When living with addiction and mental illness, we tend to lack mindfulness about most things in our lives. One of the things we’re least conscious of are the choices we’re making. We make decisions based on self-destructive impulses rather than on mindfulness, wellness, and preparation. We’re impulsive, compulsive and reckless with the choices we make. We put ourselves in harm’s way and endanger not only ourselves but our loved ones, and even total strangers, with the dangerous choices we make. Although many people believe addiction is a choice, our addictions are in fact deeply rooted illnesses that are not of our choosing. We might not have the power to choose whether or not we’re addicts, but we do have the power to become more conscious about the choices that we’re making daily. These choices, even the seemingly small, insignificant ones, add up to determine our overall well-being. We can practice becoming more mindful about our decision-making, and we can practice making conscious choices out of self-love rather than self-destructiveness.
Becoming Conscious Observers
The practice of mindfulness invites us to become more observant of everything going on within us and in our lives, our thoughts and feelings, our behaviors and patterns, our life cycles and recurring issues. The more mindful we are of ourselves and how we’re living our lives, the more we discover that how we think and feel impacts everything, how we make choices, what kinds of experiences we have, and what kinds of issues continue to appear in our lives. We can practice becoming more mindful of our thoughts, our emotions, our daily lives, and our overall life experiences. We can use meditation and other mindfulness tools to help ourselves with this. When we become more mindful, we can take a better inventory of how we’re contributing to, or detracting from, our well-being in life and our success in recovery.
Choosing Self-Love
The more we’re paying attention to our thoughts and emotions, the more we can focus on choosing healthy and self-empowering ones, and we will, therefore, be in a better place to make healthier choices for ourselves. We will begin to make choices out of our natural instincts for self-preservation and self-protection, instincts that are damaged by our struggles with addiction and mental illness but that we can begin to mend. We will become more self-caring and self-loving. We will design lifestyles for ourselves that support our sobriety and create routines that reinforce those lifestyles. We will shed the habits, relationships, and behaviors that we were choosing out of a lack of mindfulness, that reflected our instincts toward self-abandonment. When we commit to looking at our choices and the thought processes behind them, we empower ourselves to start making choices that better serve us in our recovery and that fuel our healing.
At The Guest House Ocala, you will be treated with dignity, respect, and compassion.
Call 855-483-7800 today for more information on our treatment programs.
theguesthouseocala.com
3230 Northeast 55th Avenue Silver Springs, FL 34488