The Road to Enlightenment: A Revealing Interview With Noah Levine

Noah Levine is the author of Dharma Punx, Against The Stream, The Heart of the Revolution and Refuge Recovery. He is also a Buddhist teacher and counselor.

Noah created a Buddhist approach to addiction recovery called Refuge Recovery, a program that includes peer-lead meetings as well as a professional treatment center. He is the founding teacher of Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society, with centers in Los Angeles and San Francisco and over 20 affiliated groups around North America.

He teaches meditation classes, workshops and retreats internationally. Noah holds a Master’s degree in counseling psychology and lives in Los Angeles.

Interview With Noah Levine

Q: In your interview with Tommy Rosen, you said that you started using at seven years old because drugs and alcohol were accessible at home – you saw them as a solution to your suicidal tendencies and they numbed out your feelings of pain and angst. Tell me about those feelings and what you were trying to escape?

Noah: There was like an existential crisis. Like, what am I doing here? Where are my parents? I felt alone and emotionally abandoned. My parents divorced when I was very young. My mother was struggling with her own addiction and, although physically present, was dealing with two divorces and four children—and her own addiction. My father was a weekend dad. It was painful and I didn’t really want to exist. That, coupled with my parents being Eastern-oriented and believing in reincarnation, suicidal ideation wasn’t like lights out—it was start over.

Q: By 16, you progressed to smoking crack and shooting heroin on the streets. At 17, you had three felony arrests. In the summer of 1988, you were sitting in a juvenile hall cell, and you felt like you’d reached the end. Drunk, you described yourself as feeling scared and hopeless. You tried to commit suicide that night. The next morning you woke up and you reached a turning point, when your father came to see you. I really liked what you said about this moment: “We all sort of have a different doorway to dharma or spiritual practice. Suffering is a doorway. For me it was the suffering of addiction, violence, and crime which opened me at a young age – 17 years old. I was incarcerated, looking at the rest of my life in prison and thought, ‘Maybe I will try dad’s hippie meditation bullshit.’ Suffering opened me to the possibility of trying meditation.” Why do you think you had resisted your dad, and meditation, until then?

Noah: It just didn’t make any sense. I didn’t completely understand it. But my anger, angst, political orientation – sort of punk rock, anti-establishment, anarchist rebellion – wasn’t supported by that. Seeing my parents sit quietly in meditation and talk about compassion and love to me also really influenced the punk movement – where we were kind of looking at the hippies as a failed rebellion. If we were going succeed where the hippies failed it was through a violent revolution, not a peace and love drugged out sit-in. I became desperate enough to realize that my form of rebellion was just causing more suffering for me and those around me and I saw my father as a happy, well-adjusted person. I knew it was clear that meditation had helped him and I knew I needed it to save my own life.

Q: You said that you’d discovered the power of meditation and that you could choose not to pay attention to your mind. Could you tell me about that power – particularly in relation to an addictive mind?

Noah: I talk about breaking the addiction to our minds because it’s really in the mind. Of course cravings are physical, but if the mind is saying ‘drink, use, overeat, gamble’ – whatever the addictive behavior is – it’s the mind that is telling us to do that. Learning how to ignore the mind, to break our addiction to it, is key. One of the first steps in a concentration-based meditation practice – when people do mantras or even a strict mindfulness or breathing – is ignoring your mind and choosing to pay attention to something else. We start to wake up to consciousness and awareness. What we call mindfulness is separate from the contents and objects in the mind – the thoughts, plans, cravings, aversions, resentments, and fears. With good instruction, we can say: I’m not stopping those thoughts, but I can choose to not pay attention to them and to not obey them. Breaking the addiction to the mind is a huge part of the recovery process, but it’s not an abstinent space because you have to think of your mind the way like a food addict would think about food. I can’t not eat. You can’t not think. I have to be able to have some discernment upon what food I can eat and what food I have to renounce. What kind of thought I can eat, and what kind of thought I have to set aside and ignore and break my identification with.

Q: When you were first sober, you had a resistance to the theistic language of 12-step programs and had a reactive use of meditation. Then getting into trouble motivated you to recommit to a 12-step program and you went on to visit a meditation retreat. It was then that you began what you describe as a “serious practice.” With that in mind, what advice would you give to a person in early recovery who is just beginning a meditation practice, and how early do you think it would be beneficial to start that?

Noah: It’s a key and necessary tool that needs to be applied right from the beginning. I have a treatment center – Refuge Recovery Treatment Center – and we have people in detox starting mindfulness practice, compassion and forgiveness meditations. We run a 90-day program and all the way through the treatment process people are meditating. Coming out at three months sober, they have a three-month foundation of meditation practice that they then carry through their recovery right from the beginning, rather than waiting. Now, meditation is a field that is not a quick fix – it is a gradual developing of wisdom, compassion and forgiveness. The sooner you start, the better because this is going to be a process of years of retraining the heart and the mind, of breaking our addictions to the mind and having a wise relationship to it. And meeting ourselves and others with forgiveness takes a long time. If we procrastinate, then it’s just going take longer and longer to find the freedom…and to find the recovery that we seek. My advice is start from the beginning. Start as soon as you can. I know a lot of people think – even in the treatment world – that brand new people can’t meditate. That is usually said by people who themselves – even with long-term recovery – never have a meditation practice. It is not people who meditate that say new people can’t meditate, it is people who don’t meditate.

Q: What prompted your leap from a dedicated meditation practice to new recovery practice?

Noah: My teachers encouraged me to teach. At that time, Kevin Griffin and I had started to do a little Buddhism and 12-Step teaching together. I questioned, am I going to be a recovery Buddhist or am I just going to be a Buddhist teacher? I made the early decision that I don’t want to exclude people who aren’t at their dharma doorway. When I started teaching Against the Stream, it was for everyone who has dissatisfaction, and who are seeking freedom. As it turned out, more than half of my community were recovering addicts. My first book, Dharma Punks, is my story of addiction and recovery and how Buddhism was essential to that. I realized that so many people in my community are trying to find their way with Buddhism as a recovery path and what we really need is an actual format, organization, and peer led support – so that people aren’t dependent on a teacher. The 12-Step model is brilliant in that respect – being of service to each other and accountability to other recovering people. We were breaking free from that Buddhist hierarchy of needing the teacher. That inspired me to create a peer led Buddhist oriented recovery process.

Q: Anything different from a 12-Step recovery can sometimes be considered controversial. You summarized this beautifully in an interview as a theistic versus a non-theistic approach. How would you describe Refuge Recovery and its accessibility for atheists or those opposed to the theistic language in recovery programs?

Noah: I would describe it as a humanist psychology. It is a mindfulness-based intervention; a developing of emotional intelligence and positive emotions through the practices of forgiveness, compassion, love and kindness; and developing the wisdom to see the impermanent nature of craving. Also, the impermanent nature of all thoughts, feelings, and sensations – through an investigation of meditative discipline. The whole process is like a humanist psychology and is not a theistic mystical intervention. It’s rational and is based on the neuroscience and psychology of how human beings work. It’s an action-based transformation.

Q: You said in your interview with Tommy Rosen that there is a misconception that you need God to recover?

Noah: I think that the 12-Step guys were brilliant. They saw a spiritual solution and realized that you can’t stink your way out of alcoholism – there’s actually some sort of spiritual practice. Also, they were Christians, so that’s all they knew. And yet they were so open-minded about their spiritual beliefs – they said higher power as you understand him. They included prayer and meditation in the steps. But they didn’t really understand that there was a non-theistic meditative discipline that was transformative. We found a quote by Dr. Bob – one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous – that said the only equivalent to the 12-Steps is the Buddhist four noble truth and eightfold path, which add up to 12! These are the 12 things that need to be done to end suffering.

Q: That forms the basis of Refuge Program of Recovery?

Noah: Yes, Buddhist teachings. It’s the core of what Refuge Recovery is: the four noble truths and the eightfold path.

Q: In the preamble of Refuge Recovery meetings, it states that the intention of the group is to ‘explore Buddhist perspectives on recovery and that it is meant to be a support for recovery, not a substitute for a dedicated practice; spiritual growth and recovery require individual effort.’ What does that mean?

Noah: Going to meetings is not enough; this is a place to support investigation and study. There’s a meditation in the meeting, but recovery is a full life practice. The eightfold path is about how we speak, how we relate to money, how we relate to sexuality, how we look at our whole life. Our life becomes a mindfulness practice and that is not just sitting in a meeting for an hour and talking about it. It’s not a substitute for the effort, the intention, and the practice of making wisdom and compassion your life’s path.

Q: You said a recovering person can attend 12-Step meetings and Refuge Recovery. What would you recommend to those who feel that 12-Step meetings are not for them? Can they solely attend Refuge?

Noah: Yes. Half the Refuge Recovery community is just doing Refuge and is no longer doing 12-Steps. Half is doing both. We also have a lot of Refuge Recovery members who are very happily 12-Step oriented – maybe even theistic, believe in God and love the 12-Steps – but they never really learned meditation there. They’re coming to Refuge to learn self-forgiveness and mindfulness and some of the things that the 12-Steps don’t teach you. So it’s a very mixed community; there are Buddhist atheists who believe this is the only thing that makes sense to them; there’s the open-minded agnostics who feel Buddhism makes sense to them, but so do the 12-Steps; and then there’s theists who believe in God, but are very happy to finally learn some good meditation instruction.

Q: You said that the cause of suffering is referred to in Buddhism as an unquenchable thirst. How would you say that craving arises in addicts, as opposed to non-addicts?

Noah: That’s the question! The inventory in the second noble truth is really aimed at identifying in our lives: attachment issues, developmental traumas, or acute traumas that (perhaps) led to our ordinary craving becoming addictive behavior and addictive craving. Certainly everyone has cravings for pleasure, but not everyone has the disregard for consequences that leads to sticking needles in our arms and drinking alcoholically.

Q: Is there anything else about Refuge Recovery that you’d like to mention?

Noah: There are a couple of the things that we’re experimenting with. Not introducing ourselves in meetings as addicts – instead introducing ourselves by our first names – breaking some of that identification with the addiction and acknowledging that we are people who are recovering and we’re here. Also, there no set tradition around celebrating abstinent time, although some meetings are doing that and it’s become the group decision on whether or not they want to. The 12-Steps have a strong tradition to celebrate time. Refuge hasn’t really taken a stance on that. I personally have mixed feelings about it. There is a hierarchy that gets created and this can create shame when they relapse – they feel like they lost their time and have to introduce themselves as a newcomer, so they don’t want to return. We’re trying to avoid some of those pitfalls.

Q: You’ve created a not-for-profit treatment center. How do you see that aspect of Refuge developing over the next five years, and what is the model of accessibility?

Noah: We’re focusing on outpatient treatment primarily. We have sober living and detox. Everywhere I go, people say they need a Refuge Outpatient, so I feel like it’s a service imperative to grow the business and make Refuge Recovery treatment grow. Some people are fine with meetings, but others need the support of a case manager, psychotherapist, groups, and professional addiction treatment. Eden Danzinger has trained all of our clinicians in EMDR, which is mindful-based trauma treatment. I feel passionate about this treatment center and I want to see it expand and be accessible in more places around the country – maybe around the world.

Q: How do people access it? Is it on a sliding scale? It is insured? Is it scholarship?

Noah: It’s insurance and sliding scale. It’s very expensive to run a treatment center and to pay psychotherapists. There’s not a way to do it for free. Insurance will pay – if people have it. The problem is that so many people don’t have insurance – or they don’t have good insurance. That becomes a bigger healthcare accessibility issue in our country.

Q: Are there scholarships available for people that can’t afford it? Are there any options?

Noah: There are, yes.