Wanna Recover from Addiction? Lean into Pain!
By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)
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Last week I wrote about three themes relevant to Buddhist recovery. One of the themes I emphasized was impermanence. I wanna go a bit deeper into why that’s important in recovery. It has been my experience that most people who have committed to be sober are not most likely to relapse from the simple thought that they’d like to experience the pleasure associated with their favorite addictive substance or behavior, but rather they relapse in periods of great discomfort and pain. Most of the time, addiction related behaviors are a solution to pain and sustain themselves as such. Addiction has a string relationship to pain. An aversive one.
Two days ago I was having an amazing day. I was out in the world taking photos. Earlier I had roasted a bunch of vegetables in olive oil while listening to piano music on vinyl. It all of the sudden occurred to me that just a few weeks before I had been in such tremendous and challenging emotional pain related to a loss I had experienced. It’s an amazing thing to be present to pain in such a way as to directly experience the end or absence of suffering that had felt so deeply compelling at one point in the recent past that you (I) spent 8 days doing little else but trying to manage it skillfully. But nevertheless, the pain was gone and it was now replaced by such simple pleasure of living.
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For me, there are two important take-home insights from this.
1. Staying present to pain allows one to experience its end which allows you to directly experience impermanence. This is the message of the four noble truths in Buddhism. The four noble truths is the first attempt of the human being known as “Buddha” to articulate the nature of his awakening. In practicing (and it IS a practice) the four noble truths, we acknowledge the existence of pain as normal, hold our reactivity to it lightly and with restraint and pay attention to the end of any particular round of suffering. We get to experience pain as impermanent. The more we do that in life, the more we integrate the truth of impermanence not as Buddhist philosophy, but as the way things are in life. Doing this requires presence. When we know pain is impermanent, we can relax a little and explore it. So…
2. Lean into pain! In my opinion, any practicing Buddhist worth their salt will lean into pain when it comes and when it’s manageable (we’ll talk about the sometimes overwhelming nature of trauma content later). When the pain comes and you lean into it and get curious about it and investigate it deeply, it can be very revealing. In my experience you get access to parts of yourself in grief and loss and fear that you don’t otherwise get access to. If you can stay objectively aware as you’re crying and feeling taken over by emotion, you can notice a lot of interesting things. You get to notice your stories, your orientation to others and the world, you may notice mental images that connect you to specific events in your past. Sometimes the mind even presents symbolic images that, like dreams, give you valuable information. You can notice what your impulses are. Do you reach out for help or isolate? Do you want to lash out or act punitively towards yourself? Who are you when you’re in pain? What’s there when the clarifying earth shaking loss comes? What is your relationship to loss and death? And maybe most importantly, what actually matters most? When you do not lean into grief and loss and pain, you miss an opportunity to be taken apart and put back together as a better, wiser person. You miss the opportunity to root out helplessness and victimhood and transform it into agency and self possession. You miss the opportunity to ask for help and go to connection. You miss the opportunity to give your grief the audience it demands. There is so much available to you in terms of insight, growth and healing in these moments. Don’t miss them!
Here’s another way of thinking about this. It is my experience that you ONLY get access to these enlightening parts of yourself in the painful spaces. You could begin to look at periods of grief and pain as a short window of opportunity to get the gifts it offers. I know it sounds sorta crazy. But I believe it completely. As a person interested in healing you should look to the painful places as nothing less than an opportunity to access material that can transform you. The impermanence not only allows you to lean into this material because you can relax the fear that it will somehow last forever, but it actually places a limit on how much you can “mine” from the experience and learn about yourself. You better get in there and look around while the door is open. Impermanence will close the door on access rather quickly.
How do we extend this logic to people who lean instead on addiction related behaviors? Addiction is the precise opposite of presence and wisdom developing curiosity. It’s the precise opposite of what has been described here. There’s little possibility of healing or insight or compassion or connection in addiction related behaviors. There is only aversion to pain, an attempt at escape, and an inevitable compounding of suffering. It’s absolutely understandable to do so. But it’s not generative. It doesn’t lead to awakening and wisdom. It is as the Buddha described it in the four Noble truths, a dead end.
Buddhist recovery requires a sort of spirit of warrior-ness. That may sound counterintuitive, but it’s true. It requires us to plant our feet, take a stance, fight off that which is not helpful and move towards what scares us most.
It’s not easy. But it holds the potential to change everything.
May you find the will to plant your feet.
May you find the will to take a stand.
May you successfully fight off the stories, impulses and behaviors that don’t serve you.
May you go towards the pain.
What you find there may change everything.