Path Away from Addiction
You Are Capable of Overcoming an Addiction
You are a wonderful person who is perfectly capable of overcoming an addiction problem. The only real obstacle is that can’t see this. You mistakenly believe that you are weak, damaged, cursed, or in some way rotten inside, and this is what is keeping you stuck. You are caught in a trap held together by lies, but once you see through these lies, you will be free.
The most difficult step on this path away from addiction will be for you to realize that is it safe to order accutane online you deserve so much better. Only then will you become permanently dissatisfied with the crumbs of happiness offered by drugs. You have been like a person living on mouldy scraps of food, scavenged from trash cans, who doesn’t realize there is a banquet waiting at home.
Why Do You Take Drugs?
You turned to alcohol or some other drug because, at least initially, it offered something you were looking for. Maybe there was a lot of pain in your life, and it provided some relief, or it helped you feel more comfortable in your own skin. It may be that you liked how life felt more exciting or magical when you were drunk or high. Whatever the reason, this drug appeared to offer a solution, so it is hardly surprising that you kept returning to it.
The reason you fell into the trap of addiction wasn’t because you were weaker or less intelligent than other people. You are not damaged or a bad person. It was just that you had certain reasonable needs, and you didn’t have a better solution than drugs. That is all. It has nothing to do with your worth as a human being. There is no person on this planet more worthy of your respect than you, and it is your failure to see this that made drugs so attractive in the first place.
You Are Not Weak-Willed
You may be under the impression that you are weak-willed, but is this a fair assessment? Aren’t you just desperately trying to be okay, and maybe the only thing that has ever come close to working is your favorite drug.
Wouldn’t it be truer to say that you have an incredibly powerful ‘will’, but it is moving you in a direction where it is becoming increasingly obvious that it is the wrong path? What would happen if your mighty ‘will’ was directed towards a solution that actually worked?
Addiction Myths
You’ve probably heard about people who drop one addiction only to pick up another one. This may even be something you have experienced yourself. You may conclude that you have some kind of ‘addictive personality’, and the best you can hope for a more socially-acceptable or easier-to-hide addiction, but is this true? What if the only reason you would move from one addiction to another is that some underlying need has not been satisfied.
You also may have fears about having to be on your guard for the rest of your life. If you have a history of relapse, it may be hard to trust yourself to stay free of drugs for good. After all, you hear stories of people who return to addiction after decades of clean living, so who’s to say that won’t happen to you? Well, what if the only reason people relapse is that they still don’t have a better solution to life than drugs? Doesn’t it make sense that if you fixed the problem you were trying to solve with drugs, there would be no need for such a remedy in the future?
That Which You Are Seeking
Like every human being who has ever lived, you are desperately seeking well-being. You may believe it can be found through money, religion, fame, power, sex, or drugs, but it is important that you now acknowledge that this is what you have always wanted. Failure to do so means you will keep on focusing on the means (money, religion, fame, power, sex, or drugs) rather than the end (well-being).
Well-being is a wholesome thing for you desire, in fact, it is the only thing worth having, but the mistake you make is to look for it outside of yourself. Well-being has nothing to do with changing the circumstances of your life but is all about changing your relationship with life . There has been the war raging inside you (driven by your ideas about how you should be and how the world should be), and this has left you feeling troubled and alienated from the world, so it is from here that peace must spring.
At the heart of well-being is stillness. This is what you were desperately yearning for on those dark nights when you wanted it all to end. No drug could ever get close to the relief, peace, and support you will find here, and the deeper your roots into this stillness, the less you will be troubled by life. As you investigate this stillness you will be increasingly astounded and humbled until one day you realize this stillness contains the truth of who you are.
A Path from Addiction to Well-
Being
The following four steps were part of my own journey from addiction to contentment:
- Getting grounded
- Developing friendliness/acceptance
- Deepening concentration
- Gaining Insight
The word ‘steps’ suggest a process where we move from one stage to the next, but this is not what is meant here. It is better to think of the first three steps as similar to ingredients that we combine to produce the forth step (insight). In fact, each of these ingredients by themselves have the capacity to trigger insight.
The first three steps are the tools we can use to improve our life. It’s like weeding a garden, so long as you remember to keep on using your three weeding tools, you are likely to have a weed-free garden. The problem is that there may be times in our life when for whatever reason, we feel unable to use these tools. The weeds can come back, and this is why we need the forth step which is insight. This insight is where we get right to the root of the problem and begin to remove it so that the weeds are removed more permanently.
My own journey has involved cycling through these steps many times – each time producing deeper insight. I have also heard of people who have focused on just one step (e.g. getting grounded), and this has led them to insight and contentment.
Let’s look at each of these steps now in bit more detail.
1. Getting Grounded
When I talk about getting grounded, I mean putting our attention on one of the five senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste). It is these five senses that create our reality, so by focusing on one of them, we are grounded in reality.
In Buddhism, they sometimes refer to thinking as the ‘sixth sense’, but unlike the other five, the thinking sense doesn’t experience reality directly. We can look at thinking (by thinking I mean the voice in our head) as an attempt to turn the contents of the five senses into a story. This attempt to make sense of reality is helpful, but a problem arises when we become so stuck in our stories that we begin to mistake them for reality. This is where grounding ourselves comes in.
Our attention can only be on one thing at a time, so by deliberately putting our attention on one of the five senses, we get a break from our stories about reality and instead focus directly on this reality. By grounding ourselves, we find a refuge from the chaos in our heads.
Getting grounded is something we naturally tend to do when life becomes overwhelming. In my early-twenties, I was in such bad mental state due to alcohol abuse that I reached a point where I could no longer function. I stopped going to work, and I ended up on the streets. At the time I would have gladly put a bullet in my own head to stop the racing thoughts. The only relief I would get was through walking. I would do this for hours. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was attempting to ground myself.
A couple of years later, I trained to be a nurse, and I got to spend time working on a psychiatric ward. What I saw there was familiar to me. I saw people pacing up-and-down or rocking to-and-fro. I recognized that just like me these people were trying to ground themselves.
We don’t have to wait until we are overwhelmed by our thoughts to make use of this refuge. By remembering to ground ourselves throughout the day, we begin to discover contentment. The more we do this, the more content we become.
How Getting Grounded Leads to Insight
The other thing that happens when we deliberately move our attention to one of the five senses is we begin to gain insight into the real nature of thinking. It is the feeling of being in control of our thoughts that gives our stories so much power over our life. When these thoughts continue to pull our attention away from where we want our attention to be (i.e. grounded in one of the senses), we start to see that rather than choosing these thoughts we are just experiencing them.
How to Ground Yourself
In theory, we could use any of the five senses to ground ourselves, but in reality, it is usually more effective to focus on touch, sight, and sound. The problem with tastes and smells is there may not be enough of them to keep our attention.
Most meditation involves putting our attention on one of the five senses (an exception to this would be vipassana which can involve open awareness that includes all of the senses including thoughts). The focus in meditation is referred to as the ‘anchor’, and the most common anchor is touch which can involve focusing on different body sensations (e.g. a body scan) or specific body sensations (the breath). Other types of meditation use sound (e.g. mantra meditation) or sight (e.g. candle meditation). So, meditation can be a great help in helping us to learn how to ground ourselves.
Moving meditation can be an excellent choice for those of us who struggle to stay still. These mediatations all involve focusing on the sense of touch only this time it is the sensation created by movement. Some of the moving meditations I have found particularly useful include:
- Mahasati meditation
- Walking meditation
- Qigong/tai-chi
- Freestyle flowing movements
Learning to ground ourselves through meditation will bring some peace to our lives, but the real magic happens when we start to ground ourselves throughout the day. This means we spend more time focused on reality as experienced through the senses instead of our stories about reality.
I am big fan of using touch as a meditation object, but this is not going to work for everyone. Those people who have experienced a lot of trauma, may struggle initially to find a refuge in body sensations. In this case, it may be more effective to practice grounding ourselves using sight (e.g. looking for novelty in the environment) or sound.
2. Developing friendliness/acceptance
Getting grounded can be a real challenge for obsessive thinkers. I definitely fell into this camp. I used to get so frustrated with my inability to ‘stop the thoughts’. It was only when I started to see what was driving this seemingly never-ending inner commentary that things began to improve.
The driving force behind my obsessive thinking was an underlying sense of being unsafe. I didn’t trust life, so I needed to be always on my guard. I saw threats to my well-being everywhere, so I needed to be planning, predicting, and strategizing constantly. So long as my body remained in this state of siege, grounding myself was a bit of an uphill battle.
Developing friendliness/acceptance means guiding the body into a more open state. When we feel safe, there is far less to be thinking about. Our minds become far more manageable. The practice I found most useful for developing this state of friendliness/acceptance has been metta (loving-kindness) meditation. It can be a good idea to practice this meditation every day if we are struggling to get grounded in the body.
vOne of the other great benefits of developing friendliness/acceptance is it means we can now go much deeper in meditation. We begin to encounter more and more stillness and with this we find great peace.
3. Deepening Concentration
As we go deeper into meditation, we discover a states of relaxation that we never knew existed. We may experience dramatic changes in consciousness that the Buddhists call ‘jhanas’ and are inherently blissful. The real benefit of these states (at least for our purposes) isn’t that they are so heavenly, but they allow us to see things more clearly. From the position of stillness, we start to see how thoughts, feelings, and other perceptions are all doing their own thing. It is through seeing more clearly how our life unfolds that we begin to develop insight.
There can be a bit of debate in the meditation community about how concentrated we need to be in order to develop insight. I don’t believe there is a ‘right’ level of concentration that we must achieve for insight to occur, but there advantages to be had from the settled nature of the mind that arises after we have experienced jhana. I would say that we do generally need to be at least settled enough that there is a sense of spaciousness around the thoughts (i.e. there is a sense of them arising from stillness).
4. Insight
Insight is not the same as knowing something intellectually. It is a shift in how we view reality that significantly impacts how we live the rest of our life. The best definition of insight that I have come across is by Rob Burbea who describes it as ‘seeing that frees’. This new way of seeing could come out of nowhere (one of the most life-changing insights I experienced occurred while I was sitting on a bus!), but insight is more likely to arise when the mind is calm and we can see things clearly (the state we are attempting to get into using the previous three steps).
The most freeing of these insights is that when we look inside to find out who is running the show, there is nobody there. It is not so much that we have no personal free-will but that there is nobody there to have free-will! The sense of ‘me’ here and life out there is an illusion. There is only life, and we are life having an experience.
This is all going to sound bat-shit crazy to most people, and this is why we have to see it all for ourselves. With the seeing comes great freedom, we are content at last, and the need to escape our life falls away. What life is presenting us with now is the only show in town. There is nowhere else for us to go. If we can accept this, we will know peace.
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