in these situations can help prevent relapse from happening.
I had searched classes, workshops, retreats, and bookstores in my quest for a process, a method, or an approach to combining hatha yoga, yoga philosophy, and the twelve-step recovery path. This combination felt so natural that I was sure others must have already trodden this path and made those discoveries public. While there were a few books and several programs, all of which helped me in my recovery, I felt that they were mostly too esoteric to help others new to the subject. I then took all that I had read and learned and incorporated it into a more basic approach in my yoga classes and workshops. Over the past several years I have brought yoga classes into halfway houses, detention facilities, and church basements as well as yoga studios. Combining the two philosophies with the physical postures and breath work, I have developed a teaching style that brings them all together.
This book will discuss and detail the yogic concepts of the gunas (emotional qualities) and the doshas (physical and mental qualities). It will explain them in sufficient detail so the reader can use them to begin to evaluate his or her own state of being. This understanding will contribute to helpful identification of the optimum soothing techniques for each unique person. Evaluation questionnaires are included. I have found that knowing myself better, having tools to interpret the patterns of my thoughts and to distinguish what I was feeling, was a key to self-care. Using these tools, I was able to move from the thoughts in my head into the feelings in my heart through compassionate self-love. I was finding a way to both know myself and accept myself the way I am. I was better able to focus on my self-care by using these tools and making these skills and habits more effective and enjoyable, while developing a sustainable system for my personal, unique being.
The twelve-step program leads us into and through the emotional and spiritual damages of addiction to a greater sense of well-being. As one develops an awareness of a Higher Power and gains the trust and faith to depend on it, healing takes on a deeper and more profound nature. With the dislodging of past wrongs and an awareness of personal traits, coping styles, and weaknesses, one can make better choices about future behavior and take actions so as to avoid repeating past errors and wrongs. This journey of emotional and spiritual healing includes development of, or reacquaintance with, certain ethical and moral values. The three basic values taught in the twelve-step programs are honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness. There are other principles such as service and working with others that are also crucial to recovery. These basic standards are expanded upon in the philosophy of yoga.
A study of the various yogas and the limbs of raja yoga enhances, endorses, and expands the ideals that are presented in recovery meetings. In raja yoga one learns of the restraints (yamas), the observances (niyamas), breath work, letting go, contemplation, meditation, and union with one’s Higher Power in addition to the hatha practices. The various classical, well-known yogas—karma, bhakti, mantra, jnana, and raja—each relate strongly to a piece of the twelve-step recovery programs. Karma yoga is the yoga of action and consequences (Steps Four through Seven and Step Ten). Bhakti yoga is the yoga of passionate devotion to a Higher Power (Steps Two and Twelve). Mantra yoga is a yoga of sound or phrase repetition to achieve union with one’s Higher Power (prayers and sayings). Jnana yoga is the yoga of reality and study (working all the steps with a sponsor). Raja yoga is the path leading to bliss and union with the divine (the steps and traditions augmented with physical recovery). The similarities between aspects of the twelve-step programs and each of the various types of yoga allow for the practice of yoga to support recovery, while deepening and expanding on the systems of belief one learns in the rooms of recovery.
Yoga gives us specific tools to find our true selves. Breath work is critical. It is the foundation of all yogic practices, including the asana. Breathing in a deep and sustained manner has beneficial neurological effects. It can change the physical responses to a situation from an instinctual “fight-or-flight” reaction to a more measured and thought-out response. This is a vital change for people who have poor impulse control or the inability to find a mature solution to an immediate problem. Further in meditation, investigating how the mind works, how one’s own mind works, is a step in the yoga path. Are you a person who ruminates obsessively on the past? Does your mind travel into the future, anticipating events, or fantasizing about life as it could have been?
Learning what your particular mind does—the ruts of past experiences it travels through, and the habits of future travel it may take—is useful to know. Self-reflection can offer some insight, and this insight can then offer choices on how to act or how to redirect thinking into healthier avenues. Getting bound up in guilt from past actions, or becoming mentally involved in some aspect of a future event that may or may not occur, can be habits that bring about wrong thinking (“stinking thinking,” as some in recovery call it). These mental states can lead to relapse. Breath work, practicing the yama of nonattachment, taking a physical inventory of the feeling tones in the body, and meditation are all tools that are compatible with programs of recovery, regardless of the manifestation—gambling, relationships, consumerism, or drugs. The mental gymnastics and delusions of addiction are very similar in every addict.
Many inpatient recovery centers offer yoga as part of their treatment plans. There are nonprofit organizations that bring yoga to the incarcerated, the institutionalized, and the disenfranchised. There are programs for at-risk youth and juvenile offenders. The benefits of yoga are being accepted in more and more mainstream locations. This book is for those who want to know a little more about how and why this philosophy is compatible with the goals of health and recovery. It is a guide for people who are in recovery or have left a recovery center and want to continue the practice on their own. Each chapter goes into a yoga practice in detail, drawing on the relationship between yoga and recovery programs. Exercises, breath practices, and hatha yoga postures are offered at the end of each section. By practicing these, the reader will gain a working knowledge of the tools and benefits of this ancient and amazing resource: yoga.
introduction notes
1 Birnberg, Robert. 2006. Yoga, Habit, and Freedom from Addiction [Online]. Available from www.longexhale.com (accessed October 2010).
2 Melemis, Steven M. Recovery Skills [Online]. Available from www.addictionsandrecovery.org (accessed February 2011).
My Story
San Francisco in the late 1960s. What a place and an era for an alienated, frightened, headstrong teenager. With the heart of a socially conscious rebel and the dependencies of an addict, I was let loose in a city that had the answer to my fears. As early as ninth grade, I got into pot and diet pills; the summer before high school I joined protest marches and drank red wine; high school added acid and other drugs to the mix, and it was off to the races.
Like many, but not all, addicted people, I came from an emotionally impaired home. We moved frequently during my preteen years. My parents were teachers, and we moved from country to country as they obtained contracts with various schools and universities. We children learned to adapt to different countries and languages, never forging close ties due to cultural differences, lack of skills, and the knowledge that we would be leaving in a short while. My mother was an active alcoholic in countries that permitted drinking, and a dry drunk in countries that did not. My father was an angry man who was deeply disenchanted with his career, his family, and his life. My parents were brilliant people, loved by their friends, but unskilled at being parents—part of their tender flaws. That made raising children a challenge for them. They often lived countries apart from each other, and this was the case when I entered my thirteenth year in northern California—the summer that I dove into the world of alcohol and drugs. My mother was searching for recovery herself—a painful journey she did not fully embrace until shortly before I left home. During those years my brother, nine years younger, and my sister, only eighteen months younger, were each as different from me as siblings could be, but I tried to play house and create
