Powerlessness and Ruling Your World: Reflections from the Heart of Recovery

Every week, a group of 15-28 individuals whose lives have been touched by addiction to substances and behaviors gather at the DC Shambhala Center to practice meditation and discuss how it relates to their own experiences of addiction, compulsion, and recovery.

While meditation is common to many of us in recovery, what meditation means varies greatly from person to person.  For individuals attending the Center’s Heart of Recovery meetings (www.dc.heartofrecovery.org), meditation is a simple technique with potentially profound impact on our lives and our sobriety.

This technique, called Shamatha (translated as calm abiding), is a form of mindfulness meditation that uses our breath as a way of anchoring our awareness in our body and in the present moment.  We simply place our attention on the process of breathing, relaxing our body and our mind along with the out breath.   The act of breathing is part of our physical body.  Unlike our mind—which can be anywhere in space and time, our body is always present.  Right here.  Right now.  By anchoring our awareness to our breath, we bring our mind and our body together in the present moment.

As we begin watching our breath, we find that thoughts arise and distract us from our object of meditation—the breath.  When this happens, we simply label the thoughts “thinking” and return our attention to the breath.  Over and over we get distracted, notice we are distracted, and then return our attention to the breath.

We begin to see that we are powerless over the arising of thoughts.  We place our awareness on our breath and suddenly a thought arises and we abandon our breath and follow the thought.  It might be a happy thought.  It might be a sad or angry thought.  It might even be a painful thought.  Regardless, we get hooked, we follow it, and we fuel it.  We get lost in the thought.  We turn our will and lives over to this momentum that started as single thought.

In mindfulness meditation, we train in strengthening our ability to stay present, to stay in the moment even when faced with powerful thoughts, seductive thoughts, painful thoughts, or boring thoughts.   We begin by strengthening our ability to notice when we get distracted and then we strengthen our ability to let go of the thoughts and come back to the present.

By accepting our powerlessness over thoughts arising we are able to quit fighting with our own experience—with our own being.  By then training in letting go of the thoughts that arise and not giving into the itch to follow them, we strengthen our ability come back to the present moment and to experience our own life—as it truly is.  Training our mind in this way, we find that our ability to be present to our life and the lives of others increases.  We strengthen our ability to accept the present moment as it is. By being fully present, we gain the power of being fully connected to our life as it unfolds.  This becomes the ground for doing the next right thing, moment-by-moment and breath-by-breath.  In fact the irony is, if we ever want to rule our world as Sakyong Mipham teaches, we must start by accepting our own powerlessness over the arising of the present moment.