Recovery and Rice

I got a good tip from a friend for cooking rice a while ago; she basically said to catch as much steam as possible by covering the pot with a clean kitchen towel after the rice has cooked, cover it all with the lid and let it sit for at least 15 min.
When trying this (excellent) tip at home, I thought, “All the steam will disperse once I lift the pot’s lid to place the towel; I’ll simply cover the rice with the towel during the entire cooking process.”
The flame from the stove burned the kitchen towel.
I learned my lesson. I never attempted to do *that* again.
Some time passes, and now I am cooking rice and soup.
This time, I turn the stove beneath the rice off.
But what about the soup?
Sure enough, another kitchen fire because a towel on the stove is still a towel on the stove.
It probably won’t come as a surprise that those two experiences taught me to be mindful of the open flame and what comes near it when I cook, that includes oven mitts, my hair, my clothes, a wood spoon, etc.
Drinking has caused many ‘fires’ in my life, yet somehow it took me 20 years to learn that it doesn’t matter what method I choose to numb my feelings; like switching vodka with gin, gin with beer, beer with wine, wine with food, food with sex, sex with drugs…
In recovery, I don’t just learn what ‘starts the fires’ and how to put them out…Enough with the food metaphors; I am getting hungry.
Life is no swiss picnic ( seriously hungry ), nothing I can do about that. There is even less I can do with how strongly I feel things most of the time. It’s almost as if starting a fire is inevitable. Or is it?

So, here is my ‘kitchen towel tip’…Mindfulness.
Although I have been meditating for as long as I can remember, it has become my secret weapon since I started DBT (Dialectical Behavioural Therapy).

There are many metaphors depicting this method, and I will tell you my favorite one, which I heard on Headspace app.
Imagine you are walking down the street, a street you know well and walk down every day, but while you are walking, you’re thoughts are so caught up with what you’ll have for lunch, thinking of a conversation you had earlier that you end up falling down a hole.
When at the bottom of the hole, you find yourself thinking, “how did I end up here?”
Worst yet, you do the exact same thing the next day. Then again, the next day. Then again…
This may not sound like an exceptionally cheerful story, but bare with me; As an analogy for the mind, this is really helpful. Because so often, we repeatedly follow the same habits of mind; over and over again, and we find ourselves in an emotional hole, maybe even an excruciating place. Now Imagine if you simply started noticing, being more aware of your surroundings; sure, maybe next time you would realize a little late and still fall down the hole again, but perhaps the time after that, you’d notice the hole and choose to walk around it instead.
And that is how I met your mother. The wrong ending, my bad.
And That is what mindfulness and recovery did for me.