Mindfulness – Addiction Treatment Strategies | Addiction Treatment Strategies

Mindfulness Meditation
What is Mindfulness Meditation?
Mindfulness is a type of meditation that essentially involves focusing on your mind on the present. To be mindful is to be aware of your thoughts and actions in the present, without judging yourself.
Research suggests that mindfulness meditation may improve mood, decrease stress, and boost immune function.
 
1. Find a quiet and comfortable place. Sit in a chair or on the floor with your head, neck and back straight but not stiff.
2. Try to put aside all thoughts of the past and the future and stay in the present.
3. Become aware of your breathing, focusing on the sensation…

Recovering alcoholics may benefit in the battle over the bottle if they practice mindfulness meditation.
That’s according to a Wisconsin physician-researcher who is one of the few in the country testing the possible connection between meditation and the prevention of relapse to drinking among those dependent on alcohol.
Dr. Aleksandra Zgierska, assistant professor of family medicine at theUniversity of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, was the lead researcher in a 16-week pilot clinical trial with 19 participants recruited from addiction treatment clinics. She says the results of her first study (published in 2008)…

One of the first steps in dealing with addiction is to discover the emotional cause of it, whether it is fear, depression, anxiety, or pessimism. Many times these unwholesome thoughts and beliefs come from what I call the “wanting mind.” In wanting mind, we feel that our current state of unhappiness could be cured if only we could have the money, job, relationship, recognition, or power we had and lost, or never had and strongly desire. Often we cause ourselves suffering when we ache for something that lies out of our grasp or cling in vain to something that has already passed away. Sometimes, wanting mind involves tightly holding on to…