‘Many beautiful paradoxes’: Practicing meditation and mindfulness in recovery

Meditation practices have been shown to reduce stress, relieve hypertension and even contribute to weight loss. Can the practice also help people in recovery bring more balance to their lives? Producer Morgan D. Stewart caught up with devoted meditators in Madison to find out for WPR’s “Wisconsin Life.”

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It’s estimated that more than 36 million people in the U.S. meditate. I always kind of envied them, the sense of inner peace and liberation they all claimed to feel. Why couldn’t I become more like these enlightened 10 percent?   

After all, every counselor or therapist that I saw about my anxiety, depression or substance use disorder recognized that I could use some mindfulness training. Over the years, practitioners led me through visualization exercises, and all of them swore by Kristin Neff’s work on self-compassion. Nothing stuck. 

Then, in the summer of 2024, after another recovery meeting where another participant made meditation sound like the cure to all ills, I decided to email Madison Insight Meditation Group for help.  

My inquiry went something like this: 

“Can we schedule a 1:1 session? It’s been so long since I tried to meditate. I’m in the very early stages of recovery and know it will be helpful for me to begin practicing now. What they call the pink cloud phase doesn’t last for too long, I’d like to be ready when it shifts. My phone number is below in case you need it.” 

A little desperate? But it worked. I was connected with Colleen. A longtime meditator who was also in recovery. We’re only using her first name to protect her privacy. We met at a local coffee shop and she told me her story. 

“I had tried to meditate before I got sober,” Colleen said. “I had gone to a day-long class to kick bad habits and it didn’t stick because I had no way to access that and no way to put it into application. I was still in active drinking and those two just, they don’t go well together for very long.” 

Dave Creswell, a long-time member of Madison Insight Meditation Group, knows why. He explained during a beginner’s class that the last of the Five Precepts — which are things that a practicing Buddhist must give up in order to live a wholesome life — involves “abstaining from taking intoxicants which lead to carelessness.” Partying and inner peace don’t mix if the partier is being careless with their substance use. Carelessness is the opposite of mindfulness. Carelessness leads to suffering. 

Colleen was tired of being careless. She needed a few more nudges to finally kick her drinking habit, and meditation offered something mysterious to Colleen, something that drew her in and provided a challenge. 

“I couldn’t handle the quiet and yet I craved it too because I did find it comforting, and scary,” she said. “When I was drinking, I wasn’t present. It’s hard to be. It’s near impossible to be. Now it felt like I was in the middle of everything and the middle of the joke and the crowd and the party and everything. But it also, I think we all know those experiences of being around people and still feeling very lonely and hollow and a shell inside.”

She was turned on to anonymous recovery groups that “met in church basements,” she said. There, she noticed something that she didn’t expect. These sober people, they seemed happy. Colleen couldn’t remember the last time she could attest to being happy. 

“I couldn’t tell you other than ‘fine’ how I felt. And we know that that isn’t a feeling or an emotion,” Colleen said.

Beyond happiness, Colleen wanted to be able to slow down enough, to be present and to accept whatever she was feeling. So she quit drinking, finally. And finally, her meditation practice started to stick. 

It wasn’t easy at first. 

“Sometimes when I was newly sober, I had a very racing mind and my emotions are very strong. And so I really needed guided meditations. Meditations where there would be a word or a phrase and mantra that I would repeat that I could like anchor onto because the breath was too obscure for me,” Colleen shared. 

As a beginner, I also prefer guided meditations in which someone’s very soothing voice will remind me to return to the breath, or to what Creswell calls “The Breathing Body”. 

When I don’t have that guidance, my mind will wander to distant places for what feels like long periods of time. Sometimes I’ll be reliving past experiences, and imagining alternative versions of how things could have been. Other times, I’ll be barreling into the future, making sure that my to-do list is memorized. Yet, there are these fleeting moments where I’m not doing anything in my mind’s eye but staying present of what is happening right here, right now. Colleen can attest to the power of those moments of full presence.

“Once I stopped drinking, being able to just be with where my feet were, where my hands were, was incredibly difficult. Some defaults I had were wanting to control or manipulate every situation, every person, so I could get the outcome that I needed to be OK instead of being OK with whatever was going on. And it’s one of the many beautiful paradoxes — that you take the hands off the wheel and it is OK. Meditation helps me ‘be with’ those feelings,” she said.

Eventually, I’ll be able to live in that meditative space longer, but for now, I simply open up my meditation app or find one online that has a guide whose voice I really like, and I begin. While I wouldn’t consider myself enlightened, I feel more like Colleen — truly committed to changing my life for the better.    

Editor’s note: The full conversation between Colleen and Morgan D. Stewart can be found on the uHuman: a multimedia miracle website and podcast, which is exploring creative tools used to help people in recovery. Audio engineering support for this story was provided by Luke Tschosik, a music producer living in Madison, Wisconsin.

“Wisconsin Life” is a co-production of Wisconsin Public Radio and PBS Wisconsin. The project celebrates what makes the state unique through the diverse stories of its people, places, history and culture.