Addiction Recovery with Durga Leela

Addiction Recovery with Durga Leela

In Podcasts by Cate Stillman

Podcast Intro:

Durga Leela (a spiritual name) is a person in long-term recovery, a certified Ayurveda Practitioner, yoga teacher, and yoga therapist (IAYT certified) from the UK and now based in the US. She has shared Yoga as a Recovery Pathway in several Recovery Conferences over the last 20 years. She has also served as the Director of the Ayurveda Programs at the Sivananda Ashram in California since 2003 and is a professional member of the National Ayurvedic Medical Association (NAMA).

In this episode, she shares her journey of healing and recovery from addiction. She also talks about the issues of Health Care regarding addiction, how she used Yoga to heal from alcoholism, and the emotional and mental health issues surrounding addiction.

Personal story

being a child of an alcoholic,
becoming alcoholic myself in my teens,
finding yoga in my mid-20s,
a few suicide attempts,
and losing my mother to alcoholism when I was 32 years old.
Shortly after, I was fired from a job I was headhunted into. Then I “did a geographic”— moving from London to Lake Tahoe to take a year off and sort myself out. But “wherever you go, there you are,” and after nine months in the United States, my new life was in shambles. I once again felt desperate, but this time I took myself to a meeting of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous)
18 months sober, allopathic medical professionals offered me antidepressants for their diagnosis of clinical depression
Book Yoga of Recovery, Integrating Yoga and Ayurveda with Modern Recovery Tools for Addiction – YoR works with people who have a sex addiction, eating disorders, codependents with no substance abuse, and others where substance abuse is present but it is not the primary presenting issue. I work with people 16–84 years old; those who are members of 12-step programs and those who are not. We offer help to those who want to come off the pharmaceuticals they have been prescribed but find they are now dependent on them.

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

We talk about the roots of the addictive behaviors: the main causative factor is the ego, the idea of having disconnection from spirit, disconnection from life.

How Ayurveda is a foundational behavioral health care system that can help people thrive in long-term (emotional) sobriety spread addiction – it’s not just about alcohol and drugs! addiction is treated by the acute care model but needs a continuum of care from recovery-oriented systems of care – a chronic care model – and overall CARE rather than CURE which tends to be mainly at the level of pharmaceuticals and surgery – but this does not work so well for problems of addiction article: Ayurveda Journal of Health

I truly believe Ayurveda is the best system of behavioral health care for all modern chronic diseases.
sobriety, service, and fellowship (the three pillars of 12-step principles)
Addiction is a bio-pscyhosocial-emotional-cultural-economic-political, etc.
“character defects” that underlie all addictions—the one that is most ubiquitous being our tendency toward codependency—our ability to see in the other what is wrong but not be able to see or deal with it in ourselves
“Svastha”— and addiction
UT and “Svastha”

This was very interesting to me as it fits with what I’d been told in AA—that addiction was a “spiritual malady” and I was “spiritually sick.” Ayurveda describes all diseases as “forgetting our true nature is spirit.”
Dr. Harikrishnan, Medical Director of Vaidyagram Ayurvedic Clinic in Coimbatore, India, states, “Addiction arises when we lose the purpose of our life. Vedic literature tells us we only get a human birth after several thousand other lives. The purpose of human life is to evolve, to go to a further level. When you have a bigger purpose, this guides you better in how to live each day.
PK and recovery to reset cellularly. Dr. Harikrishnan, “We recommend cleansing the body through PanchaKarma-this eliminates the toxins and allows you a break from the circumstances-time away to cleanse and calm down, introduce new practices, change your lifestyle, and feel the effects of the new habits. It takes three months for food to go to the seventh tissue; within three months, our body is completely changed. Hence it is ideal for spending a minimum of six weeks to three months in a staged recovery process.” YoR offers Ayurvedic Pancha karma retreats in India.
Out-of-pocket spending vs. what is covered by gov’t or insurance.
The first stage is the deep cleanse; the second stage is learning both the principles and tools of Yoga and Ayurveda to help us make better decisions, and the third stage gives time to offer service to the others-the best way to get out of self. This increases confidence and self-esteem and allows us to share the gifts of our recovery with others. We then go back to live our lives knowing that we have a purpose, feeling calmer and stronger, knowing our capacity, pacifying Vata by eating properly and applying oil daily. (From the Book – online course – YoR Between the mat and the meeting – Ayurveda for our addictiveness; Understanding of our suffering determines the nature of our recovery)

Links/CTA:

Highlights:

Cate shares her experiences living in a Ski Town
Cate talks about the Body Thrive
Cate shares how she became intrigued with the Depp-Heard Case
Cate talks about Addiction as a Spiritual Malady
Cate talks about self-investment in addiction recovery

Timestamps:

[02:27] Durga’s Healing Journey
[08:29] Support from the Community
[13:23] Getting Introduced to Dharma
[16:52] Working with Addiction and the Importance of Behavioral Self-Care
[27:38] Emotional Inflammation
[34:18] The Biological Reality of Addiction
[41:08] The Negative Effects of Sugar
[46:54] Becoming Whole
[48:52] Healing the Habits

Quotes:

“You know you’re in recovery when you start wishing for a better past. You start to want to empower yourself, and that is to get up early in the morning and do these daily routines.”
“Constantly needing to have medicine and nourishment with you psychologically reprograms your experience of needing something else to be whole,”
“You can’t really have someone just come off of heavy substances. There is a timeline of detox to treatment and recovery.”
“We will attract to ourselves the people, circumstances, and events that give us opportunities to work through some of the life lessons that we’re here for in this life when we thirst for truth.”