323 The Mindfulness Solution To Addiction With Expert Jeff Jones

Jeff Jones is a therapist, addiction counsellor, interventionist, and now, family recovery coach working online with families with addiction. He’s expanded the context of addiction and created a three-phase program that empowers families to safeguard their loved one in an addictive cycle or recovery, while they engage in a process to stop the addiction cycle in this generation. After putting it online and wrapping a user-friendly online community around it, Jeff is moving towards his goal of empowering families to connect with like-minded others, family-specific resources and expertise when they are ready.

Contact Info

• Website: www.TheFamilyRecoverySolution.com

Most Influential Person

• Thich Nhat Hanh

Effect on Emotions

• So what I'm aware of is that my emotions can like go to extremes, whether it's spiraled downwards or climb upwards kind of thing.
• And mindfulness for me has been a very helpful antidote to ground me in reality as opposed to right away believe any extreme, whether it's down or up. So I want to reality check it with mindfulness.

Thoughts on Breathing

• When I take slow, deep breaths into my belly and actually push my belly out, it engages my parasympathetic nervous system which slows the body down, which slows the nervous system down, calms the nervous system.
• I have been using that in meditation. A natural thing that I do is, right away, take a big breath even sometimes before thinking. It has taken a long time to get there.
• The slow deep breath is always there. It's a resource that will never leave me.

Suggested Resources

• Book: Diamond Heart: Book One: Elements of the Real in Man by A. H. Almaas
• App: N/A

Bullying Story

• The story that I'm thinking of happened really not that long ago, just a couple months ago. It is interesting how it started out because I have a number of different, addiction mentors.
• There was one in particular that I had just sent her an email kind of with a compliment of what I learned from her and I was just at a place where I was looking at what I was doing and having appreciation for the different people who I have learned from whose shoulders I'm standing on kind of thing.
• So I wrote her an email and what I got back from her was a letter from her attorney. So it was confusing to me and I felt bullied by that. It was a great opportunity for me to be aware of what was going on in my own thinking process.
• I just couldn't really make sense of my giving her a compliment about something I had learned from her and then getting this letter from her attorney.
• It was kind of like letting me know how to cite her reference properly, like I was stealing some of her information or something.
• I called her and I sent an email and I said, hey, I got this email from your attorney and like, can we just have a conversation?
• Which you know, I got another letter from her attorney and just a couple of weeks ago I was at a conference and I saw her and she was sweet as pie to me. Nothing was said about it. So in that situation I felt like I was being bullied.
• I was aware of what was going on in my mind and painting all these pictures like I'm being bullied here, and then to see her and get no message of that, it was confusing to me, but what I really learned from that from a mindfulness perspective is how I really need to check out my own thinking.
• Like I can't always believe my own thinking. And if I don't check it out with the other person, it's not really going to be helpful for me to believe everything that my mind says. Now the other side of it is I do feel that I was being bullied.