The Mind-Body Guide to the Twelve Steps: Finding Joy, Sensuality, and Pleasure in Recovery

A trauma-sensitive companion to the Twelve Steps: body-based exercises for deepening your recovery, expanding your spiritual practice, 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 emphasizes self-compassion, relationship, embodied awareness, and ecological connection.

Whether you're suffering from an active addiction, seeking freedom from self-limiting behaviors, or hoping to establish or grow your spiritual practice, this innovative guide offers a holistic roadmap to navigating the journey of recovery.

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, mindfulness, trauma therapy, Jewish and integrative spirituality, and her own long-time experience in recovery to expand the Twelve Step practice beyond the conventional cognitive approach into one of “soul recovery”—a profound and sensuously embodied spiritual path.

With reflections and practices designed to complement the literature and tools offered by your specific Twelve Step program, The Mind-Body Guide to the Twelve Steps shows you how to:
• Explore powerlessness and unmanageability
• Integrate 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, self-directed touch, ritual, and guided imagery, The Mind-Body Guide to the Twelve Steps nurtures a joyful and heart-centered path to recovery and complements the healing work of Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, and Arielle Schwartz.