10 Mindful Tools For 12-Step Recovery

The 12 Steps on their own are a powerful tool for transformation. My hunch is that since you’re here, you’d like to take your recovery even further. Well, you’ve come to the right place.

In this course we’re going to weave together body, breath, and mind practices rooted in Eastern traditions, Western psychology, and the 12 Steps. These are all strategies I’ve used in my own life which have deepened my recovery immensely.

The outcome for this course is to offer you additional tools that will help you integrate 12-step recovery with other modalities and increase your capacity to practice the principles in all your affairs.

There will be several writing activities, so make sure to have a pen and paper handy each day.

Lección 1: We Cease Fighting

Fighting the present moment is a hallmark of addiction. This can look like a pendulum swinging from clinging to aversion, wanting what we want and not wanting what we don’t want. This mental battle is also physical, so in today’s class you’ll practice softening your grip so you can embody the sensations of letting go.

Lección 2: Keep Comin' Back

Today, you’ll continue the journey of resting in the present moment by noticing different landmarks of your inner body - the breath, heartbeat, etcetera - so you can find an anchor to tether your lifeline to. This anchor is the object of your "keep comin' back" during times of nervous system arousal when the emotions feel inflamed or heightened.

Lección 3: Stinkin' Thinkin'

Some people view addiction as a dis-ease of perception. This is a great theory to work with because we can have leadership over our own mind habits. In today’s class, you’ll identify unhelpful thinking patterns and where you store them in your body.

Lección 4: The Courage To Change

Recovery isn’t only about letting go. Sometimes we need strength and courage, so today’s lesson will involve movement, breathwork, and mantra that are intended to build heat and direct your attention and intention towards the courage to change the things you can.

Lección 5: Love & Tolerance Is Our Code

The key to surrendering judgement is to cultivate loving kindness (metta). Loving kindness produces brain wave patterns that are tuned to the key of serenity. When you can practice loving kindness towards yourself, the ripple effect is an outpouring of loving kindness to others. Today will be a metta practice to yourself from yourself.

Lección 6: Getting Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

When we introduce something new to our brain, the novelty of the experience gets metabolized and produces a new neuropathway - a groove in the brain tissue - just like when road crews pave a new highway. Sometimes it feels exciting to try new things and sometimes it's scary, especially if you’re holding on to old beliefs that you can’t do it or you don’t deserve it. The focus of today’s lesson is to dig deep and uncover any passions, hobbies, or desires you buried away in your addiction.

Lección 7: We Relax & Take It Easy

At any given time, our nervous system is operating in one of two states: rest and digest or fight/ flight. In active addiction and even into recovery, our energy flows quite naturally toward fight or flight as a protection mechanism. Today will include breath practices to induce the relaxation response.

Lección 8: Acting As If

One of the greatest gifts of the human experience is the plasticity of the brain and the fact that we can have leadership over our thoughts and actions. The brain can be tricked. Today, you’ll learn three strategies to influence your mind toward positivity.

Lección 9: The Number 1 Offender

They say resentment is the number one offender of recovery; that it can so easily lead to relapse. Resentment creates separation just like judgement, but if you can open your mind and heart just enough to notice the humanness of the other, resentment can be transformed into forgiveness and compassion. That’s what today’s practice is all about.

Lección 10: Attitude Of Gratitude

Advances in neuroscience have given birth to numerous bodies of research which prove that on a physiological level, we can rewire our brains away from chronic negativity and dis-ease and towards lasting well-being. One factor that influences lasting well-being is the ability to maintain positive states. Today, you’ll use techniques from Rick Hanson’s book, Hardwiring Happiness.

Reviews

Sadie’s 10 day course on mindful tips helped me feel more grounded and connected to my sobriety and my higher power.

Her open, friendly and relatable talks and exercises made me look forward to each day of the course.

My only wish is that the course was longer!

You have put in ten lessons what I have come to believe are 10 guideposts or Cairnes which should be used in recovery. I might call them principals that help and guide the recovery of sponsors and sponsees alike.
Thank you!

beautiful course, will definitely do it again. Thank you!

I will come back to this course and complete it again. Next time I will work more with the journaling exercises. Thank you for teach me.

This course is really fantastic Sadie! It is great instruction on applying principles in a sort of different and a wonderful integration of those principles and the other element of my program that truly keeps me healthy - mindfulness. Thank you!!!!🙏

Thank you Sadie for this course which I will return to and recommend to others 🙏🦋🌏

Thank you Sadie this was wonderful and so helpful! Shall return whenever I need a refresher and get sidetracked! Namaste 🙏

Sadie is awesome. After 29 years I relapsed for 2 months over my sexual identity and my looming 50th birthday. I made radical changes; leaving the small homophobic town in South America I had lived in for six years, and moved back to the California town. I had gotten sober in at the age of 20. Yes, I was a low bottom drunk, who would not have seen his 21st birthday and has never had a legal drink in the state of California. I explored my sexuality without worrying what would make its way to my son in the rampant gossip back to my teenage son and burden him with the processing his father sexuality, when he had not yet experienced and processed his own sexual awakening, and re-committed to sobriety in the rooms I had gotten sober with with the people who have known me my entire adult lifetime. I have lost my way with the 11th step with the neurosis of good step work: bad work judgment. Today I keep it very simple. Indoors I start my day with Sadie Barr's "Upon Awakening" 11th step guided mediation and/or outside I Go To God with the simple acronym GOD=Go Out Doors. Life is good today. I have been with my male soul mate for 10 years, married for 2 and we are committed to nurturing each others and our own spiritual growth. I celebrated 11 years of sobriety in April and it is a freedom to not have the burden of time; I know longer begin a thought with Because I have x# we are sober. I should have x$ in the bank or phone because I have x# of years sober I should not be experiencing this or that problem. I work the program one day at a time and the great lesson is that the only place I can start from is where I am TODAY. I'm excited to work Sadie's writing in this workshop as I haven't written a daily gratitude list in many years. Today I am grateful to be able to travel thanks to my husbands job with the airlines and my grateful was the best spacious Rain shower here in Portugal at our first night's hotel while stretching out all the kinks from air travel. If we weren't in different states I would ask Sadie to work with me on restorative Yoga as I am challenged with chronic pain and i intuitively know she could step right in to my full time self care program of neuroplasticity, PT, ice, heat, meditation and trauma work F the doctors of the west. No more surgeries for The end.

Thank you! So kind and so strong, so connected to the incredible path of recovery. I’m very grateful for your guidance.

Loved it. Very practical. Helpful in any moment. Thanks 🙏🏼

What a great 10 day course. Great insight about the 12 steps and plenty of reference from our basic text and way of life. Thank you!

A Wonderful Journey with this 10 day Meditation Thanks🌺

Easy practical tools that can be applied anywhere and anytime. Sadie voice is calm and gentle. Her cues are thoughtful and eye-opening. Learning always 😊😊😊😊😊

Loved these simple and powerful exercises. Great for folks in recovery — but it’s not required to get the benefit from Sadie’s kind voice & lovely practices.

So many helpful ways to make my path easier.

I would recommend this course to anyone that would like to add to their tool kit.

Friend of Bill W.

What a lovely course! As a fellow 12 Stepper I greatly appreciate your content and meditative material. It has been so helpful for my recovery journey! Please keep coming back 🙏🏽

Great course. I'd recommend it to anyone who's in recovery and meditation.