So what’s this new way then?

As far as I’m aware I’m the first in the UK to use Mindfulness to treat addiction, so I suppose that’s new and my style of teaching is also new. But the truth is there is nothing new in what I teach. Mindfulness has been around for a very long time. It‘s a ancient wisdom that has been practiced by Zen monks to achieve profound feelings of inner peace and the most blissful euphoric highs for more than 2,600 years. So you could say it’s tried and tested.

Fortunately you don’t need to be a monk to practice Mindfulness – I’m no monk I can assure you! But these guys are really onto something and Mindfulness is starting to have big impact on mainstream psychotherapy, particularly in the USA. Not least due to the amazing work of Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts.

I’ve also borrowed a few bits from some other traditions that are helpful and reduced it all down to some simple techniques and few helpful ideas that you can apply in your day to day life. Practical tools that you can use to stay clean and be “alright" within yourself, whatever life throws at you.

I’ve taken out all the religious stuff because I find it gets in the way and I really don’t want you believe in anything at all. I’m not the slightest bit interested in raking through your past either – my own is murky enough I can assure you.
I’ll coach you in the techniques as you go about your normal routines and after a while they just become how you live. But until then you’ll need a bit of support and I find it’s a good idea to keep in close contact for a while.

If you mess up, then you’ve messed up, it is as it is. It’s not compulsory to however, and some people do get this straight away, but if you do mess up, you are not back to square one, it is a learning opportunity. We’ll learn from it and move on, keep practicing and you’ll be fine.

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness simply means “watching”, becoming mindful of your thoughts and feelings. But before you can watch your thoughts and feelings you need to learn how to quieten your mind.
Quietening your mind is a nice thing to be able to do, because the coke has sent your thinking into overload and you could do with a rest.

The techniques are really simple and I’ll teach you some if you come for an assessment, but it’s only the start really, because quietening your mind allows you to stand back and start to watch your thoughts rather than always being carried away them. This is a pretty useful skill for everyone but for you it is extremely important, because as you will quickly see, not all of your thinking is operating in your best interests, in fact some of it has been stitching you up. _ hasn’t it? It has been telling it’s a good idea to get on it, and then spends the next few days telling you that you’re an idiot for doing so. It is not stretching the point too far to suggest that your thinking has been trying to kill you. It has been telling you to engage in behaviour which you know deep down is a bad idea and is potentially life threatening. Being able to observe and let go of some of these thoughts could save your life.

How can Mindfulness help with cravings?

One of the first things that I need to teach you is how to deal with cravings. Cocaine addiction is an addiction of the mind, when you take cocaine it stimulates the reward pathways in the brain and gives you a rush of feel good neuro-chemicals. After a while certain things become associated with this reward and just to be exposed to these “triggers”, start a craving. You will often experience this as compulsive thoughts about using. Planning, anticipating or recalling previous experiences, these thoughts invariably lead to you scoring, and away you go again. If you haven’t learnt to watch your thoughts, this can leave you feeling completely helpless and genuinely baffled as to how it keeps happening.

I’ll teach you a technique that I call “crave surfing”, which is extremely effective in managing cocaine cravings. You’ll be staggered how quickly they pass when you learn how to “surf” them. Cocaine cravings come in two parts – there are the thoughts in your head, but also a feeling in your body. Different people sense the feeling in different parts of the body, but usually you will experience an excited, anxious, “butterfly” type feeling in your lower abdomen. The thinking and the feeling are connected, the worse the feeling gets, the more compulsive the thoughts of using, and that in turn makes the feeling stronger, it’s a vicious circle. Even thoughts about not using cocaine or trying to battle the thoughts with more thoughts just seem to aggravate the craving until eventually you give in – the harder you try the worse the craving seems to get.

We need to break this cycle and I’ll teach you some techniques that will help you to quieten your mind when a craving starts. I’ll teach you how to then focus your attention on the feeling, and just observe it. Without the thinking to perpetuate it, the feeling will pass very quickly and you will have learned how to surf a cocaine craving – magic!

But how does Mindfulness help with me deal with painful feelings.

Addiction is much more than just dealing with cravings, it is essentially an attempt to do the most natural thing in the world, and that is to move away from uncomfortable feelings and to feel really good –to be high on life. Mindfulness is a tried and tested way to do this, and with practice you’ll experience the most profound inner experiences and find that you can deal effectively with any painful feeling, what ever life throws at you.

As you develop the ability to stand back and observe your thoughts you will quickly see that there is a link between how you feel and what you are thinking. Just as with cravings the feelings are perpetuated by the thinking. Anxiety is driven by anxious thinking, anger is perpetuated by angry thoughts and guilt by guilty thoughts, loss, hurt, feelings of abandonment and all other negative painful mood states require corresponding thoughts to continue the feeling in your body. If you were able to look at feeling under a microscope on a neurological level you would see that a feeling is in reality just a physical response in your body to a thought in your head. Anxious thoughts cause the release of stress chemicals; adrenaline, and cortisol, angry thoughts release anger chemicals and so on. If we aren’t mindful of our thoughts and feelings they can quickly overwhelm us and cause us to react negatively, we might have an angry outburst, or panic, or make some other ill judged response. It’s really common for cocaine binges to be caused this way, and although they may seem like they come out the blue, when you can stand back and observe you’ll often find that they are caused by a steady build of frustration or stress.

I’ll teach you how to quieten your mind and observe feelings in your body without reacting to them and allow them to pass without incident. I’ll help you apply the techniques during our coaching sessions and we can “surf “painful feelings together, but more importantly you’ll be learning how to do this yourself, so that you can resolve the painful feelings as they come up in your day to day life and they don’t have the opportunity to build to crisis point. Apart from being essential in your recovery, learning this practice offers you a very powerful way of living, because when you choose how you respond rather than your feelings choosing your response, then very much better things come of that. It will have a positive effect on every aspect of your life and I am often asked to work with people who have never had problems with addiction, and have recently worked with a number of city traders who have found this an extremely profitable way to trade, but that’s another story.

What about getting high?
I’ve got a secret for you – coke heads are boring! They sit around talking b*****ks, repeating the same rubbish over and over again, no one listening to anyone else, all thinking they are the most interesting person in the world. That’s if they still go out, many just sit at home in some dark paranoid hole. I reckon that there is more to life don’t you? Perhaps you’ve forgotten how to live, how to get real enjoyment from life.

The trouble with cocaine addiction is that it gradually takes over, eventually we stop getting enjoyment from anything else. As your mindful practice develops you will start to find enjoyment in all sorts of things, things that you have never noticed before, simple things, nature, music, food, your children, human relationships. Mindfulness teaches you how to bring your full attention to the most important thing of all and that is the quality and intensity of your experience of life now. With practice you can achieve the most incredible euphoric highs without taking drugs, and develop an unshakable sense of peace and wellbeing. If you do slip up you’ll lose the high for a few days, and since no self respecting addict would take something that takes the high away, the chances are you’ll stop the drugs. As amazing as it may seem most of my clients now get much more from life than they ever did from drugs. But I’ll let you discover this for yourself.

A New Choice

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