Living Wisdom - what is addiction.

What is Addiction?

Doing something that gives temporary relief but yields negative consequences.

It’s not the thing the person does or takes, alcohol, drugs, gambling, phones and tech, sex, shopping, etc. etc.

 So let's not ask why the addiction instead ask why the pain?

We have to look at what is this thing is giving the person. Why is there a need, then we start to get somewhere. The behaviour is a coping mechanism and it’s time to look at what created this pattern, this program so we can look at rewriting it.

We have to look at the environment and the culture in which the person is existing, their worldview and beliefs. Who they think they are in this worldview that they have created for themselves. Understand how this is impacting the soul. Looking back through their timeline, their life‘s emotional journey, and the layers of dust they have on the mirror of their soul. Often the self soothing behaviours are too numb out the call of this dust on the mirror, the shadows, and often it seems far too painful to look at them let alone embrace them so the cycle of addiction continues.

Like everything, breaking the cycle, starts with awareness and self inquiry into the behaviours and programs. This needs to be done without any judgment or self shaming, just loving acceptance of what is. Open the can and let those worms out.

Once one can see clearly the behaviours and why they are enacting these behaviours, we can dive deeper and look at the underlying programs that are driving them.

For example:

Shame can be the most toxic and painful emotion to experience. How much are we carrying without even realising? After all advertising is constantly telling us we are and our bodies are not good enough. They know our self shame will drive us to buy products that we can use so we no longer need to feel this shame.

We might have a core wound or trauma that we created a program where we believe we are not worthy and this produces a deep sense of shame for our own existence. This is such a deep sense of shame and can be very painful contend with, to allow in to our experience. So when anything happens in life to trigger this feeling our subconscious shadows, programs say 'NO we will protect you from that', and create a whole heap of mental activity to leads down a path of avoidance, and we are now lock in an avoidance shame cycle.

It’s only when we turn in word and learn to regulate our emotions, learn to safely feel our feelings and re connect to that which lies beyond this protective shadow personality that we can be liberated from the addiction cycle.

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Living wisdom

If you want to delve further I highly recommend the writing of

Gabor Mate - The Myth of Normal and The hungry ghost