One thing I am doing while I am on this leave is helping with some meditation groups. If you have ever heard of Refuge Recovery, a Buddhist based recovery program, there are many meetings in my area. I know many of the people because my regular meditation group is recovery friendly. So I needed a place to go meditate one night and called a friend. Turns out this meeting was at a residential treatment center, and it was really nice. They have them 2 times a week there and late enough that I can make it even with work (15 minutes from my house).

I am technically not in recovery, but no one asks. I believe if I hadn't started meditating at 19 I would have had an addiction, and 2 of my kids have had issues with addiction. The smoking thing a couple years ago really pushed me into treating it as an addiction as well. I asked my friend about it being okay if I came, and he said it was good to have a person with a lot of experience in case there are deeper questions. The facilitators are all pretty new at meditation relatively.

Then I am going to a Boulder group once a week and maybe another Denver group that is more experienced people and a large baby boomer demographic. Those are places where I am not in charge of anything.