There is a longing in each of us for wholeness. For love. When we lose touch with our basic goodness, our inherent well being, we experience some form of pain—loneliness, anxiety, boredom, frustration, anger, aggression, neediness, emptiness, etc. Sometimes we can face these feeling states and find our way back. Sometimes we can only cope as best we can. Other times, we simply seek to escape. We turn to work, exercise, entertainment, gambling and thrill seeking behaviors, food, caffeine, alcohol, and other substances. When we avoid what is actually happening to us for long enough, coping becomes a habit. Habits, unattended, turn into addictions. We grow mindless about our responses to life. Our physiology and brain activity can become entrapped in a vicious cycle that deepens drug dependencies.
Mindful Recovery offers a different approach. We use mindfulness to cultivate the capacity to calmly bear witness to our emotions, habits, reactions and responses. Mindfulness helps us to recognize when we are vulnerable to yielding to our addiction. We recognize the relapse cues and make other choices. We develop the resources to tolerate what we have not been able to tolerate. This helps us to get to what actually drives our unconscious urges. We can heal from our childhood wounds and make friends with our physiological predispositions. We can free ourselves from the powerful grip of addictions.
Mindful Recovery emphasizes:
- Strengths and resources
- Education
- Non-judgmental awareness
- Developing cognitive and behavioral
strategies for early recovery - Making friends with our defenses and bad
habits - Compassionate interventions
- Working with somatic cues
- Making more wholesome choices
- Fostering loving self-care and
self-discovery - Finding one’s true path
Every moment offers infinite possibilities. When we become mindful, when we learn to truly love ourselves and our one precious life, we open to the goodness life has to offer each one of us. Like the lotus rising up out of the mud, we unfold one petal at a time into a glorious flower.