To put it bluntly, addiction recovery is a complex process. There are a lot of moving parts and reasons why a person falls into addiction in the first place, so it follows that working one’s way out won’t be straightforward either. Which is fine, the intricacies of life are what make it beautiful.
Given that, an ever more potent tool in the recovery toolbox has become alternative therapies like meditation. These types of treatments strive to compliment the clinical side and create a much more holistic recovery experience that pays the appropriate attention to all aspects of the body and mind.
The mind, after all, becomes as addicted as the body so while our bodies crave drugs, so too do our minds. Our thoughts dictate our actions and drug and alcohol abuse toys with our thinking and decision making.
Meditation is a therapy that focuses squarely on the mind, fostering and nurturing the ability to take control of your thoughts and help deal with triggering situations in the future.
What Is Meditation?
Let’s consult the dictionary here, Cambridge Dictionary defines meditation as “the act of giving your attention to only one thing, either as a religious activity or as a way of becoming calm and relaxed”.
Giving attention to only one thing. That’s big, don’t brush past that. Meditation, to the uninitiated, often carries the connotation of someone sitting there quietly and just kind of zoning out which is a caricatured view of what’s actually happening.
Meditation is something done with intention and contrary to the stigmatized and imagined version, the point is very much to be present rather than absent. The idea is to create mindfulness and focus.
The act of meditating encourages you to become more conscious of thoughts, feelings and what’s around you. To gravitate towards increased self-awareness.
There are a wealth of positives that come with it, Harvard, for example, notes that mindfulness meditation may ease anxiety and mental stress.
Benefits of Guided Meditation for Addiction
Guided meditation is essentially the same thing as general meditation, the difference is that you’re being guided by a trained professional or teacher. They walk you through the process with the aim of making you present and mindful and the benefits are immense to both the body and mind.
Body Benefits
As mentioned above, meditation can ease anxiety and stress. Additionally, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health adds that it can help with fatigue and sleep patterns. Increasingly, evidence has come to light that meditation can help lower blood pressure and even more profoundly, perhaps even improve immune functions.
In terms of our physical health, those improvements make a world of difference in how our bodies feel and that plays into how our mind copes with things. A healthy body corresponds to a healthy mind.
Mind Benefits
The most powerful benefit is the ability to control your thoughts, this leads to an increased ability to focus and ultimately a heightened capacity to find calm in the midst of a storm. The concept of mindfulness comes into play here as well, meditation encourages you to connect with your thoughts & feelings and learn to accept them.
That mindfulness and self-awareness of course also get you on the path towards creating or finding your inner peace.
Find Recovery With Above It All Treatment Network
The mind tends to wander and those wandering can lead to dangerous places, chaotic places but with continued guided meditation a person can learn to control those wanderings and step away from the chaos and into a more serene & controlled headspace. If getting your mind back in order is a priority reach out to us at Above It All Treatment Network, our years of experience and vast network means we can connect you with a rehab specialized in meditation to get you the best outcome possible.