Speaker 1: So when people think of addiction, they think of alcoholism, heroin addiction, crack, cocaine, but you have a much broader understanding of addiction.

Speaker 2: Yes. It was shown to me. It's that I think it's the relationship between the inner and outer worlds, and those most obvious things, like heroin, alcoholism, substance misuse, they are merely the most evident form of addiction. I think it's an attachment, a belief that the material and external world can somehow resolve the problems of your inner life. Put more simply, addiction is a behavior that you would like to stop, and when you try to, you cannot. Addiction begins with pain, and it ends with pain. You are in pain. You practice whatever it is you do to get you away from the pain, whether it's pornography or food or sex or drugs, and then it leads to more pain, and then the cycle begins again. So I am increasingly, as I am taught more about the nature of addiction, less and less interested in the object. It's almost better to be a crackhead, because if you are a crackhead, it's pretty clear what the problem is, because you're taking crack. So it's a good entry point into the conversation. If someone's taking crack, and they go, I don't know, the problem is, could it be the crack? No. But if it's someone's codependency, toxic relationships, work, they'll deny it all the live long day. Think about it, I found myself in contexts where various forms of my addictive behavior were lionized. Like if you're a 20-year-old at a drama school in London, and you are a heroin addict and you drink, that's an advantage. People think, oh my god, this guy, he's crazy. Something. Yeah, until it's not. Until it's like, yeah, alright, there's a lot of sick everywhere, and he's breaking all the windows.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Or there's this subtle, insidious form of addiction, like perhaps looking at myself in the mirror, just wanting to be liked all the time. Oh boy, that's exhausting.

Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's a good, isn't it, because it's a signal that there's something in you that wants to be fed and nurtured, and the good news about the 12 steps, and that sounds kind of Christian, the good news is the answers are coming. The Lord is present. He is within. The resurrection will happen, and it won't be over there, it will be in here. It will rise again.

Speaker 1: So do you think then that addiction is really sort of a spiritual affliction on some level? Because it is so broad, and it addresses so many pieces of our behavior, it's in essence like we're chasing this desire, this need, but it's based in the material world, and the material world can't make us happy, so then we just keep going back for more. Is that your understanding? Is that your belief? Yes. Yeah. And so what then is recovery look like?

Speaker 2: For me, recovery looks like the 12 steps. It looks like an admission of a problem, the belief that the problem and your attitude towards it can change, a willingness to accept help, both from other people, and to hand over your will and your control, and in my case, a kind of belief and acceptance of a higher power, a different type of consciousness. It looks like making an inventory and sharing that inventory with someone else, being willing to admit that you have problems, and being willing to have those problems removed. It looks like step seven we're at now, being humbly asking for those problems to be removed, a sincere commitment to change, then an inventorying process that is no longer about the self, but about others, people that have been harmed, and a willingness to make amends to them, and then 10, 11, 12, the final three steps, remain conscious and aware all times. Your life is in the moment that you're living in. Step 11, conscious contact with a higher power, through prayer and meditation, we connect with our own understanding of God, because as we've discussed already, although it may be only in mine, available with subtitles, that the solution to this problem is a spiritual one, a connection to a higher power. Having had this realization, and this is significant, and we're at a departure from most insular and I would say somewhat narcissistic theology or practice is pertinent, is step 12, having had a spiritual awakening, we carry this message and we serve others. For me, that's what recovery looks like. There are translations and interpretations, and there are tweaks, but for me the principles not only apply in 12-step methodology, but also I've seen comparative ideas in Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, even secular and materialist ideologies. In the end, that's to be a sort of, or even psychiatry say, an acceptance that there's an aspect of yourself that has to be overcome.

Speaker 1: Right now for you personally, are you living in the vibration of step 12? I mean, I see what you're doing, you're putting yourself out there to essentially help others. Is that what provides meaning on the other side of recovery?

Speaker 2: I don't see myself as being so far down the path of recovery that I am in this luxurious position of being able to help others. In many senses, I'm in the same position I was in when I was a crack and heroin addict. The program works, so I continue to work the program. I suppose, in a way, because I've got a particular set of skills, I am now alloying those skills with what I've learned. I mean, primarily as a communicator and an entertainer. Communicate is a good word to mispronounce. I don't see myself as evolved or advanced beyond the 12 steps because, in a sense, there was nothing that needed to be evolved or advanced. I just needed to recognize that what I thought was a yearning for heroin or other people's approval or fame or money was this requirement for a connection to God. As a teacher of mine once said, all forms of desire are the inappropriate substitute for the desire to be at one with God.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's beautiful. It's good, isn't it?

Speaker 2: He told me that when I was quite young, and it took me ages to listen.

Speaker 1: I was 27. You wrote a quite brilliant book on mentorship. Thanks. I've enjoyed it. I've listened to it in the car on my trips. Obviously, you've taken this quite seriously because here you are, working with groups of people on a regular basis, trying to help them essentially realize these things that you have been fortunate in some ways enough to realize. Can you talk about the importance of mentorship a bit and how it's baked into the 12 steps, what it means for you?

Speaker 2: Whilst the 12 steps can be worked in isolation, the intention of some of the original forms of literature of 12-step philosophy was that it could be worked in alienation and isolation for people that were just geographically isolated. In my experience, and I think this is common to people that have a 12-step program, it is best worked communally for a number of reasons. One, the acknowledgement that other people have got lives and problems and the belief that your own life and problem is the center of the galaxy is a peculiar, if understandable, one due to the way that the senses work. Particularly having someone, as it were, upstream, a mentor, a teacher, or in my case, multiple, but one in particular with a 12-step program, is like the acknowledgement that I don't run the show of my life anymore. All of these things for me is a process of negotiation and going backwards and forwards and thinking, no, I can do it the old way again. I still have the problems that I've always had to a degree, that's what's somewhat complex about this philosophy. But when I'm afraid or I feel inadequate or like I've got problems and I'm thinking, ah, this is what I'm going to do to solve these problems, I talk to someone else and I say, I've got this problem, I'm thinking about doing this, what do you think? My sponsor or mentor, without fail, will say, well, I don't have any advice or an opinion. But my experience is that when you do things like this, x, x, x, x, and it's usually boils down to, don't fucking do that, you idiot.

Speaker 1: So it's a bit of an ego check.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And yeah, an ego check and a sort of an acknowledgement of the limitations of the ego, you know, of like, maybe I don't know enough about psychiatry to use the term ego accurately, but whatever is the sort of the parameters, the circumference of the ecosystem of my intelligence, the kind of decisions that I make, the kind of relationships I form, the kind of mistakes that I make, if I'm to alter that, it's good to have some external input. One, like from people that are further down the path than me, people that have been clean and sober for longer than I have, and two, from a system, a programme, a method that runs at odds and is applicable to my condition, but it's entirely distinct from my condition. So when I'm thinking about this is what I want to do, I check with sponsor, I check with programme, you know, like, what's beautiful about this? And as I learn more about it, as I'm taught more about it, what I recognise is, whatever it is that's happening in my life that is problematic for me, I can apply this system, I can acknowledge there's a problem, believe that it can get better, ask for help, inventory it and see what's going on, what patterns of thought and, in our language, defects of character have taken part. I can make a sincere commitment to change, I can list people that I've harmed, be willing to make amends to them, and the process goes on, 10, stay aware, 11, increase conscious contact of higher power, 12, be of service. What I feel like the 12-step programme does is it retakes you from unconscious, unaware, and places you in conscious and aware, and it does it again and again, in the cloudy, murky mess of drug addiction, two, not drug addict, obsession with other people's approval, to not obsession with other people's approval. Now, something that's as subtle and as behaviourally and socially acceptable and, indeed, encouraged as other people's approval, I can come in and out of that, but at least now I know where I'm going to be, and a sponsor and a mentor is a great place to go. I've had this experience, it made me feel like this, and he knows where the bodies are buried, he's seen my step four and five, he's seen my big inventory of my past, and he's able to say, well, if you're thinking of getting into a relationship like this, you might want to consider how that compares to this relationship that you were previously in.

Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it's interesting, I mean, once you've done some degree of work, right, you've read and you've meditated and you've studied, you know that you should be living from this place of love, from your infinite soul, from your divine nature, all the time, and you wake up and you're like, okay, well, I'm going to do that, I'm committed to doing that, I know that that's going to bring me true happiness, contentedness, or at least that's what I think I am, but every day we're drawn into this, you know, ego vacuum of, okay, well, no, actually I am what this person thinks of me, I am what I do, I am my job, I'm disconnected from others, I'm in competition from others, I'm separate from God, and in a way, your mentor can check that, that behavior.

Speaker 2: Yes, it's a vital component, like, it really is, to have people that you trust, that you've selected, you know, prudently, that have a program of their own, because as I said, I was taught, if you are listening to somebody else and what they're telling you doesn't come from the program, you're listening to a drug addict, so me, without this program, I'm a drug addict, that's what I am, my solution to the problems of life are take drugs, life is painful, trust no one, take drugs, with the program, I am, be of service to others, we are all one consciousness, I'm a different person, I'm a different person, but that guy is still in there, you know, so like Churchill said, no plan survives human contact, so don't be disappointed when this program doesn't immediately turn you into St. Francis of Assisi, you know, I'm still me, but what I know is that I know there's another direction to going, I know that the solution isn't, oh, if I can just get everyone to like me, then it's going to be okay, I've tried that, it doesn't work.

Speaker 1: Yeah, one thing, you talked about your first mentor, I believe his name was Chip Summers. Yes, Chip. And I found it actually really, really interesting how you described sort of the ideal conditions for mentorship to thrive, can you talk about that a little bit, like what are those ideal conditions for mentorship to be successful?

Speaker 2: I would have to say that the ideal conditions for mentorship to thrive is surrender and acceptance and honesty, open-mindedness and willingness, these are the ideal conditions. When I'm dealing with people with addiction issues, in a sense it becomes a relief once you're in the program, once you're on the other side, because I go, oh, you're a heroin addict, are you? Well, here are the things you need to do. I don't want to do that. Okay. So what about you? Have you got a problem? Yeah. Because this is not me, this is not my idea, this is relatively new for a theology that's going to become as influential as I believe it's going to become, it's 70, 80 years old. It's derived, of course, as I'm sure you're aware, from the theology of William James, the psychiatry of Carl Jung, first century Christianity, as espoused by like Emmet Fox, and there are some linguistic and I would say nomenclature problems as a result of that. I'm interested in the ordering of the vocabulary so it becomes more appropriate and accessible. I'm not about demystification, but re-mystification. God is present in this. There's nothing without God in this, but it's a heavily, heavily cargoed word these days.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I think your point around the attitudes that a mentee must have is honesty, open mindedness, willingness. You also, I think, describe the 12 step at least as very conducive to mentorship because there's a clear end result, right?

Speaker 2: Yeah, man. I mean, there's a clear end result. From taking heroin to not taking heroin is pretty clear and pretty radical transformation if you know what it's like to be addicted to heroin or anything. The other thing is that whilst the principles can be loosely worn and can be practiced in accordance with the individual to a degree. They are protean. They are not rigid. Like anything that's real, it's got proper balls. It's not going to fall over as soon as there's a stiff breeze. It also, what I've realized, has got built into it a sort of protection against the cult of personality or whatever. Me continually, I'm acknowledging, what do I know? I know nothing. It's the principles that are important. You'll notice being, as we're having this conversation in Los Angeles, that a lot of cults don't go that way. A lot of cults start with, hey man, peace and love, and end with, let's put some poison in the salad bar. A lot of cults start with peace and love and end with, I want to have sex with all of the people that are in this cult. Now what I now know is there are kind of certain absolutes that my job is to be of service to others. That don't mean I'm going to spend my whole life being of service to others because I'm flawed. But I know that if I'm not being of service of others, the results are not guaranteed now. It's part of the territory that I know I'm safe in. So if I'm thinking in this situation, I want this, I want this, okay, good luck because we've tried that method.

Speaker 1: So last genre of questions, because I know that you're hosting a big group. I want to talk a little bit about yoga and it's kind of spiritual and embodied practices. Because the 12 step was obviously very, very influential for you from a spiritual perspective. But I wonder what the relationship is between the 12 step and yoga and a little bit about the importance of yoga and your personal healing journey.

Speaker 2: Step 11 of the 12 steps is increase conscious contact with God of our understanding. The point of yoga is to prepare the body, you know, I'm talking about asana yoga, prepare the body for meditative states. So there's an obvious corollary there around step 11. My personal experiences, I started doing yoga when I was in treatment to get off drugs the first time, like not at a place, the place I got clean wasn't that, I'm proud to say, fancy. But like I started doing the yoga classes outside and like, so it took over. My mum always said, you should be doing yoga. I got like sort of dark memories of people always telling me the answer was going to be meditation for me and spirituality, but I plowed on with that heroin and crack and other people's approval and all that stuff. So yoga, why I like yoga is because it's an embodied physical practice. And this, the body is part of it. And increasingly, I think that the line between consciousness, the body, the spirit and the mind is an imaginary one. I mean, I can't find an exact point where neurology is distinct from the nervous, you know, I don't know where that line is. I don't think there is a line. So for me, yoga, I know your man's into the Kundalini. I love that stuff. I was well into that for a while. I've not done it so much lately. I've not done as much anything lately because I've got two very young daughters and my life is... That's a form of yoga right there. Yeah. For the practice, for the patience and the surrender. Yeah, there's a lot of that going on, I tell you. But what I do, like I in some senses neglected my body in the first part of my life. I didn't know how to inhabit it. My personal practices now, some yoga always. I'm glad I did enough Ashtanga yoga that I'm now, it's always a place I can go, I can practice on my own. Primary series and if I'm in somewhere that has yoga, I like to do yoga with others. Kundalini, I love it. I love the, you know, the Kundalini experiences, like without introducing pharmaceuticals or plant medicines, sort of, you know, and there are certain types of breathworks, I know you're familiar with Wim Hof and stuff, but I like the Kundalini experience. I've had moments of cessation of self, like moments of like, oh my God, I'm not me. And then, oh no, I am me, it's me that's remembering I'm not me. I've had that induced by Kundalini before, so I like it. I also like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, that's why I'm a fan and a student of, in your country, and like who is here for this workshop today, because like, and you know, elsewhere, Ricardo Wilk and in my country, Chris Clear, all like various black belts under the Gracie system, because the Jiu Jitsu for men, it puts you in your body, and women for anybody, I suppose, but I'm talking from a personal perspective, like it puts you in your body. It for me means contact with people that's got absolutely like this non-sexual submission. I mean, it's full of so much amazing stuff, and I'm very interested in developing that, which is curious, because it's like I'm a white belt, you know, so I'm not really... You're on the other side of the room. Oh man, I'm not going to be leading that particular charge.

Speaker 1: So because, you know, there was like, I think 1.5 million people in the United States anyways that got into treatment for alcohol and drugs this past year, but after 60 days or so, there's 80% of those people relapse. And I wonder if you think maybe the combination of yoga, Jiu Jitsu, physical practices can help sort of stem that relapse, because I wonder where we're going wrong a bit with

Speaker 2: the recovery. I don't know. I don't know. I would be very open to that, and I imagine that you have done more research into that than I have. What I feel is necessary is a deep personal connection with God, and for some people, they might be people who are physically unable to do yoga and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and why should they be excluded? But for me, it's like, how are you going to concede to your innermost self that your construction that you've been living in is not going to work for you? Not that you're a bad person, you need to be admonished, but you've got to get deep. And part of my deal is yoga, part of my deal is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, but the only things that I would sort of confidently pass on and inculcate is 12 steps. Because that's the only thing that I've 100% sort of has, like, it works for me. But I feel that there's as many versions of recovery as there are addicts, and I think we're all addicts to some degree, and I think these 12 steps, they're like Shakespeare. They can handle interpretation. They can handle people going, well, I'm a Buddhist, and I want to do it this way. Well, I'm an atheist, I want to do it this way. We're radical feminists, we want to do it this way. Whatever it is you want to do, this can handle you. That's why I like it.

Speaker 1: Thank you for doing what you're doing.

Speaker 2: Well, thank you for providing this wonderful location and this wonderful platform. It's a real privilege and most serendipitous.

Speaker 1: Yeah, you're bringing a lot of people that I think would be otherwise intimidated or afraid into the fold, being able to look more deeply into themselves and find that God.

Speaker 2: Thanks man, because I feel strongly compelled to do it in a way that's almost indistinguishable from the mad, frenzied wanting of my addiction. It's something, I want God bad. I want people to be healed, but I know that must mean there's more surrender in me yet to do.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Thank you, sir.

Speaker 1: Thanks, man. I'm Jeff Krasnow, and welcome to Commune, where every week we explore the ideas, values, and practices that bring us together and help us live healthy and purpose-filled lives. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We hope you'll join us.