Jennifer Matesa - The Recovering Body: Physical and Spiritual Fitness for Living Clean and Sober

Praise for The Recovering Body

Jennifer Matesas The Recovering Body is an engaging commentary on the importance of exercise and meditation for people in recoverybut it is so much more than simply a self-help book. Personal, luminous in its depth of understanding of the human condition, this is a book that would benefit anyone who struggles with self-image.

Kaylie Jones, publisher of Kaylie Jones Books and author of Lies My Mother Never Told Me

The Recovering Body is an essential read for anyone struggling with addiction and compulsion. Matesa has integrated science and stories that provide critical insight and guidance from every perspective. This book is the road map toward fulfillment and happiness.

Shane Niemeyer, triathlete and author of The Hurt Artist: My Journey from Suicidal Junkie to Ironman

With warmth and intelligence, Matesa suggests that healing the body from physical addiction is not separate from spiritual healing. Through fascinating stories from the field and using her experience as an educator and journalist who overcame her own addiction, she explains how movement, nourishment, sleep, pleasure, and mindfulness pave the road home to yourself. A blueprint for healing, body and soul.

Susan Piver, author of The Wisdom of a Broken Heart

Hazelden Publishing

Center City, Minnesota 55012

800-328-9000
hazelden.org/bookstore

2014 by Jennifer Matesa.

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwisewithout the express written permission of the publisher. Failure to comply with these terms may expose you to legal action and damages for copyright infringement.

ISBN: 978-1-61649-567-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

Editors note

The names, details, and circumstances may have been changed to protect the privacy of those mentioned in this publication.

This publication is not intended as a substitute for the advice of health care professionals.

Alcoholics Anonymous, AA, and the Big Book are registered trademarks of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc.

18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5 6

Cover design: Theresa Jaeger Gedig

Developmental editor: Sid Farrar

Production editor: Jean Cook, ImageSmythe

Typesetting: Bookmobile Design & Digital Publisher Services

For Jonathan

for his honesty, guts, and wild sense of humor.

Live well, hijito.

Contents

My editor, Sid Farrar, and the team at Hazelden, for requesting and believing in this work

My agent, Stephany Evans at Fine Print Literary, for her excellent representation

All my sources quoted hereinmy deepest gratitude for your time, expertise, and stories, which are priceless

Von Keairns, Virginia Mayo and Elise Yoder, Kathy F. and Anita, Chimene, Debbe, Jess, Kathie, Lori, Mary Jo, and Nancy, Moira, Laurel, Jim Z., and my sister Judy, for unfailing love

Carole C. for the central metaphor of this book

Susan Atkinson and John Beiter, for listening and healing

Kathy Ketcham, for mentorship and friendship

Jason Schwartz at Dawn Farm, for sharing resources

Michael V. Genovese, M.D., J.D., ABIHM, for kindly reviewing this work from a scientific perspective

Janice, Tom, and Danielle, for teaching me the basics

Petra Fallaux and Ginger, Jeff Oaks and Andy, for the walks and talks

George and Justin, for the playlists

Darlene, Suz Falvey, and Jim, for the workouts

Erika Freiberger, for skilled bodywork

Christina Sible at Yoga on Centre, for yoga instruction

Susan Piver, for meditation instruction

Pittsburgh Friends Meeting and Pittsburgh Shambhala Center, for silence

Nick, for perseverance through all the years and for our son

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Scott Gonzalez, M.D., and Opiate Detox Recovery (www.heroin-detox.com) for permission to reprint passages that originally appeared on that site.

Some names of people quoted in this work have been changed to preserve anonymity, but all the stories told here are true.

I have tried my best to represent these stories faithfully.

Any errors of fact are mine.

The day I was asked to write this book I had just finished talking about addiction and recovery with a bunch of medical students from across the country. I was standing on the sidewalk of a crowded downtown street, looking at my phone, checking my email, and the editor who sent the message asked me whether Id consider writing a book about exercise and recovery. I laughed out loud, because as an immediate response to this question, my mind had cued up and rerun a grainy but vivid home video of the bike-hike my sixth-grade class held almost forty years before to raise money for our overnight class trip to Gettysburg.

This home movie is stored in my minds archives as Exhibit A in the trials of my fat, ugly body and its consistently lousy performance in moments of stress, pleasure, even ordinary days. (Fat and uglythese are the words the offscreen narrator uses about the movies subject: me. Of course, in my addictive mind, Its Always About Me.) Once the movie is cued up, Im forced to watch as the footage unwinds. One warm spring Saturday, we all brought our bikes to school with the purpose of riding one hundred laps around the paved lot between the school and the church next door, a distance calculated to be ten miles. When we were done, wed go back to our sponsors and collect pledges for each mile wed ridden.

Ten miles on a bike seemed like a trip to the moon for me at eleven years old. I had a bike, all right: a pink girls bike with a white vinyl banana-seat and swoop handlebars, a bit small for my body since my dad had given it to me when I was seven. But because we lived deep in the suburbs, with no sidewalks and no roads safe for bikes, I never rode the damn thing. Hell, I never even walked anywhere. We lived between two farms, so we had no neighbors and no neighborhood. Our house was surrounded by woods, and my motherwho was raising her three kids on the Long Shelf Life diet (Twinkies, Wonder Bread, Lucky Charms, Coke)didnt let us wander past the pear tree at the back of the yard. If she could have chained or microchipped us, she might have, but as it was, she didnt trust us to roam. It seems to me now that I was a bit like a feedlot animal being fattened up for the slaughter. And as in the film Groundhog Day, that small death happened over and over again when the kids at school teased me about the shape of my body and its inability to perform in gym class. So when the bike-hike rolled around, I made it maybe five or six miles. I was reduced to asking two of the boysBrian and Doug, who were stringy and fit from Little League training and had finished way ahead of meto make up my distance.

I was the one who was picked last for every team. I was the one who fell off the monkey bars, who couldnt hold the flexed-arm hang in the Presidential Fitness Test. Faith Ann, who grew up not far from me on a real farm, rode horses, and took care of the animals, could pull her chin over the bar.