Ordinary Recovery: Mindfulness, Addiction, and the Path of Lifelong Sobriety

151 Pages·2010·0.97 MB·English

by  William Alexander

Shambhala Publications, Inc.
Horticultural Hall
300 Massachusetts Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115
www.shambhala.com
© 1997, 2010 by William Alexander Cover design by Jim Zaccaria Illustrations © 1997 by Kazuaki
Tanahashi Originally published as Cool Water: Alcoholism, Mindfulness, and Ordinary Recovery.
Thich Nhat Hanh’s Five Noble Precepts are reprinted from For a Future to Be Possible: Commentaries on
the Five Wonderful Precepts (1993) by Thich Nhat Hanh, with permission of Parallax Press, Berkeley,
California. Robert Aitken’s gathas are reprinted from The Dragon Who Never Sleeps (1992) by Robert
Aitken, with permission of Parallax Press, Berkeley, California. The excerpts from “Little Gidding” are
reprinted from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, with permission of the publisher, Faber & Faber Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Alexander, Bill, 1942– Ordinary recovery:
mindfulness, alcoholism, and the path of lifelong sobriety / William Alexander; calligraphy by Kazuaki
Tanahashi; with a foreword by Kevin Griffin.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of: Cool water. 1997.
eISBN 978-0-83482272-6
ISBN 978-1-59030-828-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Alexander, Bill, 1942– 2. Recovering alcoholics—United
States—Biography. 3. Alcoholism—Treatment—Religious aspects—Buddhism. 4. Buddhist meditation—
Therapeutic use. I. Alexander, Bill, 1942– Cool water. II. Title.
HV5293.A2A53 2010
362.292′8—dc22
2010021473
This one is for Toni Delacorte, who came
into my life at just the right moment—
not once, but twice—over a remarkable
span of thirty years!
CONTENTS
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Something’s Happening Here
Breakdown, Ordinary Recovery, and Autumn Prayers
Coming Home
Off the Cushion and Out the Door
My Liver, My Mind, My Self
Mindfulness
Psychedelic Cheeseburgers and Shimmering Pines
Making Stew
Stepping Off the Hundred-Foot Pole
BREATHING ROOM
Rage at the Short Hills Mall
How to Build a Cathedral
BREATHING ROOM
Rapture
God’s Will
. . . And the Power to Carry That Out
Blood in the Steel
I May Not Be Much, but I’m All I Ever Think About
BREATHING ROOM
Keep Coming Back
How to Wash Dishes
Already Broken
Lenny and the Three Stooges
BREATHING ROOM
Get (It) Together
BREATHING ROOM
The Healing Buddha
Afterword
Resources
FOREWORD
WHEN THIS SMALL BOOK CAME out a dozen years ago (under the title Cool Water),
it had a big impact—on me and many others. We heard the message loud and
clear, a voice crying out in the Twelve Step wilderness, “You’re not alone!” For
those of us who’d struggled to align our Buddhist practice with Twelve Step
principles, here was someone who’d been there—and had returned to tell the
story. The line connecting mindfulness and recovery had been clearly drawn.
Bill Alexander forgoes the platitudes of Alcoholics Anonymous and the
sanctity of Buddhism to get at the blood and soul of recovery—the personal
struggles and the transcendent insights, the wild ride and the dreary hours on a
hard chair in a church basement.
Bill’s writing takes the risk of affirming that what he is feeling now, where he
is at this moment, is important—never claiming to have arrived or to know, but
only asserting that the view from here, from his own lived experience, is worth
capturing. With the eye of a Beat poet and the teeth of a gonzo journalist, Bill’s
writing is, most of all, alive.
Don’t look for your “final answer” in this book, but only the penetrating
vision of a pioneer, one who is still out there on the edge. We need Bill—to keep
us honest, to keep us questioning, and to remind us we’re still not alone.
KEVIN GRIFFIN
Berkeley, California
PREFACE
Returning to what is
Means going back to the ordinary.
Understanding the ordinary:
Enlightenment.
—TAO TE CHING
I WAS HAPPILY SURPRISED when Shambhala Publications contacted me to say that
they wanted to publish a revised edition of my book Cool Water. They wondered
if I’d go along with that. Of course I would.
Since that day, I have had ample time in preparing this brief introduction to
turn it into another book entirely and nearly did. My friend, the writer and poet
Phil Rice, caught me in time and gently reminded me that it’s the book being
revised, not me.
There is precious little need for you to know much about my life since the first
publication. Things have changed, certainly. In most cases, I have changed with
those things, often with a fair measure of grace and occasionally with some of
my older, defective skills that I thought long buried. I’m single now and living in
a remote spot in Minnesota. The little boy I wrote about in the first edition of
this book, my son Will, is a man now and far away. I have even fewer teeth, my
knees don’t work, and many of my friends are gone. I sleep late and I don’t
comb my hair.
Time has passed and, somehow, I haven’t found it necessary to take a drink or
use narcotics, exotic botanicals, or pills of any kind during all those years, with
their considerable narrative. The drugs, the booze, the hallucinogens all seemed
to have stories to tell me. For a time they hijacked my life and stole the stories
my finer self could have told, burying them in deep places in my mind and body.
When I was using drugs and alcohol I lived in a world that was not my own. I
lived as hostage to chemicals, and, bizarrely, I loved my captors, out of my
delusion and fear. But that’s for another book.
How have I been able to remain sober all these years? I’ve been guided by the
central teaching of this book, which I think is best expressed on the very last
page:
When you’re taking out the garbage, just take out the garbage. If we
could just learn that simple lesson, I think all the rest of it would just
take care of itself, don’t you?
My good friend Win Miller mentioned that paragraph to me one Saturday
afternoon as we were driving on a Minnesota backcountry road, through green
meadows under cloudless skies. He said that he’d been trying to figure out how
to get rid of the spiritual clutter in his life while simultaneously getting rid of the
material clutter that so inhibited him and his family. He couldn’t figure out how
to do both. He said he’d meditated and then picked up this book and read that
final paragraph. He told me, with a smile, that he just went ahead and cleaned his
office, content with the joy of the present moment.
If you look deeply, those two paragraphs above contain the entire contents of
this small book. There are three principles that inform the book.
1. Mindfulness.
2. The sacred nature of the ordinary, which I call Ordinary Recovery.
3. And encompassing all, the gift of story.
When taking out the garbage, only take out the garbage. When cleaning your
office, only clean your office. Maybe there’s an inkwell that belonged to your
grandfather, hidden under the scraps of paper, and subscription forms to
magazines you never filled out anyway, or maybe under all of that is an alabaster
egg a child once gave you, or a note you didn’t really pay attention to from your
spouse.
When you clean off the desk of those scraps of paper, you might find that one
ordinary thing that brings an opening to things as they are. For years I’ve had a
picture of my grandmother Lillis McElroy on my desk. It sat there for many
years and I had stopped noticing it. One day, I was pushing a cup of coffee out of
the way of my keyboard and lost control of the cup and there was coffee
everywhere. I snatched up Lillis’s picture and held onto it while I tried to save
the other objects and papers on the desk.
When I was done, I noticed the picture still in my hand. So I sat on the black
cushion that I keep in my office and I looked at her. I looked at her with what is
called “nonjudgmental awareness” or, my preference, “bare attention.” I didn’t
make up any stories, I just breathed and looked deeply at this woman who had
fallen in love at fourteen and married at eighteen, eloping from her home in
Center Point, Texas. Episode after episode of my life as a young boy in
McKenzie, Tennessee, flooded back in as that hijacked narrative of my finer self
was reclaimed. The theft of little parts of my life was overturned and my life
became more spacious, my story richer as I sat and looked at Lillis, without
beckoning to stories but simply letting them come. I knew for the first time that
when I was a child Lillis had been the most important figure in my life.
Following the simple lessons of mindfulness and bare attention your life, too,