Sometimes we search so hard for understanding in this world when there simply isn’t the understanding we need to fulfill our desires. We want to understand the light as much as we want to understand the natures of evil and suffering. We want answers to everything or to as many questions we can muster up in our minds. And we all do this to find peace, to give some sort of sanity to the confusion and chaos that life holds.
It is hard for us to recognize something we are caught up in. The patterns we create for ourselves usually offer us something we feel we have to gain. Meanwhile, the fear and pain remain. We simply continue to feed them until we have satiated the need to quell the emptiness, when in reality, we have not.
There is somewhere inside of all of us that knows when a desire cannot be truly satiated. That fear alone perpetuates our search; our confusion, our turmoil. That fear alone perpetuates and emphasizes our need to be greater than it is in reality. But in being so caught up in the energy of addiction, we fail to see that the need is no longer a need but has taken on form. It becomes a power play. You against the energy, you against the fear, and ultimately, you against yourself.
With addiction, we set up a framework for our minds to protect and defend our inner landscape. The energy exchange between the person struggling with addiction and the object of the addiction creates a power vacuum. Power not only feeding into one another, but in defense of one another, vying for control and understanding on some level. The use of power becomes self destructive and self validating in a distorted way, and it can become challenging for us to recognize and more importantly admit that we are hurting ourselves out of fear, pain, and the need for self love.
Addictions do not serve reality, they serve illusion and will continue to do so as long as we hold on to them tightly. They will appear strong in might within the illusion. We need trust. There is a greater might within trust that will take us out of the illusion and into the light. We are as afraid of the energy behind the addiction as we are of letting go of it. The strength of the addiction is indicative of how strong our fear is as we work to let it go. What resists, will persist, and will gather strength. If it is illusion and not reality, it will gather strength in the illusion and perpetuate the cycle of darkness.
Some addictions need to leave our lives and complete a miasm that might have been in our lineage for generations, masking itself in various forms. Some might need to stay to complete an ancestral lesson. The miasm will serve in its capacity as it heals itself when we maintain awareness of our interactions, responses, and relationship with addiction.
So how does one recognize an addiction? We all have them in one way or another. Take a look at your lives. Look at a relational response that becomes repetitive, a misguided source of power which leaves you drained and within the emptiness not believing there is light to be found. Ponder your relationship to it and notice if you identify with it as harmful to you physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. You can recognize an addiction by the intensity involved in the relationship to the object you are addicted to. By separating the object from what you think it is giving you and holding your fear around its absence, you can begin to source your true power. You have to place yourself in the center of the fear and the pain and see if you can withstand it gently in your heart. Within that space, your emptiness has great power within the light.
An addiction is not merely something we are drawn to. It becomes its own entity and we have a relationship with it as though it were a friend, a child, a parent, a sibling. The relationship we create takes on a form that loses its authenticity in nature. The focus of the addiction no longer holds meaning in the way that it did before we developed a codependent relationship with it. Its meaning and intention changes itself as we dive deeper into its energies. The addiction changes form as we change with it. The relationship becomes more than it is in reality, and more than it needs to be.
The miasm which propelled us into the addiction needs to be respected. There is healing medicine there. I don’t believe it is us versus an addiction. Like all relationships, there is always something that serves a greater good and the medicine we take when we take the energies behind the addiction into the light will be everlasting.