Break The Vicious Cycle Of Addiction

What you will learn

Addiction is the behaviour of habitually turning away from direct experience happening in the moment, despite the fact that it will have negative consequences. The more we turn away from what is going on in the body, the more we will be trapped on the vicious cycle of addiction. Mindfulness teaches us to become aware of the body, feeling tone in the body, the breath, and be with our direct experience. When we learn to come home to the body, to be with mental pain and anguish, we begin to free ourselves from the vicious cycle of addiction. During our 10 sessions, I will share some of the mindfulness teachings that gave me freedom and liberation from the hell realm of addiction and compulsive behaviours.

10 Day Course

14 mins/day

English

Hosted by Insight Timer

Course Outline

LESSON 1
The Vicious Cycle

In this opening session we slow down the process of what is happening before we pick up our choice of addiction or engage in our choice of compulsive behaviours. When we become aware of what is happening in the body, with our feelings, thoughts and emotions, it may help to interrupt our addictive and compulsive behaviours and or relapse. Each session we begin with a breathing space, to help begin to train the mind to come back to what is happening in the body.

LESSON 2
Becoming Aware Of Our Triggers

We can not avoid our triggers. Yes, it is good to become aware of our triggers, because it can help us to be vigilant if we know we are going to be in an environment where these triggers may be present. Today we will take a look at our triggers, and how we can work with them.

LESSON 3
Coming Home To The Body

Mindfulness teaches us to come back to the body. The journey of recovery is learning to find our way back to the body. But some of us have lost our way home, because our bodies were violated in childhood. We have to relearn that our body can be one of the safest place we could ever inhabit. The breath is the guide back into the body. In today’s guided meditation we come home to the body by practising mindful breathing in the body.

LESSON 4
Understanding Our Feelings

Mindfulness teaches us, that the body will produce feeling, and that feeling tone in the body is unavoidable. We can not escape feeling. But what we can do, is begin to notice that feeling tone, is sensation in the body, pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. And if given space will change and even dissipate. In today’s guided meditation I will take you through a body scan. A journey of exploring feeling tone in the body.

LESSON 5
Thoughts Are Not Facts

When we are controlled by our thoughts, we make interpretations, believing our thoughts to be true. Based on those interpretations, we make decisions, which can have detrimental outcomes for our recovery. In this session we will begin to see that our thoughts are not facts, they are just mental events arising and passing, like all other events in our live.

LESSON 6
Exploring Our Emotions

Our thoughts and emotions can be so fleeting and subtle that we might believe they don’t matter. However, they shape our speech and bodily actions. In this session I am inviting you to be with your emotions like anger, while breathing into the body, and allowing your emotions to arise and cease, like the waves in an ocean.

LESSON 7
Stinking Thinking

Stinking thinking, make up the stories we tell ourselves. They are the superego disguised in the voice of a negative parent or adult, who told us unkind things in childhood. In this session we see how we create the extra dramas in our lives, that can keep us stuck on the vicious cycle of addiction.

LESSON 8
Actions Have Consequences

Actions have consequences. Every time we relapse we are at risk of going around and around the vicious cycle of addiction. In this session explore how actions like blame, self pity and distraction can sabotage our abstinence and sobriety of mind.

LESSON 9
What We Can Learn From Our Addictive Behaviours

Understanding what we gain can help us cultivate, self compassion towards ourselves, because it can be so easy to beat ourselves up in the aftermath of a binge, or a slip, or relapse. The fact is that our addictions and compulsive behaviours are what Dr Gabor Mate’ calls adaptations to trauma in our childhood. We hold on to our addictive and compulsive behaviours for a reason.

LESSON 10
The Cost Of Our Addictive Behaviours

Watch your thoughts, they become stories; Watch your stories, they become excuses; Watch your excuses, they become relapses; Watch your relapses, they become dis-eases; Watch your dis-eases, they become vicious cycles; Watch your vicious cycles, they become your wheel of life.