MBRP — mindfulness-based relapse prevention — combines meditation practice with classic relapse-prevention skills: you learn to notice triggers, thoughts, and cravings as events that rise and pass, instead of orders that must be obeyed. In a randomized trial published in JAMA Psychiatry, it showed added benefit at twelve months over standard relapse prevention and usual care.
MBRP is an eight-week structured program, developed at the University of Washington by Sarah Bowen, Neha Chawla, and G. Alan Marlatt's team. Each week pairs a meditation practice — body scan, sitting meditation, mindful movement — with a relapse-prevention skill: identifying high-risk situations, working with triggers, riding out cravings.
The premise is precise: relapse is usually triggered by a moment of automatic reaction — the feeling lights, the old behavior fires. MBRP trains the gap between the two. You do not learn to have fewer cravings; you learn to be less kidnapped by the ones you have.
MBRP's best-known practice is urge surfing: watching a craving rise, crest, and fall the way a surfer watches a wave, staying on the board instead of fighting the ocean. The craving is located in the body, described like weather, and kept company until it changes — which it does, usually inside twenty to thirty minutes.
It sounds passive. In the trial, it was not: the MBRP group showed fewer days of use and heavy drinking at twelve months compared with standard relapse prevention and treatment as usual.
The 2014 JAMA Psychiatry trial is the anchor: real people in treatment, randomized, followed for a year. Later studies are broadly supportive, with the honest caveat that effects vary and MBRP is a complement to — not a replacement for — other care. It asks for daily practice, and like all skills, it works in proportion to the reps.
You do not need the eight-week course to use the engine. Two minutes: sit, find the breath, and when the mind wanders — it will, that is the practice — notice where it went and come back. That is the whole mechanic, and it transfers directly to the moment a craving wanders in.
For the structured version, MBRP-trained clinicians and programs exist in most cities and online. And Marrow's Riding the Wave paces the urge-surfing practice itself, beat by beat, any hour.
Riding the Wave is MBRP's signature practice, paced for you in ten to twenty minutes. Free, private, nothing to install.
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