What is Addiction and how to we overcome it?
What is addiction?
Addiction in its fundamental form is the incongruence of energy between the mind and heart. When we feel something is off, or not a “fuck yes!” it is always a no, yet we tend to not trust our heart usually because we do not trust our own spirit. Many times when we go through our check list of reasons a decision is correct for us, it makes total sense. Yet there will be a deep feeling that something is just not right and we cannot identify why it isn’t right, yet we feel it, and that feeling never goes away. usually when we make those logical decisions, over time the energy becomes more and more incongruent and eventually tears us apart and things fall apart. We will all experience this crumbling in some way in our life whether in business, love or any significant situation that we experience.
We become addicted to much more than substances, we become addicted to work, judgement, sex, criticism, exercise, food, people, things, places, pretty much anything. The addiction is defined by living energetically from a place of fear. In order to learn how to live from an energetic place of love, we must experience the opposing polarity to discern the meaning within our self. Some say that the purpose of life is to learn to love ourselves and this is very true, yet we commonly mistake love with attachment. To identify this within ourselves, we must address our shadow side. The side of us we do not accept or want to see. Many people associate the shadow with the devil, or evil, i disagree. The shadow is simply the unknown aspects of our consciousness, yet we fear the unknown and deem that place bad, or evil. This identifies the core of inner conflict we experience during decision making processes.
I have struggled with addiction most of my life. Being an intuitive empath I feel things more than most, and much of my life I didn’t want to feel what I felt, so I numbed it out. When we numb the mind the pain builds up in the subconscious like pressure, and eventually that pressure gets so big it requires a release. When it gets to this point the release comes in the form of a mental breakdown, a physical trauma, or some form of life changing destruction that makes us face it. The first thirty five years of life I manifested situations and people into my life that taught me lessons and helped me grow. I didn’t see it as that at the time, however once the emotional pain wears off we tend to see the lesson in retrospect.
The deeper I have gone, the more I have realized that whenever I act out of a place of emotional intensity or sense of lack, my decisions end up teaching me a lesson as opposed to benefiting my life and future. How do you know if you are acting out of a place of emotional intensity or lack? Let me give you an example.
I was engaged once to an amazing woman. We had one big problem though, the communication just never seemed to get on the same page. I tried everything I could think of, yet no matter what, the relationship seemed to deteriorate regardless of my efforts. Finally, in a place of fear of losing this woman that I was so in love with, I asked her to marry me. At the time I was convinced that I could make it work, that as long as I didn’t give up and showed her the degree in which i loved her, that she would see it and accept what I had to offer. She was my ultimate addiction.
The engagement lasted 23 days, things deteriorated even faster and it seemed that no matter what I did it was wrong. Why? Because I was operating from a place of fear of losing her, instead of having faith that she was the one for me. She felt my fear and that turned her off. They say that you can never say the wrong thing to the right person and you can never say the right thing to the wrong person. I wanted so bad for this woman to be my wife, yet it wasn’t meant to be. Accepting that was one of the most difficult lessons I have ever had to learn and sent me on a journey deep within and ultimately led me to identify and work through my deepest childhood pain of abandonment and rejection.
The good thing is, the bigger the lesson we learn, the better the turn around once we actually learn and embody the lesson we were meant to live by. For me, this lesson was about addressing abandonment, facing the rejection I felt as a child, and believing in myself through self love and integrating my inner child.
Self awareness and humble acceptance of life situations is a fundamental aspect of letting go of perceived control issues, acceptance will bring up that which does not serve us, trigger us, and if allowed; flow through us and leave. We must address these suppressed aspects of the shadow self or we will be haunted with our shadow until the day we die. Have the courage to accept and face this, do not let addiction control your life, because life is much too short to be wasted on being a prisoner of our own fear.