I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Tommy Rosen, founder of Recovery 2.0, who is a yoga teacher and addiction recovery expert. He shares his wisdom about recovery, the benefits of yoga, and what inspired him to create his amazing Online Conference.
Without further ado, I am very pleased to welcome Tommy Rosen!
What do you hope your listeners will gain from your experience?
TR: I came from a background of fairly extreme drug addiction and alcoholism. I got sober, found recovery, initially going to Hazelden in Minnesota, and then luckily found the 12-step path.
I worked the 12 steps for many years, growing and learning quite a bit. Being relieved of the acute symptoms of addiction, I then learned in recovery that there are many layers to the onion.
In order to find true peace, true contentment, my claim to fame needed to be more than that I’ve survived addiction. I wanted to thrive in life, and what I found was that there were certain ingredients for someone like me to thrive, and those ingredients were three things:
1) Yoga – Learning how to connect with my breath, learning how to move, learning how to get comfortable in my own body. That piece was very, very important.
2) Meditation – Learning about meditation from a variety of different disciplines and perspectives, to calm the mind and to be able to open up to the greater forces. That was very important.
3) The Lifestyle of Health and Wellness, which includes a huge overhaul in diet and taking a look at all the things that you ingest in your day.
Those ingredients, when coupled with the work of the 12 steps and other spiritual philosophies, made for what I call true recovery.
What are the benefits of yoga for those in recovery?
TR: When you start talking about recovery, in my estimation, everybody is recovering from something. Some of us are just recovering from poor breathing. Some of us are recovering from thinking too much, being disconnected from our food, our body, or from having poor relationships or different kinds of trauma.
Almost every human being walking this earth can be on a path of personal transformation. That is what I think of when I say recovery. Yoga is a path of personal transformation, just the same as the 12 steps and many other spiritual paths. They complement each other.
Yoga is about connection. It’s about union, the union of body, mind, and spirit, the union of breath and movement with the quieting of the mind, the developing of health, flexibility, and strength in the body. All of these things are positive assets when it comes to recovering from addiction.
Addiction is really, quite frankly, the opposite. Addiction is being disconnected from our minds, from our bodies, and from our spirits.
Yoga brings us back into alignment and back to our focus in the practice of yoga postures and movements. We have to focus on our breath, we have to focus on the movement and the alignment of our body.
Guided by a great teacher, we’ll focus on specific parts of our body and aspects of the practice. We’ll find that at the end of the 90-minute practice, it’s the first time we’ve actually paid attention to ourselves for 90 minutes, maybe in our lifetime.
It’s one of the most intimate, fulfilling, and amazing acts we can undertake with ourselves. I think one of the reasons why yoga has gained such popularity in recent years is that people are getting a hit of this feeling of elation, this high, in a very natural way, and they need it more and more with the craziness of this world.
People are actually feeling that yoga is not a give-and-take proposition; it is a necessity. We have to have it. It is exciting
What advice would you give to parents once they realize their child is dependent or has become addicted to drugs or alcohol?
TR: There is so much to say to parents. I have to preface this by saying I do not have children, but I was somebody’s child at one point. I really witnessed a lot of mistakes, and I’ve thought a lot about those mistakes. Over the past 20 years of my recovery, I’ve counseled many parents.
Most kids don’t start off with hard drugs; they start with the more prevalent drugs, which they’ll find around them, usually marijuana, alcohol, or cigarettes.
The first thing I tell parents is to remember the goal. The goal for your child is to be healthy and happy, to make decisions for themselves, and to self-reflect and self-correct. That is the goal.
No one can expect their child not to make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. Can your child reflect upon their own experience and adjust future decisions based upon what they’ve learned? That is all we can hope for as parents: that our children will be able to make good decisions based on the experiences they’ve had.
An example would be if you drank too much alcohol and you ended up throwing up or worse, you would look at that experience, and you would say, “That was not a pleasant experience for me.” You would learn from that experience. The goal is for you to continue learning from the mistakes you make and the successes you’ve had.
Too often, parents go into discussions with their kids in a more punitive way. The goal is that at all costs, they have to stop drinking and they have to stop using drugs, so that takes the focus off the experience of the child, teenager, or adult.
Now, it places it in the realm of criminalizing their behavior. All the focus is on the substance or the behavior around the substance. That is a terrible mistake. If your kid is smoking pot, drinking, and they’re actually enjoying it, and you come in there as a parent and say, “No, no, no, absolutely not,” it just puts a rift between you and them. What we want is to inspire our kids to make good decisions.
How do we inspire someone to move away from substances? It’s the same question of how to get a dog off a bone. You throw the dog a stick, and then it leaves the bone alone.
You can’t break a habit, but you can replace it with something more inspiring. As parents, we have to inspire our kids.
If we find that maybe we haven’t done a great job of that or if we are not feeling connected with our child who is 15 or 16, in the middle of the individualization process, and we don’t seem to have any control over our children like we used to and that whole issue, maybe the parents are not the ones that do the inspiring.
Find your kids great mentors, teachers, or guides. This could be a therapist, a Karate teacher, a yoga teacher, or an athletic coach. A number of people could come into your kid’s life and inspire them on to greatness.
They can get them interested in the things that are going to be good for their body, good for their mind, rather than having them go down the road of the thing that means the most to them in their life, is this drug or this alcohol?
If you are starting to feel like your child is already starting to develop an addiction, meaning they can’t seem to put it down, and you are deeply concerned about your child’s well-being, that is quite a different story.
The key is trying to find a way to communicate with this child, whether that is you or another person. Once a child crosses that line into acute addiction, it is very difficult for parents to know because the kid is going to try to hide it as much as possible.
You need to break through to help the child and see what is happening. Once you see the truth of what’s happening, that denial can be broken. Steps can be taken to get help.
That help can be therapy, or some kind of 12-step meeting. That can be inpatient or outpatient rehabilitation. There are a lot of choices.
What kept you going in your darkest hour? Why did you decide to seek recovery? What gave you hope?
TR: I want to give you two perspectives on this. When I was in my darkest hours, my level of awareness was at an all-time low. I would say that my level of awareness is at an all-time high right now.
Now, I can reflect back and tell you what kept me going and what made the difference for me. I can tell you from where I’m sitting today, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you then.
I wouldn’t have known what it was, but now I can tell you that it was the love of my family. They never gave up on me. They may have given me a really hard time. I was giving them a really hard time. We were at odds.
We had a really rough sort of run there, but they never lost interest in my safety and protection. That meant a lot to me, even though I would never have admitted it at the time.
When I reached my bottom and picked up the phone and called my father, he was there for me. I could have called my mother, and she would have been there for me, too.
My parents weren’t going to be there to enable me. They were going to be there for me at that point, because they knew I had a problem. Although they didn’t know the extent of it, they knew that there was a big problem.
They were there to send me to get help. When I asked for help, they sent me somewhere I could get it. That was key.
There is a spirit within me. Even with all the darkness, I wanted to survive. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to survive. Looking for something in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways, I just got so far off track. There was faith in myself, even at the bottom.
I don’t feel that I decided to seek recovery. I was cornered by my behavior. That’s just being honest. I didn’t feel that I had any other way to turn.
I had reached that point where I had no money. There was certainly no girl who would be within a twenty-foot radius of me. I had lost many friends, and I had very little respect for myself. Being disconnected from my family, there was really nobody I could call.
I feel like if I had had money, I might have bought myself some comfort in some way, shape, or form. If there was a girl there to take care of me, I might have manipulated her and worked that angle.
At the bottom, you are looking for any way out, except to admit that you have failed in life and that your best efforts have led you to this place. It’s a very hard thing to look at. I was cornered, so I had no choice but to ask for help.
Looking out three to five years, what would you like to see as some of the next big trends in addiction treatment and recovery systems?
TR: What I want to see is a more holistic approach to addiction and recovery. I want people to help newcomers understand and debunk the myths, confusion, alienation, and misunderstanding about 12-step programs.
I think there is a real misunderstanding about what goes on in those meetings and what the program is. It is such an incredible journey and such a wonderful thing. I think if people only understood it better, there wouldn’t be such a barrier to entry.
I feel that people are so scared of it. It is one of the coolest things going on on the planet today, and if people only realized it, they might get sober even sooner. They might find more success.
There needs to be mandatory yoga and meditation. Obviously, you can’t do that to someone who is just getting sober, but I think that it needs to be introduced once a person is detoxed off of whatever substance they have been doing, or whatever the behavior is.
Yoga is a path that leads to true healing, happiness, and a successful, thriving life. It needs to be introduced early.
Finally, the diet piece. A very strong communication needs to be made about the food we eat, the addictions, and the behaviors that we have.
Tommy Rosen is a yoga teacher and addiction recovery expert who has spent the last two decades immersed in yoga, recovery, and wellness. Tommy is certified in both Hatha and Kundalini Yoga and Meditation. He is one of the pioneers in the burgeoning field of Yoga and Recovery and has over twenty years of experience assisting others to holistically transcend addictions of all kinds.
