Tag: Meditation

Human AF

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Writing helps me figure things out. Myself. The world around me. My place in the world around me. All of it. I typically have everything sorted out before I bring it to a blog, but I am still in the process right now and thought I would try it this way. I might be all over the place, but that’s where I am.
I am a thinker. Sometimes that’s a good thing, and other times, not so much. I try so hard to feel my way through situations, but that just isn’t who I am. I have a hard time talking about my feelings because I have a hard time knowing how I feel about things. I prefer to figure everything out in my head and make sense of it. I suspect that can make it a bit of a challenge for the one who gets to therapize me. Don’t question that word. I love it. Yesterday I spent my therapy time on the couch NOT talking about the things I should have been talking about. Those things don’t feel good. I don’t necessarily know how they make me feel, but “not good” works. I tend to keep it light unless I absolutely know that I have to throw the uncomfortable thing out there. I like to share my joy. At the end of our session I felt like my therapist was ready to “kick me out of the nest.” I let her know that she would have to die to get rid of me. Which, for the record, isn’t true and I MIGHT not say again if given the opportunity. But she is fabulous and assured me that I didn’t need to go anywhere. On the drive home I was being less than compassionate toward myself for being so clingy and for not discussing the things that I should be sharing. Whatever SHOULD means. And yes, I know the quote about “shoulding on myself” because I am a walking, spiritual self help book. I felt like shit when I got home because I spent the entire drive in my head focused on all the things that are “wrong” with me and how I got that way. If Jon Kabat-Zinn had been there, he would have reminded me that as long as I am breathing there is more right with me than there is wrong with me. But he wasn’t riding with me. He’s a busy man. When I got home an amazing thing happened. I received a message from a Facebook friend. I don’t know this woman. I have met her one time. She seems to know me and really knew what I needed at that exact moment. She sent me a poem (I think it was a poem) called “Hiding.” It was absolutely beautiful and absolutely ME. It was about how I had spent that hour on the couch hiding. It was about how the horrible memories that keep coming up for me have been hiding because I wasn’t ready to know my truth. It was about how I hide from the world when I get overwhelmed. It was about all the ways I hide and how it’s all so necessary and completely OK. I let out that breath I didn’t even realize I had been holding. I began to relax. I let this woman know how timely her message was and how much I appreciate her. I even opened up to her and shared from my heart. Just wow. A beautiful God moment. A beautiful connection. And I am grateful.
Now I’ll take it back to the REAL issue I was upset with myself about. My need to cling. It’s a known fact that when I love a thing, I really love it. It’s been the joke of the week with my cacao consumption, but it’s true. I love it and love it and love it some more. I tend to feel like I can never have enough. It could be green smoothies, Buddha bowls, or kombucha. Driving home from Wilmington yesterday it occurred to me that my feeling of needing more might be (IS) a deep rooted feeling that I am not enough. Some days I know that I am broken. There is a piece missing that I have tried to fill in so many ways. With drugs. With sex. With alcohol. I have become more skillful in the ways I fill that hole. I have yoga, meditation, community and God. I have an amazing family and a ton of friends. Yesterday afternoon the feeling of not being enough was strong. That hole felt very large. Something is missing. What the fuck is it and what do I do about it? Sit with it? Keep doing the work until my heart and my head catch up with each other? Because I KNOW I am strong, powerful and capable. I know I am loved and that I AM LOVE. I also know feelings aren’t facts and not to believe everything I think, but I am human and some days are harder than others. I know a lot of things intellectually. Feeling them in my soul is another story. Maybe life is designed that way to keep things interesting. Maybe I need more. Maybe I need to stay out of my head so much. Writing helps.
I mentioned in session yesterday that as much as I love my work, something is missing. It was the first time I allowed myself to say those words out loud. It didn’t occur to me until I got in the bed last night that the Universe heard that statement and responded. I received a phone call just an hour after I got home yesterday from a woman who is having a very difficult time recovering from surgery. She is depressed and she is struggling. She wants to work with me one on one. I am going to meet with her today. I have more than enough to keep me busy and out of my head. I’m not sure I even need another thing on my calendar, but my heart said yes and I couldn’t argue with the fact that this was the exact thing I had just said I wanted. The Universe always responds.
Today is a new day. The sun is shining and right now at THIS moment I am content and I am grateful. Perhaps the trick is just to stay with the bad feelings until they pass. That sounds so simple. Maybe too simple. OR, perhaps the trick is writing about it, reading 5 books, therapy, energy healing, sound healing, yoga, meditation and a healing circle or three with an AA meeting thrown in there just because. Clearly, more is better. Today I am going to live my life, love the Hell out of the things I love, obsess a little less and remind myself that I am so enough I might even be too much. I’ll overthink that one another day. Being a human is hard.

Strong Enough

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“That thing you are most afraid to write. Write that.” ~ Nayyirah Weed

An interesting thing happened to me last week. And by interesting I mean fucking horrible. I am not necessarily ready to write about it yet, but here I am anyway. Last week I had a lot of ugly and completely repressed childhood memories present themselves to me rather suddenly. I say this was suddenly, but maybe it wasn’t so sudden at all. I have been back in therapy for the past four months working through a lot of things, including childhood trauma. I began to process these new memories with my therapist last week. So many of you have reached out to me to talk about EMDR and how helpful it has been for you or a loved one. I am thrilled to hear your success stories. That has not been my experience with it. I just don’t process that way. Fortunately, the therapist I have isn’t Hell bent on continuing with something that’s not working for me. We are talking through a lot of things and I take it to my journals and my meditation. Sometimes things come out on my yoga mat. I process slowly but I am thorough. It seems to be working. It’s always helpful for me to share here because there will always be someone who will send me a “me too” message to help me through and remind me that I am not alone in this. Whatever this is. I’ve had a hard time with theses images coming back to me and honestly, it made me feel a bit crazy. I have a wonderful and wise friend who pointed out that I know these things happen to other people, I just didn’t think it would happen to ME. She was so right and so helpful to me in that moment. When I opened up to my therapist about this she had the sweetest smile on her face and she looked genuinely happy. It is her opinion that it’s time. I am strong enough and I finally feel safe enough to deal with this. This was somewhat comforting, but I’m not quite there in sharing in her happiness. And, because I am who I am, I questioned if maybe she was the crazy one. I called a friend of mine who is also a psychologist and opened up to him. I value his friendship and his opinion. Imagine my surprise when he seemed genuinely happy about this too. I began to feel a bit better about it and the way I’m thinking of it is starting to shift. It actually is interesting to find more pieces of my puzzle. Maybe this didn’t happen to me as much as it happened FOR me. I am trying to get into the space of feeling empowered by this. It might take a minute, but I’ll get there. Last week’s full moon was so powerful that I can’t help but think she was shining the light of awareness on this for me. Clearly it’s time for me to know these things so I can begin to let go of them. I know that when I let go I create space for better things to flow into my life. I asked The Universe to help me be open and I think this is how the Universe has responded. I’m creating space. None of this feels good to me and it’s not particularly fun to deal with. But, I’m doing it. Never once did it cross my mind to numb myself with alcohol or any other substance for that matter. There’s beauty in learning how to stay. I am not sleeping well because along with this came nightmares. I know they can’t last forever. In the meantime, I’m napping when I need to. I’m participating in immersive experiences that nourish my soul. I’m eating the things that make my body feel good and I’m journaling my way through this. And it’s working. I am learning so much more about myself through this process. My word of the year is “Learn.” I even got it tattooed on my arm. Just WOW. I keep coming back to “be careful what you ask for or you just might get it” statement. I feel connected and I feel heard. I don’t feel crazy. I feel healthy. If my mind wanders to that weird place that tries to tell me otherwise, I have a family to remind me that I am so loved and I have a host of amazing people to remind me that I’m a bad ass warrior. I’ll get through this and I’ll help others as I do. THAT is everything to me.

Inner Child Healing

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This week my therapist asked me if “I ever have anyone sitting in front of me in circles or what not who obviously don’t want to talk about something.” She asked what I do when that happens. She said she uses that time to take notes. And then she took notes. Can you believe that it was hours later before I had a clue that she was talking about ME? Of course I don’t want to talk about things with her because the things she wants to talk about don’t always feel good. My preference would be to go in, sit down and tell her all of the amazing things going on in my life. My life really is FULL of amazing things that I am grateful for every day. I especially feel good when I can present her with some work that I did on my own or some fascinating discovery I have made about myself. It’s a classic “Look at me, I am so good!” moment. And really, all that stuff is great. What’s not so great is the actual work I am doing. Inner child healing. First of all, I know I said I wasn’t going to “work” on myself anymore. Obviously, that’s not true. Second, It’s more like figuring things out than work. Third, I am my favorite project. Inner child healing is no joke. She mentioned this to me over a month ago. I bought the book she recommended and jumped right in. If there’s a book involved, I am usually all about it. But then it got weird. Unfamiliar. Uncomfortable. So I stopped. My favorite line is “that’s weird and I’m not doing it.” It was that way for me when I got to AA. It was that way when meditation was suggested to me. It was that way when I went to my first yoga class. Weird. Not for me. I ignored the idea for a month and eventually came back to the book. I skipped the first few chapters because they were weird and not for me. Then I hit on the inner 3 to 6 year old. And HOLY FUCKING SHIT. So that’s what happened? Mind blowing really. I won’t get into specifics, but I will tell you that there was some trauma I first experienced at this age that shaped the way I processed, dealt with and lived in the world. This little girl needs to be protected. She needs to feel safe. She needs lots of love and support. She is me. Her experience makes me sad because she is also the little girl who learned to numb herself with drugs and alcohol at a crazy young age. I haven’t even started on the 7 – 12 year old and wonder just how that works since that child was already using. And missing out on being a child. Guess I’ll figure that out soon enough. Or not. I still really struggle with staying open with my therapist. Some days I do great, and some days I feel the wall go up and I feel myself become numb. I don’t know how else to explain it. She tells me she experiences me as going in and out of being present. I think that is called disassociation. I’ve read the DSM too many times for someone who is not a psychologist. I am just going to call it throwing up the wall and closing my heart. And I hate it so much. I know that it is a way I protected myself in the past and that it served me well then. It’s time to let that go because it truly doesn’t serve me today. I just don’t know how. I can do yoga poses to open my heart. I can meditate and recite mantras. I can write about it, teach about it and talk about it. I have yet to figure out how to get there and how to stay there. On the days when I shut down like that, it feels like a giant step back. A friend told me it’s a stand still day and not a step back. I can live with that. I can be still and be ok. Meditation has given me that gift. I don’t have to hurry through this process. I don’t even have to love the process. I just have to love me. I am being extra gentle with myself through it all. Making sure to sleep enough and eat the right foods. Random daytime baths are a must. The main thing is to remind that little girl that it all turns out alright. She’s a little warrior. A survivor.

4 Years ❤️

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I couldn’t let this day pass without telling the world that today I have been sober for FOUR YEARS. That’s 1,462 days of feeling all the feels without numbing myself out. Four years of healing. Four years of growing emotionally and spiritually. Four years of making (mostly) good choices. Four years that have been beautiful because I have been awake and completely present. I love this day more than my actual birthday because this day four years ago is the day I chose to live. I didn’t just wake up on this day four years ago and stop drinking. That would have been great. Getting sober was a process for me. A long process. I know some people who actually do wake up one day, make that decision and get sober. That’s not my story. I couldn’t imagine my life without alcohol. Everyone I knew drank A LOT. It really didn’t seem to me like I should be the only one getting sober. I knew I would never have fun again. I was sure of that. I had been bouncing in and out of treatment centers, ER’s, medical detox facilities and even the ha ha hospitals. It was a long, miserable road for me and my family. On this day four years ago I woke up in a treatment center and I knew it was the day they were going to stop giving me pills to help me detox. It was the day I was going to have to be in my skin. I did the only thing I knew how to do. I sat. I sat for what was the most uncomfortable two minute meditation. And I didn’t die! The next day I sat a little longer. And every day after that. It was my go to when my emotions were too strong for me to manage. That, a ton of meetings, all the yoga and an awesome AA sponsor who I texted every 3 minutes so she could reassure me that I was ok. Those first 8 months were the hardest for me. I thought about drinking daily. Something shifted during that eighth month and the desire to drink practically left me. Sobriety, AA, meditation and yoga have given me a strong foundation. I have learned to love myself. Believe me that was a process too. I still work at it. Some days it’s easier than others. My life is so beautiful today. My relationships are healthy. I have so many loving and supportive friends in my life. Today I woke up at a yoga retreat in the mountains that I was invited to lead. I drove home to my beautiful family and then I taught a yoga class in MY yoga studio. All of these things are gifts of living sober one day at a time. That is never lost on me. My heart is FULL of gratitude tonight. ❤️IMG_5290.jpg

1,400 Days

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1,400 days of choosing me. 1,400 days of waking up and making the choice to live fully present. 1,400 days of making the choice to grow spiritually and emotionally. I choose me every day in every way. When I sit down on my meditation cushion. When I step onto my yoga mat. When I go to one of “those meetings.” When I eat foods that nourish my body. When I rest because I’m tired. When I let myself experience whatever I’m experiencing without numbing myself, I choose me. I heard early on in my recovery that “eventually we stop wanting what’s bad for us and start to crave what’s good for us.” I held on to that for a long time hoping it was true. It didn’t happen overnight, but eventually, magically I think, it began to happen for me. I no longer feel like I’m missing out when I see people doing the things that I choose not to do. Believe me, it is definitely a choice. I’m not missing out on the blackouts, relationship problems, hangovers or any of that other “fun stuff” by choosing me. Recovery has given me the most precious gifts of all. Self respect and love for myself. The real kind of love. The kind of love that says it’s ok if you aren’t perfect. I love you as you are. The kind of love that says get your ass up out of bed and get on your yoga mat because it makes you feel good! The kind of love that says you are being an asshole and you need to take a nap. Real love. The kind of love that says it’s ok if the only thing you did right today was breathe. 1,400 days of learning what that real love is. 1,400 days of making one empowered choice after another. 1,400 days of choosing me. ❤️

Mornings with the Universe

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IMG_3090Someone recently asked me about my morning routine. I have a practice rather than a routine. I practice every day. My morning practice is one of the ways I show up for myself. I call it Mornings with the Universe. Sobriety has taught me to love and care for myself on all levels. My mind, my body and my spirit. I start each day the same way. I wake up, take a few deep, conscious breaths and say thank you to the Universe. Then I get on my meditation cushion and sit silently for 20 minutes. Always. It’s the way of easing into my day and into the world that works best for me. My mind isn’t yet racing with all of the things I need to do and I am able to connect with something higher than my ego self. I love mornings. That is my standard “routine.” Some days, that’s all I have time for before I have to get started with life. On days like today, I can take my time. Some mornings I need movement and I step onto my yoga mat. Some mornings I need stillness and I spend time journaling. It’s all about tuning in to myself and honoring my needs. People often tell me they feel stuck when they try to journal. My response to that is to just do it. Don’t worry about what you write or how it looks. Write. From your heart. I love daily meditation books and try to read from one every day. Most days I do. I just picked up The Soul’s Companion by Tian Dayton and I am in love. Meditations from the Mat by Rolf Gates is one of my favorites. I feel connected to his words. He writes in a 12 step yogi way and it’s the same language I speak. It’s my life. This morning I spent my time in my books and journals. Sorting out my thoughts. I guess I needed stillness this morning. I’ve had a bit of chaos in my life this week. As we all do from occasionally. In the midst of the chaos I discovered that a 6 am bath feels pretty damn amazing. I’ll be incorporating that in from time to time when my schedule allows. Unfortunately, it won’t be a daily thing. Unless I get up at 4 am every morning. Which I won’t. Because that’s crazy. My morning practice sets the tone for my whole day. Occasionally my day falls apart, but as long as I have taken the time to connect and center myself, I can handle whatever comes my way. Some days I pull oracle cards and burn incense and play with my crystals. Some days I sit on my deck with a smoothie. It doesn’t matter what I do as long as I do it. I’ve had people tell me that my practice sounds like work to them. It might be, but I love working on myself because I am worth it.

Hope Dealer

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I am a Hope Dealer! Number 499!  Plus P Productions sent me a Hope Dealer chip in exchange for my story.  They are doing a very cool thing by giving a face to addiction and showing the world that we do recover.  Check them out!  http://pluspproductions.com

Everyone has a story.  This is mine.

I was born an escape artist. Simple as that. I don’t ever remember being comfortable in my body and in my own skin. So I learned to escape it. I grew up in a loving home with two parents that worked hard to make sure they provided all the things we needed and most of the things we wanted. Alcohol was present in my home and I liked to snag sips of my dad’s beers from a very early age. I caught my first buzz at 8 or 9 years old. I was with my parents at a cook out hosted by their friends. A friend and I decided to sneak into the cooler of the adults and sneak wine coolers. Oh my! Instant LOVE. I was happy and warm and completely comfortable. I loved the way I felt. Being an elementary school aged child, I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to drink, but any time the chance showed up, I took it. By junior high school I was drinking every weekend. I had also picked up a new way to escape my body and my mind. Huffing. As in sniffing cleaning supplies or other harsh chemicals. Paint. Glue. You name it. I either sniffed it, or put it into a bag and breathed the fumes. Every day. All day. By the time I made it to high school, I was the kid who snuck alcohol into school every day in a bottle of Chloraseptic spray with just enough red food coloring to make it look legit. And then came the drugs. Marijuana was first. Then pills. Cocaine and meth followed. By the time I was 16, I had quit school to do drugs and hang with anyone who wasn’t going to school. I had my 17th birthday in a behavioral health center. It should have been a rehab. Who knew? I didn’t see the point. I learned nothing because I didn’t want to be there. I left and resumed the same old, same old. My life was a string of alcohol, drugs and many, many blackouts. When I was 19 I met a stable man who wanted to marry me. He owned his own business and didn’t do drugs. My parents were thrilled. My Mom planned a beautiful wedding and then sent me on my way into the grown up world. The grown up world was not ready for me. During that marriage I drank every day and became addicted to pills. I managed to stay married until I was 21. As soon as I turned 21 I was able to purchase my own alcohol and really didn’t see the need to be married. I moved into a small apartment. Alone. I immediately became addicted to meth and in hindsight probably already was when I moved in. I had a job that paid for my meth addiction and little else. I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep and I didn’t pay any bills. I eventually got evicted and went straight to a rehabilitation center in Nashville TN. It felt great to get my head straight. I remember how healthy I felt and how much I liked being in that center with so many women who were so much like me. They were also much older than I was and I had a really hard time imagining that I was as bad as them or that I was in the right place. I did my 28 days and went back out into the world of drugs and alcohol. I lost my job that I hated and to accommodate my drug addiction, I learned how to manufacture methamphetamine with some of my “friends.” How I lived through this, I will never know. I saw the most horrible things in the two and a half years that this went on. I hated the things I was doing, the people I was doing them with and mostly I hated myself. I was just broken enough to agree to trying another treatment center. This one was in Oklahoma and it was a long term center. I was ready this time. I was miserable enough with my life that I was honestly ready to leave it behind. So I did. I stayed at that treatment center the entire 4 months it took me to complete the program and then I stayed to work there. I met my second husband there. He had also completed the recovery program and was working there. The treatment center probably should have mentioned that it was a bad idea for two drug addicts to get married, but that’s what we did. Then we had babies. Two of them. Two beautiful and perfect babies. And I was happy. I was healthy and I was comfortable being me. Being a mommy. The good times lasted only a short time and my husband relapsed. I had the sense to know that I would not raise my children in addiction. So he moved out. I had no idea how to be alone, with myself and with my two children. Alcohol reentered my life. I found solace in a bottle of Makers Mark bourbon. Every night. After I put my children to bed. I drank myself to sleep. I had a man friend who lived in North Carolina. I called him to come and visit me. He came and pretty much never left. Within 6 months my two small children and I moved to North Carolina. Oak Island. Party Central. Everyone is on vacation all the time there or so it seemed to me. My alcoholism really went unnoticed for quite a while. Years. In those years, we had another child and lived a pretty normal life where I drank way too much. My behavior when I was drunk became pretty outrageous and AA was suggested to me. So I did what any good alcoholic would do. I hid my drinking. I knew it was a problem. Since nobody realized how much I was drinking, my behavior just seemed strange. I needed therapy. Obviously. And special behavioral therapy because my behavior was so fucked up. Enter DBT. Dialectal Behavior Therapy. DBT introduced me to mindfulness. DBT combines Buddhism and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy into one. The problem was that I was still drinking and, truthfully, usually drinking before therapy. I still saw my regular therapist who really kept pushing yoga and AA on me. After having a complete breakdown and ending up in a state mental hospital (which is one of the scariest places I’ve ever been), I decided to go into another rehabilitation center. I was ready to address my alcoholism. This treatment center was a 28 day program and it was close to home. I had my doubts. Once the fog lifted, I decided to try. I knew I had overcome bigger things and thought just maybe I could leave the alcohol behind. This treatment center had a lot of extras. Yoga, art therapy, guided imagery (meditation), and DBT. They didn’t call it DBT, but I recognized it. The problem was that I hated myself so much. So much. I didn’t think I was worth saving. I was failing as a wife, failing as a parent, and failing as a human. My anxiety was through the roof. Breathing is the one thing humans should be able to without too much trouble and I couldn’t even do that. I have this tattoo on my hand that says “HOPE.” HOPE is an acronym for Hold On Pain Ends. I knew what it meant to be hopeless. Some tiny piece of me also remembered that there was a better way. I started to pay attention to that HOPE tattoo on my hand. I went to yoga. I went to the art therapy sessions and drew mandalas. I went to guided imagery. And I sat. I sat and I stayed with whatever “happened” to me. Whatever happened was all in my head anyway. It was so uncomfortable, but it also felt good to begin to get healthy again. Eating food instead of drinking my calories. Moving my body in yoga. It felt good. I knew my therapist would be proud of me and believe me when I tell you I was all about seeking approval. I knew that I was going to have to buy in to the 12 step program they were selling. I had a hard time with this because of the whole God thing. This had always been a problem for me. I did have a tiny bit of faith in meditation. My therapist was adamant that meditation was the medication for me. I trusted her. She was the ONLY therapist I ever had that didn’t steer me wrong and I loved her for that. I began to use my morning free time to meditate. The others would play ping pong and foosball and I would take a yoga mat and go off on my own to sit. It was miserable. I could only sit for minutes at a time. 2 or 3 minutes. But I did it. Every day. 28 days flew by and I left treatment to go into a half way house. That didn’t work for me. I needed to be home with my children. I couldn’t get better away from them. My family was scared that I couldn’t be at home and get better either. I had tried before without success. I missed my family too much. After one week at the half way house, I came home. It was two days before Christmas. On Christmas I got a brand new meditation cushion from my mom. A beautiful Zafu and Zabuton set. And I sat. I sat and sat and sat and hated it. My mind darted here and there and everywhere. I went to local yoga classes. I hated it. I was so uncomfortable in my skin. I hated moving in front of people, I hated being touched by the teachers and most of all I hated the tears that I seemed to cry every time I was in class. I went to AA meetings. I didn’t hate them as much as I hated yoga and meditation, but they were weird and the people were weird. I went anyway. My life started to suck less. I was told that it’s not only OK to cry in yoga, it’s perfectly acceptable. I was taught that everyone’s mind darts around in meditation. That’s why it’s called practice. I was taught that all alcoholics and addicts have to learn how to get comfortable in their skin. I wasn’t special or unique. That little voice in my head, everyone has one. The AA people explained to me that I don’t have to act on every thought that enters my head. I really wanted people to meditate with, so I started a local meditation group. I posted to a FB page for locals in my community and found some people willing to sit with me. These people helped me so much. They were my teachers. Older. Wiser. They taught me that nobody really gets to meditation because things are so wonderful in their lives. They were all searching when they found meditation. Searching for something better. I was still going to yoga pretty regularly and still not loving it. But, I went anyway. It gave me something “wholesome” to do during my day that distracted me from my desire to get outside of myself. What it did was put me directly inside of myself. Inside of my body. It was moving meditation! For the first time in my life I was able to be in my skin, in my body with no distraction. I learned how to breathe deeply. I learned how to let go of my thoughts. I learned how to create space in my body by letting go of the years of torture I had put my body through. I learned to invite love and light into that space. I started to grow and to thrive. I wanted to practice yoga all the time. I started going to multiple classes a day. One day I saw a FB add for a Recovery Yoga workshop in Carolina Beach. I registered and I went. What I found there changed my life. I found a group of yogis in recovery, just like me. The people who put all of their addictive tendencies into their yoga practice. The people who, just like my meditation friends, came to yoga in crisis. Searching for something, anything better. I cried through that whole 2 hour workshop. This time it wasn’t my body opening up and letting go of years of abuse and anxiety, it was gratitude. Gratitude to be in a room of people who I felt a part of. Gratitude for my sober life. Gratitude for everything. I knew these were my people. The next week I signed up for a yoga teacher training in that same studio. On the first morning of teacher training we sat in a circle and introduced ourselves. Again, I heard through every one of these women’s stories that nobody gets to yoga because they love their lives so much. Yoga is healing. Yoga is love. Today I am a yoga teacher. I teach yoga to help people heal.   We are all recovering from something.  It doesn’t have to be addiction or mental illness. We don’t make it into our adult years without some sort of trauma, grief or loss. I teach yoga to help people heal. I teach a lot.   I have the opportunity to teach mediation every time I teach a yoga class. Meditation IS yoga.  I always incorporate meditation into my classes. Meditation came first for me. I had to learn how to stay with whatever came up. Until I did that, my yoga practice couldn’t grow. The two work together for me. I start my days with 20 minutes on my cushion. Every day. In times of chaos, I come back to my cushion to sit with it, to let it pass. In times of crisis, I hurl myself upside down into a handstand. My body and my mind are both aware of what they need today. It’s a beautiful place to be. I have so much gratitude for all of it.

1000 Sober Days

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Surrender. Bow. Give Thanks. Yoga. 💜 Today I have been living sober for 1000 days in a row. ONE. THOUSAND. DAYS. I went to bed last night remembering where I was 1000 days ago. I was in a treatment center. I had my last drink 1,005 days ago, but I medically detoxed for 5 days and since the meds made me loopy, I don’t count those days as sober days. 1,000 days ago I woke up in a treatment center for the third time in a year. Broken. Terrified. Sick. I knew it was the day I had to come off all the medication I had been on to make my detox more comfortable. I knew I had to do it or I wasn’t going to live long. Alcohol was killing me and I was letting it. I couldn’t not drink. I had heard in AA meetings that I should pray. I had no idea how to do that. I had no faith in anything. What I did have was a therapist who promised me that meditation was the medication I needed. I trusted her. She was the ONLY therapist I ever had that didn’t steer me wrong and I loved her for that. I had absolutely nothing to lose. I mustered up all the energy and courage I had and I took myself into the quietest room I could find in that place. And I sat. I sat and I tried to calm myself. I was terrified to come off my medication. I was terrified to live a life without alcohol. The thing is, it wasn’t really a choice I had. If I wanted to live it was a have to. I didn’t love myself enough to really care, but what I did have was three children who I knew needed me. They needed a healthy mom. A sober mom who could be present for them and give them all the love and attention they deserve. On that day 1,000 days ago, as I sat in meditation, I knew. I just knew that I was going to be alright. No matter what it took or how bad it sucked, I knew I was going to be alright. And guess what? I have been alright. Every. Single. Day. I have been so alright. It took a minute to figure the whole sober thing out, but with a ton of loving and supportive people to help me, I figured it out. One day at a time. AA was a great place for me to start. Because, really, where else was I going to meet sober people? People who didn’t drink liquor by the half gallon on a daily basis. People who knew the pain I was in. People who knew how scary it is to live without a crutch. But, I needed more. I needed yoga! I went to local yoga classes. I hated it. I was so uncomfortable in my skin. I hated moving in front of people, I hated being touched by the teachers and most of all I hated the tears that I seemed to cry every time I was in class. I went to AA meetings. I didn’t hate them as much as I hated yoga and meditation, but they were weird and the people were weird. I went anyway. My life started to suck less. I was told that it’s not only OK to cry in yoga, it’s perfectly acceptable. I was taught that everyone’s mind darts around in meditation. That’s why it’s called practice. I was taught that all alcoholics and addicts have to learn how to be comfortable in their skin. I wasn’t special or unique. That little voice in my head, everyone has one. The AA women explained to me that I don’t have to act on every thought that enters my head. I really wanted people to meditate with, so I started a local meditation group. These people helped me so much. They were my teachers. Older. Wiser. They taught me that nobody really gets to meditation because things are so wonderful in their lives. They were all searching when they found meditation. Searching for something better. I was still going to yoga pretty regularly and still not loving it. But, I went anyway. It gave me something “wholesome” to do during my day that distracted me from my desire to get outside of myself. What it did was put me directly inside of myself. Inside of my body. It was moving meditation! For the first time in my life I was able to be in my skin, in my body with no distraction. I learned how to breathe deeply. I learned how to let go of my thoughts. I learned how to create space in my body by letting go of the years of torture I had put my body through. I learned to invite love and light into that space. I started to grow and to thrive.

Today, my life is not at all like it was 1,000 days ago. It’s not ever perfect, but it’s perfect for me. I remember that girl from 1,000 days ago, but she’s not me. I have so many blessings in my life. So many new friends. So much love. So much to be grateful for. My entire life is set up in a way that supports my recovery. It’s a beautiful life. Thank you all for being a part of it. ❤️