so long do to your excessive busyness.
Addictions are great distracters from living life and waste much of
our time. When I freed up the time I used to waste dealing with the
addiction issues and drama I could now put that newfound time to use
in many more productive and healthier areas in my life. As you will
see in the latter part of this post, contemplative time or meditation
played a large part in the success of my own recovery program.

I once read about an addict that disliked spending any contemplative
or introspective time on herself to become self aware. She claimed it
just promoted being more "self obsessed" and she wanted to spend less
time thinking about herself and not more. Well, all this has to
balanced up, but without giving the question of "who I am and what are
my real recovery needs" some thought, I would not have the recovery I
do today. And this self inventory is needed every day on a continual
basis, as each day has 1440 minutes in it and it only take one of
these minutes, or even less sometimes, to suffer a slip. I seek the
middle path and have to accept I need some introspection time as well
as some non-introspection time in my life. Just work toward balance
and work in the direction of not over doing your self awareness and
insight or under doing it as well.

Don't ever expect perfection either with this balance of self
awareness and self obsession. If you see things getting out of hand,
reign things in some. I don't run perfect programs by any means, but I
run successful ones as long as I work towards perfection but am not
upset if I never get there. If you want to be a "perfectly recovered"
addict then shoot for perfection in an area where it is possible such
as perfect abstention from alcohol, drugs, gambling, etc. If you an
overeater, compulsive spender, sex addict or clutterer shoot for 80%
to 90% perfect as 100% perfection in these later mentioned areas is
nearly impossible over the long term. This is how I work my programs
in these areas and found much peace through this acceptance of
realistic perfection rates and living within the 80% to 90% recovery
goal which allows me to reach good recovery as well as find peace with
the addiction.

Why do I counsel you to not be perfect with such things like
overeating or spending and possibly sex? Just ask an NA to use drugs
once in while on a controlled basis or ask an AA to take one drink a
day and then stop! You know how far they would get. The addicts that
have to participate in their addictions, such as eating, sex and
spending have to realize their addictions are also part of living and
they will have a hard time finding peace when they make the tiniest of
mistakes with their program. They cannot perfectly abstain as their AA
and NA and GA brethren can, so they need different tools for their
peace mission. These addictions we participate in daily require
"judgments" to be made and whenever judgments have to be made mistakes
are also a possibility. Cushions or "recovery space" is important in
certain of my programs to allow for some mistakes in judgments. This
does not mean I use these cushions as a license to practice my
addiction guilt free. When setting such cushions we have to realize
that if we are too strict we will have no peace and if we are too
loose we will have no recovery or peace as well.

I also use trend analysis for some of my addictions for instance: is
the Fat, Clutter, Debt or Sex Compulsion growing, declining or has it
been frozen? One nice thing about freezing an addiction is it can only
get better from here. This gave me much comfort with my clutter
recovery work. I knew if I did not add to the clutter it could only
stay the same or go down and it took 8 years to get it down by 98%.
This concept is what gave me hope and comfort to keep working all
those years on it. This philosophy of looking at certain addictive
trends is much more helpful to me than having too strict a set of
rules to follow by the letter such as: did I eat an extra apple and
now have to beat myself up over that 70 calorie apple and now I am no
good because I ate that apple. If I eat an extra unneeded apple
between meals I will take it off the next meal or tomorrow's meal or
the day after if I feel like it. In the big picture an extras 70
calorie apple only translates to 1/3 of an ounce of unneeded fat, so I
am not going to ruin my programs peace over that.

Now, if I am eating an extra 2000 calories a day, this will put on
about 4-1/3 pounds of fat per week on my body, so this is a different
case and requires much attention as to why I have to pacify myself
with all this unneeded overeating? The answer to this question usually
lies in how I am living my life and it usually is because I am not
accepting and living within all my comfortable means. For all those
that do not know, when you eat 3200 unneeded and unburned calories it
produces 1 pound of fat on your body. Four sticks of butter equals a
pound of fat or 3200 calories. SCA uses gray, black and while to
distinguish these areas and I find this system very helpful to finding
peace with my recovery programs. The gray areas are allowed, but not
desirable actions and are signposts to back off some. The gray areas
are where the "cushions" are located in for me. Now, some addictive
behaviors don't come under this trend theory, they just blow my
program altogether, so I have to know when to apply trends and when to
throw in the hat and start over.

Let us not forget that even normal people overeat once in a while,
normal people have sex too much once in a while and normal people
spend too much money once in a while. So, normal people make mistakes
in judgment as well. While we are not normal, we must realize that we
should not beat ourselves up for putting ourselves on a higher
standard that normal people are on when we seek perfection with
playing with our addictive area each day. The big difference between
normal people and addicts is that normal people can stop when they see
they have gone too far with their actions and their actions produce
unhealthy consequences. Whereas addicts will continue with the
unhealthy actions no matter what.

With sex needs, these can vary from person to person as to what is
needed for happiness and peace, so we cannot say sex is a necessity of
living for all people. But, whether the feelings are of sexual desire
or for hunger of food, these are all natural desires and I see much
guilt in the programs when addicts have these natural feelings. Since
addicts have abused these areas for so long they become super
sensitized to anything dealing with them and it can be hard to be
objective. How many times do overeaters feel guilty for eating even a
carrot stick? Anything that goes into their mouth now becomes
evil...we still have to eat to live, but it must be done in a balanced
way.

Here are few examples of how we can go to extremes to destroy our own
peace when we work an unbalanced recovery program that puts peace
last. I recall one fellow in SA beating himself up for looking at a
woman while eating lunch at a mall. He said he faces a wall now while
eating lunch for fear of seeing a woman. He had terrible guilt and you
could hear the pain in his voice as he asked himself "What is wrong
with me - I am a man - Why can't I look at a woman? " This fellow was
not a child rapist or sex killer, he was married and had a decent
life, but got hooked on a little too much internet porn and his wife
complained. But, from a place of zero peace with internet porn he goes
to the other extreme of zero peace because he can never look at
another woman again.

Another fellow said he trashed his computer, TV and VCR and forget the
pool or beach, he is afraid to go out of his house for fear of seeing
a woman. A third fellow mentions how he literally pounded his head
with his fists to punish himself for catching a glimpse of a woman
getting out of a car, yelling at himself "What the hell are you
looking for?" Well, looking at women produces pleasure chemicals in
the brain of man, so it was a simple question to answer - he was
looking for pleasure that is what he was looking for...all natural
desires. Nothing different from getting excited over a glimpse of cake
or ice cream or excited over the next compulsive purchase. We all are
visual people and through the senses addicts participate in their
sensation addiction one way or another. Running a program where you
feel ashamed or guilty for having natural feelings is not a program
that you will ever find any peace in.

On the other hand, "if you abuse it ~ you lose it," so if we have to
play with our addictive area each day, we have to develop a program
that allows us to participate in these areas in a balanced and
recovered way or we lose the privilege to participate in it as most
AA, NA and GA addicts must do with 100% abstention. Some of us can
find a semblance of balance with certain addictions that must be
participated in on a daily basis, otherwise the ones that can't find
an acceptable balance point have to eat lunch facing a wall all their
life and are fearful of leaving home. Always remember, there are
triggers all around us but we ultimately have to pull the trigger
ourselves. This trigger pulling is usually dependent not on the
thought but on the emotions behind the thought. Changing programs
helped my peace development with sex. I dropped out of SA a few years
ago and joined SCA where they view sex as a God - Nature - Higher
Power given gift and not a shameful desire. I still enjoy looking at
women periodically, but I had to scale back from my previous "looking"
life quit a bit otherwise I would be producing too much brain
chemicals for recovery - if nothing changes, then nothing changes.

Now when I enjoy a woman's beauty I also send a metta blessing her way
to help remind me they are not just objects but people - "may any pain
or suffering you bear be lessened." The use of this blessing gives
back something to them in exchange for them providing me with their
visual beauty. If I start looking a little too much then a "vacation"
from looking so much needs to be taken. This is what I mean when I
talk about balancing recovery program and only shooting for 80% to 90%
perfect. To make things clear with the 80% to 90% rule. I am not
referring to cheating on my wife only 20% of the time and calling that
good recovery. I am referring to the small things that addicts beat
themselves up over and seem to destroy their hopes of finding peace
with. In SCA they term these areas as "gray" areas that are signposts
or danger boundaries to be aware of. The other choice is to hammer my
head and face the wall. So, if there are a choice of recovery programs
for your addiction try them all out to see what fits you best.

With some of my addiction abstention standards I hold myself to a
similar level of perfection that a normal person might obtain and with
some other addictions I use a lower standard for my program. It just
varies from program to program and what fits me best. My main concern
in setting such standards is to find a place that gives me the
recovery and peace results I want. If the recovery I strive for is too
harsh and unrealistic and is not sustainable for me then I will find
no peace while living with these addictions that must be participated
in on a daily basis. The only way I could be at peace with taking
drugs, getting drunk and speculative gambling was with not
participating in those areas any longer and have found peace with
accepting that is how it must be.

But most of the other addictions requiring judgments and daily
participation are a constant battle of balancing the addiction and
balancing my peace. Yes, peace is foremost in what I expect from my
recovery efforts. Peace is a wonderful signpost if you learn how to
use it. When your peace is disturbed so goes your programs. Anyway,
this is how I work my recovery programs with certain addictions that
require judgments, so if you can benefit from this method fine, and if
not, then I hope you find a method that works for you.

In my old life, peace used to be very elusive, really it was
nonexistent but once I started changing the direction of my life I
could get a taste of how this restructuring was changing my ability to
find inner peace. It is a funny thing with most of us. We find no
peace or happiness and think our problem is not having enough
complexities and sickness so we lump on some more problems on our
backs and when that doesn't fix things we dig our hole even deeper. It
never occurs to us to change directions and start removing
complexities and headaches from our lives? But, once we get a taste
for something that really works we can have faith in our recovery
efforts and then we can work calmly with the thought that someday our
efforts will pay off as we will be enjoying a new life. It all starts
by taking one step in the other direction that we have been going all
our lives.

Here is a short recount how I changed direction in my life. My own
peace started getting destroyed each morning around 3AM - 4 AM and I
could use this insomnia meditation time laying in bed to recount how I
had destroyed my life and made such a mess for my family. In my own
clutter recovery work I had long since learned that "everything you
own takes a little peace ~ peace of you." A lot of my problems came
about through "attachment" and the excesses of "clinging" as the
Buddhists call it. There are many flavors or sects of Buddhism around
the world, but almost all share the "3 pillars" as a foundation. These
pillars are:

1) mindfulness or meditation for personal insight

2) the liberating wisdom non-attachment or non-clinging and accepting
impermanence

3) The development of compassion for others.

As you can see, these pillars have nothing to do with believing or not
believing in God, so they are open for all to use irrespective of
religious affiliation as well as the atheist and agnostic. I didn't
have to wait for Buddhism to tell me that excessive attachment causes
pain. But once I started to study Buddhism a few years ago, it
supplemented what I had learned with my hands on experience through
the painful education of recovering from my addictions. With dealing
with such problems and looking for a way out, it is good to backtrack
and start repairing the damage and deal with the wreckage of the past
at the source in this backwards mode. Once we start to clear up the
wreckage of the past, the future will clear up as well. I did as
Theseus did with the cord he laid down to help find his way back out
of the Minotaur's Labyrinth. He backtracked via the cord as a guide to
get out of the problems he had created for himself. In this case, I
backtracked to develop a credo that would have gave me a different
life *if* I had lived by those words from the start.

I was blessed with working a mindless job so I could use much time for
"working meditation" and could meditate on my life and how to change
things or accept them. This working meditation paid off big and within
6 years I was able to develop a credo that I live by even to this very
day: "Each day I work to live within my means, comfortably fit within
my space and gratefully accept my current position in life." By year 9
of working meditation, supplemented with my early morning insomnia
meditations, I was able to develop a very high grade program of
grateful acceptance. With this ability to practice gratitude and
acceptance I was finally able to be at peace most of the time. By this
time a lot of the wreckage of the past had been cleaned up and I could
start getting some sleep...sometimes till 8.30 am.

People also get attached to stressful situations from not knowing any
other way. This stress is the number one killer for addicts. They say
resentment is a big one for the addict, but resentment just causes us
stress - so go to the source and work on lessening your stress if you
want peace. For me, stress comes about whenever I live beyond my
means. To most people this "means" refers to money, but when I refer
to means, I am speaking about all of them; whether they be financial
means, spiritual means, capability means, energy means, mental or
stress means, caloric means, health means, comfortable space means,
time means and most important my recovery program means. You see there
is much more to living a serene, happy and balanced life than mere
money.

When we invest excessive time and energies in acquiring or building
attachments these attachments become veritable extensions of our being
and come to define us for ourselves as well as define who we are for
others. When these attachments take on this role we become susceptible
to pain via these extensions. If the person, place or thing we are
attached to gets rebuked it is a personal rebuke on us, if they get
damaged or defaced so goes the defacement and damage to our very
being. Now, I am not going to tell you I am a total renunciate and am
attached to nothing and removed all stress and problems from my life.
But, I did have to give up lots of things associated with the old sick
life in order to get a new one. Doesn't it make sense that we cannot
recover from a sickness if we continue to take more of the poison that
is making us sick?

What we have to be mindful of with such renunciations is to always
seek balance in our decisions. The life of a renunciate or monk or nun
is not the best choice for all of us either. Imagine a life where the
entire world was composed of monks and nuns that begged off each other
for foods, did not work and only meditated and never had sex and
reproduced? This goes against the "flourishing" aspect of natural law
theory, so for all of us to live such a life is not good for our
species. But, for a small percentage of society to practice this way
of life does not hurt the species but may in fact help it. Buddha
said to always seek the middle road and this is what I try to do with
my recovery work - I seek balance.

The Buddhists caution us to not get attached to ideas themselves so
they say to guard against clinging or attaching to the doctrine of
attachment itself or any of the other Buddhist teachings as well. I
will say that if you can get attached to a successful recovery program
by investing your time and energies and this program is ultimately
expressed as an extension of your self and it becomes to define
yourself, then you will be mindful of anything that starts to chip
away at this extension and feel it as an injustice to your very being
when it happens.

The hard-core Buddhists would not approve of such an "attachment"
idea, but few Buddhists are perfect anyway and addicts definitely
cannot afford to be perfect, so I mention it as a recovery option.
This is how I do it, my investment in building recovery and in
building a strong and healthy body defines who I am to myself and I am
keenly aware of anything that affects it. This idea is not an end all,
it is only one part of the whole. This idea of investment and
definition must be coupled with working the 12 steps as well as
repairing the wreckage of the past and living within our comfortable
means, and is just another part of my program that I build upon.

But, underlying any attachment I may have is the realization of this
doctrine of impermanence. I also moderate my attachments and stressors
through practicing a program of voluntary simplicity. I practice
grateful acceptance as the serenity prayer tells us. and, I make good
use of step 11 - praying only for God - Nature - Higher Power will and
the power to carry it out. Step 11 does not mention my will, but
require me to release all to God - Nature - Higher Power ...if I want
peace. You see, peace is almost always our own choice. We can choose
to cultivate peace by living our life in a direction to promote peace
or choose the opposite direction for living our life which destroys
our peace. When I choose to go beyond my means I start to feel stress
and my addictions start to call. If this "trend" continues too long
then the slip will come - when I put my wants over my programs wants.
I shouldn't complain if this happens. It would be ridiculous to think
I can have my old sick life as well as keep recovery intact?

Yet, addicts do it all the time. They think they can live life with
impunity just by applying the 12 steps to a crazy and spiritually sick
life. If that was the case, the 12 and 12 would not mention living
"right size." I accept it as a tradeoff that is needed for a new life.
I can have the new life, but have to give up the old life to get it
and once I accepted I could not have it both ways, it became possible
for me to find some peace in my life. You see, 12 steps or not, we all
have to answer to natural law. Within the boundaries of natural law is
where stress chemicals come from within us and as addicts I believe we
are super sensitized to these chemicals and we seek relief though our
various addictions. If I ignore natural law and force my will over my
comfortable abilities, then I would not have much success with my
recovery efforts.

I don't know if the lady with the horses will find a new owner of not,
but hopefully she can let them go in peace if she has to and realize
that this desire to own horses does not seem compatible with fostering
peace within her - at least for now. Ultimately, the person, place or
thing itself will always be the final judge as to what we can
comfortably have or not have in our life and our recovery program ...
as long as we are open to listening to the truth. Always remember,
what we think or anyone else thinks about an issue means very little -
but what our program thinks about it means everything to us. Our
recovery program always has the final say when it comes to our peace.
We can always have hope for the future, but for success, we must
accept how things are in the here and now. As the famous late Buddhist
lecturer Alan Watts said, "It is not what you think, it is not what
you hope ... but what IS."

Take care,

V (Male)

Agnostic Freethinker
Practical Philosopher