This Friday 15th March @ 7.00pm GMT (British Time)
Session Four: Cravings Management/Relapse Prevention/ The Ten Worlds.
Handbook “Climbing The Mountain” available on Amazon.
Please read session four before attending
Sun Lotus Recovery is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Sun Lotus Group Meeting
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83189357632
Meeting ID: 831 8935 7632
In this final session of exploring the physical, neurological aspects of addiction, we will look at how to control cravings and look at some techniques to enable the practitioner to manage and overcome these phenomena.
This is fundamental to a persons recovery from an addiction disorder, especially in the first, few vulnerable months.
There is scientific evidence that after three months the human brain begins to accept and reconfigure to the new behavioural regime and cravings become weaker and weaker.
These skills known as “Cravings Management Skills” are an essential foundation to a person’s recovery and I cannot over emphasise how important these skills are because without them relapse is inevitable.
The learning process for any new skill is practice, repetition, repetition, repetition, which enables you to master them.
This allows your brain to construct the new neural pathways needed in order to integrate these new life skills.
We have allowed our disorder to run our life, acting out continually in response to urges and demands from our reptilian, base brain.
Our lizard brain has been running the show for years and years.
We have no impulse control because of this, the impulse to use and the behaviour of acting out have been fused together to form a compulsion.
We need to retrain our brain, we need to develop a pause button to stop ourselves being in this Reptilian Autopilot Mode.
This allows the pre frontal cortex, the rational brain, to challenge and dispute the impulse.
We must learn to ignore or not to listen to The Lizard Brain Addiction Monster when it shouts at us and to listen to our rational neo cortex.
I call this “Making up both your minds” this means you no longer listen to Old Base Brain, you don’t even want to give it a moments thought, because if you do, you will relapse, you already know this, as your real life experience is that you have always acted out when you have listened to The Lizard.
This session also contains an introduction to The Ten Worlds Teaching, which is a fundamental teaching revealed in The Lotus Sutra, which gives the practitioner an understanding of positive change and spiritual evolution towards a greater sense of well being, which is another essential to recovery.
When I discovered The Ten Worlds Teaching, it was another light bulb moment of recognition for me as I completely identified with The Lower Worlds due to the consequences of my addiction disorder.
I also found the technique of verbalization, which will be covered in the session, as an indispensable tool for managing my cravings and I still use it, even after being in recovery for many years, as cravings can still arise on occasion.
It is imperative that the practitioner masters these techniques as relapse prevention is the bedrock of building a life free from drugs and alcohol.