Recovery Curriculum

OUR CURRICULUM

for Addiction Prevention & Recovery

BrightLife Objectives

Our curriculum elements are designed to engender confidence, ease, and empowerment in our clients for life.

To accomplish this, each week, clients receive a new lesson highlighting one pillar of BrightLife's recovery curriculum which is paired with customized somatic practices and cognitive exercises.

These daily practices are designed to accomplish four objectives:

Demonstrated Client Benefits include:

Reduced incidence of urges and cravings
Habituated self-care practices
Enhanced self-awareness & introspection
Increased emotional resilience & stability
Improved mental focus
Diminished reactivity
Reduced experiential avoidance
Stimulated parasympathetic response
Improved confidence & self-image
Development of a positive, growth mindset

Rejuvenate Body & Mind - Stimulate the parasympathetic response to restore balance to the overtaxed nervous system.

Create Empowered Understanding - Establish a practical understanding of the forces addiction uses to compel behavior—and deliver proven techniques and practices to counter them.

Neutralize Harmful Mental Habits - Lead clients through a Neurological Repatterning Process that neutralizes key maladaptive mental patterns known to trigger addicted behaviors.

Habituate Self Care - Introduce a range of mind-body wellness techniques and solidify regular habits of self-care.

BrightLife Curriculum Overview

Each week, participants attend a workshop, either in-person or online, that introduces a new module of BrightLife's curriculum.

These weekly modules combine a unique blend of instruction and practice, including a series of neurological-reprogramming exercises embedded within select evidence-based yoga and mindfulness practices.

The weekly modules are designed to rejuvenate the nervous system while re-writing specific triggering mental patterns that can fuel addictive cycles.

The comprehensive system employs repetitive exercises, performed both in formal practices and in daily life, that reinforce improved mental habits and skills. All together, the practices can be completed in less than an hour a day.

Learn more about each week's focus below.

Module 1 | Attacking Addiction's Weak Point with BrighLife Brain Training

WEEK'S OBJECTIVE – Introduction to BrightLife and restoration of the parasympathetic nervous system.

OVERVIEW – Our first module introduces the BrightLife system and techniques while working to restore the overtaxed nervous system to its natural relaxed state.

IN CLASS – We'll explore BrightLife's new targeted model for understanding addiction and its proprietary brain-training process. Your clients will learn about addiction's optimal points of interdiction and discover how to employ customized tools to interrupt the cycles that fuel addiction. We’ll conclude with an overview of the five maladaptive habits of mind that can propagate triggers.

AT HOME – The daily BrightLife exercises will alternate between a calming and rejuvenating guided-relaxation session, based-upon the practice of yoga nidra, and a trauma-informed yoga posture sequence that will be used in subsequent weeks to support the BrightLife Brain Training exercises.

Module 2 | Neutralizing Triggering Pattern #1: Negativity Bias

WEEK'S OBJECTIVE – Enhanced Gratitude and Positivity

OVERVIEW – For those struggling with addiction, the nervous system’s innate tendency to prioritize negative experiences (perceived as threats) over positive experiences can leave many people overwhelmed and hopeless. This week’s instruction and brain-training exercises are designed to neutralize this tendency.

IN CLASS – Your clients will learn about the functioning and purpose of negativity bias, and will then discover how to put in place our structured brain-training regimen to cultivate gratitude, positivity, and hope to support their deliberate engagement of the recovery process.

AT HOME - This week's daily BrightLife exercises will help your clients to train their nervous systems to seek out the gifts and blessings in daily life, effortlessly and automatically. They'll alternate the yoga-based brain-training exercises with a powerful guided-relaxation practice to rejuvenate body and mind.

Module 3 | Neutralizing Triggering Pattern #2: Psychological Resistance

WEEK'S OBJECTIVE – Improved Acceptance of Present-moment Experience

OVERVIEW – In the BrightLife program, we use the term psychological resistance to refer to the mental and emotional struggle against our present moment experience—a struggle which can be a source of significant emotional turmoil. This week’s instruction and brain-training exercises are designed to create a more effortless acceptance of that which cannot be changed.

IN CLASS – This week's focus will be dedicated to helping neutralize unhelpful mental and emotional reactions to life's challenges. We'll put in place a brain-training process to re-train the nervous systems to respond with calm and skill—even in the midst of life’s difficulties.

AT HOME – The daily BrightLife exercises will help to train the brain to respond to life's ups and downs with greater ease. Yoga-based brain-training exercises will be alternated with the guided-relaxation practice to calm nerves and soothe emotions. This week will arm your clients with the tools and insight to feel more calm, more often.

Module 4 | Neutralizing Triggering Pattern #3: Emotional Reactivity

WEEK'S OBJECTIVE – Enhanced Emotional Resilience

OVERVIEW – The addiction-compromised nervous system is often driven into a fragile state where even modest emotional experiences are reacted to in dramatically unhealthy ways. This week’s instruction and brain-training exercises are designed to minimize emotional disturbances while enhancing resilience and developing an ability to remain calm and in-control even when they do arise.

IN CLASS – Week four is devoted to zeroing in on how to minimize and manage disturbing emotions. Clients will learn how to employ customized brain-training exercises to shift how the mind processes emotional experiences to aid in finding greater balance and ease with impulses and emotions of all kinds.

AT HOME – The daily yoga-based brain-training exercises will help clients experience emotions and impulses in a new light. Focus will be placed on experiencing emotions as raw sensation to minimize their power. Clients will gain skill in observing, feeling, and understanding emotions of all kinds. The brain-training exercises targeting emotional resilience will be alternated with the guided-relaxation sessions to soothe the overstressed nervous system.

Module 5 | Neutralizing Triggering Pattern #4: Attention Deficit

WEEK'S OBJECTIVE – Elevated Mastery over Thoughts and Attention

OVERVIEW – Unmanaged attention can be a major source of stress and overwhelm that significantly hinders the recovery process. This week’s instruction and brain-training exercises will highlight the habit and consequences of poorly-managed attention and provide customized tools to develop greater mastery over all aspects of mind.

IN CLASS – The deliberate use of focused attention can radically change the trajectory of our lives. This week's brain-training regimen will begin to rein in the unruly mind and train our minds in a way that supports recovery and balance.

AT HOME – The daily exercises will help clients create greater mastery of mind to minimize stress and engender feelings of enhanced calm, clarity, and control. As with every week, clients will alternate between the formal yoga-based brain training exercises and the guided-relaxation practice to calm the nerves and rejuvenate the body.

Module 6 | Neutralizing Triggering Pattern #5: Victimizing Mindset

WEEK'S OBJECTIVE – Establish a Growth Mindset

OVERVIEW –The struggles associated with addiction often leave people with a defeated and victimized perspective that views life challenges in an unnecessarily harsh and negative light. This week’s instruction and brain-training exercises are designed to help clients perceive the opportunities for growth that are inherent in daily difficulties and to arm them with the skills needed to utilize them to enhance wellbeing and happiness.

IN CLASS – Learning how to see the opportunities for growth in life's challenges is what week six is all about. This week's brain training will help clients to use life's ups and downs as opportunities for creating more calm and happiness in life.

AT HOME – This week's daily brain-training regimen will help clients uncover the opportunities for growth that usually go wasted and unused. The process engenders enhanced appreciation for day-to-day life and provides tools for transforming any moment into a positive experience. Daily yoga-based brain-training exercises will be performed on alternate days with the rejuvenating guided-relaxation practice.

NOTE

Neurological Repatterning Exercises
The BrightLife N.O.T.E. Process

One of the most powerful aspects of the BrightLife system is the daily neuro-repatterning exercises that are conducted in tandem with traditional yoga and meditation practices.

In the BrightLife system, the yoga posture sequence, called the Recognition Sequence, is used as a kind of laboratory where maladaptive habits of thought and attention are recognized, experienced, and neutralized.

To accomplish this, BrightLife employs the four-part N.O.T.E process: Notice, Observe, Try, Experience.

NOTICE

Where the client is prompted to notice a specified maladaptive habit of thought or attention.

OBSERVE

Where the client is led to connect with the immediate negative consequences of the specified habit in mind, body, and emotion.

TRY

Where the client is invited to adjust the habit from the maladaptive pattern to a more healthy pattern.

EXPERIENCE

Where the client is directed to feel the immediate and significant improvement in their experience of the same situation as a result of the adjusted behavior.

The N.O.T.E. Process is inspired by the scientific method and is designed to create two back-to-back experiential experiments:

NOTICE and OBSERVE serves as the control experiment bringing into conscious awareness the negative consequences of the default behavior.
TRY and EXPERIENCE represents a secondary experiment wherein a single variable of thought or behavior is altered yielding a new, and more healthful, result.

This approach helps clients obtain immediate, first-hand experience of the consequences of typically unexamined patterns of thought and behavior together with a tangible sampling of the power they have within themselves to achieve an improved state of being.

This insight translates into an empowering stance that helps to fuel client engagement. Further, consistent repetition of the exercises serves to establish new mental habits that bolster wellness and enhance self-control.

SAMPLE NEURO-REPATTERNING EXERCISE

BrightLife's N.O.T.E. Process

Note: from the lesson "Resistance is Futile" which emphasizes the immutable nature of each moment and the negative consequences derived from the mental tendency called "Psychological Resistance"

Repatterning exercises are performed first during BrightLife's Yoga Posture Sequence, and then, in all aspects of daily life.

NOTICE the tendency to act as if what's happening now shouldn’t be happening.

As you move through the postures of the Recognition Sequence, you’ll come up against a variety of experiences that you may be convinced should be different from how they are:

- "My hamstrings shouldn’t be so tight."
- "I should be able to balance better than this."

- "This sequence is taking forever."

OBSERVE how your opinion about what's happening now has no effect on what's happening now, at least for this moment.

All the complaining, criticism, and frustration in the world can have no effect on what you’re experiencing in this moment. Watch and see.

TRY giving what's happening now your full permission to be as it is.

Give your hamstrings permission to be tight. Give yourself permission to be a horrible balancer. Give the sequence permission to take its sweet time. Make space for what’s on the screen. Don’t get confused though, this doesn’t mean you should give up. It means to do your best while giving what’s on the screen permission to be here, at least for this moment.

EXPERIENCE the change in your experience even in the midst of the very same circumstances.

When we make space for what's happening now, it doesn’t change what's happening now, but it does change our experience of it. Where before there was irritation, frustration, or anger, now there’s more okay-ness with the moment.

BrightLife is suitable for anyone independent of physical fitness level.

No prior yoga experience is required.