Recovering from addiction is a time of healing. As you make your journey from addiction to sobriety, you will start to find healing and a sense of inner peace that may have been lost throughout years of hardship. While the overall Recovery is a positive journey, there are moments where Sobriety can come with its own challenges. One way to help yourself face this is Meditation. The process of stopping yourself for a moment and clearing your mind can go a long way to keeping your recovery on track. Here’s 5 ways meditation can help with your recovery.
Reduced Stress
This is the big one and the one that probably already came to mind. As it is, life can be stressful with work, family, and other responsibilities stacking up. Recovering from addiction only adds to the stress. People often think of stress as just some passing annoyance, but stress can also lead to relapse. Meditation helps lower stress and to slow you down and explore the root causes of your stress. It’s also a great way to help bring yourself back to center when the stress of Recovery starts to get overwhelming. Taking a few minutes to focus on your breathing can help put everything back in its place.
Giving Attention to What Matters
When we star the recovery process, we are often in conflict with our past. While suffering from addiction, we aren’t only harmful to ourselves, but also others around us. The weight of that past can be a lot to work through all at once. Meditation reminds us to stay in the present moment and manage only what is before us. Being mindful keeps our energies moving forward through recovery and way from our difficult pasts. The truth is, recovering takes time and a meditative practice reminds us to focus on what’s immediate and not the mental clutter that comes from having addiction in your past.
Better Physical Health
You know the old saying “Healthy body, healthy mind.” The mind and the body are directly linked. Having a clear state of awareness will help you to build up the physical resilience you’ve been missing out on. The physical practices of mediation like deep, slow breathing can help bring your attention back to your body and help motivate you. Meditation is also linked to reduced stress which improves overall physical health greatly.
Build Inner Strength
Regular Meditation changes the way your mind works. These positive effects happen after you’ve been meditating for a while and work to strengthen your inner emotional stability. Over time, meditation helps to keep stress down and help you to handle rough emotional states even easier. Consider this building a life skill. Rather than facing stress unarmed and unprepared, meditation gives you a way to work through it and builds your inner fortifications against it.
Reconnect to a Spiritual Practice
Mediation can help reconnect you to a spiritual practice that was lost to addiction. Entering back into sobriety means reconnecting with the parts of your past that got lost along the way. If you’re looking to explore your spiritual side or even reconnect with a particular faith, meditation can be a great way to start to rebuild those practices before you’re ready to fully commit to them. This is also a great technique to pick up along the way as a means to focus on the spiritual aspects of your life regardless of your faith.
Sobriety is a journey of healing that involves rebuilding not just your body, but also your mind. Meditation can’t cure everything, but it can help get you back on track. It’s a great technique to add to your recovery program and has the added benefit of being able to be done anywhere and at any time. No matter how far along we are on the road to recovery, we all need to clear our heads sometimes. Contact us today at Newport Beach Recovery Center for more information.