Christopher Dines Quotes

In my view, compassion takes empathy to another level. With compassion, there is an internal calling to move empathy into action. Compassion is love in action.

No one can control their results. We can, however, control our attitude. When we practise compassion, it is most effective when it is unconditional and free from seeking an outcome – compassion is a matter of choice rather than a self-seeking action. And so, if we assist another human being from a place of presence and compassion, we are not looking to find our happiness off the back of others' suffering. Nor are we trying to control them. Compassion is a conscious choice rather than an emotional knee-jerk reaction.

In 'Drug Addiction Recovery' Christopher Dines elegantly teaches us a process for healing from paralysing grief, addiction and emotional wounds using a mindfulness-based approach.

Emotionally wounded addicts have an extremely difficult time with intimacy and with trusting themselves and others. They have a deep desire to trust, but their emotional scars and traumatic memories haunt them whenever an opportunity to trust another person arises. Naturally this can lead to a very lonely existence.

We are essentially pure consciousness, which perceives the material universe through our own awareness.

When you can begin to see the similarities between you and your work colleagues in respect of 'being human' and the collective challenges we all face, it makes life much easier to deal with, especially when met with overbearing behaviour.

The more positive action you take grounded in presence (stillness), the more effective you will become in your line of duty, work or social life.

Let's remind ourselves that to be compassionate and forgiving doesn't mean we are endorsing dysfunctional behaviour. On the contrary, it's essential the harm that was inflicted upon us is properly validated and grieved. Forgiveness isn't an intellectual concept or an airy-fairy idea. It's a painstaking process. To be compassionate and to forgive mean we are gradually letting go of poisonous, toxic feelings that are trapped in our minds and bodies.

Inspiration originally meant "being in spirit", indicating that when we are inspired we are connected to a higher domain of pure awareness and pure consciousness. True inspiration can only flow through us when we are anchored in the present moment.

During the Meiji era, the Japanese Zen master, Nan-in had a visitor from a respected university – a professor who wanted to learn about Zen.

Nan-in served the professor a pot of tea, but when the cupwas full, he continued pouring until the cup was overflowing. The startled professor watched in amazement until he could no longer restrain himself from intervening, "The cup is full and no more will go in. You're making a mess!" "Like this cup," Nan-insaid, "You are full of your own opinions, artificial concepts and negative speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"

Like the learned professor who wanted to understand spirituality, you too must empty your cup and have an open mind and heart.

Compassion is a beautiful grace that releases hate and fearful emotions. Through the power of compassion, when put in delicate circumstances with dysfunctional human beings, rather than loathing their behaviour, you can be compassionate to their internal suffering and love them unconditionally.

Generally speaking, drug addicts are afraid of their emotions. Many have spent years avoiding uncomfortable feelings by finding all sorts of ways to suppress them – what we might call 'numbing out' (by means of alcohol, cigarettes, food, drugs, sex, controlling people, compulsively fantasizing and so on).

A family is a social system and if that system is dysfunctional, the ramifications for the children growing up within it are grave. In what is known as generational drug addiction, the adult children of drug addicts and alcoholics are quietly suffering all over the world. By the time the children have grown up, dysfunction has been deeply ingrained in mind, body and brain.

Meditation is a powerful practice which can help us to heal our emotional pain. To observe our thoughts and feelings requires willingness and gentleness. We cannot be rigid and harsh on ourselves and hope to feel serene. We have to be willing to go easy on ourselves. The only way to be present and gain the benefits of mindfulness is to love ourselves unconditionally. This is a gradual process.

The beauty of mindful-life-breath meditation is that you are not restricted to having to sit in the lotus position to be present. Whether you are on a busy train, driving a car or walking down a crowded high-street, you can easily remind yourself to focus on your breathing. Appreciate the subtle sensation of oxygen flowing in and out of your nostrils.

Road-rage is really another expression of inner rage. However, because driving is such a trigger for millions of people, we have labelled it "road-rage", directing the emotional dysfunction to an external circumstance rather than coming to terms with the internal condition.

The evidence of grave emotional and mental suffering is clear to see in the growing number of mental health units, "re-habs" and overflowing psychiatric wards as people try to find relief in compulsive drinking, drug abuse, gambling, over-eating, under-eating, chasing prestige, hoarding money, "retail therapy" and over-indulging in pornography and sex.

Things sometimes go our way and sometimes they don't. All we can do is apply ourselves to our profession, giving our very best effort but emotionally letting go of the outcome. Why? Because if we obsess about an outcome, we cannot possibly honour the present moment.

Relatively speaking, the mind controls the body but who or what controls the mind?

The borders between different countries are, in truth, not real. They are a by-product of the ego.

The reality is that there are plenty of trustworthy people in the world rebuilding their lives. It was a very gradual process for me to open up and talk about what was really going on in my recovery. The more I started to take risks by talking to others, however, the more I had an opportunity to exercise boundaries. As I asserted new boundaries, I started to gravitate towards people with integrity, warmheartedness and decency.

The Karpman drama triangle is a classic model of codependent behaviour. First of all, a codependent will rescue someone. Then, when their 'brave and charitable' work hasn't been acknowledged, they become very angry at the person they have attempted to rescue. And finally, they start to feel like a victim. They feel sorry for themselves and complain how the person they rescued never appreciated them. The important thing to learn here is that if a person wants to change, it's because they have made a decision to do so.

You must learn to circulate success and have it working for you.

Two monks were once travelling together down a wet and muddy road. The rain was torrential, making it almost impossible to walk along the path. As the two men were trudging along, a beautiful girl dressed in silk appeared. She was unable to cross the path and looked distressed.

"Let me help you", said the older monk. He picked her up and carried her over the mud. His younger male companion did not utter a word that night until they reached their lodging temple. Then after hours of restrained conversation, the younger monk exclaimed: "We monks do not touch females; it is too tempting for us and can create a bad outcome". The older monk looked into the younger monks eyes and said, "I left the girl on the road. Are you still carrying her?"

This ancient Zen story illustrates beautifully how so many of us are trapped in the habit of constantly "re-living" the past in our minds, thus dishonouring the present moment. The young monk wasted hours distressing himself with judgment, speculation, anxiety, resentment and ultimately self-perpetuated unhappiness as a direct result of not being mindful.

The process of recovering from addictiveness happens at a deeper level of consciousness and through feeling our pain without using old addictive fixes. There is no escaping that getting in touch with our original pain is the touchstone to mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

Most human beings wish to be happy and healthy. This universal realization is painfully obvious and yet is overlooked due to its simplicity. We all naturally desire to feel free on all levels: mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. We wish to feel joyful, abundant, serene and blissful. This desire is ultimately grounded in a higher human nature.

We are not going through an "economy crisis"; we are going through a "spiritual transition". On a deeper level, the collective conscious of humanity is awakening.

Stress, burnout and strain on the human heart are all increasingly taking their toll for millions of hardworking people. However, even someone who is working in a job that simply 'pays the bills' can turn mundane and stressful tasks into pleasant activities with a slight adjustment in attitude and by adopting a daily mindful practice.

There must be intelligence applied with enthusiasm otherwise you are leaving yourself open to blind faith.

Scores of high-powered men and women are addicted to substances or destructive addictive patterns of behaviour. As a matter of fact, it is easier to hide one's addiction while maintaining a high-powered position compared to the addicts and alcoholics we see sleeping on street corners.

Mindfulness does not erase negative memories; it 'transcends' them giving us back our deepest power which resides in our hearts.

It will be increasingly difficult to be of maximum service to the world if we cannot or will not be open-minded and understanding towards people who might "appear" to be different from ourselves. When we can love someone who is not like us, we are living mindfully.

By all means play the game of life, create new visions and have fun but do not identify yourself with your vision.

The enlightened question to ask in any relationship is, what can I give rather than what can I get?

Tragically, because many addicts are not given sufficient love, nurturing and non-shaming dialogue at crucial stages in their early emotional development, they are on a quest to find contentment from a source outside of themselves.
Their parents might have provided bountifully for them; however, their parents were never fully emotionally present while parenting, which made their children feel starved of emotional nourishment.

In the addiction recovery community, we recognise that addicts can starve themselves of receiving social, sexual or emotional nourishment. Sex and love addicts starve themselves of a healthy, personal relationship and, consequently, deliberately avoid wholesome relationships with other human beings. We're getting quite deep now, but there are many papers and books published on sexual and emotional anorexia. I have also suffered from emotional anorexia. It's no myth!

There is a difference between following your instincts and listening to your intuition. Instincts are primitive modes of survival (fight, flight, freeze, sexual urges, hunting and so on), whereas intuition is a much higher manifestation of thought and emotions.

The more you genuinely praise people in your consciousness, the easier it is to tune into your own inner joy.

The human brain is incredible in its capacity to heal and rewire itself. The human brain can be shaped and trained to be more resilient, calm, compassionate and alert - we can condition ourselves to be successful. Through mindfulness meditation, we can literally re-wire our brains through new experiences, which modify our neural network and our neural chemistry. Mindfulness also enhances gamma synchrony and improves the function of the human brain.

In 2017, I was invited to lead a mindfulness workshop and guide a live meditation on Mingus Mountain, Arizona, to over 100 men and women at a recovery retreat. On the eve of my workshop, I had the opportunity to join in a men's twelve-step meeting, which took place by the campfire in Prescott National Park Forest, with at least 40 men recovering from childhood grief and trauma. The meeting grounded us in what was a large retreat with many unfamiliar faces. I was the only mixed-race Brit, surrounded by mostly white middle-class American men (baby boomers and Generation X), yet our common bond of validating each other's wounds in recovery utterly transcended any differences of nationality, race and heritage. We shared our pain and hope in a non-shaming environment, listening and allowing every man to have his say without interruption. At the end of the meeting we stood up in a large circle and recited the serenity prayer:

"God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know that one is me".

After the meeting closed, I felt that I belonged and I was enthusiastic about the retreat, even though I was thousands of miles away from England.

Between the ages of 10 and 21, my thoughts were consumed with how to escape reality - how to mask my feelings of inadequacy, shame, guilt, fear, abandonment, rage and loneliness.

It was only when I started to reconnect with my inner child four years into recovery (I was over four years clean and sober off drugs and alcohol) and started to attend a love addiction support group that I was able to trust again and have faith that there are just as many honest and trustworthy women as there are women who are not interested in monogamy.
However, it was after ten years of continuous recovery that I started to really dig deep into my childhood grief work and was finally able to reclaim my inner child. I started to take risks again. On a practical level, you can't get very far in this world if you resent and distrust the opposite sex and, sadly, many men and women suffer in this area. Rather than celebrating the opposite sex, they fear them. Empathy and self-compassion has helped me in this area too.

Needing nothing gives you everything.

Originally, there were no man-made borders to divide and segregate lands on this beautiful planet.

Many people in recovery find that they feel spiritually grounded when in regular contact with the great outdoors. Others feel a deep serenity after lighting a candle in a church or temple or by chanting a sacred mantra. The point is that, unlike a typical religion that lays out a non-negotiable ideology, spirituality is expansive and deeply personal.

It is impossible to control outcomes or results, although most of us have been programmed from a very young age to believe otherwise. The idea that we can perform actual 'magic' causes tremendous dysfunction, unnecessary suffering and prevents the development of emotional resilience.

Try and live in the present moment. Create appointments with yourself to specifically work on your mental picture. Then fall back into the present moment.

A worthy prayer is a deliberate intention which has been guided by your heart.

The word 'pranayama', often referred to as alternate breathing, comes from the Sanskrit meaning 'extension of life force' or 'extension of breath'. At times, we are going to have days where we are bombarded with one task after another.

This simple yet effective meditation only takes a couple of minutes and its calming qualities can be felt almost immediately. It is one of the easiest meditation techniques to apply. This practice is well worth applying at least three or four times a day (somewhere private) to develop emotional balance and evenness of mind, especially in the working environment.

The outside world is a design of our imagination.

Gratitude can help you stay in the present moment.

The process of creating your dream ought to be playful, mixing and channelling your inspirational thoughts and intuitive feelings into manifesting your dream.

You can create a harmonious attitude by simply being.

The truth is that unless you feel worthy of your highest vision then you cannot possibly experience it. You must become aware that you are worthy.

One of the greatest challenges facing humanity is that of being able to live with one another in a peaceful and civilized way. We all have our individual uniqueness and perceptions of how we believe the world ought to function. This creates conflict unless there is a deeper realization in the collective consciousness and an understanding that most human desires desecrate the beauty of the nowness of life.

Inner rage is a phenomenally dense frequency that lies dormant in the vast majority of the human species.

Drug addicts will likely suffer from other addictive or dysfunctional behaviours. Seldom will you meet a drug addict who does not exhibit multiple addictive behaviours. Because drug addiction and eating disorders are impossible to ignore so are often in the splotlight, often subtler addictive behaviours, such as love addiction, compulsive underearning and sex addictions, may be neglected.

When the weeks have built up with frustration and immense stress and one of your co-workers, a manager or an employee triggers irritation or angers you, knowing how to respond in a mindful way can pay huge dividends. Knowing how to not take other people's emotional baggage personally and intuitively sensing when to bring up concerns and when not to is an expression of emotional intelligence. This is all possible if we are being truly mindful.

The process of applying Mindfulness Burnout Prevention (MBP) in the workplace or any environment has a much more far-reaching effect than simply accessing equanimity throughout the vicissitudes of life. Continuous learning helps us to stay youthful, sharpen our mental faculties and wire new neural connections in our brain (making us better equipped to accomplish); it is also a sign of humility.

While excellence is a wonderful ideal, perfectionism is a dysfunctional belief system. Many people openly admit that they are perfectionists, which is really an unconscious cry for help. Being a perfectionist is really stating that whatever we attempt to do will never be good enough. This is due to a mistaken belief that we are flawed and unlovable.

Drug and alcohol addiction almost killed me. I was a grave substance misuser in my teens. I started drinking at ten, smoking at eleven and by the time I attended high school aged twelve, I was regularly smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol on weekends. I was a full-blown alcoholic at thirteen. Tragically, I had my stomach pumped at fourteen and although I promised my family I would never drink again, I started less than two weeks later. I was completely hooked on alcohol.

Think of an untreated sex addict who spends hours every night until the early hours watching pornography on the internet instead of spending that time with their wife or husband, and then becomes so tired due to the late nights that their professional life suffers. The sex addict's behaviour will cause resentment, destroy trust and create economic insecurities in the family and home.

Mental stories can literally spoil a human life. It took me a long time to become aware of my mental commentary, such as: "Everything always goes wrong", "I won't be accepted", "I'm a failure" or "What's the point?" Those fears were deep-rooted and triggered many upsetting addictive patterns of behaviour

Hitting bottom is an inside job - it's something that happens within our consciousness.

If you want success then decide to provide a great service to the world. Do not think how you will survive. Think of how you can serve.

Unhappiness is a warped and distorted perception of reality. When a man says he is unhappy with his life and gives a written list of why he is dissatisfied, he has given a frank account of the state of his mind. If his mind is neglected and starved from stillness of thought, the nature of his thinking will reflect turbulence, anxiety and a lack of fulfilment.
However, when he is able to transcend thought, by being the observer (the witness) of his thinking and can take control of his mind, tranquility begins to flow through him. He is no longer a slave to his mental concepts, distinctions and limiting beliefs.

Like gratitude, authentic appreciation in the workplace is a realisation that can be nurtured and accessed with daily mindful practice.
By and large, people who are grateful, happy and enthusiastic are going to demonstrate better performance than those who are unhappy and unappreciative. There is increasing evidence that a grateful mindset amplifies happiness and mental and emotional wellbeing.

For many emotionally wounded addicts, the idea of grieving is a daunting prospect. To regularly grieve does require courage and a desire to heal - but rest assured; the resulting gains from these efforts are profound.

When we seek to escape from inner conflict and pain, we are running away from unresolved childhood trauma or original pain. Most people with serious addictive natures who are in the process of recovery have found that trauma played a huge role in escalating their addictions. It certainly did for me.

When we truly forgive in our hearts, not only do we purify ourselves from the heavy burdens of negative karma but we begin to create a new space for positive energy to enter this world. When we forgive, we are no longer chained to the negative actions we have created in the past.

Ecstasy and bliss must come from within.

Being able to be aware that we have thoughts, but that we are not our thoughts, is a major breakthrough for people seeking emotional health and spiritual wellbeing.

Inner peace and inner bliss are eternal dimensions deep within which we can experience anytime we are prepared to surrender and accept life exactly how it is.

The key to accessing love, joy, peace and compassion is to be free from the dominant state of compulsive thinking. Once we are able to flow into mindfulness and still our thoughts, happiness manifests.

Once we stop "searching" for joyful feelings in people and things, no matter what polarity the external world brings us (positive or negative), we can still be aware of the inner peace that resides in our consciousness.

Many of us have been unconsciously programmed to treat walking as a means to an end, especially while in the workplace. Naturally, a lack of mindfulness while walking leaves one hostage to self-perpetuating stress and anxiety.
We rush (often while shouting into a mobile phone), completely missing the enjoyment of walking. Walking and breathing, if practised harmoniously, can be peaceful and thoroughly enjoyable. Even walking down a corridor or into an office or wherever we are working or being of service can be a harmonious action.

Pure consciousness expresses itself in millions of different forms but the root of consciousness is what we call Being, The Light, Universal Life, Spirit, I Am or God.

Whether someone is a CEO of a major corporation or is serving meals in a diner, failure to adopt a mindful approach will mean that mental and emotional exhaustion could become a habitual condition. Whether someone is stressed about their stocks losing value or being able to pay their bills, the internal underlying conditions of stress and pressure are essentially the same.

Isms' are described as transference of addictive patterns of dysfunctional behaviour, passed down from generation to generation. For instance, if a mother was an alcoholic who never made it into recovery, her behaviour would leave a mark on her children, husband, etc. Unless her adult children join some sort of recovery programme and adopt the mindfulness practice, they will have very similar behaviour traits to their mother but minus the alcohol abuse. There is a strong possibility that they will become codependent and form relationships with other codependents or alcoholics.

Let go of fighting your habits. Simply be present and observe their patterns. This will help you to break free until the negative patterns eventually subside.

The more we uncover who we are not and discard our disempowering unconscious behaviours, the more closely we can be in sync with our true, authentic selves.

The power of self-kindness can help us to heal our chronic shame and self-loathing. In a world that is often mean-spirited and cruel, a daily practice of kindness and warm-heartedness can make all the difference.

The most fascinating revelation is that humanity can tune into a consistently higher frequency through the power of peace and inner stillness.

My very best thinking led me to a therapist's office weeping and pleading for help regarding my alcoholism at the age of 19. I thought I could 'manage' my alcohol addiction, and I failed miserably until I asked for help. My older friends in recovery remind me that I looked like 'death' when I started attending support groups. I was not able to give eye contact, and I covered my eyes with a baseball cap. I had lost significant weight and was frightened to talk to strangers. I was beset with what the programme of Alcoholics Anonymous describes as 'the hideous Four Horseman – terror, bewilderment, frustration and despair'. Similarly, my very best thinking led me to have unhappy, co-dependent relationships. I can go on. The problem was I was dependent on my own counsel. I did not have a support system, let alone a group of sober people to brainstorm with. I just followed my own thinking without getting feedback. The first lesson I learned in recovery was that I needed to check in with sober and wiser people than me regarding my thinking. I still need to do this today. I need feedback from my support system.

Through mindfully practising love and compassion we are able to heal our hearts and minds from our hurt and suffering, thus bringing harmony into this world. The more we are open to love, the easier it is to share kindness with all living creatures.

When we observe the flow of our breathing, we transcend our thoughts and are able to bring mind and body into harmony with each other. Thus, we create calm.

In my personal recovery, mindfulness has helped me to become aware of my trauma responses and given me an anchor to stay present when I have been triggered. Being able to feel my triggers without reacting must be largely credited to learning to anchor myself in my body through mindful body scan meditation.

People who often talk about showing a 'stiff upper lip' are choosing to suffer in silence, isolating themselves from others and destroying a chance to be authentic and sincere. I have spent time with many male recovering addicts who have healed as a result of talking about their emotional pain and depression. Some of them fought in the first and second wars in Iraq; they are physically hard men and are certainly not 'weak'.

Through practising body scan awareness meditation, we can greatly reduce the detrimental effects of stress and make our working lives pleasant and enjoyable.

First and foremost, if we maintain healthy emotional boundaries and direct love and kindness inwards, we are taking care of ourselves and secondly we are giving a subliminal message to others about how we wish to be treated. People tend to subconsciously treat us how we treat ourselves.

Anxiety and stress-related mental dysfunction is the plague of modern-day society. Millions of people are tormented by anxious thinking and the consequent distress this brings, irrespective of whether they live in a mansion or a bed-sit or whether they earn millions or are living on the breadline. This would indicate that external circumstances cannot prevent or cause pathological anxiety or free people from negative emotions.

Capitalism grants you no limits in how much you can grow and expand your services.

Guilt is imperative if we are to create and sustain a decent code of ethics and a sound moral compass. Guilt can help us to listen to our conscience, enhance empathy, and therefore have fulfilling relationships. Without guilt, we would live in an extremely dark world. However, misplaced guilt often triggers us to be over-apologetic and people-please. Many people repeat the word 'sorry' without needing to, while still others feel guilty for their very own existence. Emotionally wounded, shame-based people often feel that they are constantly 'getting in the way'. This stems from a sense of feeling unlovable. To ask for one's own needs to be met often results in a feeling of guilt. I call this misplaced guilt. Similarly, a person may feel guilty even if they have been abused or harmed by others. Misplaced guilt or excessive guilt stifles people's chances to live happily and peacefully.

To be self-compassionate is not to be self-indulgent or self-centred. A major component of self-compassion is to be kind to yourself. Treat yourself with love, care, dignity and make your wellbeing a priority. With self-compassion, we still hold ourselves accountable professionally and personally, but there are no toxic emotions inflicted upon and towards ourselves.

When you are living in the present moment, you will experience a deep sense of inner joy, peace and awareness.

When you try to force your dream to "happen faster" you will only create fear and thus, resistance. As you try to force it you are actually sending energy into the universe that "you are not in reach of your dream and it's not coming fast enough". This will then create frustrations and anxiety. The universe will respond to your emotional state and give you like energy (more experiences to create fear and anxiety).

Conscious breathing anchors us into the nowness of life and gives us a fresh outlook, no different from how a baby observes reality without mental commentary. The baby enjoys watching the world and human activity without any limiting mental concepts spoiling his or her perception. Naturally, we all have to evolve from the helpless state of babyhood, but to be able to tap into that wonderful ability and truly BE in the moment is immensely liberating.

Frozen grief occurs when we deliberately numb out and refuse to process our major losses. Frozen grief is essentially suppressed emotional pain (loss and abandonment) stored in the human body. Frozen grief torments drug addicts. Deep below the emotional surface of the drug addict who has yet to find recovery lies untold, suppressed pain and loss.

The incredible benefits of practising and applying mindfulness and self-compassion in the workplace are being increasingly recognised by human resource professionals as well as the medical profession, as the stresses of competing in today's global economy take their toll on the mental health and emotional wellbeing of many otherwise talented and enthusiastic individuals in the workplace.

Understanding why we are afraid to grieve is a prelude to transforming our lives. Getting in touch with our deepest fears and airing them in a safe space can be incredibly liberating.