Intergrading Meditation Into Drug and Alcohol Centers.

Drug & Alcohol Rehabilitation Centers Today

Over the years the industry of Drug and Alcohol Treatment has grown to enormous numbers it is also projected to grow by 31% from 2012 to 2022. Speaking from experience of twenty four years in Recovery the spiritual side of the program has become watered down with a very narrow viewpoint for the 21st century. The rehabilitation center I came out of(1992) was old school mostly medical and emotional with very little attention to the holistic and spiritual side from the get go. Yes, prayer is implemented from the first hour of entrance and yet so much is left untouched. Thank goodness for AA meetings and sponsors.
 Addiction no matter what the ism is, boils down to dis-ease with oneself, hence the phrase it is a disease. The facts  are that most addicts come broken and lost, empty and feeling apart from not a part of the world.  A pattern of bad habits, bad choices, and well the spiral continues to the rock bottom point.  

The industry today is big business, from the courts, to the centers. to the sober living houses, long gone are the half-way houses of old. This is the 21st century and while it has kept up with the medical and psychological sides, it lacks still on the holistically spiritual side which is truly having the individual tune into his or her body, mind, and spirit as a center of three. This century has brought forth the holistic concepts of homeopathy, holistic healing, Reiki, EFT tapping, Yoga, Herbs and natural organic eating, energy and sound therapy, and my favorite Meditation just to name a few that have really come to the forefront of awakening and tuning into our truest selves. 

When entering a rehabilitation center, most people are at their lowest in all three centers, body, mind, and spirit. This is the point to which many if these were implemented at the beginning of the journey it would allow old habits to be quickly countered with new healthy loving habits and also create a earlier practice motive. Early recovery demands early methods of meditations. 

How Meditation Helps Recovering Alcoholics

However, at the root of every meditative practice is a quest for detachment or inner calm. In this sense, meditation fits nicely with recovering alcoholics’ central goals, i.e. establishing distance between themselves and their desire to drink.

It’s this psychic distance between wanting to have a drink and actually doing so that is so useful to recovering alcoholics. When students enroll in meditation classes, either through an alcohol rehabilitation clinic or an independent meditation schools, they learn to view their own impulses from a third-person perspective. In so doing, there’s a potential to cultivate peace and contentedness without resorting to alcohol or substance abuse.

Relation to Rehab

Many alcohol and drug addiction treatment programs have included meditation in their overall treatment plan. It’s not used in place of other therapies.  Instead, it provides powerful additional support for addicts in recovery. Part of the value of meditation is that those in treatment can practice it even after the initial recovery period is complete.  This makes meditation a valuable tool they can use to stay sober for the rest of their lives.

Research supporting Meditation for Addiction

A growing body of research supports meditation as an effective addiction recovery technique. For example, one study found that recovering intravenous drug users felt meditation was one of the best therapy tools to help them overcome their addiction [1]. Researchers who examined incarcerated substance abusers found that those who were taught how to meditate had lower levels of relapse and more positive outcomes after release than those who received only conventional recovery treatments [2].

Research suggests that meditation also helps people with alcoholism and drug addiction when it’s incorporated into a practice that includes physical exercise. For instance, yoga sessions that include meditation have been shown to be an effective part of addiction recovery [3]. In another study, recently-abstinent cocaine addicts who learned Qigong, a Chinese practice that incorporates meditative techniques, reported fewer cravings and other addiction-related symptoms than those who received a placebo treatment [4].

Meditation is not only for the spiritual

With all the talk about higher powers and Buddhist or Vedic meditation, a person couldn’t be blamed for assuming that meditation as a part of alcohol rehabilitation is a specifically spiritual endeavor. While it’s true that the world’s best known traditions of meditation all have a spiritual bent, there are just as many secular takes on meditation as an act of mindfulness rather than prayer.

What is Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy

“…mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), brings together the latest understandings of modem science and forms of meditation that have been shown to be clinically effective within mainstream medicine and psychology.”

- Mark Williams,The Mindful Way through Depression

Since this sort of thinking circumvents any talk of faith or otherworldly intervention, it gives scientists a chance to have an empirical look at the benefits that meditation can play in addiction recovery. One study conducted by the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Wisconsin found that mindfulness meditation can play a role in preventing relapse.

Dr Aleksandra Zgierska coordinated the study, and she says the practice of mindfulness as a means of staving off cravings is nothing new – it’s just that most of the evidence of its effectiveness was anecdotal until recently. Now, backed by clinical research, meditation as an alcohol rehabilitation tool is garnering mainstream attention.

To integrate this holistic healing and many of the others into mainstream  rehabilitation centers would only prove to add one more useful tool on the road of recovery. To be so archaic in this Dawn of Aquarius Time seems to be counter productive to the generations walking out of today's center's without every tool possible to their complete recovery and cure of this dis-ease.