Summer House

Palm Beach Post — She has a strong grip and broad shoulders and a rage that was so out-of-control she was called The Hulk.

Jen is just 22 and already has suffered years of abuse, from a boyfriend who burned her, beat her and tried to drown her, and from her own self-directed rage.

She believed she found a release and control over her anger and pain by cutting herself.

"It was sick and twisted," she said, curled up in a couch that wrapped its arms around her. "I would have the biggest smile on my face watching the blood run down my leg."

She tried to kill herself nine times, drank and took every kind of drug she could get.

It took courage and knowing that she was hitting bottom, but she finally got the guts to go to her father, who knew little about her abusive and addictive lifestyle, she said. He helped her find The Orchid Recovery Center in Delray Beach.

The staff there, in turn, helped her find a path toward peace through, among other treatments, yoga training.

Enter Angel Lucia, whose mission is to help heal women in recovery through yoga and meditation at her Bindu Yoga Studio in West Palm Beach.

Lucia partners with The Orchid and teaches at the facility and in her own studio.

Jen clearly has a loving addiction to Angel, who nods encouragingly at her while Jen talks about her horrendous experiences.

Nearby are the tranquil-looking yoga mats, candles, books and tapes that are an important part of this lifestyle.

The women in recovery are a close-knit group. They don’t like outsiders watching their yoga, but Jen explains how she is going from an enraged self-mutilator to accepting that life can hold joy for her.

"She winds us all down," Jen, who has been sober a little more than four months, says.

"I can come in angry, jumpy, and the yoga releases all the bad emotions. I like the breathing techniques."

Jen says she is clinically depressed, bi-polar and suffering from short-term memory loss. Yoga and the camaraderie of Angel and the addicted women in recovery at The Orchid have helped her become more centered, she says. She’s starting to like her life.

Angel smiles knowingly. She, herself, had an alcoholic father who threw the family into turmoil. She knows what it’s like to walk on eggshells around a person who can explode at any moment.

She attended family rehabilitation with her parents.

It was yoga and meditation that helped her physically unwind from the effects of a former career as a surgical assistant and a past laden with strained family relations.

"Mentally, I felt more balanced," she says of the yoga she learned and is teaching. "I moved into a more neutral state."

Now, she says, she takes what she knows works for her and tries to transfer it to her students.

"I can’t say I’m floating," she explains. "I can stop and reflect on what is building up in me. What is it and how can I reduce that? If I hold it, it will make me ill."

She watches Jen look at her with a little half-smile. You can almost imagine this powerful young woman she is helping, and whose fists could put Angel on the floor, breathing softly and learning to control her runaway emotions.

"She does have that understanding from having been through something like what we are going through," says Jen.

"When I’m with Angel, I turn off that cellphone, and I am moving and getting that hour of focus."

Angel says some of the women moan and groan and fight off her efforts to help them, not physically, but by withdrawing. She sends them out of the room until they re-engage.

Jen defends that kind of self-protective behavior.

"The feelings are new to us. Any kind of emotion is a shock and completely hard to deal with," she says of women who have learned to numb themselves with drugs and alcohol.

"She helps to keep people sober. She helps with acceptance of a lot of things and letting go. My anger has gone from major to manageable."

Adds Angel, "Yoga helps us to fill a spiritual void. I’m another bridge for them to that. I don’t want to say that I’m better than anyone else this way, but I know what I’ve overcome and know how to apply it to them."

Meditation can be a powerful tool in relapse prevention and can become what one therapist called a “positive addiction” that provides a healthy alternative to addictive behaviors. People also report that meditation leads to new insights about the source of their cravings and helps to dissolve them.

In their book, Mindful Recovery: A Spiritual Path to Healing from Addiction, Drs. Bein and Bien offer ten “doorways” to recovery, from journaling to meditation, and they present dozens of specific meditation exercises based on their experience as therapists and meditators. Their book says: “People use addictive behaviors to avoid facing what hurts them. The Buddhist mindfulness practice offers a gentle way to begin facing pain and working with it to establish a new relationship to life. Mindfulness helps in two ways: first, by becoming aware of yourself and your environment, you understand what hurts you, what ‘triggers’ you, and second, by befriending your triggers, you can disarm them. Mindfulness provides a larger purpose, a broader context in which to see a problem. And then things fall into place more gently. If you are awake and relaxed and enjoying your life, there is less need and desire for your addictions.”

Kevin Griffin writes about Buddhism and the Twelve Steps saying this: “Buddha said that the cause of suffering is desire, and the Twelve Steps try to heal people from desire gone mad: addiction. Both systems ask you to look at the painful realities of life, to understand them, and to use this understanding as the foundation for developing peace, wisdom, faith, and compassion. The practical aspects of Buddhism is one of its main corollaries to the Steps.” His book, One Breath at a Time, is an exploration of how the two systems can work together, and he offers meditation techniques based on Vipassana and Metta practices.

“Zen is the ultimate and original recovery program,” says author Mel Ash in his book, The Zen of Recovery. “It exposes our denial of true self and shows us how all our other diseases and discontentments flow from our fundamental denial of unity with each other and the universe.”

Sogyal Rinpoche writes: “All we need to do to receive direct help is to ask. Didn’t Christ also say: ”Ask, and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you. Everyone that asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth”? And yet asking is what we find hardest. Many of us, I feel, hardly know how to ask. Sometimes it is because we are arrogant, sometimes because we are unwilling to seek help, sometimes because we are lazy, sometimes our minds are so busy with questions, distractions, and confusion that the simplicity of asking does not occur to us. The turning point in any healing of alcoholics or drug addicts is when they admit their illness and ask for aid. In one way or another, we are all addicts of samsara; the moment when help can come for us is when we admit our addiction and simply ask.”