Summer House

Meditation can be a powerful tool in relapse prevention and can become what one therapist called a “positive addiction” that provides a healthy alternative to addictive behaviors. People also report that meditation leads to new insights about the source of their cravings and helps to dissolve them.

In their book, Mindful Recovery: A Spiritual Path to Healing from Addiction, Drs. Bein and Bien offer ten “doorways” to recovery, from journaling to meditation, and they present dozens of specific meditation exercises based on their experience as therapists and meditators. Their book says: “People use addictive behaviors to avoid facing what hurts them. The Buddhist mindfulness practice offers a gentle way to begin facing pain and working with it to establish a new relationship to life. Mindfulness helps in two ways: first, by becoming aware of yourself and your environment, you understand what hurts you, what ‘triggers’ you, and second, by befriending your triggers, you can disarm them. Mindfulness provides a larger purpose, a broader context in which to see a problem. And then things fall into place more gently. If you are awake and relaxed and enjoying your life, there is less need and desire for your addictions.”

Kevin Griffin writes about Buddhism and the Twelve Steps saying this: “Buddha said that the cause of suffering is desire, and the Twelve Steps try to heal people from desire gone mad: addiction. Both systems ask you to look at the painful realities of life, to understand them, and to use this understanding as the foundation for developing peace, wisdom, faith, and compassion. The practical aspects of Buddhism is one of its main corollaries to the Steps.” His book, One Breath at a Time, is an exploration of how the two systems can work together, and he offers meditation techniques based on Vipassana and Metta practices.

“Zen is the ultimate and original recovery program,” says author Mel Ash in his book, The Zen of Recovery. “It exposes our denial of true self and shows us how all our other diseases and discontentments flow from our fundamental denial of unity with each other and the universe.”

Sogyal Rinpoche writes: “All we need to do to receive direct help is to ask. Didn’t Christ also say: ”Ask, and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you. Everyone that asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth”? And yet asking is what we find hardest. Many of us, I feel, hardly know how to ask. Sometimes it is because we are arrogant, sometimes because we are unwilling to seek help, sometimes because we are lazy, sometimes our minds are so busy with questions, distractions, and confusion that the simplicity of asking does not occur to us. The turning point in any healing of alcoholics or drug addicts is when they admit their illness and ask for aid. In one way or another, we are all addicts of samsara; the moment when help can come for us is when we admit our addiction and simply ask.”

Britney Spears is seeking a less toxic lifestyle. Spears voluntarily checked herself into rehab on Monday, her manager, Larry Rudolph, confirmed to E! News. "We ask that the media respect her privacy as well as those of her family and friends at this time," Rudolph said. Despite Rudolph’s request, the paparazzi rapidly tracked Spears down at Malibu’s Promises treatment center, and photos of the rehabbing star taking a smoking break surfaced on the Internet Tuesday afternoon.

While he declined to offers specifics on Spears’ treatment, Rudolph told E! News‘ Ryan Seacrest exclusively that the 25-year-old singer was "doing great." He said that Spears was determined to make recovery her top priority, and that all she wanted was time to rest and get better. Spears’ decision to seek help comes after she briefly checked into a treatment facility in Antigua last week, but departed less than 24 hours later. On Friday, she returned to Los Angeles, where she took the drastic step of shaving her head and acquiring some new tattoos, before hitting the club circuit in a short, blond wig and sunglasses.

The self-inflicted makeunder capped off months of bizarre behavior from the former pop princess, who admitted in a posting to her Website last month that her recent actions had been "far from perfect." Spears kicked off her hard-partying regimen shortly after filing for divorce from Kevin Federline in November, an occasion she celebrated by hitting the town without her panties…repeatedly. In December, she celebrated New Year’s Eve by either nodding off (per Rudolph) or collapsing into a "dead faint" (per the New York Post) while on the clock as the host of a Las Vegas bash.

Even those closest to Spears were reportedly powerless to convince the fallen pop star to clean up her act. In an email to Hollywood.com’s That Other Blog last week, Spears’ former personal assistant Felicia Culotta wrote that she was "crushed/saddened/heart sick" about the singer’s downward spiral. "WE (as in her Family and nearest and dearest—ALL of whom are NOT on the payroll anymore!!) are doing EVERYTHING in our power to get help for Britney and all in our power to NOT pad the bottom or move the bottom, so when she does indeed hit rock bottom, she’ll stand up and walk away from this whole fiasco a new, confident, changed, career driven Britney like we all knew and loved," Culotta wrote. Just days later, that rock bottom moment came to pass, as the newly bald Spears finally accepted she needed professional help.