Lost in Thought

For the past few weeks, I've been meditating. Not sitting around on my porch or anything....I mean going to organized, guided meditation. I've been going once a week for ninety minutes, about half of which is Buddha talk and since that's not really my thing, I meditate extra during those parts. I'm sure I'm doing it wrong, but I'm finding it helpful. I'm not emptying my mind, if that's what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm just re-arranging the things in it and prioritizing them, and that's good enough for me right now.

I'm not certain if it's part of the "official" meditation instructions, but each time I've been, as the leader of the group guides us into wherever it is we're headed as we're sitting there with our eyes closed, he says "nothing needs to be done right now." Every time he says it, I can feel hot tears pressing against the inside of my eyelids. Because recovery is hard. Really hard, like full-time job hard. I spend a lot of time thinking about meetings - which ones to go to, which ones I like, which ones I don't...and that's on top of my regular job. One of the recurring things I hear in meetings is "if you work a tenth as hard on recovery as you did on drinking, you'll make it" so I must have been working REALLY hard all those years.

Like any normal person with a job, I do find it hard sometimes to find the time to do the things that help me re-set my life when things get a little messy and history shows that if I don't do that, the consequences get ugly.  So I'm taking a few days and going to the woods to unplug, to sit and be quiet, to breathe in and out and be conscious of my breath. Nothing has to be done right now.