Core yoga maple grove1/6/2024 ![]() Yoga is a part of the reason that I was able to realize all that the Twelve Steps have to offer, and I believe strongly that yoga is indispensable in the treatment of addiction. My 23-year relationship with yoga began the year I got sober for the final time in June of 1991. In my opinion, this is the hopeful result that people refer to as the miracle of the Twelve Steps. You might say I had become disinterested in drugs and alcohol. I no longer desired to use nor did I have any charge around it. Eventually, I woke up one day to the realization that I could not remember the last time I actually thought about using drugs or alcohol. Day by day, I continued to do the work and show up. Now, I finally had something that I wanted to hold onto. All this time I had been kicking and screaming. There is fear in this stage, and many people get stuck here. I knew I wanted to be sober, but now I was concerned about whether I could sustain it long-term. When these horrible dreams finally stopped after months, I realized that I actually wanted to be sober, that it had become important to me. I had a series of nightmares in which I used drugs and felt tremendous remorse and shame. This was a very slippery phase, during which I was mostly thinking, "There has to be some other way." Then something rather amazing took place. In the second stage, I had developed some concept of how to go about being sober, but still was not sure that this life was for me. ![]() In the first stage, I knew I needed to get sober but had no idea how to, nor did I necessarily want to. ![]() So much was improved, but there was a long way to go before I was truly out of the woods. Yet, I would spend the next 10 years of my recovery still mired in addictive thinking and addictive behaviors such as gambling, smoking cigarettes and forming codependent relationships. I worked with a sponsor to go through the Twelve Steps, and my life got significantly better. I first got sober and began a "one day at a time" approach to abstinence from drugs and alcohol. I tell people that my story is really a story of recovery within recovery. My entry point for the profound shift in thinking that has taken place within me was Hazelden Betty Ford in Minnesota, where I spent 40 days or so back in 1989. I come from a background of severe drug addiction (alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, freebase, and heroin) and now have over 23 years of continuous recovery.
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