One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps

One Breath at a Time Griffin, a Buddhist meditation teacher and longtime 12-Step practitioner, weaves his personal story of recovery with traditional Buddhist teachings. Full description

Part One

SURRENDER

Steps One through Three can be characterized as the Surrender Steps. First, a surrender to the truth of our disease and our inability to control it; then surrendering to a Higher Power, seeing that we will have to depend on something besides our own will and knowledge to stay sober and develop spiritually.

No one wants to surrender. The word itself implies failure and vanquishment on the field of battle. But as we enter the process, we often find that it's the battle itself--with drugs and alcohol, with the world, with ourselves--that has crippled us in many ways. In this case, surrender becomes preferable to going on fighting.

Surrender is a traditional element of every spiritual journey. Before we can begin to realize our potential, we must break out of limiting concepts of who and what we are and what we think is possible. This may mean giving up long-held beliefs and comfortable behavior patterns. Cynicism or fantasy, fear or control, anger or grief--many of us cling to these patterns and others. As we begin to surrender, we see that we will have to let go of these destructive habits of mind before we can move toward freedom.

The Twelve Steps are a great tool in this movement. While many people tend to think of spirituality as looking up, toward the heights of perfection or saintliness, the Steps remind us that we must first look down, into the darkness of our souls, and see and accept our shadow before we attain an honest and authentic spiritual life. Until we explore the difficult side of our nature, our spiritual work will always lack depth and integrity. Our hearts and minds are complex and mysterious; they can only be known through the heroic work that begins with surrender.

STEP ONE

"We admitted we were powerless over alcohol; that our lives had become unmanageable."

In Twelve Step parlance, we "work" the Steps. There's effort involved, action--we're not just thinking about them or meditating on them--and the work of Step One is quitting drinking--or drugging, overeating, gambling, or whatever activity brought us to this point. We don't just "admit" we've got a problem, we do something about it. Often what precedes that action is what's called a "moment of clarity," that brief flash where we suddenly see the truth of our situation. In that moment we can no longer hide from the suffering we are experiencing--and causing. The light of awareness shines, sometimes blindingly, on our devastated lives.

In Buddhism, this moment of clarity is called "Right View," and is the first stage of the Eightfold Path--the Buddha's practical blueprint for spiritual development. With Right View we more generally see the truth of suffering--our own and that of others, and we also start to develop a vision of the possibility of freedom.

For me, a "moment of clarity" and "Right View" both are pointing to a kind of seeing, something visual. To bring this metaphor together, the type of meditation that I practice and teach is called Vipassana, usually translated as "insight meditation." Vipassana means to "see clearly." Rather than understanding wisdom as an intellectual process, this language points to the senses, grounding our understanding of the truth in the body, rather than the mind. Right View means the blinders are taken away and we see the truth clearly; a moment of clarity is when the lies we've lived with fall away and the stark reality of our disease is revealed to us. This vision is the beginning of recovery and the beginning of the path of awakening.

A BOTTOM

JUNE 6, 1985

Every alcoholic or addict reaches a bottom, a moment when the misery of addiction becomes so overwhelming that it's impossible to ignore any longer. Unfortunately, for me it took another three years after the Cambridge wedding to reach that point. My bottom didn't come in one of my many blackouts or incidents of driving drunk; it didn't come during the violent fights with my girlfriend in my twenties, or when I was arrested for possession of methadrine at nineteen. It came quietly in my own moment of clarity at age thirty-five.

I was standing in the doorway of the Red Robin, a restaurant in a suburban L.A. mini-mall. My friend Steve was making a final trip out to his car after packing up his drums. The last-call lights in the bar shone brightly as the waitress cleaned the semicircular red leatherette booths and blew out the teardrop candles.

"Now I remember why I don't like playing in bars," said Steve. He carried his snare drum case in one hand, his stick bag in the other. "I hate drunks." He waved his sticks toward three stragglers hanging on their barstools. The one on the end was arguing with the bartender about getting one more drink. The other two were squabbling about a spilled beer, which one of them was wiping off with the other's sweater.

I tried to conceal my own state of inebriation, shamefully aware of the cold, green bottle of Heineken I was holding in my hand. I had no idea this would be my last drink of alcohol.

We had just been fired from the gig because I'd tried to throw an unrehearsed band together on a moment's notice out of desperation. Steve, a drummer good enough to do studio work in L.A.'s highly competitive recording scene, had only been playing with me as a favor.

When Steve said he hated drunks, he wasn't talking about me, but I still heard it that way.

For a long time I'd been telling myself that drinking wasn't my problem. Neither was smoking pot, which I did as often as I drank. No, my problems were women, money, depression; my lack of spiritual attainment; my failure as a musician. If only I could solve these issues, I thought, the drinking and drugs wouldn't be a problem.

But I couldn't solve these problems, and they'd only increased over the past three years. After the wedding in Cambridge I ran off with a New Age guru who promised instant enlightenment. After three months of "living on faith" with him in a mad crisscrossing of North America, I bailed out-- losing faith not only in him, but in myself. He had insisted I stop practicing Buddhism, so even that support was lost for a time. While living on the streets of Venice Beach, I fell back more and more into drinking and taking drugs.

Finally I found a job, and then another band. I moved in with a new girlfriend, Margaret. But soon she was accusing me of being an alcoholic. One day I promised her I would stop. That night the drummer in the band got me stoned in the parking lot of the club we were playing. I wasn't drinking, so I thought it was okay. Before long, though, with a beer here and a shot there, I was back to daily drinking, along with the pot.

Margaret persisted in her accusations. Angry with her, I began an affair with the waitress at the Red Robin, and after a few months my life had lost all semblance of sanity: every night I drove Margaret's car for an hour to the Red Robin where I drank beer, smoked pot, snorted cocaine, and made out with the waitress in her blue Corvette on my breaks. Oh yeah, I also played old rock 'n' roll songs for a bored audience.

And all the while I was thinking that I was a spiritual person.

When the band wanted to go on the road, I quit and tried to hold the same gig with Steve on drums and some pickup musicians. We went in without rehearsing and quickly got fired.

Although I was still unconvinced that drugs and drinking were my real problem, it seemed like my whole life had become too much of a mess. I had to stop.

I was lucky. When I woke up the morning after the Red Robin, my hangover was slight but my resolve was strong. That first surrender--the first of many--seemed effortless. I'd finally given up fighting the idea that I was an alcoholic. I felt the great burden of addiction and compulsion lifted and a confidence in my decision. Somehow I knew it would stick. This was one of those mysterious moments of grace that come to so many recovering alcoholics. I had no idea where my life was headed, but I knew instinctively that I was going in the right direction, that I'd be okay.

I was wary of joining a Twelve Step program--I wasn't much of a joiner--but I felt that it would be unlucky at least, dangerous at worst, to refuse to at least check it out. While I felt confident in my commitment to stop drinking and using, I'd seen myself through enough binge cycles to know that there's always the possibility of falling back.

Still, a couple of weeks passed before I went to my first Twelve Step gathering, and then only because Margaret was going. I shook no one's hand and didn't raise my own hand; I took no phone numbers and spoke to no one but Margaret. I was there; that was going to have to be enough for now. A banner with the Steps printed on it hung by the podium where the speakers stood. I read through them, trying to figure out if the program made any sense. I saw Step Eleven: "Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him." So, these people were into meditation, too. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad. Meditation was something I trusted. I first heard about it when the Beatles got involved with Hinduism in the 1960s, and anything the Beatles did was good enough for me. I didn't get around to actually learning to meditate for years, but when I did my addictive impulses served me well for once, as I stuck religiously to the twice-daily routine. Soon I discovered Buddhism and embarked on a series of meditation retreats, culminating in the three-month silent intensive. The irony of my arrival at the retreat with a terrific hangover was lost on me at the time.

In the years since, things had slipped a little, what with the drinking, drugs, and general disaster of my life. But now I got back to meditating more regularly. These Twelve Step people didn't seem very spiritual, really; for one thing, they couldn't sit still during the meetings. And they were always talking. Buddhists are very good at stillness and silence, and that's what I thought of as spiritual. But the alcoholics did seem kind of happy, and they knew how to stay sober. I decided to take the helpful information and try to integrate it into what I thought was my more sophisticated Buddhist practice.

POWERLESSNESS OVER ALCOHOL AND DRUGS

At that first gathering I bought a copy of Alcoholics Anonymous (known as the Big Book) and began to study the Steps. Step One, "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol; that our lives had become unmanageable," took time to sink in.

I'd always worked at controlling my drinking and drugging, often counting drinks, even counting hits of weed. In one band I was known as "Mr. Toke" because of my habit of stopping rehearsal to take a single drag off my little pipe. It always seemed to me that if I was able to moderate and (usually) control how I smoked dope and drank, it meant I didn't have a real problem.

Because I was often working at night and didn't have the constitution to drink constantly, I rarely drank during the day. But, right after breakfast I would smoke pot to get myself ready to write songs. Writing and practicing the guitar, I would maintain my high until dinnertime, then stop. I wouldn't smoke again until after the first set of my band's gig. That way I'd have the energy to get through the night. After the second or third set I'd start drinking beer, keeping close track of how many I'd had and timing it so that I wouldn't be too drunk to play the last set. After the gig, if there were any kind of party, I'd drink Tequila with my beer or snort cocaine if it was around, always punctuating everything with more pot.

After getting sober I began to see that the very need to try to control showed my powerlessness. If I didn't have a problem, I wouldn't have to think about controlling--counting, pacing, mixing proper proportions. And then there were the times when I didn't control myself, nights when a feeling came over me like a tidal wave, a craving so strong there seemed no choice but to drown myself in drink. And I would, going wild in a kind of hysteria until I'd blacked out, like the night at the wedding in Cambridge. This happened many times over my twenty year drinking career. Afterward I'd be wiped out and need days to recover. Then I'd start the cycle of control, pacing, mixing again.

One friend went through a similar cycle. A bright, stylish woman in her late fifties, Paulette's son had died in a drunk-driving accident some years ago. While she'd been a serious meditator and worked with her grief in various groups and workshops, she'd never dealt with her own alcoholism. Recently she wrote me an e-mail about her struggle. "Most of the time I have no trouble with alcohol. Occasionally, something happens and I drink with a feeling of omnipotence and abandon. Such was last evening."

"Omnipotence and abandon," that's just how it feels--until you do something you regret. She goes on. "At a party last night, under the influence of too much champagne, I revealed someone's secret to those who should not have heard it. So a huge can of worms is open at my doing . . . Over my life, there have been far too many mornings filled with remorse and no memory. Even of last night, there are things I don't recall, but I completely recall this inappropriate secret revelation--and the tone and attitude with which it was done--and I just ache with self-loathing and guilt and shame. I realize I must not drink."

This note captures so well the darkness and despair of a bottom. When Paulette shared this with me, I felt strangely happy because I could see what she couldn't: that rather than a terrible failure, what she was experiencing was the beginning of a new life. With grace and luck, things would only get better from here.

DENIAL AND PURIFICATION

Denial is what keeps us from taking the First Step. Until we acknowledge that we have a problem--that indeed we are powerless--we can't even begin to recover.