Mindfulness and Addiction Recovery

What is mindfulness, and what do mindfulness and addiction recovery have to do with one another? I don’t want to sound like a new age hippie, but there’s a lot to mindfulness that’s practical, sensible and critical to a deep and lasting recovery from addiction. Here is an all-purpose definition from Mindful.org:

Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.

While mindfulness is innate, it can be cultivated through proven techniques, particularly seated, walking, standing, and moving meditation (it’s also possible lying down but often leads to sleep); short pauses we insert into everyday life; and merging meditation practice with other activities, such as yoga or sports.

When we meditate it doesn’t help to fixate on the benefits, but rather to just do the practice, and yet there are benefits or no one would do it. When we’re mindful, we reduce stress, enhance performance, gain insight and aware ness through observing our own mind, and increase our attention to others’ well-being.

Mindfulness meditation gives us a time in our lives when we can suspend judgment and unleash our natural curiosity about the workings of the mind, approaching our experience with warmth and kindness—to ourselves and others.

In recovery, meditation has been recommended since the beginning of Alcoholics Anonymous. Meditation can mean many things, but most people now consider the definition of mindfulness above as related to meditation. Mindfulness gives meditation a more conscious purpose. Actually, I regard meditation as a way to become totally aware of mindfulness concepts, so that a person becomes “mindful” throughout the day, not just times set aside for meditation.

In recovery, complacency and purposeless drifting can lead to relapse. The recovering addict doesn’t have to concentrate on recovery to the exclusion of all else, but the recovering person must keep a certain level of awareness at all times. We can train our brains to be aware of what we decide is important, then a recovery state of mind becomes second nature. When a person is in a recovery state of mind, mindful at all times of the reality of addiction and relapse triggers, the person doesn’t have to stop in a risky situation and start from ground zero deciding what to do — the recovering person who’s mindful of addiction and recovery will intuitively know. In the AA promises, a section states “we will intuitively know how to handle situations that used to baffle us”.

This intuitively knowing doesn’t happen by magic, but by becoming aware and mindful of addiction triggers and recovery principles. Meditation is a great way to become mindful – mindful at all times. Through effort, perseverance, practice and focus, the addict-mind becomes a recovery-mind, and addict-thoughts become recovery-thoughts, and, then, addict-actions become recovery-actions. Mindfulness and addiction recovery, from my perspective, are inextricably bound.