This is how and why Trauma-Informed, Somatic Mindfulness Meditation can make such a difference in our lives.

Recovery is finding a new way to live, and this requires self-awareness and actually learning how to respond, rather than react. It is developing a relationship with our mind, our emotions, and our body. Addiction is checking out, “I don’t like this experience and I sure know how to change it!” Mindfulness meditation and other body-centered (somatic) practices are checking in. Our body tells us the truth. It is a very useful, reliable messenger. When we are in our bodies, we are in the here and now, whereas when we are in our head, we are almost always in the past or future. Mindfulness meditation and therapeutic movements, such as trauma-sensitive yoga, are mind-body practices that support self-awareness and the integration of our whole being in a safe and simple manner, often leading to insight and deep change.

Respond Rather Than React

Addiction of any kind can be viewed as obsessive thinking and compulsive behavior that we persist in despite negative consequences. In actuality, it is a form of comfort seeking. Those in recovery from addictive behaviors need coping strategies, especially in early recovery. When faced with life’s challenges, the tendency is to drop into “auto pilot”, habitual patterns of thinking and reaction hardwired within us for comfort and safety. How can we bring compassionate awareness to our experience and skillfully respond, rather than automatically react?

The Research Backs up the Practice

Mindfulness meditation is an evidence-based practice, highly effective for relapse prevention, invaluable for managing stress and other psychological issues that arise. Additionally, because practicing mindfulness helps one remain present and conscious of what is happening now, including urges and cravings to use or act out on other self-destructive ways, mindfulness is a practical skill for observing the experience without automatically reacting.

Rewriting the Story

In active addiction, being in our bodies was often terrifying and the very last thing we wanted to do – and this may still be the case in the early months of abstinence. But if we can compassionately check into the body and recognize what is happening, we can experience a powerful glimpse into our sensations and emotions, as well as what we tell ourselves about them – our “stories”.  Mindfulness training establishes the necessary stability of mind for witnessing our “afflictive emotions”: anxiety, worry, fear, self-doubt, shame, self-judgment and others. These emotions and stories often sink us into a deep hole of continued despair and self-destructive behavior, and yet they are stories we can rewrite. We can create a new story with the chapters about “the space between” as the pivotal phase!

Neuroplasticity

Somatic mindfulness training gives us the tools to closely observe how this happens, to pause, “connect the dots”, and reverse the process, thus disentangling thought, emotion and risky impulses. With this embodied awareness, there is less attachment to our thoughts, weakening the trend towards sinking into the abyss. It also creates new neural brain pathways, as well as evidence that we can skillfully respond, rather than react. But this ability does not happen overnight without a certain amount of intention and training.

Rewiring the Brain Reframes our Experience

Mindfulness helps heal the brain. MRI scans have shown that after just three weeks of mindfulness practice, doing only thirty minutes a day, the brain’s “fight or flight” center, the amygdala in the limbic area, tends to shrink helping regulate stress and anxiety. As the amygdala shrinks, the pre-frontal cortex, associated with higher order brain functions such as awareness, concentration, decision-making and impulse control, becomes thicker. The “functional connectivity” between these regions, how often they are activated together, also changes. The connection between the amygdala and the rest of the brain gets weaker, while the connections between areas associated with attention and concentration get stronger. In other words, our more primal responses to stress seem to be superseded by more evolved ones. Meditation helps heal the brain.

Breaking the Harmful Pattern

Researcher and author Sara Lazar, Ph.D. states, “Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day.” Addiction is impulsive, comfort-seeking behavior used to escape difficult feelings or situations, whereas mindfulness involves conscious and deliberate focus on difficult emotions as a way of disarming them and interrupting habitual destructive patterns.

It is understood that addiction is a brain/neurobiological disorder, and meditating can help heal and rewire our brain.