Have you ever noticed that nobody you know looks like the people in the “inspirational” images you see online or on TV? You know the ones: the handsome, toothy, broadly smiling men and women with perfect hair that ride around in convertibles with the top down and thrust their arms triumphantly toward the sky, ... Read More
Think Big, Start Small: Building a Sustainable Spiritual Practice
We live in an age when all the corners of the world are talking to each other—even if they don’t always agree on much. That wasn’t true for most of human history. Until the last 500 years or so, it was hard for places that were far apart to communicate. It took a long time to cross the oceans in what today ... Read More
The Gifts of Light and Laughter
I don’t suppose that the poet William Wordsworth had the holiday season in mind when he wrote these famous words: The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; After all, he was writing in the nineteenth century, long before the commercialization of ... Read More
Guarding Your Sobriety through the Holidays
"There’s no place like home for the holidays," according to the song made famous by Perry Como in the 1950s and played every holiday season ever since: Oh, there's no place like home for the holidays 'Cause no matter how far away you roam If you wanna to be happy in a million ways For the holidays you ... Read More
What I Am Thankful For
As we approach Thanksgiving Day once again—the national gateway to holiday madness and family food fights over football and politics—I’m especially thankful for all of the many animals that have blessed my life, domesticated and wild. (I ask forgiveness from the turkeys about to make the ultimate sacrifice ... Read More
12-Step and Non-12-Step Approaches to Recovery: What’s the Difference?
How do we know when it’s a beautiful day? What makes us say so? I stood on the lawn the other evening and wondered. Why was I responding so deeply, why was I so moved? And why did I feel so much lighter, like a burden had been lifted? When I looked around, the answer seemed obvious: beauty, harmony, and ... Read More
Yoga for Healing and Wholeness
“Stinkin’ thinkin’.” I remember hearing that phrase for the first time from a friend who was in a couple of different 12-Step groups. The saying points to something also understood in many spiritual circles, that the thinking mind—the part of us that lives in words and tries to figure things out—often gets us ... Read More
Epigenetics and Recovery
We live in interesting times in which things are changing faster than we can sometimes keep track of them. One of the places where this occurs is the field of medicine. The changes that are happening and about to happen there are truly amazing, and are bringing great hope to many that cures of diseases such ... Read More
Judaism and Recovery
In the interest of full disclosure, I am not Jewish; but having written here previously about aspects of Christian, Buddhist and Taoist spirituality as it impacts issues of addiction and recovery, and given how many members of the Jewish faith there are in the U.S. and the New York area, it only seems right ... Read More
Mindfulness Apps for Recovery
There’s an old story that turns up all over the world that goes something like this: A young man (it’s an old story, so it’s almost always a man) travels miles over rough terrain and endures all kinds of hardships to reach a legendary temple or secret group of great spiritual masters. Often the climbing of ... Read More