The Symphony Orchestra of the Serenity Prayer on Zoom #health #holistic

Virtual AA meetings. Here we are. Well, actually, here I am and there you are. Instead of sitting side-by-side in a Church basement, we are sitting face-to-face from far away. The video transmission of my face rides on rapid data that translates into pulses of light and electricity streaming from my computer to yours. At least that’s what I read when I Googled, “How does the internet work?”At the beginning, I wasn’t sure if virtual meetings could work. Spirituality via Technology? It had never been done in AA. What I came to discover, and I hope you have too, is they do. The program and community found a way. We couldn’t change what was happening in the world, but we had the wisdom to know we could change how meetings worked.In the meetings we once knew, I especially treasured the ending in prayer combined with physical embrace. The encompassing circle of faces, bodies and hands being held made me feel one with every person in the meeting – almost as if there was a rapid transmission translated into pulses of light and electricity streaming from my hand to yours. Perhaps things haven’t changed much at all.There is a setting on Zoom where the full screen always shows who is speaking and you see the rest of the attendees in little screens above. At the end of every meeting, people unmute themselves to say the Serenity Prayer together which allows for every person to flash briefly across the full screen.When the prayer begins, the different faces that flicker before my eyes represent every facet of human life: young and old, women and men, Trans, Gender Variant, Black, Asian, LatinX, White, rapper, punk rocker, artist, lawyer, nurse, garbage man, CEO, grocery store worker, student, bicyclist, jogger, comedian on the weekends, surfer, wife, husband, brother, sister, daughter, ex-con, son, father, mother, cousin, neighbor, beginner, old timer, comeback, day counter, day one. Right before me, an entire world of sobriety fits neatly inside of a box. As it does, I hear the most beautiful music to my ears in the most imperfect fashion.The Serenity Prayer is said in “unison” but is off-key, jumbled, ill-timed, and completely out of sync due to everyone’s different internet lag times. In this perceivably flawed rhythm of voices, I hear a perfect symphony. Each of these voices turn into instruments of God. The high voices sound off like trumpets. The low voices pound like a bass drum. Different quick voices dance together like piano keys and I hear a sharp, clean tap, tap, tap. A hopeful voice comes in like a slow and soulful trombone. A sad voice plays like a woody, wafting, violin. Someone who is happy sounds like the pull of a harp string. Someone who speaks quietly and shyly, becomes a soft note from a flute.Behind it all, the conductor, a meeting chairperson, watches us in concert, no longer reaching for each other’s hands inside of a circle but reaching for each other’s eyes, ears and heart inside of a square. I travel to these meetings no longer on the New York Subway but instead on the cold keys of my keyboard riding the zips and zaps of technology. However, the warmth and true connection that penetrates through my screen during the end of every meeting brings me to a visceral feeling.Some days when I see and hear the Symphony Orchestra of the Serenity Prayer on Zoom, I cry at the beauty of our perseverance. Other days, I smile as wide as the web itself.The Serenity PrayerGod grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change.The courage to change the things we can.And the wisdom to know the difference.

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Accepting Help as a High-Functioning Addict #health #holistic

When you’re a high-functioning addict, it can be easy to deny your disease. After all, things aren’t falling apart. You still have your job, your family, your nice house — from the outside everything looks great. Maybe you’ve wondered if you’re drinking a bit too much, or you spouse has said something along those lines. That might be enough to get you into treatment, but to really better your life you need to accept your disease in order to change.It sounds simple, but sometimes accepting your weaknesses is even harder than putting down drugs or alcohol. You’re a successful person and have been told for years that you’re doing well. You have control over your career and finances. So, recognizing that you no longer have control over your drinking or drug use can feel like a direct affront to who you are. That’s where treatment for high-powered individuals comes in.Getting Honest, If Only With YourselfEven if you can bluff or badger your way through business meetings, you need to bring your true, honest self to your recovery. If you are putting up facades or trying to project an image, you’ll only be cheating yourself. In order to really reap the benefits of recovery you must be willing to be vulnerable, something that is very uncomfortable for many high-powered individuals.Start by asking yourself, “Who am I?” The challenge here is getting beyond the title on your office door. You probably have many external qualifiers that you can use to tell people who you are: I’m a CEO, a CFO, an athlete, an investor, a founder. But when those are stripped back, who are you really? What is important to you?Answering this question can take time because we’re so used to being focused on external qualifiers. Take some time to think about this and mull it over. Then, jot down your thoughts in a notebook or journal.Let Go Of Your EgoSometimes, the ego gets a bad rep. The ego is focused on the self. It drives you to go what’s best for you. Your ego tells you how good you are, and pushes you to be even better. There’s nothing wrong with that — it can help you achieve great things.However, sometimes you need to push your ego aside. Even though addiction is a disease just like any other, there continues to be a lot of shame around it. Because of that, your ego may resist labeling yourself as an addict. Your ego might tell you that you don’t need treatment. It might say that you can figure this all out on your own.This is a case where you have to rise above your ego. Again, it’s time for vulnerability. It will be uncomfortable to put your ego aside and humble accept that you need help — but it will lead to you having your best life in the long run.Find the Right CareAs a boss, you know the importance of having the right people around you. Without a good team you wouldn’t be as successful as you are. The same is true when it comes to finding a treatment center.High-powered individuals and executives need a certain approach to drug and alcohol treatment. It’s going to look very different from treatment for a young adult who is down on her luck. Executive treatment plans involve you — because you are a vested player in your recovery. They empower you to make choices and continue to live a comfortable lifestyle, while also challenging you to take a hard look at your behaviors and patterns.Addiction is a disease that can affect anyone, but how exactly it plays out depends on your life. Finding a team that is experienced in working with high-functioning addicts can help you to approach treatment and recovery in a way that fits into your life; rather than expect you to give up everything you’re familiar with in order to get treatment.Sober Partners provides residential treatment in Newport Beach, California. Get more information at their website, by calling 855-982-3247, or on Facebook.

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Damaged from the Git-Go! #health #holistic

“Have you seen the Stromberg baby?” were the first words my father heard when the nurse attending my mother hustled out of the maternity ward delivery room. She was talking to a co-worker who was wandering down the crowded hallway.Rightfully alarmed, my father darted out of the expecting parent’s waiting room and confronted the agitated nurse.“What’s wrong with my baby?” he nervously blurted out. Realizing how her high-pitched statement must have scared him, the nurse took my father’s arm and eased him back into the lounge.“You have a son,” she informed him, “and he was born with his eyes wide open! The biggest eyes I’ve ever seen on a newborn.” My dad was overjoyed; a son is what he had been hoping for, although he told my mother that he really didn’t care what sex it was as long as the baby was healthy. The nurse had more information she needed to share with my father.“The reason your son’s eyes were so large and wide open was he came out with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and he was turning blue. He was likely in some kind of distress.” Shaken by this news, my dad wanted to know if the baby was okay.“Yes," the nurse assured him. "The doctor was able to untangle the cord and the baby had begun breathing normally,” but there was another problem my father needed to be made aware of; my mother had developed a case of impetigo, a very contagious skin infection and she needed to be put into isolation until the condition cleared up, usually in a week or so.This meant that I would have no contact with my mother during the first crucial week of my life. Maternal-infant bonding, I’ve learned, influences the child's psychological and physical development. I would likely be affected by these seemingly minor events for the rest of my life. I was damaged from the git-go!Possibly out of guilt from the circumstances of my birth and her debilitating skin disease, my mother became overly protective of me. I was the Baby Jesus in her eyes, which is strange because we are Jewish. As a young child, the two most significant things she tried to instill in me was the belief that I was destined for greatness, and that her medicine chest contained pills and potions that could cure whatever ailed me. Other than that, I lived a pretty normal life until my late teens when I fell in love with drugs and alcohol. My early adult years were spent in the entertainment business where consumption of drugs and alcohol seemed the norm. I had a great deal of success and a few failures, but during all times, I drank and used with increasing disregard to the consequences that began to befall me.After I hit my bottom, scrounged around there for a while, and eventually got my life back on track in my 12-step recovery program, I was introduced to a strange psychotherapist who said he could help me understand why I behaved in ways that were extremely self-destructive. He specialized in why people became alcoholics and drug addicts, and assured me he had a “method” that cured alcoholics.He seemed like an interesting enough guy, albeit a little out there, until he told me that all addicts and alcoholics were predisposed for addiction at birth! That many alcoholics were “blue babies,” like me, who were born with the umbilical cord wrapped around their necks, hence depriving them of life-giving oxygen. He further went on to explain that these people spend their lives, in effect, gasping for air or anything that makes them feel safe and alive.As if that wasn’t enough of a whacko theory, he then outlined the treatment he devised for treating alcoholics. Now, here’s where it gets surreal… After explaining his beyond far-fetched theory, and with permission, he hypnotizes his patients, walks around behind them and puts them in a rear choke hold, just like you see in an MMA bout. He continues this assault until the patient passes out, at which time the good doctor talks his subject through what he calls “the rebirthing process,” during which he relieves them of the trauma they experienced traveling down the birth canal and replacing that traumatic journey a euphoric new experience of birth. Koo Koo right?So what is the point of this crazy story?Well, in the course of my 37 plus years of recovery I’ve heard many explanations of why people become alcoholics. Childhood abuse, low self-esteem, abandonment, poverty, heredity, and any number of explanations and excuses. For me, the simple truth is I don’t know why I became an alcoholic, but I did. Fortunately, I found a way to put my disease in remission, subject to my maintenance of the solution I found in my 12-step recovery program. As a guy named Louie from New Joisy once said to me after our AA meeting, “Alcoholics Anonymous woiks, and it woiks good!”

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3 Ways to Give Yourself Grace in Recovery #health #holistic

Early on during the pandemic, you might have had grand ideas of what you would do with all your expected free time. With fewer places to be, you might learn to play the piano or finally delve into that workout routine. Maybe you’d read all those self-help books or attend more virtual meetings. You would do everything you dreamed about during treatment.Since then, you’ve probably realized that you’re not quite as productive as you thought you’d be during quarantine. Whether you’re well-established in recovery or newly sober, this time of uncertainty can be overwhelming, so it’s important to allow yourself the grace and understanding to acknowledge that sometimes, progress is slow in recovery.There are periods when — even without a pandemic — recovery happens at a slower pace than you would like. That’s all right. Here’s three steps to find peace with the pace of your progress.Give Yourself Space and GracePicture this: your friend is newly sober. She’s doing a great job of living life without drugs or alcohol. But, she’s frustrated. She wants a better job and a nice person to go on dates with. She beats herself up when she makes small mistakes, like falling into old patterns of self-sabotage.What would you tell her? You would probably celebrate the progress she’s made, and encourage her to be patient. Now, put yourself in her shoes. When you’re looking at your own progress it’s easy to be self-critical and frustrated rather than celebratory and empathetic.Grace means “courteous goodwill.” We often extend grace to others, but forget to save some for ourselves. Instead of understanding that we’ll make mistakes even when we’re trying our best, we beat ourselves up over missteps. Next time you find yourself turning a critical eye inward, replace that criticism with grace, telling yourself you’re doing great.Take A Step BackWhen you’re living recovery each and every day, the small changes you’re making become your norm. You might not see the healthy glow on your cheeks, or recognize how amazing it is that you no longer live a life ruled by cravings.Taking a step back to see how far you’ve come can help you celebrate the real progress you’ve made. This is best done using hard, concrete facts that you can look at. Scroll through your social media and see how the image that you project today is different from a year ago; look at your finances and celebrate that they’re no longer in disarray; read through an old journal and recognize the patterns you used to repeat.Recovery takes a lot of hard work. It’s important to acknowledge that and appreciate everything that you have done for yourself.Give Yourself Permission To Be SatisfiedPersonal growth is important — it’s great to always be striving for the next rung on your ladder to success. But sometimes, continuously moving can be exhausting. It’s okay to have periods when you move forward more slowly, or just stay put for a bit.This is especially important during the COVID crisis. Everyone around the globe is dealing with a lot of stress right now. There’s the physical health crisis, and the accompanying mental health crisis brought on by fear and uncertainty. Many people are dealing with financial uncertainty as well.You might find that now isn’t a time to grow — no matter how well-intentioned you were about those guitar lessons or that new knitting kit. During these uncertain times, just surviving and keeping your recovery going is something to celebrate. When things return to normal you can focus again on your next big goal.Now, more than ever, we’re forced to face the fact that we can’t always control what’s happening in our lives. Still, you can focus on small, daily habits that help keep you clean and sober. Tend to the essentials for your recovery, whether that’s meditation, exercise, meetings or mentorship, but give yourself permission to let the other things go. After all, they’ll all be there again when life — sooner or later — gets back to normal.Learn more about Oceanside Malibu at https://ift.tt/2YrFRKm. Reach Oceanside Malibu by phone at (866) 738-6550. Find Oceanside Malibu on Facebook.

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How To Deal With Cravings On Hot Sunny Days #health #holistic

If you associate hot sunny days with beer gardens, boozy BBQs or drinks on the beach, you’re not alone. 

In the summer, many people find the warm weather triggers some cravings for alcohol. 

When you see other people outside, drinking together, you can easily start wondering what the harm would be in just one drink…

I want to help you stop that kind of thinking in its tracks, because this is actually a great time of year to be alcohol free!

Here are 5 tips for staying sober on hot sunny days:

Key points: 

Sober firsts often feel weird

Choosing not to drink on a hot sunny day – when you’ve always done the opposite – is bound to feel a bit strange. You’re breaking a pattern and choosing a different behaviour, so you’re going to feel the awkwardness. That’s ok. 

The first time is the hardest and it’s normal to have a bit of anxiety around these things. But the next time will feel a bit easier, and the time after that will be easier still. This is all part of you establishing a new normal. 

 

Give everything a fair chance

You can’t make a judgement or draw any conclusions based on one experience alone. So, that one time you went to a BBQ sober, or sat outside whilst your partner drank and you didn’t? That’s not enough.

You need to do something at least three times before having enough information. Give everything a fair shot by being enthusiastic and positive about it. Don’t decide in advance that it’s going to be awful… otherwise it probably will be!

 

Play the movie forward 

If drinking feels appealing right now, how are you going to feel in a few hours time? Or at the end of the evening? Or in the early hours of the morning? A hangover on a hot day is awful, and you’ll be so annoyed with yourself tomorrow.

 

What are you really craving?

On hot sunny days, often what we’re truly craving is time to relax – to do nothing but sit outside and chill, or connect with friends. This is very enjoyable (and totally doable) no matter what’s in your glass. Don’t be tricked into thinking you need alcohol for this.

 

Upgrade your AF drinks!

Stay hydrated and make sure you have something chilled and delicious close at hand. This is not the time to make do with lukewarm water or flat diet coke. The alcohol free drinks market is booming right now, so get experimenting! 

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The post How To Deal With Cravings On Hot Sunny Days appeared first on The Sober School.

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People are dying in US prisons, and not just from COVID-19 #health #holistic

Randall Jordan-Aparo, Darren Rainey and Latandra Ellington are not household names. But like Michael Brown, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, they were killed by law enforcement officers.Not police officers, but corrections officers.No dataset tracks the number of people in prison who die at the hands of those hired to keep them safe. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that between 2012 and 2016 – the most recent data available – approximately 128 state and federal prisoners died from homicide or accidents per year. The agency does not separately report incidents involving prison staff versus prisoner-on-prisoner violence. This is also likely to be an undercount since many investigations of suspicious deaths in prison are done internally by corrections departments.In the absence of detailed and reliable data, what we do have are accounts of sadistic and retaliatory violence by prison guards against people in prison. According to investigations by the Miami Herald, corrections officers gassed Randall Jordan-Aparo as he begged for help, likely killed Latandra Ellington for speaking out about sexual abuse and scalded Darren Rainey to death in the shower.Just as insidious are routine “use of force” incidents that are clearly excessive. In June, for example, Florida corrections officers beat Christopher Howell to death while removing him from his cell after he reportedly “refused a command.”State neglect of prisonersAlthough it doesn’t receive the same national media attention as police brutality, there is an ongoing humanitarian crisis in U.S. prisons. As a sociologist, I have researched and written extensively on the history of state prisons – which hold two-thirds of people incarcerated in the U.S. – and the causes of mass incarceration.Similar to excessive police force, brutality by prison officers is part of systemic state violence against people of color, and Black people specifically. As I explain in my book, “Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration,” racist ideas about irredeemable “criminals” helped convince state legislators to spend approximately US$70 billion to build 1,000 prisons in the 1980s and 1990s. By 2007, operating expenses for state corrections departments had increased 250% to $56 billion a year.After the election of President Barack Obama, a wave of white racial resentment galvanized by the Tea Party movement swept business-backed fiscal conservatives into state houses across the country. As promised, governors and state legislatures began to defund a variety of state agencies and programs. Where politicians had once protected already underresourced departments of corrections from spending cuts, they now began to delay maintenance on prison facilities and strip state prisons of educational programs down to what one Florida state legislator called “bare and naked incarceration.”As a result, state prisons today are severely underfunded, understaffed, overcrowded and deteriorating.‘A callous disregard’In Florida, the state I have researched most extensively, fiscal austerity hit the Department of Corrections early, under the leadership of Gov. Jeb Bush, and continued long after he left office in 2007. The Miami Herald chronicled the decline. In 2012, after five years without a raise, the state cut thousands of corrections officer positions by moving from an eight- to a 12-hour shift. By 2017, the Herald reported, the state could not fill 2,500 corrections officer positions left open because of high turnover and low pay. And, in 2019, the new Florida Department of Corrections Secretary warned that years of budget cuts and legislative indifference have created a system at the brink of a “death spiral.”The consequences of understaffing are compounded by prison overcrowding. According to an analysis by ProPublica of federal data, between 2011 and 2018, 32 states closed one or more prisons, without corresponding reductions to the state’s overall prison population. This year, as coronavirus hit, at least 16 state prison systems – in every region except the Northeast – had seriously overcrowded prisons, according to local news reports.Most departments of corrections contract with private companies to provide health care in state prisons. The rising cost of medical care and reduced state budgets squeezed these companies’ profit margins. As a result, the existing barely adequate health care in prisons deteriorated. At Ely State Prison in Nevada, for example, there was no full time physician on staff for 1,000 male prisoners. According to one medical expert, the medical neglect he saw amounted to a “callous disregard for human life and human suffering.” Since 2010, courts have ordered at least 10 state departments of corrections to fix substandard health care in the states’ prisons. In 2018, a U.S. District Court fined the Arizona Department of Corrections for “not taking its obligation seriously” as people in prison continued to die from medical neglect.Prison overcrowding, inadequate prison health care and a lack of infrastructure to manage the outbreak of disease has led to an alarming number of COVID-19 cases in state prisons. In San Quentin State Prison, just outside of San Francisco, more than one-third of prisoners have tested positive for COVID-19. According to The New York Times, in mid-June the five largest known clusters of the virus were inside correctional institutions.Since the first week of May when prisons recorded a high of 87 prisoner deaths, as of mid-July every week on average 42 people die in prison of COVID-19.No accountabilityWhen prisons are understaffed, offer no programming and provide inadequate mental health care, maintaining order becomes more difficult. The use of solitary confinement increases. Resentment builds. Studies show that officers who work in chaotic and hostile work environments are more likely to adopt an “us vs. them” mentality and resort to retaliatory violence.Prison officers’ acts of violence are often not reported. The blue code of silence that people associate with police applies equally to corrections officers. Prison staff that come forward are threatened and harassed. And, even more than police departments, prisons are not transparent. It is often only through local news media investigations that we hear these stories.Corrections officers are rarely held accountable through civil lawsuits or criminal prosecution for their acts. The Miami-Dade County prosecutor Katherine Fernandez Rundle, who faces a real challenger in the upcoming primary for the first time since she was elected in 1993, declined to prosecute the prison officers who locked Darren Rainey in a scalding hot shower and left him there to die. The family of Rainey, a middle-age Black man with a diagnosed mental illness, later settled a civil rights lawsuit against the Florida Department of Corrections for $4.5 million.Governors and state legislators have little political incentive to improve prison conditions. Sadistic, violent and other unconscionable acts by corrections officers against people in prison don’t provoke the same public outrage as police murders of people in their homes and communities. Under the system of mass incarceration, those we have marked as “criminals” are denied not only their civil rights but their humanity.Heather Schoenfeld, Associate Professor, Boston UniversityThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Medical Detox: The Importance of Aftercare #health #holistic

Medical detox allows you to rapidly address the physical dependence on opioids. Within days, you can remove cravings for drugs or alcohol from your life, under the supervision of a medical team. But with the physical side of dependence addressed, what comes next? Getting personal, individualized aftercare following Opioid and Alcohol Detoxification Treatment is a critical first step to a healthy life without drugs and alcohol.“We have seen patients that just gave up because they believe they have failed so many times that they are not willing to go through all the emotional and physical suffering to fail again,” says Clare Waismann, founder of Waismann Method® Opioid Treatment Specialists and Domus Retreat. But “most of the time they didn’t fail – the treatment center failed them because they did not receive treatment based on their needs, they received treatment based on a preset protocol.”Getting individual treatment that is highly personalized can help you succeed in recovery.Healing with Respect and Dignity Society tends to treat people with addiction terribly. There is a lot of stigma and shame connected to substance use disorders, and that often gets integrated into various recovery options. Often times, treatment centers prescribe a set of steps or aftercare approaches, without assessing or considering the person receiving them, what that person actually wants and, more importantly, needs.Domus Retreat, the aftercare facility that works with Waismann Method® clients, takes a different approach. Rather than making clients feel like just another body without autonomy, instead of putting them in group sessions where they feel unseen and unheard, Domus Retreat aims to clearly understand, support, and respect each individual’s needs.At Domus, clients are reminded that they have nothing to be ashamed of. It is natural to get lost, and honorable to seek and receive help. With this productive thought in mind, it is easier for people to move toward a future that is hopeful and positive. Positivity, hope and self-respect set a foundation for a successful recovery.“We try to have people enjoy the sun, try to show them that every hour they will feel better regardless of where they started from,” Waismann says. “By the time they leave, they know they can feel good without drugs, even if they relapse. Even if things don’t work out as expected when they get home, there is hope because in a short time they have learned that life is livable without drugs..”An Aftercare Approach Designed for YouAt Domus Retreat, clients can stay from anywhere between 4 and 28 days. They have access to one-on-one psychotherapy, private yoga sessions, massage, and more. They are able to spend time working with professionals to decide what they want to address now that they have dealt with their physical dependency. This often means taking steps to address the pain that caused drug abuse, whether that pain is physical or psychological.“Because we have very, very few patients at one time, we try to individualize their treatment as much as possible,” Waismann says. There is accountability, but to individual goals rather than prescribed benchmarks of success in recovery. This allows people to focus on the things that will make the best impact on their overall health.At Domus Retreat, clients also have the chance to address any physical or mental health diagnoses that came up during treatment. Oftentimes, talking with mental health providers can result in reevaluating diagnoses that clients had before. With drugs no longer masking the root problem, it is easier to see the real symptoms.“It is very difficult to make an accurate diagnosis when the patient is emotionally influenced by the substance they are using,” Waismann says.Health care professionals create customized treatment plans for each client based on their all-encompassing medical and psychological assessment. Throughout treatment, the team looks for effective and feasible ways to optimize each client's plans to sustain long-term recovery. One of the most important goals for the Waismann Method® and Domus Retreat team is to establish a trusting and nurturing relationship with each individual, ultimately creating hope.The Bottom LineThe purpose of a good aftercare program is to heal, restore, and better the lives of each client. Anyone who has experienced substance abuse or mental health issues knows that sustaining a healthy life is a work in progress. It is a natural part of being human to expect and need a helping hand along the way. Recognizing this need and seeking help is the first and most important step in creating a healthy and loving relationship with yourself.

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