A couple weeks ago, 9 1/2 months into recovery, I sat down at a table in a Japanese restaurant to await a dinner companion. I was in a great mood...excited about eating sushi, excited about spending time with my friend and going to the movies, excited that it was a Friday night. I opened the menu and immediately my eyes latched onto "hot sake". Wham -- there I was hit with my first craving since cleaning up. I was consumed with WANT and got lost briefly in a little fantasy, watching it happen -- euphoric recall and all. It caught me really off-guard and my immediate reaction was fear. A WTF-where-did-this-come-from? kind of fear.
I babbled here a few months back about taking to mindfulness. Learning to disidentify with thoughts, feelings, sensations -- watch them come, maybe hang out for a while, then be on their way. Bringing it to bear on depression, anxiety, anger, reactivity...learning not to let my mind have its way with me. I believed that it would be a great skill to have in the face of an urge to use and had hoped that if/when one did hit I'd be able to experience it with, as they say, "spacious awareness". Well, it wasn't immediate, as I wasn't at all in a mindful state when opening that menu, but before long it became clear that this craving was nothing special and nothing to fear. I saw it as "craving is happening" rather than "I am craving". Then I deconstructed it into a physical urge, a feeling of want, and a collection of thoughts, taking none of them personally, experiencing them non-judgmentally, even "pre-conceptually" (just stuff happening). Not getting hooked by it, and not pushing it away; just letting it be and staying present with it. Suddenly it seemed like anything else I've been learning to experience mindfully in recent months and it receded from the forefront of awareness, became just a subset of what was happening in that moment. Shortly the rest of the menu and the art on the walls became more interesting and my urge to drink vanished. I greeted my companion when she arrived and we had a lovely meal. We went to see My Week with Marilyn, which seemed to us a splendid flick.
Mindfulness rocks.
