The Mind-Body Guide to the Twelve Steps

An embodied, trauma-sensitive companion to the Twelve Steps: body-based exercises for enhancing recovery, preventing relapse, and understanding the root of your addiction.

For readers of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and Trauma and the 12 Steps.

Considering addiction through a trauma-informed lens, The Mind-Body Guide to the Twelve Steps offers an accessible, lyrical, and practical guide to Twelve-Step recovery that elevates a somatic approach rooted in healing, relationship, and Earth connection. 

Somatic and spiritual counselor, educator, and writer Nina Pick shows how addiction is rooted in survival strategies that protect us from overwhelmingly painful experiences.

Pick draws on attachment theory, polyvagal theory, somatics, trauma therapy, Jewish and integrative spirituality, and her own long-time experience in recovery to expand Twelve-Step practice beyond the conventional cognitive approach into one that centers relationship, ecological connection, and mind-body healing. 

With practices designed to complement the literature and tools offered by your specific program, The Mind-Body Guide to the Twelve Steps shows you how to:

• Explore powerlessness and unmanageability
• Develop Earth-based and body-centered practices to cultivate self-compassion
• Explore dance, vocalization, and other creative arts to enhance your recovery
• Create transformative ritual and ancestral healing practices
• Expand your ideas of Higher Power and prayer
• Forgive yourself and others 
• Cultivate daily practices for reflection and meditation
• Understand the intersections of addiction, developmental trauma, and intergenerational trauma

Drawing on plant medicine, mindfulness, poetry, touch, ritual, and guided imagery, the reflections and exercises in The Mind-Body Guide to the Twelve Steps nurture an embodied and heart-centered path to recovery and healing in the vein of Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, and Arielle Schwartz.