Recovery Slogans: One Day at a Time

Just keep your head where your feet are

I read Ram Dass’s ‘Be Here Now’ when I was in my late teens/early 20’s. It’s about spirituality, yoga, and meditation. It’s about being present in one’s body. I’ve never been a yoga person, but I’ve always been spiritual. I eventually learned how to practice Transcendental Meditation and meditated twice a day for about 25 to 30 years. The subject book was right up my alley, so to speak.

. . . allowing my consciousness to run ahead of or behind my actual bodily presence affected my moods, thoughts, and emotions.

The main impression I took from it was that I could control my consciousness and where it existed at any given time. Later, in Al-Anon, I learned how allowing my consciousness to run ahead of or behind my actual bodily presence affected my moods, thoughts, and emotions. It was one of the first steps in learning how to identify my “piece of the pie,” learning how I contributed to my own misery and identifying my part in unsatisfying relationships.

Don’t get me wrong. Metaphysics has never been a meeting topic in Al-Anon, but it’s there for the learning if you’re wired that way. In the context of my recovery journey, ‘Be Here Now’ was an introduction to “self-regulation” and Al-Anon gave me the tools, mainly the Slogan “One Day At a Time” — to self-regulate if and when I wanted to. It took me eons to get to the point where I actually wanted to self-regulate, heh-heh :-)

One Day At a Time NOT in Practice

The best way to tell you how I practice this slogan is to show you a slice of how I didn’t practice it in the past.

I have a very special relationship with my mother. Even though she was my “abandoner” in the past, we’ve healed our way through that part of our history. She is now my best friend and my primary helper in dealing with the limitations of my handicap and how it affects some of my daily activities. We’ve been living together for about 11 years now.

The thought of losing my mom used to fill me with terror and fling me roughly into panicky crying jags, my mind filled with dread and phantasmagorical visions of me wearing rags, living on the street, and begging for alms. Like a character in Oliver! “Please sir. May I have some more?” And those thoughts visited me often, so I had regular crying jags. A lot of them.

The thought of losing my mom used to fill me with terror and fling me roughly into panicky crying jags . . .

I stayed on this mental masturbatory path until I decided that I wasn’t getting anything out of it and chose to put my consciousness elsewhere. And the best place to put it was in today, specifically, where I was at any given exact moment: what I was doing, who I was with (if anyone), etc. I endeavored to keep my head where my feet were.

Now Comes the Doing

Following are some techniques I use to pull myself back from the abysses (and I have several that torture me if I allow them to, not just the mom-dying thing).

Technique no. 1

Because I must know where my body actually is before I can bring my mind back to it, I situate body in space and time — wherever I am when I’m having those frightening thought s— by focusing my five senses with intent:

• I gaze intently at how the wind blows through the leaves on the trees outside my office window
• I listen carefully to the sound of the lawnmower in my neighbor’s yard
• I breathe deeply taking in the scent of the chilli simmering on the stove
• I relish the touch of the delicate fluff of my cat’s fur against my hand
• I carefully taste the different flavors and textures of the tangy tomato salad I’m eating

Technique no. 2

I imagine that my day is book-ended by two pillow scenarios: the pillow I lift my head from when I wake up in the morning and the pillow I lay my head on when I go to sleep at night. I don’t allow myself to think of anything that happened before I wake from the morning pillow or what might happen after my head hits the evening pillow.

Technique no. 3

For those thoughts I project w-a-a-a-a-a-y into the future, which can sometimes leave me paralyzed by anxiety, I “shrink” myself. I say something like this: “My name is Lisa. I’m in the bedroom of my home in Springfield, which is in Pennsylvania in the United States on planet Earth in our solar system in our galaxy.” With each “re-location” (in italics), I visualize where I am now and then where I move to (e.g., from bedroom to entire house to town to state, etc.) As my consciousness travels to increasingly larger locations, I can better see what I minuscule speck I am in this universe of ours. My thoughts — and hence my fear and anxiety — shrink and I can finally think, “I’m OK now.” This technique is a favorite of mine :-)

Technique no. 4

For a quicker version to recover “mom’s-dead” crying jags — you know, in case I’m driving, in public with friends — I say to myself, “I’m at Applebee’s having dinner with Mike and just for right now, my mom’s alive and I’m fine.”

It’s a tricky thing, this bringing myself back into my body. But it’s much better than the alternative, which is getting drunk with emotion over some future scenario I’ve conjured in my mind. Although I used an extreme example for illustrative purposes, these techniques work on smaller, albeit still troublesome, emotions, too :-)