At The Anzelmo Wellness Center we have carefully selected various therapies as part of our detox plan and recovery program. These therapies help you on a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual level, in order to make your transition into a sober lifestyle as easy as possible after your Ibogaine treatment. When a recovering addict opens up new body and mind pathways of thought, emotion and being, new vibrations are created, thus disrupting and decreasing previous addiction memory pathways.
As you remove your old habit — addiction — we want to replace it with new habits: positive and supportive techniques that you will take with you when you leave and start rebuilding your life. Our Qigong instructor talked to us about how Qigong works, and why it’s so effective for those suffering from heroin addiction:
Many addicts are very emotional. When we have an addiction, it’s very related with emotions. We are trying to find something outside of ourselves to calm our emotions, to make us feel better, because we don’t know how to find it inside of ourselves. So we want something external to give us the balance that we don’t have in a natural way, because we don’t know how to do it for ourselves.
In general, people with addiction are trying to find something to help them get some balance in their lives, or to have more joy in their life, or to handle some issues that they have, like trauma or fear or pain. So the first thing that Qigong does it to get back a little bit of peace, peace of mind, because it works in a very direct way in our nervous system. It helps us to calm down our nervous system which has been very altered by these different substances that the patients have been consuming for years. So it’s very altered, it’s not working in a peaceful, normal way.
It’s a very slow process of learning how to feel your body again. Addiction numbs your body – drugs give you peace, but it’s a fake peace because it doesn’t last. This will help them begin to feel their bodies again.
There are so many things that can affect the nervous system. The principal thing is stress, and the body gets very stressed with the chemical substances that addicts are using to calm themselves. On the one hand, they feel relief for one moment, but on the other hand it’s not natural, its external – it’s something that you have to keep taking, that you have begun to medicate yourself with. And your system is going to pay for that later because it’s not natural, it’s not your own, so you away need more and more and more and more.
So you end up making your own body lazy. It no longer knows how to make you feel better on your own. And that’s what Qigong does, it wakes up our capacity to heal ourselves. It allows you to do it for yourself, but it takes practice. Everything we need to be healthy and be peaceful and have joy in our lives, it’s already inside of us and just by clearing our energy channels we can start to access it again.
Qigong is a vital step in a 10-part program at The Anzelmo Wellness Center. We have found that this ancient Chinese practice will not only increase vitality but is directly able to re-direct cravings into emotional balance…in five short minutes.
The Anzelmo Wellness Center is an integrated clinic, using holistic methods dedicated to healing severe addiction, deep trauma, and other challenges that life hands us. Our treatment philosophy combines the best of Western treatment modalities with ancient healing techniques and traditional indigenous wisdom.
