welcome my name is natasha sherman and i am your host my guest today is tommy rosen he is the author of recovery two point zero move beyond addiction and upgrade your life through more than twenty years of recovery from addiction noted yoga teacher and founder of recovery two point zero tommy learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work in recovery from his explorations on the yoga mat and in twelve step rooms he found a path to sustainable recovery that includes mind body practices a profound look at diet and a more holistic and inclusive perspective on the twelve steps welcome tommy thank you so much i'm so pleased to be here natasha i'm delighted that you're here as i said i've done a number of shows on addiction and recovery and i want to start the show by saying the book is brilliant the book i mean if you have any questions not about any substance abuse or anything just kind of addictive patterns in life it's rich with information so i'm thrilled that i get to interview thank you so let's start with defining addiction i'm working with a broad definition of addiction yes i like people to in their mind to go beyond just the simple drugs and alcohol or so we're not expensive you the definition i have is any behavior you continue to do despite the fact that it brings negative consequences into your life any behavior and that covers the span of talk to me about the different kinds of addiction your the ones that we're most familiar with of the ones that we can see clearly you know drugs and alcohol obviously come to mind i write and i speak a lot about the big sex drugs alcohol food addiction is next with food addiction you're dealing with emotional eating in cheating the eating disorders such as believe me and are actually challenges that we have in our relationship with food next you have the people addictions sex addiction  dependency the relationship disorders after that you have the money addiction so shopping being constantly in a state of debt or gambling and then so then usually just the big we have the four aggravation for aggravations our negative thinking self doubt pro cross the nation and resentment people often challenge me on me those are not addiction i don't crave negative thinking i certainly don't crave procrastination or resentment or self doubt and i say well that's true you don't crave those things but it still fits my definition of addiction these are behaviors that your continuing despite the fact that they bring an egg of consequence into your life so right there we can really expand our perspective of addiction yeah and you know as i'm going to do as i  before i'm going to do this in little sound bites and jump from point to point because there's so much i could ask you and i just want to kind of went to people's appetite and there's a lot of wisdom in these little snippets but you talk about and you said it's one of the most painful forms of addiction codependency is the disease of the last self it compels us to look outside ourselves to another person for fulfillment it is the most common addiction and often is the beneath the other addictions i think that almost says it all it pretty much sums it up that before if you speak to a drug addict an extra gadgets an alcoholic who's in recovery and you say to them which came first relationship troubles or drugs and alcohol and every time it's going to be well of course as children growing up difficult challenging family dynamics or even just a relationship with oneself very challenging growing up the relationship disorders were there first so why this is so very important is if you're in recovery from for example drug addiction or alcoholism once the drugs and alcohol are are gone from your life and your body starts to recover your mind starts to recover you start thinking more clearly guess what's there all the stuff they began with yeah the stuff you began work the stuff that was there when you reached out to drugs and alcohol to solve the discomfort of those feelings or the the feeling of being separate from or disconnected from or i don't belong i don't know how i belong and the disease of the last self says it all and don't know i am where i am or how i can figure that problem out so i'm always looking to someone else or something else to solve that problem you know it occurs to me that that's kind of the human condition no matter where you go that there is this this longing this kind of i don't care how happy you are how your childhood may have been and there are very few of those it's this sense of not quite enough and where do i belong and then all the other stuff follows it but it's almost like it's like the steam roller that you know how do you stop it because right now technology it's as you just give us the phrase have taken your yourself away from the moment from your so again it's like where do we start so you say you know after you've and you know first of all that's no small thing to stop your addictions your physical addictions but then you're left with you then what happens when that's the good news it may not seem like good news if first because most people are not used to spending time with themselves i don't just mean being alone i mean literally sitting still being quiet contemp e and starting to experience the feeling of actually being with yourself and of course at first after a lifetime of avoiding that that might be uncomfortable for people but the more that you do that the more you realize the actual solution the more you get the thing that you were always searching for in the first place which was always right here inside but for whatever reason you either were not directed to turn your gaze inside to build that relationship or you were frightened too and you didn't want to look and you begin this abit of avoiding yourself by any means necessary really it doesn't really matter what the addiction is that process of order yourself leads to all of that pain and all of that discomfort the only way it stops is you have to stop but you said where do we start we start by stopping we start by the french putting our ass down on a cushion and sitting still osing our eyes maybe taking a few deep breath and seeing what is there without reacting to it anyway just simply seeing what is there and beginning to develop the most important relationship you it's there are so many things in there and i think it's one of the things that you talk about is that there's no one way to do this journey and i want to get to like twelve step programs and things like that but what i really want to what i get from this is this is a journey a process as the saying goes not a sudden landing so you may sit for three minutes and and find it extraordinarily uncomfortable and you leap up and say ok i'm not going to do any more of that and let me see what else i can do but kind of continuing that process and then maybe it goes to four minutes or maybe there's some other access to what you're talking about is getting to ourselves yes well imagine you've been in the house and the lights have been off but the whole time maybe years decades you never clean the house and then all of a sudden you turn the light switch off and you look around and you think to yourself my god it's filthy in here look at the squalor i've been living in this and it's a little bit like that when you first start to meditate you turn the lights on and you start to watch your mind and your mind you realize oh my god i can't stop thinking not only can't i stop thinking but i don't necessarily like what i'm thinking about so at first it's that way but hopefully with the guidance of a wise teacher and a community of support and this is so important yeah someone will tell you hey it's supposed to be that way you don't need to worry about that that's going to change over time first you're supposed to experience the feeling of just watching how busy your mind is and just by watching you'll start to realize my goodness some very large percentage of the thoughts that come into my mind are actually not useful yeah some of them are actually destructive wow i don't have to do anything about that sinking it's just happening well very quickly there's this moment of freedom as takes place there wow you're like wow i i can take a vacation from having to do something about all this thinking and that's where biggy now that's the meditation part and you know it's it's again we think that our thoughts are real and and our identity is collapsed in with that and as you talk about meditation it's systemic when you're noticing that the thoughts are just kind of a traveling side show you know and they're moving on and they're repetitive and what else but i think what i hear also and hear is in that it's practicing not judging it just observing it so i want to jump into twelve step programs because you know you've done and you talk about in your book access to this is not just like one and done that you want to use all the tools that are valuable and one of them was a twelve step program and very often people go twelve step program that means and then they have all the meanings attached to it so say a little bit about that what we all want is freedom how can we have we need a teaching everybody anyone in a human body needs a teaching to follow the teaching that you follow believed you were that particular teaching goes  if it's a true teaching it will lead to the truth and immutable unchangeable truth any religious path in its core i'm just talking about the doctrine the core philosophy of the core statement of the religion has truth in it is true for all religious paths is true for all spiritual paths otherwise it's not true religion it's not true spirituality big book of alcoholics anonymous if you want to go to the original document and look in there and you can see language you can hear stories read about the condition of alcoholism you can apply that  other addictions as well in there is truth does that mean that every word ever spoken in there is truth not necessarily its truth as it reveals itself to you the problem that people have with the twelve steps is they don't understand what that truth is or how to access it because you're at the mercy of your teacher if you don't know anything about the twelve steps and you just have ideas about it well that's called contempt prior to investigation you want to investigate and then you can speak from your own experience the way you investigate is with the teacher what they refer to as a sponsor so you have a sponsor that sponsors experience will become influential in your path into that particular version of the truth the twelve steps are legitimate as a source of truth that's why so many people have recovered from them and very often people have been guided through them in ways that may not all to merely have led to the truth and maybe they needed something or something different right and the most important thing about the twelve steps that everybody must understand just like any religious or spiritual path is just the beginning you  have the spiritual path and now you must go out and you must live your life now last i checked all of us were in a body it has needs and needs to be detoxed on a regular basis and needs to be fed nourished we need to be able to eliminate that which is no longer necessary all those things happen in the physical body but none of those things are addressed by the twelve steps it's just simply not the focus of that work right now the twelve steps or the first you get sober you build up a foundation of recovery because we know that we can't get to the truth if we continue to behave with drugs and alcohol and other addictive behaviors you could live the rest of your life right and that's just one path there are infinite ways to get sober there are infinite ways to learn and to grow as a human you know it's really great and one of the things you say in the book is don't let the twelve steps become your life get a life because of the twelve steps so as you talk about it's a launching point one of the things that you talked about is the idea of  seeing the possibility of a full recovery lit used say leave some space for the possibility of full recovery from addiction now some of the people that i've talked to who have been who are recovering addict consumed with the addiction that you know as someone who was had to be brought back within our ten three or four different times facing death facing just like the worst possible things you can imagine and one of the things that they said was did they see you know what did what did they think about becoming a non addict or a recovering and what less common was they didn't even see it as a possibility then that's a big part of the reason why i wrote that into the book you see when i say leave possibilities or in your mind for a full recovery that doesn't mean that you can now go out and drink that you can now go out and use drugs that you can act out in addictive ways without your life imploding right it means that you have grown into a new consciousness where you no longer desire those things because you recognize they could only you back down to a previous level of consciousness that's called relapse but you see it's you are setting yourself free each day people say to me tommy you've been sober now almost twenty eight years don't you think you could have a glass of wine classic question comes all the time don't you think you could smoke a joint aren't don't you want to jump on the bandwagon of all this legalized marijuana  united states and canada i'm like you're asking the wrong question question is why would i want to put a veil over my awareness why would i want to change my consciousness in a way that demotes my well being why would i want to talk to kate this body even the slightest bit i can't begin to get my mind around what a drink or any drug could do to bring something positive to my life i don't worry about it i don't think about it it's not it's just simply not there has there's no charge for me around those substances and the more i have recovered from it that doesn't mean that i can now go out and have a glass of wine and everything's just going to be fine with me you know what will happen my and i don't need to activate my mind in that way that would be a sincere fall for me into a previous consciousness that i don't desire to visit ever again you know it's interesting i lived at a yoga center in india years ago and one of the things i remember the teacher talking about is we have all these unburned seen in us you know until and light meant and what you're talking about is it's not part of your everyday life but it isn't an burned seed and if you activated it and kind of fertilized it whatever it could get activated and why would you do that well it's one wonder to look at this is think about the person who's not quote an addict miss so many people i know they come home and their manner of unwinding relaxing is to have a couple of drinks it changes the way they feel they they like the feeling of it right nothing wrong with that there's no judgment about it in any way shape or form for them for me whether i was an addict or not to make that choice would run counter to my desire to learn and to grow to continually evolve to look at my feeling whereas to smoke a joint or have a glass of wine or a couple drinks every night that's not me looking at my feeling and i'm not rubbing it it's a it's a it's a it's a lot it's a decision to interrupt yeah how i am and i lose the present moment and it's the most precious thing that i will ever have in my life i would not give it up for anything whether i was an addict or not so i have a question because you talk about the frequency of addiction and then you say consciousness and you're talking about elevating your consciousness to another level consciousness is contagious we are susceptible to our surroundings and the vibration of the people we spend time with so  kind of falls into that people places and things and being conscious of those choices we make soleil say a little about the vibration of cause i think of it like listening to a radio station literally the radio station is turned to the addiction channel and on the addiction channel all kinds of addictive  s negative thinking self doubt all the poor aggravations they're happening you're in this force field of addiction you're stuck there as long as that radio station is there you're on the frequency of addiction so you might get better in the sense of releasing some of the grosser addictions like drugs and alcohol but like i had to find out i was still in the frequency of addiction how do i know that because after drugs and alcohol were gone it was codependency backs cigarettes gambling addiction was still very very much alive in the mind body system the radio was still tuned radio we're still tuned to the frequency of addiction now change the radio station let's tune into the frequency of  at recovery but let's call it the frequency of connection how do you change the station you have to do certain things you have to be around certain kinds of people you have to change the routines of your life so that the radio station changes and stays changed because of course as we know in early recovery there's still this vacillation you might have changed a radio station for a moment but  you're sort of drawn back to the frequency of addiction once again so there are certain things that we need to do when do we do them every day because we need to maintain the vigilance towards a new level of consciousness a new radio station a new frequency for ourselves things like going to meetings post at meetings for example or any meeting where people are getting together in the name of recovering from addiction pieces wonderful connecting with yoga teachers meditation teachers nutrition music art song dance nature really connecting with people you love and lo and behold you do you do all these things and all of a sudden you find yourself after a period of weeks or months or years and you find yourself a new radio station now the radio this whole body mind system is attuned to the frequency of recovery frequency of connection frequency of love it doesn't mean you will not have difficult days means way from dist wow well that kind of says it all and it's so powerful and i think one of the things that i really wanted to bring out and is that your book is all about is it it's abo body mind spirit it's about taking care of the entire package and one of the things that you talked about and i love is and we're almost out of time but before i start with that sentence i just again want to encourage people to pick up the book we all have addictions whether i have an addiction to caffeine i have an addiction to staying up late whatever is it terrible no it impacting my life it's worth exploring so this book kind of is very in breaking and in compassing and thoughtful and thought provoking so i encourage everybody to pick it up but one of the things you say is inside your body is a pharmacy that is open twenty four hours a day the drugs you are really looking for are all right there within you everything is experienced through the body yeah that  pretty much sums it up in terms of my work in the world yes i am trying to inspire people to work with the internal pharmacy which is your integrated system yeah your hormonal system your chemical system rather than to reach outside in addictive ways and i are with addictive substances yes and i think the last thing i want to say is we keep going back to the empty well and then were dissatisfied oh let me try that well again and then we come back to dissatisfaction so it's kind of what you're talking about is simply access to being happy that's all we've just been looking in the wrong places yes yes we need an upgrade tommy aware at the end of our time i can't believe it went by so quickly thank you so much for being a guest on my show thank you for your book thank you for the work that you do i invite everybody to tune in thank you so much can i just simply send people to a website absolutely our membership our global membership exists at our two zero dot com that's the letter r for recovery r two zero dot com and that's also appearing on the screen and in the credits so it gives people an opportunity to definitely reach out to me it's a pleasure thank you  natasha my name is natasha sherman thank you for joining us