Welcome!

Posted on July 16, 2011 by

We are not powerless over our addictions, nor are we helpless victims of heredity, a disease, a spiritual malady. or a slew of character defects that require the intervention of some “higher power,” and a lifetime of meetings to control. This is not my opinion, but the result of decades of scientific research into addiction, and the simple fact that 75% of all addicts recover on their own without formal treatment or self-help groups.

We learn to become addicted, and we can learn to make the changes necessary to our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that will relieve us of the burden of our addictions for a lifetime, not just a day-at-a-time. The objective of “Powerless No Longer,” is to teach you how to take advantage of your brains’ natural ability to rewire itself, its neuroplasticity, to overcome your addictive behavior, and reach your full potential.


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Neuroplasticity and Addiction

Posted on May 1, 2012 by

In February, I had the opportunity to address a group here in Ajijic on the topic of neuroplasticity, and how it applies to addiction and an ageing population. The video is in three segments, and totals about 40 minutes in length. The talk was given on the 19th of February, following three weeks that were unseasonably chilly here, and we even had a little rain, if anyone is curious about the references to the weather in the first part of the talk.

The venue was our Sunday morning “Open Circle” gathering. Each week we have a speaker on a different topic, typically someone local with specialized expertise in a certain area. They let me speak anyway, and, in fact, they let me come back on April 22nd to talk about Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, which I’ll be posting here in a week or so.

Enjoy the video! When you reach the end of the first segment, click on the little white box to start the second segment. Rinse, repeat.

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Mindfulness

Posted on December 3, 2011 by

Mindfulness, simply put, is the ability to “be there,” right there, in the moment, present to our lives. It’s washing dishes when we are washing dishes, and chopping wood when we are chopping wood. Left to their own devices, our minds wander willy-nilly all over the place. I’ll bet that your mind wanders from the printed page all the time. How many sentences or paragraphs have you had to read over because you caught yourself making a grocery list, or thinking about what’s on the agenda for tomorrow? See what I mean?

I’m going to teach you a simple form of meditation, designed to help you train your mind to “stay there,” wherever you are. Why is this section here? We are beginning a journey of discovery, and what better place to start than learning how to focus our attention upon what’s going on in our own minds. To recognize the feelings and beliefs that keep us chained, it helps if we are present, and aware of our reactions. Is it necessary to practice mindfulness perfectly in order to recover? Of course not! Recovery is a process, not an event, and we only need be aware that there is such a thing as mindfulness, so we can tell when we are “in the moment” and when we are not.

There is another reason I am introducing mindfulness meditation here. Along with learning to stay in the moment, it’s also important that we learn to treat ourselves with compassion. We don’t practice compassion very much when we are using, not with those around us, and certainly not with ourselves. If we can learn to treat ourselves gently, with loving kindness, we can learn to treat others in the same manner. Continue reading →

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What We Can Learn, We Can Unlearn

Posted on August 16, 2011 by

What we can learn, we can unlearn

Up to now, we have been discussing neuroplasticity as though our brain is a one-way street, but that’s definitely not the case. Our brain is totally fluid, what we can learn we can unlearn just as quickly. In the first part of this chapter, I mentioned that our neural circuits are pruned to the tune of 20 billion synapses a day, or so, during adolescence, and this practice continues, although at a slower rate, for our entire lives.

Pathways we don’t use simply shrivel-up and die. We forget people, places, and things; we lose skills, some acquired with a great deal of effort; we change habits, likes, dislikes, political parties; we adapt new ways of doing things, discarding the old; in other words, if we are the sum of our experiences, we become different people over time, and this is all a result of neuroplasticity.

Baseball players have batting practice every day, during the season, and many continue all winter; actors rehearse again, and again, and again; in fact, every learned skill must be practiced to maintain the neural circuits we have created, or we lose it, over time. Jascha Heifetz, the renowned violinist is rumored to have said: “If I don’t practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.” Continue reading →

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