Yoga and Addiction Recovery

Yoga in general brings stress relief, increased physical stamina and strength, time for self-reflection and self-awareness, improved exercise and eating habits, improved self-confidence and self-image, pain relief, better sleep, higher energy, decreased fatigue, and emotional healing. In recovery, we tend to need guidance and healing in all of these areas.

The enhanced concentration and mindfulness that yoga requires of you, demanding all of your attention to the present moment, trains you to clear your mind. This can clear away whatever else might be on your mind, including the anxiety, fear, shame, and self-doubt that you might be feeling in early recovery. 

The postures of yoga can help to release repressed emotions. As we move and flow through postures, we stretch and open the parts of the body where emotion is typically stored, releasing it. Practicing yoga, in tandem with counseling, can really help to open and deal with repressed emotion and unresolved trauma. 

Yoga can even help relieve and detoxify some of the body’s organs in sobriety. Think of bending postures to massage the internal organs, twisting postures to wring out organs and pent-up emotion in our spine, hip opening postures where we particularly carry a lot of emotion, and inversions to redistribute stagnant blood and energy back into the core to energize the circulatory and respiratory systems. Yoga can help to balance and heal parts of the brain affected by substance abuse, in a natural way. It can bring dopamine homeostasis that can directly contribute to long-term management of addictive behaviors. 

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