Posted by Admin on March 4, 2016
For the sake of brevity, I will do my best to explain addiction from a different perspective without going into the complete where’s and why-fore’s. We are not all born addicted – we all can become addicted at any point in our lives – and often do because of environmental (family) circumstances surrounding us.
To understand addiction, one must first understand a myriad of other things – such as why are we here?
The first thing to understand is that we are all Spiritual beings having a physical experience. When you understand the answer to the question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”, it will be easier to grasp the true nature of addiction and then be able to recognize it ‘sneaking’ into your self.
By the way – the answer to the chicken/egg question is neither one came first – they both arrived at the same time – as did we all.
What is addiction? How does it get started? Why is it so hard to stop? The answers to these questions all relate to the spiritual awareness of the self. As I said, I have been addicted to numerous ‘things’; and it wasn’t until recently that I totally understood addiction. At its simplest – it is as someone else said – looking for something outside of self to make the inside feel better. While that may be true – it does not offer much of a solution to the nature of addiction – and as a result, many do not break their addictions – not because they are weak, rather, because they are unaware.
Once an awareness of addiction is known – and believed – the addictions will almost disappear without much effort – depending, of course, upon what the addiction is – many have physical ramifications of just stopping; therefore, they must be relieved gradually to avoid the physical discomfort (suffering is self-imposed).
To fully understand addiction, one must first take a little journey into Quantum Physics. Yeah, a big word for a really very simple concept. At its simplest, Quantum Physics is nothing more than the study of energy – at its lowest common denominator – the atom.
Energy is! It can never be created nor destroyed; always has been and always will be; has no end and no beginning, etc. Some call it God, some call it Buddha, some call it Jesus Christ – by the way – it is Jesus THE Christ. Christ means chosen one…. Some call it Great Spirit….. it really does not matter what label one puts upon it – it is all the same.
Therefore, we are all energy and everything around us is energy, rocks, plants, gravel, trees, water, air, etc. As such, everything vibrates and is in motion – some at a slower (lower) vibration than others. We humans vibrate at a much higher rate than rocks, tables, chairs, etc.
I think everyone can agree that feelings or emotions (there is a difference, by the way) are energy – or if you cannot agree they are energy, perhaps you can agree that they generate energy. Anger is a good example. Can you sit still when you are angry? More often than not, we pace around, throw things, break things, kick something, etc.
It is very difficult, if not impossible to just SIT in anger – yes, it can be done; however, more often than not, the anger just continues to build until it reaches a point of Doing something, i.e. exerting energy. And even while just sitting, we are exerting energy. Have you ever walked in on a confrontation, an argument? You can feel the energy in the room, right? Enough said.
So understanding that emotion/feeling has energy or vibration, we can now start to almost understand how addiction works. The last piece of the addiction puzzle is that the ‘negative’ emotions; anger, fear, sadness, melancholy, etc. vibrate at lower levels than do the ‘positive’ emotions: joy, happiness, compassion, etc.
I believe it bears repeating that a person with an addiction is not weak, just unaware. Addiction is a result of doing something, shopping, eating, drinking or taking something, drugs, alcohol, food, etc. When we do anything that raises our emotional/feeling energy level and we ‘feel’ better as a result, what is actually happening is that whatever the substance is – consuming or doing – it actually masks our lower vibrational feelings – anger, frustration, etc. and we ‘think’ we feel better because we now are able to recognize the higher vibrational feelings. This is critical to understand because it seems that our ‘drug’ of choice gets us high, but in reality, it does not – it only masks our lower vibrations and we ‘think’ it gets us high. Do you understand the difference?
This can also explain why there is such a small window of the ‘high’. We can reach a certain state of ‘ecstasy’ and feel better than we have ever felt before – until! We take the next drink, eat the next donut, buy the next pair of shoes and all of a sudden our feeling of ‘ecstasy’ disappears only to be replaced with doubt and guilt and remorse and we ask ourselves Why? Why did I do this again? How did this happen, I was being so careful!?!
However, whatever we use to mask our lower level vibrations is only temporary and does not last very long, therefore, we remember that we felt better when we did whatever it was that changed those feelings and all we all want is to feel good – all the time. The best part of all this is that it IS possible to feel good all of the time without any external substance or stimuli. This is happening more and more since we have entered into the ‘New Age’ way of thinking/living.
It is pretty simple, not necessarily easy, but indeed simple. Stop focusing on the negative emotions when they arise – instead work on understanding Why they arise and Where they come from.
It used to take a lot to get me angry, but when I finally did get angry, it was very often way out of proportion to the situation that triggered it – notice I said triggered it and not caused it? No one or nothing can Cause us to be angry, the anger is already inside of us and it is only triggered by something. I could not get a grip on this until I worked on my trigger. For me it was something that happened between my father and I when I was about 9 years old and I was extremely angry, but could not do anything about it, could not express it – I just had to swallow it. Well, I swallowed it okay, but whenever I got angry after that, my degree of anger was way out of alignment with the situation, whatever it was. It wasn’t until I did some group work and some meditation – both guided and solo, that I understood I was not angry at you – I was still angry at my father and since he is not around and I could not express it to him anyway, it came out at the current event that triggered that memory.
This brings about the Law of Attraction as well. Like attracts like. So with anger being suppressed within me it was easy for my lower vibrational psyche to latch on to fear, lack of self-worth, disdain, mistrust, etc. in other words, my trapped anger attracted all the other emotions that vibrate at a similar frequency to anger and I was just not happy most of the time. I found out at an early age (15) that alcohol relieved that. If I drank, I felt better and since all I wanted to do was feel better, I drank. However, unaware of what was happening, when I drank, I often did things that I may not have done otherwise and now I added guilt to my plethora of destructive energy in motion (emotion). And while the drinking did indeed make me feel better most of the time, the hangovers were worse than the ‘high’ I had when drinking. So the drinking was only temporary AND it was destructive as well. To clarify, the drinking itself was not so destructive, but the amount I had to drink became destructive. The first time I drank I only had approximately 1 ounce of vodka in a large coke. But by the time I had been drinking a few years, 1 ounce of vodka or any other alcohol had no effect other than to tell my psyche that a couple more would make me feel better. And so it progressed until it almost killed me. I finally had a spiritual awakening, a realization that this was no way to live and if I truly wanted to be happy, joyous and free, I would have to give up anything that made me feel otherwise. I had to learn to go within to feel better without.
If you don’t go within, you go without.
Avoid anything and everything that makes you weak and embrace everything that makes you stronger. <Gives you Power>