The Breath of Life

[Upbeat Guitar Music]

Mike: Welcome everybody. This is Avoiding the Addiction Affliction brought to you by Westwords Consulting and the Kenosha County Substance Use Disorder Coalition, I'm Mike McGowan.

Mike: You know, sometimes I run across people who have such a wide variety of interests and expertise that the conversation involves much more than just a topic or two.

Mike: And today is one of those days. Reverend Dr. Monica Cummings has dedicated her life to being of service to others, drawing on her experience as a college basketball player, army officer, Peace Corps Volunteer, Parish and Community Minister, University Faculty Member, Yoga, Meditation Instructor, and Substance Abuse Counselor.

Mike: Rev. Dr. Cummings provides support for those she works with in an inclusive, non judgmental, compassionate, relational approach to the healing process. Welcome, Dr. Cummings. How are you?

Monica: I'm great, Mike. How are you? Thanks for having me.

Mike: Well, I'm so glad you could join us. I'm good. I'm good. I wanted to start first.

Mike: I always like to start with this about your work and passions, but you're in recovery, right? Long term recovery.

Monica: I am. I took my last drink of alcohol on January 7th, 1990. Over in California, we call it our birthday there. And so I celebrate my AA birthday, January 8th, every year.

Mike: Well, happy birthday.

Monica: And so since January 8th, 1990.

Mike: Wow. And that was in California.

Monica: I did. I got sober in California.

Mike: And so then you decided what the heck, why as well, which Wisconsin, the epicenter of alcohol usage, right?

Monica: Well, you know, and I did that after I moved here in '08. So I had many years of sobriety and that included being in the peace corps.

Mike: Yeah.

Monica: In South Africa, which is a country that does enjoy its beer, homemade beer. And that was hard being in recovery, being there and at that point, I was still regularly attending AA meetings and it was hard for me to get to meetings while I was in country. But, yeah, it's been 1 day at a time.

Monica: So for people who are like the people I work with who are struggling with their challenges of staying in recovery or getting into recovery. It's one day at a time, and still all these years later I still remember it's just one day at a time. And knowing that what I did yesterday influences what my life is going to be like the next day.

Mike: Every now and then we read about people who've had a long, long stretch of recovery and for whatever reason, they go back. And I always admire folks who say, whoops! And then say, I'm day one.

Monica: Yeah. Yeah. And as we talked about the opioid. I know at least one person who was in long term recovery.

Monica: I'm talking 20 years who had surgery, got put on an opioid and that switch was clicked back on and unfortunately they lost 20 years.

Mike: Yeah, it's such a devastating disease. I want to ask you about one of your passions and what you do now. How did you discover yoga? And your bio says, forgive me, you practice, I'm going to read this.

Mike: iRest Yoga Nidra meditation. Okay, first of all, explain what that is. And then how did you get into it?

Monica: So iRest Yoga Nidra, and I stands for integrative, so it's integrative restoration. And so that's the new part. Dr. Richard Miller named it that. And then the Yoga Nidra is thousands of years old, like the Yoga Nidra is a part of the practice of yoga.

Monica: People think yoga is just a physical, you know, you walk into a yoga studio and you do the physical aspect of yoga. But yoga is so much more than just the physical movement of the poses. Meditation is a vital component of yoga. And so iRest Yoga Nidra Um, . Miller, who's also a trained psychologist, a yogi, experienced yoga Yoga Nidra with his Western thinking, and especially Western clinical thinking thought, how can I make this accessible for Western audience? And so he used his psychology and integrated Western with the Eastern practice and came up with iRest Yoga Nidra. And he knew it would be helpful for people with PTSD.

Monica: So he piloted at Walter Reed Medical Center to augment talk therapy and medication therapy for service personnel returning from combat. And since then, it's grown to include being proven to be helpful for people in recovery.

Mike: Well, and for those of you who listen regularly, you know, that we're going to put links to Dr. Miller's research on the blurb of the podcast. But that deeper relaxation. Well, first of all, you were a college basketball player, so you had to already be into your body and breathing and relaxing as part of that, right? So you, you probably took to it like a duck to water.

Monica: I did. And the reason I love practicing iRest myself and teaching it to the people I work with in the CCS program here in Kenosha County is the 10 components involved in iRest the solution.

Monica: Heartfelt desire, which encourages people. What is it that gets you up in the morning? What is it that drives and motivates you in the world? So that's your heartfelt desire. Intention. You know, set your intention for today. How do you want your day to go? How do you want your life to go? And then the inner resource.

Monica: And people used to call the inner resource your safe place. And the inner resource can be a person, place, thing. A special object or symbol where the person can go and get grounded and get centered and reset emotionally immensely. So, if they're experiencing something tragic, or they've been triggered.

Monica: Or they're stressed out, a person can go into their inner resource and regroup, so to speak. The heartfelt desire and the intention, the heartfelt desire is like a locational app and the intention is like coordinates to get there. And it just helps people to have a direction and purpose. So that's why I love practicing iRest.

Monica: I love teaching iRest. And then there's breath sensing and body sensing and iRest also opposite feelings. I worked with someone and it was like revelation that she could feel two things at one time. You can feel happy and also be sad. With the state of the world right now, people are like, such a downer, how can I be happy?

Monica: Well, you can, you can be happy and hold the happy feeling and at the same time still be sad for the world. And it's not mutually exclusive. And so, for people to know that they can hold both things at the same time and experience opposite feelings at the same time. It's just been a revelation for folks.

Mike: Yeah. You mentioned PTSD and when we're talking about recovery, that sense of stress and anxiety, and you're right, we see so many people experiencing it today. That has to be a resource and a tool in your tool belt that can help. How long does it take to feel proficient in it?

Monica: Practicing iRest?

Monica: Oh, it's the journey, each time I practice I experience something new or something new comes to me, but it's just in the practice, just have these great ideas, in the course of a day and I know it's because iRest helps to put my mind at ease enough where I'm able to think through things and process things at a level that I wasn't able to do that before practicing iRest to help my mind just be in a state of reception.

Monica: If that makes sense.

Mike: Yeah, it does. And we see people struggling a lot. You and I both work in the community a great deal. What are you hearing about people's struggles with their mental health?

Monica: Well, right now it's not so much the folks I'm working with, it's providers who are concerned about what may happen with Medicaid and Medicare and whatever happens with especially Medicaid will then impact BadgerCare and I'm a comprehensive community services provider and the program does have a number of folks who are on BadgerCare as well as other types of insurance that could be impacted if they make cuts to Medicaid or Medicare.

Monica: So I'm hearing from providers that folks I'm working with in terms of what may happen in the next month or next 6 months in terms of funding.

Mike: Yeah, for those of you listening, BadgerCare is Wisconsin's state generated program to help, and most states have a program like that. Monica, I did a conference last week, and there were tons of providers there, and you could have cut the anxiety.

Mike: It was palpable. They're wondering like, well, what do we do? And for me, it's what do we do? But it's like, well, what do the people do who are serviced by programs that are reliant on these programs? Like, we don't know yet how it's going to shake out.

Monica: But I'm having flashbacks of Reagan's cuts when public institutions to help people with mental health was shut down.

Monica: And then that's unhoused population exploded because folks didn't have anywhere to and private inpatient wasn't at the point where they could absorb when you know, state institutions shut down. So that's my concern and the folks that I work with are on the margins already and are vulnerable, which is why they're in the program.

Monica: They're vulnerable and support. They need to wrap around support, not just with their mental health, but just things to help them through daily living. One of the other things I do is I teach yoga, trauma informed yoga. And I am a vet. And so I just completed my Warriors at Ease Level 2 training last October.

Monica: And my trauma informed yoga it's different from regular yoga. Like I said people in the West think yoga is about the physical act, but trauma informed yoga really focuses on how opposed feels in the body and in how important breath work is in terms of helping to help people self regulate.

Monica: If they are triggered or you encounter a situation that's stressful or produces anxiety.

Mike: And that's not only the sort of thing you can practice every day, but it improves over time, but you have to have vigilance when it comes to that. You literally have to practice that.

Monica: Yes, and so with the folks I work with, we start every session out with belly breathing.

Monica: And that's simply imagining you have a balloon in your stomach and as you inhale, blow your balloon up and all this breathing is through your nose and just imagine each time you inhale your balloon expands, your stomach expands each time you exhale. The balloon relaxes, inhale, blow your balloon up, exhale, let your balloon relax. And start every session with belly breathing, breathing helps to soothe the central nervous system, which then helps the rest of the body to relax and regulate.

Mike: Yeah, I work with young people, Dr. Monica, and I think you'll relate to this. I call this the free throw. Right before you shoot a free throw, how do you breathe so that you're as relaxed as you can? And it's much the same way. And it sells them. So it's not something that's like, oh, I'm not doing that.

Mike: It's like, oh, okay, if LeBron does it, then I guess I can do it too, right?

Monica: And LeBron does practice yoga.

Mike: Yes, he does. Among everything. If we were all as healthy as him, I don't think we'd have to worry.

Mike: We still have a stigma around this, right? And we both work with people who are affected by the stigma of substance use as well as mental illness. How do we break that stigma and have this treated like other diseases?

Monica: Talk about it. I am an ordained minister and each congregation I've ever served. I've made it clear to the people I served during the interviewing process that I'm in recovery and I will speak about it from the pulpit.

Monica: I've done sermons on the 12 steps of AA. I've talked about my recovery journey and without fail, there would be someone in the congregation who would come up to me wanting to have a private conversation and about their struggle or a relative's struggle and how it's impacting them.

Monica: So I think talking about it helps the stigma and that's why I do it, I speak to it. So if there's anyone there, they know one, they're not alone. They know they have an ally in me. If they choose to approach me and to talk about it. And that's happened. And I don't think if I did speak to it from the pulpit, that that person would've felt comfortable enough to approach me and say, Hey, can I have a private conversation, because I've got this going on.

Mike: Especially in today's day and times, we still see very public figures trying to shame people who have mental illness or substance use disorders. And we have to overcome that.

Monica: And we do. And it, and that comes from the old pull yourself up by the bootstraps and the stigma that people just use your willpower.

Monica: You know, you're weak if you can't control that aspect of your life, they label it as weak. That puritan mentality, just to drop on and suck it up and that's just old school thinking. That's not understanding the human body and the human brain and knowing and these same people will then go and have three whiskeys.

Mike: Yeah. Right.

Monica: Or will drink a bunch of glasses of wine at dinner and get their buzz on, but then criticize someone else who then talks publicly about, well, three glasses of wine will then send me on a run to want to do other things, or I can't stop at three glasses of wine. And so there's just some people who will not acknowledge that it is a mental health issue and a medical issue just like with diabetes is the example, do you change a diabetic and some people do well if they will just change their diet and exercise, look at them, and that's not helpful, as opposed to saying it's a medical situation.

Monica: What can we do to support this person and improving their mental and physical health?

Mike: I think it's amazing too, because I don't know too many people who aren't affected somewhere in their family with either substance use or mental illness of some sort. I rarely run into somebody that can't personally relate to all the things we've been talking about.

Monica: And unfortunately in our culture there's just some folks who think the old, I just keep going back to the old, pull yourself up by the bootstraps and suck it up. We all have problems and it's not the problem Olympics. There are people all you grew up poor. I grew up this and that and look at me now.

Monica: I'm the CEO, that's not the point pairing your pain with someone else's pain. We all have different tolerances. We all have different mental and physical makeups that makes some people possibly more resilient than others. And then you throw in gender and socioeconomic class and ethnicity and then the stressors are just layered and compounded.

Monica: And then you look at generationally, how far back in a family tree or lineage, it has people struggled with with mental health.

Mike: Oh my goodness, if you did a genogram on my family, it would just bleed substance use disorders all the way down, you could just see it. And I'm not alone.

Mike: And when I tell the story, Monica, that when my dad passed away, my uncle went to the funeral home with me to be a help. And he was a help. Cause I'd never planned a funeral before. And when the guy said, what did he die of? My uncle squeezed my arm really tight. And that was a message to me. It looks sympathetic if you were on the other side of the desk, but that's a message to me, I got this.

Mike: And he just said to the funeral director, Oh, heart disease, it runs in our family. Because he was afraid that I would say he died of his own drinking. He died on a bar stool. And so we hide it. And hiding it doesn't do anything for the stigma at all.

Monica: And that's why in AA we say we're only sick is our secret.

Mike: Yeah.

Monica: I was, in my bio I mentioned being an army officer. I was kicked out of the army as a second lieutenant because I flunked a drug test.

Monica: That was my biggest shame. That was my shame. I had never failed at anything. And then I was relieved of my commission and shown the door as a second lieutenant in the army because I failed a drug test.

Monica: And I carried that shame with me, didn't identify as a vet for [inaudible] Until I was working at a local university and I was honest, filling out paperwork to be hired someplace. I had to put that I did serve in the army, that I did not receive an honorable discharge.

Monica: I received a less than honorable discharge. And one veteran's day, they were like, Hey, would you be the keynote speaker? And had the process. And I did do the keynote and was honest about my experience and vets are like, we claim you, I'm a Unitarian Universalist minister and we have a military ministry, it's hard for me to then attend those meetings. And it was there where I really got the process. My internalized shame around having been kicked out.

Monica: And of course, they claimed me as a vet, the attitude was, you wore the uniform, you were willing to put your body and your life on the line, you're one of us. But, you talk about shame and that was the biggest shame I had being kicked out and I lied to my family about it.

Monica: I wasn't honest with them about what went down. And of course I have since come clean in fact, it's in the book. Got it on my bookshelf. No... Restored To Sanity. And I have a chapter making the list. And of course, that's a step, the eighth step where you make a list of those you've harmed and I talk about making that list and of course me being at the top of the list, having to make amends to myself for some of the choices I made, consequences from those choices from my life.

Monica: So yeah, shame is huge and shame will cause folks to do whatever they need to do, not to, not to feel it and certainly not to let anyone else know what the core root of the shame is.

Mike: You mentioned earlier about feeling two feelings at the same time, and you can feel that sense of shame, and then you go to a support group meeting, whether it's a vet meeting or a 12 step meeting, and you're feeling the shame, but you also feel the acceptance.

Mike: So you can feel that too, and that's a great way to overcome the shame is to realize people just accept you for who you are and the journey that you took.

Monica: Well, and the shame is self imposed.

Mike: Yeah, right, right.

Monica: It's what we do to ourselves, like guilt, external, where people are dumping their crap on [inaudible]. But the shame is what we swallow and internalize and it's what we do to ourselves. That's not to say that other people don't have a part to play in that and trying to shame us.

Monica: But like some other things that we internalize and then for some of us, we begin to believe it. And then that's how folks involved in substance use and abuse and what they can to try to shut off those feelings, especially if they they're feeling negatively toward themselves, how did they [inaudible]?

Monica: How did they turn it off? You know, they pick up.

Mike: And I don't know how to put this in a way that's not going to sound callous and I don't mean it that way. But, Peace Corps minister, faculty member, yoga, meditation instructor. We may be in this spot again. There's a lot of things an individual can do that are not program reliant.

Mike: So if the worst happens and programs aren't accessible to those people that really need them, we will need to find resources because the struggle is still there.

Monica: It is. And I also teach at the YMCA and the YMCA here in Kenosha has a relationship with NAMI. Folks who are members of NAMI or attend a program at NAMI, I believe are eligible to then use the YMCA, which I do teach a mat yoga class at the Y once a week. And so you're absolutely right. And that's one of the reasons why I became a yoga teacher. I started practicing yoga back in like 1990, like '94, '95 and practiced on my own.

Monica: I took a 16 week class at a community college in Southern California, got my routine together, had my book and I practiced at my home until at the university I worked at, a coworker sent me an email that said, this is why black people don't practice yoga. And I read the article and I thought.

Monica: We're missing out on wellness, African American communities missing out on wellness because of that feeling of not not feeling welcome or accepted in a yoga studio. And I expanded that and it's not just a person of African descent, low income folks. When you think of a yoga teacher or someone that practices yoga, what's the first image that comes to mind? Is a certain body type. Right. A certain style of dress, and I started thinking about it. And so my goal when I became a yoga teacher was to bring yoga to people in the margins. I wanted to bring yoga to people who would not feel comfortable for whatever reason walking into a yoga studio. And I am so grateful I've been able to do that teaching at the Kenosha Y, as well as being a [inaudible] provider where even though I am a SAC, a Substance Abuse Counselor, that's not role in the program.

Monica: My role in the program is teaching people yoga and meditation to help them to learn to self regulate to help them to work with whatever it is they wanted to work with.

Mike: That's awesome.

Monica: And I am just beyond ungrateful and most folks I'm working with have either have never taken yoga before or couldn't afford to go to a yoga studio to practice yoga.

Monica: And so I'm just really grateful for the opportunity to work with folks who otherwise would not for whatever reason be able to access yoga, especially a one on one session.

Mike: I think you addressed this a little bit before, but I want you to expand on it just a little bit, and I'll let you go with this. We live in a different time right now, and how do we encourage communication at a community level and bridging the differences that are just so evident. There's no gray anymore it seems like, it's either this way or that way. So how do we spread hope in a time of division where my choices are derided rather than accepted?

Monica: That's a good question, because at the Y, you'll see people with different political statements on their t shirts.

Mike: Yeah. Mm hmm.

Monica: And, [sigh] it's hard. It's back to breathing. You know, back to

Monica: um, [long pause] I've got a bunch of different answers for people who are just acting out, I just go back to my early AA teaching. Well, you just imagine a person with a bandage on their head. If you have a broken arm, people readily see that, right? They see the cast. If you're limping, people can see, Oh, something's going on with their leg or foot or whatever.

Monica: But if we're struggling with our mental health or relapse, that's not really available unless we physically look, that we've been through the ringer. And I just counsel people, if you have someone who's being aggressive towards you, who's behaving not according to social norms of behavior, to know that there's something going on with them and just imagine they have a big white bandage wrapped around their head.

Monica: They've got some type of thing going on that we can't see. In terms of the political environment we're in, where we're so polarized... I have friends who have a different political affiliation than I have. I teach folks who I know have a different political affiliation. It suggests is to look beyond that. That's such a small piece of who they are. Try to get to know them beyond that. So with my neighbors, it's pointless to talk about politics, right?

Monica: We're not going to agree. What we can talk about is we're both vets. We both grew up in Philadelphia or we both like camping or what is it that we have in common? We like to travel. And Dr. Miller says we have a negativity bias and people gravitate toward the negativity.

Monica: If it bleeds, it leads in the news, you know that right? And so, try to not lock and load on the negativity, but to maybe explore where there may be some joy or there may be rainbows and puppies and kittens to talk about, as opposed to talking about what you know, you clearly don't [inaudible].

Monica: And I think most people want to have those conversations. Again, the people I teach yoga to who I wear t shirts that are not my political choice, right. But they're my students and I connect with them on something other than politics. And I know that for most people who may listen to this.

Monica: Well, you don't know my uncle Marty. Or whatever [inaudible] listen and it is easier said than done. But it's about relationship and what kind of relationships do we want to have? We also have a choice not to engage, right?

Mike: Right.

Monica: When people first get sober, what do you have to change?

Monica: Everything. People [inaudible] things, and so there's a choice. New and recovery. Do you want to hang out at the bar? You know, we used to say you keep going to the barbershop eventually, you're going to get a cut, right? You're going to get a haircut. You hang out in a bakery, the donuts are going to start talking to you.

Monica: And so people, places and things, we have a choice, for the most part, kids do not have a choice. I know that. I'm aware of that. But it comes down to, what do we want to do to protect our mental and physical health? And then hopefully get allies in our life to help us do that.

Mike: That's great. Now that you have me thinking, I might change the name of this little podcast to, or your episode to rainbows, puppies, and kittens. I think it would be appropriate. Dr. Monica, thank you so much. You know, that there's links to the Reverend's work attached to podcasts, including links to Dr. Miller's iRest Yoga Nidra meditation. Thanks for your lifetime of work Dr. Monica, and for your hope as well as your inspiration. Can't tell you how much we appreciate it.

Mike: For all of you listening in, please listen next time. Until then, stay safe, find your peace, and if you can, go pet a puppy.