How You Can Stay Sober With Meditation

Overcoming a drug addiction and remaining sober can be a most challenging task. Few attachments are as wicked as the desire to chase the high, especially after you make a commitment to being sober.

You can kick the habit for good but you need to accept one simple fact: you are responsible for your moment to moment choices. You choose what to think, what to feel, and how you decide to act at any moment in time.

This itself is a sobering but freeing step, because once you accept full responsibility for your life it becomes easier to make health-supporting, high energy choices from moment to moment.

Meditation, or simply observing your thoughts, feelings and actions, can help provide you with a vehicle to sobriety. You can learn how to face, embrace and release feelings, helping you to embrace and release urges instead of acting on them.

How can you stay sober with meditation?

Meditate Daily

Meditation helps you observe your feelings without acting on them. For example, you might feel an overwhelming urge to break your sobriety during a particularly difficult time. Maybe you lost a loved one, or you are experiencing financial difficulties.

The moments sometimes feel too difficult to bear, and you might want to escape into a different place, away from the sorrow. Meditation helps you to embrace the feelings fully, so you can release them. Once you stop resisting your emotions you can hug the feelings and be free of them.

Admittedly, this is not a comfortable process. Most look for outside fixes to cure inner woes but the process works in reverse. As you learn to deal with your feelings internally the feelings simply fade away.

As a recovering drug user you need to accept this great truth. You can kick the habit for good by embracing your feelings, instead of acting on them, and releasing them.

Meditating daily helps you to watch more and cling less. Sitting to observe your feelings helps you observe more and resist, or react less. Training your mind through meditation can make you immune to any urges which could lead to a relapse.

Practical Tips

Find a quiet spot. You can sit cross-legged, in a chair or you can lie on a bed. Calm your body. Work your way from your head to your toes, patiently allowing each body part to settle. Once you have calmed each body part allow your mind to relax.

Anchor your attention on your breathing. Focus on the breath traveling in and out through your nostrils. When your attention wanders, note the object of your attention, whether it’s a thought, feeling, sensation in your body, a memory, or day dream, and slowly but firmly bring your attention back to your breathing.

Start with five minute sessions morning and night. You can add five minutes to these sessions each week.

This practice helps you observe your feelings, helping you realize that you choose whether to act or simply observe your deepest urges or cravings.

Be Persistent

Meditating daily helps you to observe your deepest urges only if you practice sitting persistently. It will be tremendously difficult to watch your desire to take a bit and let it go, the first few times you feel an urge after becoming sober.

Sitting and observing creates peace of mind and a calm confidence within your being. No longer are you ruled by your emotions. You are simply awareness attending to these emotions, and you choose whether to resist or cling to these feelings, or to let them go.

Remember, as you sit persistently some meditation sessions might be difficult. That’s OK. That’s simply your awareness expanding, helping you to see your mind as it really is. Ride out these sessions. This is where the real growth is.

Practice meditating daily. As you become more aware of your feelings, you can let go of destructive urges with greater ease and remain sober.

Kelli Cooper is a freelance writer who specializes in health and wellness content. She particularly enjoys creating pieces that offer advice for overcoming difficult situations in life so that people can be happier and healthier. Visit http://www.floridarehabcenters.com/ to learn more about the Unity Recovery Center and its treatment programs.