Awakening: Buddha continued

If you’re at the beginning of your recovery journey, it may seem impossible to access this part of you. But the reason you’re here is because you already did. It’s because you felt some small glimmer of hope—maybe born out of desperation—that there might be a way out, that things could change if you took wise action and reached out for help. Maybe it feels impossible to have faith in this part of you, to believe that you have the potential to be someone capable of wisdom and kindness and ethical deeds, to believe you can be the source of your own healing and awakening. But don’t worry. Recovery doesn’t happen all at once. The path is a lifetime of individual steps. It’s not only the Buddha’s example that shows us the way, it’s also the examples of people in our recovery communities who have gone through what we have and made it through to the other side. They show us we can, too.

So what does the Buddha have to do with recovery? There are two ways in which we use the word Buddha, which means “awakened.” First, it is the title given to a person named Siddhartha Gautama, a man who lived in modern-day Nepal and India roughly 2,500 years ago. After many years of meditation and ethical practice, he discovered a path that leads to liberation or awakening and the end of suffering, and that’s why Siddhartha came to be known as the Buddha.

The second usage of the word Buddha follows from the first. Buddha can refer not only to the historical figure but also to the idea of awakening: the fact that each of us has within ourselves the potential to awaken to the same understanding as the original Buddha. When we take refuge in the Buddha, we take refuge not in Siddhartha as a man, but in the fact that he was able to find freedom from his suffering. He was human just like us, and experienced suffering just like us. He found liberation from it, and so can we.