The early days of addiction recovery can be frightening, senseless, and intimidating. Suddenly, most people find themselves without the structure and ongoing support they had during treatment. Even with the skills needed to maintain their recovery efforts, many do relapse. One thing to help you stay on track are daily meditations. Short, five-minute sessions at any point throughout the day can help you stay focused and balanced. Here are five recovery daily meditations to try in addiction recovery.
1. Finding Your Mindful Presence [5 min]
When you’re feeling out of yourself, try this brief meditation to give yourself permission to pause. We all experience a moment when we feel out of ourselves. Almost as if we could see ourselves doing something from afar, like in a movie, where we’re the leading role. This meditation can help you pause for a second and arrive in the present to help you recognize the life that’s in front of you.
2. Learning to Stay [4 min]
In recovery, we let ourselves open the door to healing. But, by doing so, we’re letting vulnerability and fear come into our lives as well. Learning to stay is a meditation about allowing this vulnerability. It is about learning to stay put in this new situation, making our recovery journey real and impossible to hide. It also helps us embrace this new chapter, within ourselves and with others. Use this meditation to reflect on that journey and that new stage.
3. Invitation to Practice [3 min]
An invitation to practice is that nudge we all sometimes need to find focus and center ourselves. With life being so hectic, we often forget to take a minute to ourselves. Eventually, avoiding the need to sit back and take a moment to think. Use this meditation whenever you’re feeling lost and without purpose. Because it is a 3-minute meditation session, you can virtually fit this into your lunch break, your commute, or even when you first wake up in the morning.
4. Meditation to Let Go [6 min]
Also known as the 9 Magic Breaths, this meditation session invites you to pause from all activity. Broken down into three sections, first, your start to let go of all thoughts. The second set helps you let go of any physical tension. And, the last stage of breaths enables you to let go of all that burdens your heart. This meditation is ideal to try when you’re struggling with cravings, thoughts of relapse, or are having a bad mental health day. The idea of this meditation session is to show you how intentional breathing can help you let go of the things that seem impossible to free yourself from.
5. Walk in the Wilderness [6 min]
Nature has an incredible healing power that we must tap into when needed. By opening ourselves to nature and its wilderness, we awaken our senses. This brief meditation helps you open your mind and senses. It is within that openness that we experience the pure awareness that is our essence. Only when we arrive there, we find our true self.
Finding Help in Addiction Recovery
Daily meditations like this one are paramount to maintain a healthy recovery journey. Even still, support is vital for long-term addiction recovery. If you or someone you know is struggling with recovery, don’t hesitate to reach out. At Lighthouse Recovery Institute, our aftercare recovery programs offer a sense of structure, fellowship, and community that can give you the support you need in early recovery. More than addiction relapse prevention, we offer a sense of community and family that helps you in your recovery journey.
Meditations via Tara Brach.
