Recovery is a hard path; many abandon, many resign, many of us relapse, but the truth is that all that hard work, pain and obstacles you overcome add up to one of the most gratifying experiences of your addict life: Sobriety. Reaching it is a milestone, believe me. However, achieving sobriety brings a pressing matter, which is keeping it.
When you go through the rehab process, you are provided with several tools to help you on the outside world to keep your sobriety and keep working towards a better life. For some, is exercise, for some is group therapy, for me, it was meditation, and today I want to share with you 4 ways that meditation helped me with my addiction recovery.
It helped me develop awareness
Being aware of everything is extremely important in all aspects of your life, especially if you are a recovering addict. It helped me pinpoint negative thoughts, actions, beliefs and even patterns that could develop into a trigger at some point.
The awareness meditation brought me has guided me towards staying in the sobriety path and feel satisfied with it. Knowing everything that’s happening around me, why is it happening and how can it transcend, has definitely encouraged me to make better, healthier and correct life choices.
It helped me connect with my mind and my spirit
When you are an addict, your actions are based on your inner instincts, when to get your next fix, what to do to feed your addiction. Mindful meditation during my recovery process taught me how to relax and let myself feel.
The process of taking apart everything I did, how I felt, what was I thinking, what I was doing and why, was incredibly liberating. Being able to let everything go and focus on my present. I made peace with my past, and meditation was (and still is) allowing me to keep peace with my present while looking forward to the great future I am building.
It helped me gain patience
After recovering, all I wanted was recover the years I had lost. I wanted to do everything now and I got stressed whenever I couldn’t do it. Through meditation, I reached a place where my mind slowed down; where I could finally establish a balance between tension and relaxation, this was an incredible step up for me, as the stress can be a powerful trigger for relapses.
I learned to sit back, think about what was happening and ponder about what I could do. Even as someone that really wanted to do many things in a short amount of time; I learned to breathe deeply and slowly respond to whatever life was giving me. I started to choose how I wanted to act, instead of reacting to the situation I had.
It let me realize there were much more things to enjoy
Going into addiction recovery means changing your life for good, but it also means leaving behind all the habits and activities you used to find ‘fun’, like going to the bar, to party among drugs and similar things.
By becoming aware of everything around me and slowing down my pace, I found that there were many things I could enjoy that also meant fun. I took an offer to join ayoga group for recovering addicts and that along with my meditation exercises has truly enriched my life.
It improved my overall health
Not only I got incredible psychological benefits from meditation, I also discovered how much good it was doing for my health. Reducing everyday stress helped me lower my headaches and neck stiffness; my immune system was working a lot better and combining that with yoga, I even started to sleep much better.
This was paired with an increase in my creativity, a huge improvement in my mood, a new positive outlook on life and my tolerance for any mishaps that could happen.
Going from an addiction towards a healthy clear-headed life requires hard work and the ability to transform. In my case, the instrument able to do this was meditation; today I am a new man, I live peacefully, I think before I act and I’ve found how resilient I am.
Have you practiced meditation? Do you have any other ways that meditation can improve your life? Please, leave a comment below.
