WEEKLY MEDITATION
Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.
-Pema Chodron
Recovering from addiction is, above all, a learning process. Granted it is as much of an emotional learning process as it is an intellectual one, we can’t simply stop living with our addictions, we have to learn how live without them. And once we accept that we have to learn something, it means admitting that we don’t currently know the thing we must learn. We learned to use the substances and behaviors that formed our addictions to regulate our lives in different ways. We may also have had to learn the skills necessary to keep our addictions going—often a frightening set of survival skills that separates us from the ability to live a conventional or conscious life. So as we face our addictions, we may also need to face the fact that we don’t know how to regulate the parts of our psyche that relied on them. But in embracing the not knowing, we invite the possibility of learning new ways to embrace life and heal the parts of ourselves that rely on the mechanics of addiction to function.
