How Do Wellness Practices Help Someone Heal in Addiction Treatment?

If you or a loved one is struggling with alcoholism or drug addiction, we are here to help. Reach out to Mountainside by calling 888 833 4676.

Transcript

Wellness practices help people to begin accessing their deeper emotions. Some of the things that we do here at Mountainside, like our Mind Body Spirit offerings, which are yoga, qigong and meditation, put people in a position where they need to start sitting with discomfort.

Even our adventure-based counseling is designed for that. People go up on a high ropes challenge course. They’re afraid of heights. Maybe they go up the ladder a couple of rungs and stand there. We’re really good at urging them to just sit with that, feel that feeling of discomfort, feel the feeling of fear. In a yoga pose, feeling that physical discomfort and the emotions that are coming up. “This pose is too much for me. It hurts. I don’t want to stay in this.” This is building a muscle to actually begin to access those real deep emotions: emotions of sorrow, pair, or fear, the primary emotions that people have been avoiding in their addiction.

When you start feeling that fear that you’ve been avoiding or that pain that you’ve been avoiding, you learn to be able to sit with that instead of wanting to push back against it, to lean into it, to be like “I can do this. I did that on the ropes course. I stayed in that yoga pose. I sat in that meditation for 20 minutes. I can sit with this feeling. I can be okay with this because this is a part of who I am.” And so, it helps people to embrace that, to really make friends with that part of themselves that they’ve been avoiding for so long.