Everybody is talking about it. So what is spirituality really? It is not just a buzz word, but a higher part of ourselves that we can learn to access to lead a more purposeful and meaningful life. Mark L Lockwood helps people heal from addictions, depression and anxiety all over the world through A Course In Recovery programs and at his healing center in South Africa. Mark believes that self realization, spirituality and personal life transformation go together.
Learn of the unlimited power that is yours, in you. You will learn how you can turn this power to work for you, here on earth, to make your life majestic and overflowing with good. The 17 minute meditation is as below.
You can read the text of the three magic words meditation by U.S. Anderson below, or select captions on the Youtube Meditation video. Incorporating this as a walking meditation, for twenty minutes once a week can significantly allow your body-heart-brain to align together in a healing and contemplative rhythm that helps one get into a healing space physically, emotionally and spiritually. :
The Three Magic Words Meditation
I know that I am pure spirit, that I always have been, and that I always will be. There is inside me a place of confidence and quietness and security where all things are known and understood. This is the Universal Mind, God, of which I am a part and which responds to me as I ask of it. This Universal Mind knows the answer to all of my problems, and even now the answers are speeding their way to me.
I needn’t struggle for them; I needn’t worry or strive for them. When the time comes, the answers will be there. I give my problems to the great mind of God; I let go of them, confident that the correct answers will return to me when they are needed. Through the great law of attraction, everything in life that I need for my work and fulfilment will come to me. It is not necessary that I strain about this – only believe. For in the strength of my belief, my faith will make it so. I see the hand of divine intelligence all about me, in the flower, the tree, the brook and the meadow.
I know that the intelligence that created all these things is in me and around me and that I can call upon it for my slightest need. I know that my body is a manifestation of pure spirit and that spirit is perfect; therefore my body is perfect also. I enjoy life, for each day brings a constant demonstration of the power and wonder of the universe and myself. I am confident. I am serene. I am sure.
No matter what obstacle or undesirable circumstance crosses my path, I refuse to accept it, for it is nothing but illusion. There can be no obstacle or undesirable circumstance to the mind of God, which is in me, and around me, and serves me now.
ABOUT THE WORDS
By using the Three Magic Words meditation, you will learn of the unlimited power that is yours. You will learn how you can turn this power to work for you, here on earth, to make your life majestic and overflowing with good. Three Magic Words meditation, is not a religion or a sect or a society. In its entirety it is a series of essays aimed at revealing to you your power over all things. You will learn that there is only one mover in all creation and that mover is thought. You will learn that there is only one creator and that creator is the Universal Subconscious Mind, or God. You will learn that this creator creates for you exactly what you think, and you will be shown how you can control your thoughts, not only to obtain answers to your problems but to create in your experience exactly what you desire. Use your mobile phone and do the following 3 Magic words Walking Meditation for healing and Life transformation.
Meditation is of growing importance in today’s world. Regular meditation helps in relieving stress and thus improves the quality of sleep. Less stress means more happiness. You will live a happier and healthier life with meditation. … It is believed that meditation improves the immune system and thereby helps in controlling blood pressure and lowering blood cholesterol and whole lot more.
For more information on the therapy of the three magic words meditation or how to connect with us, do a course online, or come to our healing centre, get in touch today. A copy of the audio book is here https://youtu.be/OAoMc8cZISs
Author, Caroline McGraw, from which this article is adapted to a South African context, says that despite the increasing prevalence of both outpatient and inpatient addiction treatment programs, more people than ever are dying from drug overdoses? Why the low alcohol rehab success rates? Why the low drug rehab success rates? What’s going on what do we need to learn about why drug rehab centres don’t work? Mark L Lockwood is an addiction psychology expert, with 20 years of experience, that has also done a 180 degree turn-around from the general rehab recovery model. He has turned his drug rehab centres into private and comfortable homes where people travel and heal and thoroughly enjoy their experience in a mature, self-reliant environment, and has seen much success with this unique new model. Although there are a handful of amazing centres in South Africa, most ‘registered’ centres with unqualified professionals, offer little hope of any kind of lasting recovery from addictions. “Our clients are some of the most intelligent and amazing people in the world. They suffer emotionally, and are wanting their own healing more than anyone else. When they make the changes for themselves it makes all the difference in the world…and it lasts!
It’s sad but it’s true. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), opioid overdoses were responsible for a record 28,000 deaths in 2014, the last year of data available.
Plus, addiction recovery rates for popular 12 Step groups such as AA may be as low as 5-10%, according to Dr. Lance Dodes, the author of The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry.
Here are six reasons behind the low drug and alcohol rehab success rates that are so common today. In the process, we’ll also discuss what programs can do to help people recover as we understand why drug rehab centres don’t work.
Reason #1: Absence of Dual Diagnosis Residential Treatment
Until recently, mental health conditions and addiction were considered separate. A major reason why drug rehab centres don’t work!
Now, however, we know that a very large percentage of people dealing with alcohol or drug addiction have a dual diagnosis: a substance abuse issue coupled with a mental health condition, such as depression or anxiety. What we know from 20 years of experience is that there is always a more powerful underlying emotional issue than just presenting addictions. A lot of what we know about addiction is completely wrong, according to best selling international author Johann Hari…and we tend to agree. “Advanced Mindfullness, DBT and CBT skills coupled with durable emotional and step work from registered professionals rather than just from the recovering addicts model is a good start”, says Mark L Lockwood, Addiction Psychology Expert. “People are told they have a character and a moral problem, they are broken down, and then the idea is to build them up again through submission to the twelve steps….clients are often told if they miss a meeting, or don’t stringently follow the steps to the letter that they will relapse. This is radical fundamentalism and perhaps an addiction in itself”.
For example, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), of the 20.2 million people with a substance use disorder in the United States, at least 7.9 million (39%) had a mental illness of some kind.
Many addiction recovery professionals believe that the actual dual diagnosis rate is even higher, as mental health concerns are often under reported.
Many alcohol and drug rehabs now list dual diagnosis treatment as part of their offerings. But if you look closely, you may notice a disconnect between the services listed and the supports provided from people without actual degrees in this stuff, who have attended a day course in trauma and framed it on their office wall, as a testimony of their skill-set.
Since there’s no standard definition of what constitutes “rehab,” the quality of inpatient alcohol and drug treatment centers varies tremendously. One major, major issue in South Africa especially at the moment, is the number of professional counseling hours provided. Anyone can ‘register their rehab centre’ as an address and even make millions off unknowing medical aid companies who spit out a fortune of unskilled medical help. It’s a con really and it needs to stop. A large number of centres charge R60 000 or 5000 USD a month and offer clients one session by a degreed and registered professional. The rest of the money is spent on outings, horse rides and kept as profit.
Some inpatient addiction treatment programs offer the minimum number of counseling hours required by the state in which they operate.
That can be as little as 1 hour per week, or approximately 4 total hours in 28 days. A crazy fact that affects more than 50-80% of centres in South Africa. A BIG reason why drug rehab centres don’t work.
Make sure you check on this as you go through your research on why drug rehab centres don’t work. By way of comparison, Caroline McGraw’s centre in America offer 120+ hours of licensed professional counseling for each participant over the course of 28 days.
Reason #2: Shame and Guilt
When people first come to an inpatient addiction treatment center, chances are they’re having a hard time. In many cases they’ve just finished detoxing from alcohol or drugs, so they’re still dealing with physical issues as their emotional issues start to rise to the surface.
Many people enter alcohol and drug addiction treatment feeling frightened and unsure, but also willing to take a shot at changing their lives. But what happens next?
Too often, they get a barrage of shame and guilt messages. The non-professional counsellor tries to break them down, get through defence mechanisms and bring order to the chaos through force. Program leaders tell them that they are broken, flawed, damaged, or deficient in any number of ways. They’re told that no matter what they do, they’ll always be addicts. They are also told that there is one way to skin a cat and to not ask questions to the contrary. Many of the people I have worked with, who are unskilled and run addiction centres themselves are quite mad. Some take steroids, don’t go to meetings and walk their own walk, and others are aggressive to the point where they get personal satisfaction through their break-down techniques.
Encouraging? Inspiring? Not so much. So check this out as you conduct your addiction treatment research.
Reason #3: Focus Solely on Physical Coping Strategies
Many inpatient addiction recovery centres address only physical-level behavioural changes. These are what we can do to address physical cravings for drugs or alcohol, such as aversion therapy.
While these certainly have their place, they’re not the whole picture.
In order for you to heal thoroughly, you need to address and heal on the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual levels. Every person has these 4 levels of self.
In particular, we’ve noticed that many addiction recovery centres avoid working with emotional issues. They say they will, but then don’t.
This is ironic, because often when people use the term “mental health issues,” they’re really referring to emotional health issues.
“We try to think our way out of emotional problems and wonder why that doesn’t work out! A lot of addiction problems come into play when people say, ‘I can’t think my way out of this problem. I don’t know how to address it on the emotional level, so let me numb out to it.’” – Joe Koelzer, co-founder, of The Clearing Rehab Centre
The good news is that when you learn proven psychological techniques -such as Gestalt Therapy – to heal at the emotional level, you can make dramatic progress. Mark L Lockwood and his team of registered professionals use Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, CBT, Advanced Mindfullness and a existential person centred approach to therapy that is far removed from talking about the effect of drugs in a circle all day. Real recovery is hard an the statistics of 5-20 percent have now shown that this is one of the reasons why drug rehab centres don’t work. Mark claims A Course In Recovery has the same success rates as those of CBT and DBT clients. Mindfullness, and a complete change of life direction and transformation are the only thing that will work for most people. To do this, one needs to have a profound understanding of spirituality and the mind in a scientific context. Working these two fields together is what has created miracles for many of his clients, who continue to search for long awaited solace and healing from their addictions. In fact our therapist specialists have started to concentrate on a far more holistic addiction treatment view, where we are addicted to our thinking, not just our drinking.
Reason #4: Lax Screening Process
There are plenty of addiction recovery centers out there that accept people with no other criteria than “they can pay.” The uniformed and ill-equipped medical aids too, rely on the health department to know who to pay for their clients treatment but do almost nothing to screen the centres. They themselves probably don’t know much about addiction treatment traditionally. But thankfully this is changing. Many drug rehab centres, paid by top medical aids in South Africa, are offering services that are actually free to the public, like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. These are community programs with all the available resources online. The sponsor style, peer driven treatment is also free, non-professional help that addicts can get anywhere at any time.
This results in addiction recovery groups with participants that are all over the map.
Some people really want to recover and do the work …but others enrolled under duress or coercion.
A single person who doesn’t want to be in recovery can prevent an entire group from doing their own work.
Plus, many addiction recovery centers admit and discharge people daily. This creates a highly distracting and disjointed experience for everyone else going through the addiction recovery program as the centres become money making factories. So be sure to check this piece out as you do your research.
Some addiction recovery programs avoid these pitfalls. For example, The Clearing has a cohort-based approach, which means that everyone moves through together. Everyone starts and ends at the same time, which facilitates unified, positive progress. Their strict admission criteria also means that they turn away more than 50% of the people who request admission. Our Ocean Wellness programs and courses are much the same.
“The residential treatment program at the Malibu treatment center I went to was nothing more than well-intentioned contract counselors who rotated among clients weekly for sparse individual and group sessions. I later learned that my lead counselor was being paid $12 an hour and was an intern. Beyond that, we were completely outsourced to local AA meetings …”
When people are paying thousands of dollars a day for addiction treatment, they deserve much better than that.
They deserve supportive, caring, highly qualified staff members who are wholly invested in their progress.
Reason #6: Little to No Aftercare
Imagine going through a 28-day inpatient addiction treatment program and feeling as though you’ve made strides toward living drug-free … only to return home with no consistent support and no follow-up care.
Without a strong support system in place, you give into familiar patterns and give up on sobriety.
Sadly, that’s the reality for many people who go through mainstream addiction recovery programs.
Without the structure of their inpatient addiction treatment program, they lose sight of the skills they learned and return to their old habits.
So make sure you check out the Aftercare program that follows the inpatient stay.
Mark L Lockwood after working with addicts since 1997, and seeing the methods and madness while working at other drug rehab centres, has moved away himself from the programs and processes of the traditional drug rehab centre offering. “People are all different. So are their addictions and their emotions and thinking patterns. The idea that addiction is a permanent, moral failing that can never be healed is a philosophy we no longer follow as we move more towards a more holistic and spiritual treatment philosophy where we believe all things are possible Mathew 19:26.” A cure for addiction is highly possible but must be kept in context. If you have an allergy to alcohol, don’t ever touch it again, it may kill you! This, we can show you how to do. Mark Lockwood, Deepak Chopra, Sadghuru, Johan Hari and many others today are firm believers that addiction affects us on a brain and cellular level, where memory disguises the need for pleasure and reward as pain.
“We help people who are not unavoidably doomed addicts for life, but who medicate emotional problems with food, sex or substances. A major reason why drug rehab centres don’t work is possibly in their black and white, AA and NA community only approach. Can you heal from addictions to food, to gossip, drugs or anxiety? Hell yes! External means to internal problems don’t work. Learning advanced mindfulness and deep inner purpose and meaning in a world where you may feel de-realized as a person can be healed through connection, loving compassion and developing a far greater knowledge base about yourself, your soul and the world.
Choose wisely, ask for a weekly report and ask what psychologist did the treatment. Whether you’re a medical aid or a private person, everyone needs to wake up and keep the main thing the main thing. Which is helping people with emotional, neurological and psychological dis-ease recover and increase their quality of life dramatically. For more information. www.markllockwood.com
You may find you spend hours each day, or lie awake at night, worrying about your situation. This may take the form of fantasies in which drinking becomes physically impossible for the alcoholic, or you may scheme about techniques to avoid drinking situations. Or you may rehearse your lecture to the addict. You may torture yourself worrying where that person is, and with whom. You are afraid the addict will get killed on the highway and yet you are afraid he or she won’t. You may go over and over the past, reminding yourself of the pain. Or you may project horrors into the future, as if you could solve problems before they happen. You may be quite aware this sort of thinking does you no good and wish you could stop it.
You may question yourself, analyzing your behaviour, past and present, as to how it might affect the alcoholic. Living this way can be a form of addiction. Addiction has been described as an experience that blocks our awareness, fills time and occupies attention, and has an overwhelmingly compulsive quality. It also is a relationship to an activity that thinking and behaviour, revolving around another person, is indeed addictive.
Kinds of obsessive thinking and addictions
There are other kinds of obsessive preoccupation. A spouse may become overly involved with work and begin to use it as the only source of good feelings. Or the spouse’s energies may switch to the children, so there will be the kind of emotional involvement more appropriate to a marriage, plus an engulfing kind of control. A teenager may obsess about collections or sports to block out negative feelings, or use compulsive achievement as the connection with life. If you can’t get good feelings from relationships, you may work all the harder to feel good about accomplishments.
Why Obsession?
Obsession does serve a purpose. It gives an illusion of power and control over life. Some people even experience worry as an accomplishment of a task, and have a worry quota, whether the problems are large or small. Obsession gives a sense of movement, though there is no change, so that it is an ‘action’ that fills the day, whether it is scheming, actively rescuing the chemically dependent person, or blocking out awareness by endless, pointless tasks. From the fear of loss of control and the feeling of omnipotence comes compulsive behaviour, which helps you feel you are doing something, and covers the feelings of helplessness. Obsessive thinking may allow you to blame all your problems on The Problem, which releases you from the effort to solve them. In this way, it blocks out solutions and creative problem solving. If you were freed from the fears that lead to obsession, you would have the serenity in which you could identify choices and options. What, for example, would you be thinking about if you were not thinking about the alcoholic in your life? What would you be feeling if you were not using activity to block your emotions?
Start a Course In Recovery Today. Don’t Stay Stuck!
If you did not have a compulsion to play counsellor to the alcoholic, if you stopped helping and watching, what would you be doing with your life? A grown daughter looks back on her adult years with her alcoholic mother: “My sisters got as far away as they could but I got stuck. I still spend too much of my time checking on her, thinking about her, and helping her solve her problems. It’s kept me from ever having much of a life of my own. In a way, I guess I’m living hers.” Obsessive thinking and behaviour serve to block out anxiety, which many feel overwhelming. This may be a fear of abandonment, of being alone and unsupported. These fears may have a traumatic origin. Perhaps you had an alcoholic parent. If you were raised in an alcoholic home it’s very likely neither parent gave you focused attention. Your chemically dependent parent was unable to be emotionally close, or to put your needs first. Your other parent was usually too absorbed in the problems created by the chemical dependency to have energies for you, either. You have felt emotionally abandoned. Now, in your adulthood, these fears of still another abandonment can be so intense you will do anything to avoid that terrible feeling, even to living in a toxic, chaotic environment. This is a very normal reaction, but you stay in pain to avoid pain. To survive you will do whatever ‘works’, even if it means walling off your feelings by compulsively focusing on something outside yourself.
Other people may think it is remarkable that you will cling to a painful, abusive relationship. That is because they can’t understand your terror of being alone and abandoned is far stronger than the pain of the current situation. On the emotional level, you may even believe you can’t survive without the alcoholic in your life.
What You Can Do
The Truth shall make you free – but first it shall make you miserable – proverb
It’s hard to let go. We hang onto habits, relationships and defences long after they stop being good for us. It’s natural to ignore what we know, hoping that if we don’t notice it, we won’t lose what we thought we had. But as Freud commented, “Much is won if we succeed in transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness”. It is very sad to face the reality of our powerlessness over someone else and the uselessness of obsessive behaviour, but it will release us from hysterical misery! The First Step, as Al-Anon states, is to admit the situation to yourself: you are powerless over alcohol and your life is unmanageable. Your thinking and feelings have become obsessive. The alcoholism is not the problem you can solve; it is the problem that lies before you. The chemically dependent person needs help, but so do you. To admit powerlessness is to surrender to a new way of looking at your life. Many people equate surrender with defeat and humiliation. They are like the alcoholic who chooses death over admitting the self-destructiveness of his or her lifestyle.
Yet those who have made the choice to let go of a drug or another person have found that surrender was liberation. You can’t stand guard over someone else without losing your own freedom.
You can make a decision for acceptance, and live through that pain until it is finished, rather than staying in pain for a lifetime. Today you can decide to learn how to feel better, by changing your own thinking and actions.
For more help with Obsessive thinking and help for addiction start a course in recovery today. acourseinreovery@gmail.com or CALL 0824424779
Transform your life and sign up for a personalized course in recovery. Stressed, Burnt-out and worn-down. Depressed? Anxious or addicted, or all of the above.
Providing unique and advanced options and alternatives to depression clinics, drug rehab centres and other institutions that may not suit an individuals needs to grow, develop and heal holistically from whatever is holding them back from improving their personal lives. Our team has been created to fill the gaps between clinical and holistic, modern treatment that today statistically provides the best results worldwide.
Residential stays at our centre through to state of the art personal development systems, that help people recover, heal, renew and grow in the long term. They provide a welcome different option to a psychiatric clinic, a formal rehabilitation centre or anything of the like. Boost, exceed, inspire and create your best life in the manner which suits your personal preferences best.
Get Connected. Staying connected in a program like A Course In Recovery ensures you have growth and maintenance in your spiritual, physical and emotional life covered.
Whether it is your first day or your hundredth day doesn’t matter. What matters is consistency, connection, communication and growth in the areas of your life where you need it most.
GROW ON THE GO!
All courses include 90 Transformational Challenges, the 90 Day Course in Recovery and Personal Growth, 12 week guided modern approach to the 12 Steps for alcoholics, addictions, or emotional sufferers and the Resilient Aftercare Package. A course in Recovery – The Recovery Box set is there to help you heal your life, grow and move forward with discipline, dedication and purpose.
All Course in Recovery Packages are available now available to help you master your next big personal transformation. Theses masterclass products will help you master your psychology, connect emotionally and transform spiritually and physically – nothing less than in depth personal transformation.
WHAT DO I GET
Personal one on one sessions, Full Course in Recovery Material, Podcasts, Livestreams, Daily connections, World-class Visual and Audio Resources.
A Course in Recovery has been developed so that people can get connected to the right material, therapy and course work online and start to heal their lives. Many people come stay at PathwaysWellness and Recovery Centre in Plettenberg Bay for several weeks or months, others connect from all corners of the world online. There is no one size fits all approach here. We work with what we have, without limitations and have a growing network of people who are achieving massive results from doing the work. Anyone can sign up at http://www.markllockwood.com
WHAT DOES THE COURSE DO?
The course keeps you connected to weekly therapy. Provides a weekly podcast and offers the most amazing resources to our clients you can imagine. Everything you need to move forward, grow and transform your life.
