LUXURY TREATMENT WITH A PERSONAL TOUCH
800.330.6132Our Mission
As humans, our attempt to avoid and escape from emotional distress creates greater anxiety, despair and a greater need for stress release. The illusion of escape comes in many forms, but is always external to ourselves and often becomes an addiction. Clearly drugs and alcohol offer the fastest apparent escape. Getting high, above your stress, offers the illusion of stress release. The illusion eventually becomes a nightmare.
At Satori, our mission is to welcome our clients back from the chaos of addiction with compassion and respect. We introduce our clients to the concepts of Mindfulness, Meditation and Nutrition to set a solid foundation for their next stage of recovery.
Each client is treated like family in a safe and stable environment in Laguna Beach with all the comforts of home.
Satori's two main points of emphasis in this early stage of recovery are frustration tolerance and impulse control, two of the most difficult behaviors that lead to re-lapse and loss of hope. Each group that we offer has a component of Mindfulness as the foundation.
We believe that people often fall into addiction in an attempt to escape painful thoughts, feelings, memories, and situations. Mindfulness, which has its roots in Buddhism, involves a purposeful and nonjudgmental focus on one’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences in the present moment.
Rather than escape from painful feelings, mindfulness meditation encourages an individual to sit quietly with themselves and pay close attention to their thoughts and feelings without passing judgement. Mindfulness teaches individuals to engage in conscious and deliberate focus on difficult emotions as a way to disarm them and interrupt maladadaptive behavior patterns like drug or alcohol use.
Addiction itself begins with a mental attachment accompanied by a need for stress release. Existential stress, stress of survival creates a psychic need for attachment. Attachment to something external, outside ourselves, offers the possibility of a release from stress. Sex, drugs, rock n roll, money, religion, power, submission, love, hate, job, wife, child, husband, father, mother, identity are all attachments. It is human nature to attach. Our brains are preprogrammed for attachment. We learn to name our experiences rather than simply experience without naming. If we have a feeling, we name the feeling. When we see something, we name it. When we smell, we name the smell. Then we judge it… good, bad, pleasant, unpleasant.
The brain’s job is to analyze and categorize the experiences we have. Otherwise, experience could be a chaotic continuous mess of events leading to our demise. How could we survive such chaos? Our brains evolution has been responsible for our survival as a species; analyze and remember to perpetuate our survival. Obviously, this has been effective. We now live in the “Anthropocene Age” and are the dominant species on the planet.
If the basic nature of life is to connect and to survive, then our reaction to this is to be anxious and afraid, thus fear drives our every action. As we see it, there are two options.
Option 1: Try to escape. This option we call the struggle with life. Living is based on survival, survival instinct creates fear of dying, fear of failure, fear of life. Yet, all behaviors based on escape are an illusion, because simply… there is no escape. All attachments/addictions will make our anxiety worse eventually. This option is the most common choice for most of us but it simply doesn’t work. Perhaps then death is the escape. The very thing we are afraid of becomes something we embrace in order to escape our fear of it. This is nonsensical but is often a choice, i.e. suicide. Death is not an actual escape primarily because we don’t actually know what happens in death; perhaps rebirth with the same damn dilemmas).
Option 2: Acceptance. Surrender to life on life’s terms, surrender your expectations of survival and acknowledge the emotional distress accompanying being alive. Invite your anxiety, your fear, your negative emotions in and allow them to pass. All feelings pass, if you allow them to pass. All things pass eventually and life continues on as a dynamic movement. I call this walking through the fire of your emotions. On the other side of your distress, it was never there to begin with. By the way, these feelings, these emotions, they are only feelings. Your feelings have never hurt you, they have never done anything to you. Your behaviors however, your reactions to your feelings, these actions/reactions may kill you.
So, facing and allowing yourself to feel your fear then allowing it to pass, transforms your life experience. This is mindfulness. Becoming present, allowing yourself a space to experience your emotions and to experience the inevitable passage of feeling, witnessing your psychic state now and only now is mindfulness. Buddha called this the middle way, the path out of suffering.
Satori Recovery teaches the middle way, the path of least resistance. We explore the emotional and psychic conflicts which create life out of balance. Restoring physical, emotional, psychic and spiritual balance is an art and an exercise taught and re taught daily. We teach a form of Mindfulness meditation which allows a person to reconnect to the balance which already exists in all of us. Our philosophy in treatment is that we are all asleep; our purpose in life is to awake to what is here now. Satori means “to awaken”
