My main purpose for sharing this is to inspire hope and strength through my experience. A life free of addiction is way different from just being sober from behavior.
As someone on the other side, I know that I was never an addict, it was just that the empty and afraid part of my EGO convinced the real me that I needed these thoughts and emotions in order to fill myself up. Ironically, the more clear and sober I got from the dis-ease, the more my EGO tried to shame me which was evident in many posts I made a few years ago, early in my recovery. This was a form of self-sabotage so I could somehow punish myself for being such a weak/bad person. We temporarily lost work and some credibility in our career but that seems to be over now.
As with most things, the first step is to recognize that there is an issue. There are 12-step groups for just about every possible addiction and devoting myself deeply for 18 months really clarified things for me and had miraculous results. Finding sobriety from any behavior that fed the dis-ease was crucial and miraculously replaced the emptiness and fear with power and self-worth. From this place I was able to go deeper into what was triggering the addiction which is always a feeling of separateness, emptiness, fear and/or shame. As I devoted myself more and more to healing the root cause of the addiction, the compulsive thoughts and behavior subsided. Within a year, the thought of giving in to the addiction was completely out of the question.
Here's the way it became for me.....imagine that there is wonderful place called "happiness" and you really want to go there. There are many roadblocks to you getting there but you know that it will be worth whatever you have to do to get there. At one of the roadblocks, you see a path that takes you even farther away from "happiness" but promises you that while you are on that path, you will forget about the place called "happiness" so even though you won't ever get there, at least you won't know what you are missing. Oh, and by the way, you will have to spend more and more time on the other path because it will become harder and harder to forget "happiness". No one in their right mind would ever agree to this but this is how addiction works and until you get really clear how far away it takes you from what you really want/Are, you will succumb to it's lies.
Once all of this became clear to me, and I was able to see and experience all the emotions and thoughts that were painfully within me that led to the addiction, I began to get a clearer picture of the real me beneath all the lies. It was only through a discipline of daily meditation and yoga that I was able to quiet the false self (aka shitty committee) long enough to replace those voices with the truth of my innocence, beauty, godliness, etc. I am not saying that the addiction or false self are completely gone, I'm just saying that when they speak, I am clear where they are coming from and I know that they are not me so I don't listen to them. Would you eat something that you knew was poison if you had the experience of eating it in the past with devastating results? Then why would we listen to these voices once we recognize what they really are?
This next part is a bit controversial so let me preface by saying this is my experience and not recommended for everyone. Once I felt completely secure in my sobriety and awareness of what was really going on, I started to feel less of a vibrational match to 12-step meetings. It's not that I thought I was better than the folks there, it's just that I no longer felt like the addiction had power over me so I found other groups like Real Love and went deeper into books and meditation. If there is any chance of acting out in whatever addiction you may have, I encourage going to meetings and doing whatever it takes to stay sober.
About a month ago, I came across a book called "The Untethered Soul" by Michael Singer. As I devoured the words, I realize that this is what my soul has known all along. Every book I read, master I studied, and meditation I sat were all leading me to this simple truth......"that I am an individualized spark of God and anything else is just make-believe." So what's there to feel empty and afraid about? What is the need to be or stay addicted to anything? The Answer is.......ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!
I am here to help you on your journey as I help myself to open to the most important 3 words we can ever embrace.......I AM GOD! "We will all be Christed when we say, we are that to which we pray"...Jewel
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