Introduction to Mindfulness - Dean Amory

In the light of our experience in this program we would recommend
focusing on cravings early on in any mindfulness training course. We
had the good fortune to attend a two day training event in
Copenhagen with Alan Marlatt but we were already at week seven so
that it was too late to incorporate his insights into this program. One
of the differences between the program we ran and Marlatt’s program
is that he gets straight on to the issue of cravings in the first session
tailoring it around addiction specifically from the outset.
Marlatt and his colleagues use a lot of metaphors in their program.
For example, they offered a variety of metaphors to give participants
easy ways to observe their thoughts e.g. imagine your thoughts as
leaves on a river floating along; or clouds in the sky floating past and
dissolving; or as if you’re sitting in the cinema watching the
words/thoughts on the screen. They also used the imagery of a pig to
help participants to externalise their cravings and gain control over
them. e.g. imagine your craving as a greedy pig, the more you feed it,
the stronger it gets.
We believe incorporating the creative elements to the course would
be helpful in future programs as participants need strong associations
with simple messages to get them through crises. As one of the
participants on our course put it:: “You need to be spoon fed for
crises! Using cheesy slogans… in your face… simplicity can come in
to your head in a crisis. It is ultimately about crisis intervention at
times.”
Marlatt and his research group have just embarked on a major study
of the benefits of mindfulness training in the treatment of addiction.
It may be very useful for future programs to establish formal contact
with his group and explore possibility of using the same training and
research evaluation protocol. That way learnings on both sides of the
Atlantic could be shared and data also.
Another striking feature of Marlatt’s program is that they accept
anyone on to the program that was referred by the local rehabilitation
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