Speaking & Workshops

Allowing practice
rest is here

We change addiction care at the identity level. Addiction was a mask. Connecting with who you are allows the mask to fall.

Paul du Buf brings three decades of addiction nursing and a four-minute practice that a room can learn in one sitting — for festivals, conferences and professional gatherings. He speaks as an independent practitioner, unattached to any treatment provider.

Paul du Buf

Paul du Buf · ERA-Institute

Four minutes

Rather than read about it, do it

The practice is called ERA — Exhale, Rest, Allow. It is built on the natural pause at the end of the out-breath. Nothing is forced and nothing is held. What is new is meeting that pause awake, rather than reaching for the usual exits.

A craving is a wave. The mask is what forms when a person takes themselves to be it — it was worn because it worked, and it stayed on long enough to become the only face visible from the inside. Attention does not tear it off. It makes the wearing noticeable, and what is underneath was there before the mask.

What I bring to a programme

Three formats, one argument

The same material, pitched to the room. Each can be adapted in length; the workshop is the one people talk about afterwards, and the keynote is the one that changes how an organisation sees itself.

Experiential workshop

The Rest Underneath the Craving

75–90 minutes · up to 40 people · no equipment

Compulsion is a nervous system reaching for what it knows to escape what it cannot yet bear. The strategy worked once. The trouble comes when it becomes the only face a person can see, and what it costs is presence.

  • Guided ERA rounds, in the body rather than in theory
  • Paired enquiry: locating your own restraint
  • Participants leave with a four-minute practice usable anywhere, including mid-craving
  • Trauma-safe by design: nothing is held, no breath is ever retained, and eyes open is always fine
Keynote or talk

The Organisation as a Nervous System

30–45 minutes · conferences and in-house

Trauma-informed training gives people a vocabulary, and vocabulary is worth having. What it cannot reach on its own is the layer underneath: an organisation’s own regulation strategies can themselves be compulsive — urgency, control, the reflex to fix.

  • Why twenty-five years of refinement have not noticeably moved the relapse ceiling
  • What identity change contributes that behaviour change alone does not
  • What trauma-integrated culture asks of a system, not just its staff
  • The randomized-trial evidence for MBRP and MORE — and its honest limitations
Panel

The organisational lens

15 minutes plus discussion

On a panel of clinicians I bring the identity-level argument; among practitioners and teachers I bring the clinical rigour and what the trial literature does and does not establish. I hold no contract with a provider and nothing to defend, which tends to make the conversation more candid than it otherwise would be.

  • Addiction, trauma and contemplative practice where they actually meet
  • What three decades on the work floor adds to what the literature can measure

A note on the evidence. The randomized trials I cite tested Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention and Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement — established eight-week protocols that train the same capacity this practice trains. They are the evidence for the approach, not for my programme: neither Still·point nor the ERA course has yet been evaluated in a trial. I say so in the room as well.

About

Founded on the work floor, not the whiteboard

Paul du Buf is the founder of ERA-Institute, an independent institute that trains attention as a capacity in people living with cravings and in the practitioners who support them. Its core tools are free and openly available, and it takes no funding from treatment providers. He spent three decades as a nurse in addiction services and is the author of Shadow Dancing. He developed the ERA practice and the eight-week Still·point programme, working where addiction, trauma and contemplative practice meet.

“No wave reaches it. The door was never locked — the fighting is what held it shut, and the capacity to see that was here all along.”

Credentials
BSN, RN, NMP, CGNC
Certified Global Nurse Consultant,
International Council of Nurses

Written
Shadow Dancing: Embodied Recovery from Trauma and Addiction

Languages
English · Dutch

Based
Between Europe and Canada

Invitations

Bringing this to your programme

Tell me the room, the length you have and the audience, and I will send a full proposal. I am glad to hear that it is not a fit — a quick no is more useful to both of us than silence.

Send a speaking enquiry

Or write directly to paul@era-institute.com