The Mind-Body Guide to the Twelve Steps by Nina Pick
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.
Experiential Classes
In anticipation of my forthcoming book The Mind-Body Guide to the Twelve Steps, this 13-session experiential class will offer a mind-body approach to recovery from trauma and addiction. We will explore somatics as a complement to the Twelve Steps, cultivating a felt sense of “God in the body” and taking the Twelve Steps beyond the conventional cognitive approach into one of “soul recovery”—a profound and sensuously embodied spiritual path.
Whether you are new to the Steps, in long-time recovery, struggling with trauma or addictive behaviors, or simply wishing to apply the wisdom of the Steps to your life, the practices in this class will teach you how to listen to and nurture your body as an essential part of your recovery journey. Incorporating Jewish and integrative spirituality, eco-somatics, self-directed touch, imagery and dreams, mindfulness, and somatic movement, each class will include a presentation, experiential practice, and group discussion.
Throughout the course you will learn how to:
- Support your nervous system to support your recovery
- Nurture a felt sense of safety in your body
- Incorporate transformative ritual
- Cultivate daily practices for reflection, dreaming, prayer, and meditation
- Forgive yourself and others
- Understand the intersections of addiction, developmental trauma, and intergenerational trauma
We will meet on Zoom on Mondays starting July 10, 2023, from 7:30-8:45pm EST
The dates are: 7/10, 7/17, 7/24, 8/7, 8/14, 8/21, 8/28, 9/11, 9/18, 10/2, 10/16, 10/23, 10/30
(Please note there will be no classes on 7/31, 9/4, 9/25, and 10/9)
The course fee is $360 (due upon registration, non-refundable)
Recommended reading: The Mind-Body Guide to the Twelve Steps. Available for preorder for release in September.
To register:
About the author
Nina Pick (MA Counseling Psychology, 2012) is a somatic healing practitioner who offers a trauma-informed, heart-centered, and attachment-based approach. She offers sessions for individuals and couples, as well as a Somatics of Recovery course based on her book.
Nina has an MA in counseling psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and an MA in comparative literature from UC Berkeley. She has training in a range of modalities, including Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy, Somatic Attachment Therapy, NeuroAffective Touch, the Safe and Sound Protocol, Waldorf pedagogy, and Reiki.
Gratefully in recovery since 2009, she lives in Massachusetts, where she enjoys hiking, dancing, and spending time with her cat. She did karaoke sober for the first time last Sunday, and it was awesome. To learn more about her work, visit ninapick.com
