Why We Rehab Use Yoga & Meditation to Treat Addiction

The Lanna Rehabilitation Center in Chiang Mai, Thailand is an international-grade clinic that anyone can consult through rehab tourism even if you’re not a Thai resident or from Southeast Asia. Lanna enables anyone from any country to receive affordable yet high-quality care in Thailand while vacationing there at the same time. It’s so affordable that even if you take into account the travel costs, it’s still bound to be more affordable compared to your country’s available inpatient rehab centers.

On that note, even though Lanna uses many evidence-based “western” treatments to help its patients, it also takes advantage of the benefits of unconventional forms of treatment such as health and wellness services (like yoga, gym work, and cardio exercises), therapeutic writing or arts and crafts (integrated directly into the 12-step program), as well as spiritual development programs.

Holistic Treatment

The extended care facilities of Lanna Rehab incorporate holistic therapies into their rehabilitation packages as a complement to their individual (dual diagnosis) and group treatment, detoxification, and 12-step study. Lanna believes that in order for the patient to get over their addiction to drugs and/or alcohol, they need to have their mind, body, and spirit treated at the same time so they could get a more complete treatment with no holes or susceptibilities left that could lead to a relapse

• Treating Mind, Body, and Spirit: Holistic therapy is all about treating not only your addiction but also every single aspect of your health. The idea behind it is that, like in the case of dual therapy, the rehab center doesn’t only address what ails you in terms of addiction but also in other parts of your mental and physical health. Even your spiritual health is taken into consideration thanks to the more religious and esoteric addiction rehab techniques. This is because holistic therapy is therapy that’s described as treatment for the whole person, from mind to body to spirit.
• Multidimensional Addiction Rehab: Lanna Rehab uses yoga, meditation, reiki, and massage to treat addiction because they’re part of the holistic therapy system that addresses the physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of your life. The use of this therapy type for addiction treatment or for any type of health problem is based on the belief that health in one aspect of your life is directly linked to other aspects, so you’ll heal faster if all aspects are addressed in their entirety or sum total of the three dimensions of mind, body, and spirit.
• Traditional Medical Environments and Holistic Therapies: Most people think of the esoteric or spiritual treatments when they hear of holistic healing rather than the more technical and correct term of addressing all your health concerns with western and eastern treatment modes to heal your body as a whole. It’s also for this reason that meditation has been adopted by western medicine as mindful meditation or the more westernized or evidence-based version of the age-old spiritual treatment.

With that said, here are the following holistic treatments used by Lanna Rehab and why they’re so effective.

Yoga

Yoga is an Ancient Hindu Philosophy from India. People are most familiar with its form that increases your flexibility and promotes healthy weight loss by getting into different poses. That’s just one part of limb of the yoga philosophy that focuses on combining an individual’s physical, mental, and spiritual aspects. All of this is achieved through yoga poses. As for yoga’s true nature, it’s more than simple posturing and physical exertion. It also has a mental aspect to it in the form of meditation.

• The Philosophy Behind Yoga: The philosophy of yoga strives towards mental focus and self-awareness as well as moral principles as comprised by Asthang yoga’s eight limbs. The yoga that western culture is most familiar with is just part of the multiple limbs of Asthang yoga that emphasize meditation or “dhyana” and posture or “asana”. In a way, yoga in and of itself promotes holistic healing by the definition of the term because it hits on different aspects of your health.
• Positive Effects by Holistic Treatment: Yoga’s most positive effects in ensuring your overall health and helping you fight against addiction or relapse involves melding various mental and physical techniques though the different forms of yoga. It covers emotional, mental, and physical benefits, particularly relaxation and stress relief. Yoga also covers your spiritual health, which increases its effectiveness in bestowing the user a more relaxed mental state when all is said and done.
• The Importance of the Relaxation Benefit: Since most meditation practices of yoga involve the management of your mind’s impulses and energy, most yoga practitioners experience more mood stability even in the face of pressures and stress from their environment. Yoga teaches you how to have a calm mind so that you’re mentally stable and you can approach the pressures in life without resorting to addictive, impulsive, or even self-destructive behaviors or activities such as substance abuse.
• Yoga Releases The Person from the Concept of Self: Addiction to drugs and alcohol usually roots from self-interest or selfishness. Yoga is useful in releasing you from the concept of self, thus ensuring sobriety after addiction treatment. According to substance abuser or drug addict brain scans, there’s usually signs of hyperactivity happening in the regions of their brain that prove a greater tendency to be vulnerable to mood swings and behavioral disorders as well as a propensity to be self-interested or selfish.
• Greater Connectivity to All Regions of the Brain: Brain scans have also been taken of yoga practitioners. They showcased a greater holistic connectivity to all regions of the brain. This means that using yoga to get over addiction allows the addict to achieve cerebral balance that he has lost by being an addict in the first place. This way, there’s now more to him than his impulse to satisfy his physical needs right away or his addiction to drugs and alcohol. He now has control of himself and his feelings or hedonistic tendencies. This self-control is known as “moksha”.

Meditation

Meditation, especially the evidence-based version of it known as mindfulness meditation, is a method of focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity as well as becoming more self-aware and mindful in order to achieve an emotionally calm and clear state of mind. It trains your awareness and attention in a way that clears your head and makes you less prone to overreacting or negatively reacting to outside stimuli that can cause you stress or undue mental pressure.

• Meditation Gets to the Root of the Problem: Mental exercises to calm yourself down will help you control your emotions instead of letting them loose and dictate your behavior. After all, one of the initial steps involved in addiction rehab is to know the emotional cause of it, whether it’s pessimism, anxiety, fear, or depression. More often than not, these unwholesome beliefs and thoughts come from a wanting mind. A wanting mind is a mind that wants things in order to fulfill a hole in your life.
• Wanting Things You Lack to Become Whole: According to the wanting mind of an addict, your current unhappiness or sadness state can be solved if only you could have the power, recognition, relationship, job, or money you’ve had and lost or never had in the first place yet strongly want. You can end up suffering because you’re aching for something that’s out of your grasp or cling in vain unto something or someone that has already passed away, like when your childhood innocence or loved ones have already died.
• A Downward Spiral of Self-Destruction: Sometimes, your wanting mind might compel you to instead hold unto something negative, like your insecurities or the unwholesome belief about how things should be this way instead of how they currently are. You can also cling to emotions such as jealousy, sadness, self-pity, regret, or anger. These emotions exist for good or necessary reasons but like with anything else in the world, indulging or wallowing in them will only lead you to terrible things. They should be felt in moderation.
• Mindfulness and How It Assists: Meditation takes away this selfishness and envy by making you less selfish and varying your viewpoint a bit, thus allowing you to view things in a less biased and more objective lens. Meditation makes you realize that the things you want may not be what you need in order to become happy. Practicing meditation of the mindful variety can assist you in seeing clearly what you’re attached to so that you can let it and end your needless suffering. Meditation teaches you to let go of anger or sadness and letting things be rather than have you waste time wishing to change the unchangeable.

Reiki

The concept of reiki came from the Land of the Rising Sun known as Japan. It’s about how the human body is surrounded by an energy field or life force. This aura of spiritual energy, ki, or chi connects the person with the rest of the world. This occurs even if you may never see this flowing field of power or even believe in them at all. Reiki in terms of rehab therapy can be performed in a one-on-one session, like in the case of individual psychotherapy.

• What Is Reiki Designed To Do? Reiki came to the United States in 1922 through Japan’s Dr. Mikao Usui, according to John Hopkins Medicine. It’s a type of energy healing wherein a trained practitioner uses sweeping movements, hand placement, and light touch to move the energy field around the patient to promote healing or detoxify a patient. Reiki, according to an article found in the journal “Nursing Clinics of North America”, is designed to do the following:
  • Reduce pain
  • Reduce stress
  • Reduce anxiety
  • Relax the muscles
  • Improve your sense of well-being
• How Reiki Rehab Is Done: Even though one-on-one personal sessions are usually the way to go about reiki rehab, some practitioners claim that they can provide reiki to those who aren’t even in the same room as them. According to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), one-on-one reiki sessions involve the patient lying down on a flat table with his eyes clothes while fully clothed. The reiki user then moves his hands over the patient’s body in a series of 12 to 15 hand positions.
• Energy Field Manipulation: The patient usually isn’t touched as all as each reiki position is done from 2-5 minutes. The idea here is to shift the energy around the person in more favorable patterns by directly manipulating the energy field itself instead of using massage, pressure points, or acupuncture to lead towards a positive result. In addiction program terms, the reiki practitioner can help patients deal with pain or stress by shifting or improving their ki patterns that have been disturbed by their being addicted.
• Reiki Detoxification: A reiki session’s main reason for reiki manipulation is to help the addict undergo what’s known as reiki detoxification. Once the session is complete, the reiki practitioner is supposed to assist you in withstanding the withdrawal symptoms associated with drug abstinence by balancing out your ki. The process, according to the reiki professionals, takes from 7-21 days or 1-3 weeks. They’re also accompanied with symptoms such as:
  • Anger
  • Cough
  • Nausea
  • Irritability
  • Headaches

Standard detoxification from drugs and alcohol produces the same symptoms. However, the minor differences with reiki include the fact that the symptoms tend to shift from one part of the body to another as the reiki practitioner shifts the energy around, whereas standard detox doesn’t include shifting headaches from one part of your head to another. It takes about 3 weeks to undergo reiki detox, which is much longer than regular detox. This is why rehab centers use reiki as CAM therapy.

Massage

Last but not least is massage therapy for drug rehab in the Lanna Rehab Center. Massage works by acting on the body with pressure, with the massage therapist using his hands, fingers, a special device, feet, forearms, knees, or elbows to apply pressure on the body to relieve it from pain or stress. It’s also a powerful form or method of relaxation as well.

• Massage Therapist: Technically and traditionally, the person who’s professionally trained to give massages is either referred to as a masseur (male) or masseuse (female). However, those terms are obsolete and carry negative connotations to them, like in the case of the sex industry offering massages that can lead to sex. This is why medically trained massage professionals are instead known as massage therapists as part of the business norm, particularly in places like the U.S.
• What Massage Brings to The Table: Massage doesn’t only offer a drug-free way to deal with the aches and pains of drug addiction rehab since using drugs to get over drugs kind of defeats the purpose of rehab with few exceptions to the point. It also can do wonders with your healing process as you slowly but surely train your mind to kick your bad habits and be more used to sobriety. Pain and cravings can be better resisted with a nice, comforting, and compassionate massage from a massage therapist.
  • Pressure Point Manipulation: Like with reiki and yoga, therapeutic massage focuses on your body’s pressure points. These are in turn connected to the vagus nerve of your brain. What’s more, manipulating these pressure points can also make your body feel temporary pain that activates its natural painkillers, leading you to feeling better than before. It’s like being lightly beat up so that your dopamine and serotonin supply are released to address this pain.
  • Hormone Release: According to the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA), massage assists in increasing your supply of dopamine and serotonin while also reducing your supply of cortisol or the stress-induced aging hormone that makes you age and weaken faster. During detoxification and withdrawal symptoms, your dopamine supply decreases in a dramatic fashion, thus resulting in a painful or at least uncomfortable rehab experience. Massage can ease this suffering.
• The Benefits and Side Effects of Massage: When it comes to massage, someone is usually hired by patients in order to address the aches and pains in their body that they don’t want medicated or surgically fixed. It also brings with it a myriad of benefits and a few side effects that you should watch out for. They include the following.
  • Blood Pressure and Heart Rate Reduction: Massaging the body of an addict can reduce his heart rate and blood pressure because it stimulates the body’s parasympathetic nervous system that can actually affect your circulatory system as well, thus promoting healthy circulation. This is handy for addicts with high blood pressure or hypertension as well as anxiety withdrawal symptoms.
  • Lowers Pain and Induces Relaxation: Because your heart rate and blood pressure drops through massage’s ability to boost your lymph system’s effectiveness, you’ll naturally calm down and reduce pain symptoms from detox and drug rehab at the same time. In fact, this painkiller effect is what massages are most well-known for on top of its relaxation capabilities.
  • Removes Metabolic Waste: A massage-boosted lymph system is also dependable when it comes to removing your body’s metabolic waste buildup. This is also because it lowers your blood pressure to healthy levels rather than making it drop to dangerously low levels, therefore leading to efficient waste management.
  • Natural, Alternative Method of Drug-Free Healing: You don’t need to use drugs in order to free yourself from pain and anxiety. You can instead depend on all-natural massages to get you through. What’s more, trust is established between you and the massage therapist through all this intimate touching. It even increases or improves how aware of your body you are.

Conclusion

A sense of wholeness is involved when ensuring your recovery through holistic treatment since addiction is usually caused by lapses in some aspect of your mental or physical health. It’s only natural for patients to feel wrought with disillusionment, fragmentation, disjointedness, and overwhelming feelings of confusion or befuddlement. Holistic treatment rounds up the clinical modalities of a program, making it more complete in terms of healing the individual.

It incorporates esoteric or alternative practices like yoga, meditation, reiki, and massage as well as exercise, tai chi, arts and crafts, adventure or experiential therapy, and other forms of body-centric work that are included with traditional rehab programs like detoxification and psychotherapy. When it comes to drugs and alcohol treatment, it’s better to be safe than to be sorry in order to significantly reduce your relapse risk.

Lanna Rehab Will Holistically Assist You in Getting Over Your Addiction

Holistic treatment in Lanna Rehab is all about incorporating complementary and alternative medicine to evidence-based medicine practiced in the west in order to wholly treat the addicted person in all aspects of his health a la dual diagnosis treatment that go beyond simply treating the addiction itself. Lanna offers a solid drug rehab program that combines holistic therapy with clinical modalities in order to help patients heal in multiple aspects of health, from physically to emotionally to spiritually.

They’ll assist you in recovering from your addiction and getting back to your feet. Just call them at their 24/7 hotline for more details and to avail of their cutting-edge drug and alcohol rehab facilities. Their hotline is available 24/7. Call now!