Introduction: Something's Happening Here

The Hazelden Foundation is an alcoholism rehabilitation center located on over five hundred rolling acres of trees and grasses just outside the tiny town of Center City, Minnesota, an hour and a half from the Minneapolis/St. Paul Municipal Airport. To a casual visitor it might look like the campus of a well-endowed junior college. To the anonymous suffering souls who arrive there in the cars and vans that pick them up from the airport, and who are still in the ethanol haze from that final final drink before committing to the unknowable life without booze and drugs, it looks like something else entirely. Visions of heaven, purgatory, and hell gleam from the polished windows and stone walls.

Hazelden is a place thoroughly informed by Western religious belief and practice. The folks who run it would never say that and no graduate will defend or attack that statement, but it is such a place just the same. In a thirty-day stay there, the drying-out drunk learns about God as we understand him (emphasis added), a Higher Power who can relieve the years of accrued shame of active alcoholism. This is the home of what is called the Minnesota Model for recovery from alcoholism, and the program here is solidly planted in the fecund soil of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). It works; and folks who have stayed sober in AA for years, with or without a Hazelden medallion in their pocket, will tell you that "if it works, don't fix it!"

How could we have explained to that casual visitor, if she had happened to show up on 4 February 1997, exactly what is going on in the Renewal Center at Hazelden, a boomerang-shaped building just around a gentle curve from "Primary," the mother ship of all recovery units? How to explain the smell of temple incense, the ringing of Japanese bells, and the startling sight of a line of seventeen men and women walking ever so slowly, eyes cast down and hands folded in a distinctly unprayerful knot just below their navels, through corridors lined with pictures of AA founder Bill Wilson and display cases of AA memorabilia? And how do you explain it when these same people enter a small room and fold themselves into an awkward position resembling, in some cases more closely than in others, the Lotus position and then how to understand, in this Judeo/Christian enclave, the silent and motionless twenty-five minutes of meditation that follow? No one moves. There is no sound. The incense smoke drifts lazily from a black plastic bowl full of uncooked brown rice. There is an ersatz altar, a coffee table really, decorated only with a pine bough. All this is overseen by a middle-aged man with short graying hair and a bit of a gut peeking out from a curious black bib that is worn over a plaid sports shirt and apparently held together by a circle of polished wood above the left breast. What is going on?

I have just described a moment or two from the first ever Ordinary Recovery retreat at the Hazelden Renewal Center, a six-year-old facility devoted to the support of recovering alcoholics in their day-at-a-time quest for lifelong sobriety. It was the first time in the short history of the so-called recovery movement that a bunch of drunks, or other folks whose lives had been seriously affected by alcoholism, joined in the rigorous discipline of seated Zen meditation (zazen), with pure, clear, and shared intention, in an atmosphere of faith, doubt, and effort to get better together. These folks—Henry from Tampa, Ann from Madison, Ottie and Lida from Tucson, and others—jumped into an event never before experienced in such an atmosphere.

I was the guy wearing the little black bib and, with these pioneers, had set out to see what could be done to experience our individual lives and selves in new and exciting ways. The vision of Ordinary Recovery is my own, and these pioneers came to add their eyes to mine.

It worked. By Sunday we had come together, the seventeen of us, in ways we could not have imagined on the previous Tuesday night when we gathered for the first time. Sunday noon, I announced that we would end this retreat with just one more chant. I stood with Elene Loecher, the spiritual director of Renewal Center, and Mollie Brodsky, a Buddhist drunk and good friend who worked with me that week. We stood solemnly for a moment, and when we burst into Roy Rogers' theme "Happy Trails to You," the place came unglued. It got downright inappropriate in that room. Ann from Madison started making a sound somewhere between a laugh and a howl. Ottie and Mary and Kate started to giggle. Bridget beamed. Elene cried tears of gratitude at haying heard, just before Roy's song, the wonderful words of T. S. Eliot,". . . and all shall be well / and all manner of things shall be well." I vow never to forget those wonderful, gutsy people. We were disciplined in the midst of permissiveness and bold in the face of ghosts and demons. One of us climbed a hill late one afternoon and screamed at God, over and over, "Why?" and then got her answer in the still quiet of early morning zazen.

This was the first experiment with the intensive side of the practice of Ordinary Recovery. It won't be the last. There is a gentler practice as well, one that is simply a matter of connecting with the stuff of the ordinary world and being transformed by it. I realized early on that recovery from alcoholism is rather ordinary and that the real danger is to see it some other way. I saw that I was not special because I was an alcoholic and that to be a recovering alcoholic did not make me special either.

That is what Ordinary Recovery is. Not complicated; not special. Any addict, like so many of his brothers and sisters in the larger world, lives a life of rapture and illusion. Ordinary Recovery is about waking up to what is real. When you see what is right before your eyes, you are healed. The way to the healing moment is through paying attention: Pay attention; the medicine is right before you all the time. You are enlightened by the entire phenomenal universe, and "the price is not less than everything."

The world heals you. As the world heals you, you heal the world.

I invite you into this world. I want you to imagine that it is just you and me on this journey. If you'll come along, I'll keep my attention on only you. The pages to follow and the words you're reading right now are yours and mine to share. See how they fit.