An unexpected recovery
I didn't see it coming, but maybe that was the point?
September is Recovery Month both in the UK and the US (and thanks to the internet, probably elsewhere to some extent at least!). Throughout the month I’ll be sharing some of thoughts about recovery, from addiction and from other challenges in life, both in essays and on Notes.
If I’d known this would have been the outcome, there’s a really good chance I would never have started. It would have seemed too scary by far, and absolutely not what I was looking for.
And yet when it arrived, it made me so happy, and has continued to do so for almost 10 years.
I didn’t start Yoga Teacher training with any anticipation that it would change me. Change my life. Beyond thinking that it would give me a way to earn a living that wouldn’t create stress, I assumed I’d still be the same person.
How wrong I was. In all aspects of my thinking.
Yoga didn’t, as it turned out, provide me with a stress-free way to earn a living. Far from it, I never quite managed to make it as a full time yoga teacher, and the work of trying left me fraught, broke and disillusioned with the whole idea.
But the training itself proved to be significantly more life changing than I had ever thought possible. The fact that I didn’t expect it showed me how little I had understood about Yoga, and the extent to which it impacts daily life, in the first place. How surface level my (at the time) 6 years of almost weekly classes had been.
I started my training excited for the course and in dire need of it. I was, as my teacher wrote in the foreword for my book, Bent Back into Shape, Beating Addiction Through Yoga, “…a crazy ball of energy….” which “….had a manic, restless, unsettled feel about it, albeit with a loud and vigorous friendliness”.
A more honest description would be that I was a mess. I was deep in the fallout of a total breakdown the previous year, the inevitable result of a number of stresses hitting me at the same time, while I was still struggling to process my grief at my brother’s death almost 8 years previously.
I turned to yoga because I didn’t want to go through my doctor for help with what I had internalised as shameful mental health problems. Practising yoga to help with stress seemed far more acceptable than admitting to anyone that I was falling apart.
But fall apart was what I had done. And part of my coping strategy was to increase the already dangerous amount of wine and cider I was drinking, and the amount of cigarettes and marijuana I was smoking.
I was a dedicated student in my Yoga training, and practiced almost every day. I was able to stop drinking in the week so I could get up early for my morning practice, but the gloves were off at the weekend, apart from the weekends I went to the Yoga studio for class.
Gradually, as my body learned to enjoy the yoga filled, alcohol free weekdays, it objected more and more to the booze and smoke filled weekends.
Not only that, but I was starting to feel differently about it. When I smoked, I was more aware of my breath, conscious of the fact that I was using my deeper, more controlled breath to send the toxic air deeper into my lungs. I became more attuned to my body, and felt the pain of my liver and gut far more acutely.
I was developing a new relationship with myself, with my past, and with my emotions. One in which alcohol had no place. I didn’t need to drink to become someone else, because I was becoming happier in who I was. I no longer needed to drown the sorrows of my past mistakes, because I was healing myself and learning from them. And I no longer felt I had to numb the pain of the many stresses in my life, because I was learning other ways to deal with the emotions, instead of trying to shut them down.
Without realising it, I was moving into a new way of being that didn’t need alcohol, cigarettes or weed. That didn’t demand I destroy myself in order to survive. That would, in fact, allow me to live in ways that I had previously thought impossible.
The fact that I will celebrate 10 years of recovery next month would have been as unlikely to the person I was 10 years ago as to the person I was 12 years ago, deep in despair and teetering on the edge of mental collapse, convinced that the next glass of wine was the only thing that was keeping me together.
Had I known at the start of my Yoga teacher training that I would emerge from it sober, and smoke free, I would have run from it, terrified of such a future. I am so glad I didn’t have that foresight!
Because, it turns out, far from being terrifying, life in sober recovery has given me more than I could have ever imagined!
We all tend to fear the idea of the unknown, and what lies outside our comfort zones. But so often, we discover that that is exactly where the treasures of life lie.
What have you found in the unknown spaces outside your comfort zone? Share in the comments!