#5th precept

[suraira]

The One-Week Caffeine Addiction Solution

by John Fawkes Putting all this information together, here’s the exact schedule you should follow to kick your addiction in one week.

Before starting: Figure out what your substitute habit is going to be—decaf coffee, herbal tea, root beer, etc. If you normally make or consume your caffeine at home or the office, acquire a supply of your substitute that will last you more than a week. Also get a bottle of DL-phenylalanine capsules.

The last day you consume caffeine: Throw out all your caffeine. Coffee, soda, caffeine pills—get rid of them all.

Day 1: Consume 1,000 mg of DL-phenylalanine first thing in the morning and another 1,000 mg around noon. Start consuming your substitute beverage in place of your usual caffeinated beverage at the same time and place you would normally be consuming caffeine.

Day 2: Take 1,000 mg of DLPA in the morning and 1,000 mg at noon. The morning of Day 2 is the hardest for most people—once you go without caffeine that morning, it only gets easier from there.

Day 3: Take 1,000 mg of DLPA in the morning and 500 mg at noon. By the afternoon of Day 3, if not sooner, your caffeine cravings should be all but gone.

Day 4: Take 1,000 mg of DLPA first thing in the morning and 500 mg at noon. Things will be noticeably easier by this day at the latest: withdrawal symptoms should no longer be noticeable, although you’re still a few days away from completely resetting your tolerance.

Days 5 and 6: Take 500 mg of DLPA in the morning and 500 mg at noon.

Days 7–10: Take 500 mg of DLPA in the morning, but not at noon. By Day 7, your tolerance will probably have been completely reset and your addiction will be over, but you should keep going for 10 days just to be absolutely certain.

Day 11 and beyond: After 10 days, you can resume having one caffeinated beverage a day, in the morning, if you so choose, as long as it has less than 100 mg of caffeine. Check this list to find the caffeine content of a beverage.

You may also take 500 mg of DLPA either in the morning or around noon as desired. Be aware that taking it with or shortly before caffeine will potentiate the effects of the caffeine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reset Your Caffeine Tolerance This system is simple and has been proven effective time and time again. Even for an ardent tea drinker like me, it’s well worth taking a week or two off from caffeine in order to once again enjoy the full benefits of the world’s favorite drug.Caffeine withdrawal can be tough, but if you follow this system, you’ll only experience mild discomfort for the first two days. By Day 3, you’ll barely even miss caffeine. After a week or so, your tolerance will have been completely reset—it will be as if you had never had caffeine before.The even better news is that you don’t have to quit caffeine forever, and your effort will not have been “wasted” if you start drinking coffee again. In fact, a one-week caffeine washout will allow you to once more experience the full benefits of caffeine from a nice, low dose while still functioning at 100 percent the rest of the time and sleeping soundly at night. Written byJohn Fawkes Los Angeles-based personal trainer, online fitness & nutrition coach, and health & fitness writer. https://www.coach.me/JohnFawkes?ref=ModAV Part 2 of 3

[garysanderspdx]

Here’s my sobriety story, recorded at the 3rd annual Refuge Recovery Conference in Los Angeles

Here’s my sobriety story, recorded at the 3rd annual Refuge Recovery Conference in Los Angeles

[rainbowtwo]

Recovery and the Fifth Precept

'Most of us who came of age in the 1960's convinced ourselves that getting high was the quickest - if not the best - way to begin the long, strange trip toward higher consciousness. Aldus Huxley, the man who wrote The Doors of Perception and turned Timothy Leary on to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, seemed to be saying that we could access ancient wisdom through the wonders of modern chemistry.

For a while at least, that theory seemed to hold true for me, and I suspect I'm not the only reader of this magazine who became interested in Buddhism following an acid trip back in the sixties.

Further on down the road, in the 1970's, I got a bit more serious about my Buddhism. I struggled through a few meditation retreats with the Korean Zen master Seung Sahn and even considered taking vows to become an official Buddhist. But one of the Buddhist precepts particularly bothered me. It was the fifth one, the one about abstaining from intoxicating drink, and presumably from other drugs that also gave rise to heedlessness.

I never got round to taking formal vows and soon fell away from my meditation practice altogether. It took two decades before I reconnected with meditation, in this case a Vipassana group. Getting high was still an important part of my daily routine, but I'd long since abandoned the delusion that alcohol and other drugs were somehow furthering my spiritual growth. I could no longer hide the fact from myself that I was an alocholic and drug addict - a functional one, with a good job, a house, and a family, but an addict nonetheless.

As a journalist, I'd written about twelve-step spirituality and the burgeoning recovery movement, but I'd never felt like Alcoholics Anonymous was for me. I knew enough about Buddhism to know that its teachings about the dangers of craving and attachment (and obsession, and selfishness and egomania) might offer a path out of addiction. After asking around, I discovered the beginnings of a Buddhist recovery network. I found the work of Kevin Griffin, the author of One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps and more recently A Burning Desire: Dharma God and the Path of Recovery. I attended one of the retreats at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County. I also connected with an eclectic group of recovering addicts who were interested in Buddhism and gathered every Monday at a place we called the KooKoo Factory, a funky loft/performance space in San Francisco's Mission District. That group disbanded following the death of its founding angel, and I started attending a larger meditation recovery group at the San Francisco Zen Center. I also put a little more effort into finding an AA group that was right for me, and discovered that some of my old ideas about AA were based on too many preconceived notions and not enough personal investigation.

Several years ago, I started working on a book about the early years of the psychedelic drug movement (It would be published as The Harvard Psychedelic Club.) One question the book asks is whether drug-induced feelings of wonder, awe, empathy, and interconnectedness are authentic religious experiences. My answer is that while the experiences may be authentic, the real issue is what we do with them. Do the experiences change the way we live our lives? Do they make us more aware and compassionate human beings? Looking back on my own history, I'd have to say that a few psychedelic drug experiences back in the day did change the way I think about the world and live my life. They did make me a better person. But I can't say the same thing about a few decades of experiences with other drugs, including alcohol.

Last year, I interviewed six Buddhist teachers about their interpretations of the fifth precept. Some of them urge complete abstention from alcohol and other drugs. Others see nothing wrong with a glass of wine with dinner. Some urge caution but still see some value in psychedelic drugs. One thing I've learned in my own recovery is that it's not up to me to decide if someone else has a problem with alcohol or other drugs. It's up to them. And I've come to feel the same way about the fifth precept.

So if you have a problem with the fifth precept, you might want to ask yourself just why that might be.'

- Don Lattin, Recovery and the Fifth Precept in Tricycle, The Buddhist Review, Fall 2010.