CHAPTER 1
Discovering how powerful you are
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.
–Albert Einstein
I encourage you to read Addiction Unplugged : How To Be Free very carefully with a mind that is wide open to having many of your cherished beliefs challenged about addiction, about recovery and indeed about life itself. You would do well to begin by giving yourself the permission slip to un-know everything about addiction that you have come to know.
You would also do well to un-learn everything you have come to learn about life—your life— as you have come to understand it. Even put to one side what you may call the common sense things, which often enough, are little more than handed down judgments about life, rather than truths. Take a deep breath, and like magic, go ahead now ... un-know and un-learn ...
There, it wasn't too difficult was it? After all, you've never really believed all that known and learned stuff anyway, have you? If you had, then your life would have been working just nicely by now, wouldn't it? The fact that it isn't, can really boil down to only one thing: how you have learned to make sense of your world feels all upside down and ... always has.
The way you have been trying to make your life work may have been the way shown to you by your parents, partners, family, friends, teachers, counselors and others, but for you, there's still something missing. You are looking for YOU and for as long as you keep trying to make someone else's version of your life take the place of your own definition, there will always be heartache. So it's now time for you to discover how to exchange the upside-down world that was shown to you, and which you've been trying to live out ever since, for the more right-way-up world, that at last feels true to you.
The liberating message I am sharing here is a message for the frustrated seeker, and of course that is you. You may have read everything about addiction recovery (or think you have), been everywhere to seek help (or convinced yourself you have), tried every therapy to overcome your addictions (and told everyone you have), attended all kinds of treatments in pursuit of a cure (or seems like you have) and yet still feel stuck! Sometimes taking one step forward and always at least two back, you have absorbed all the information out there and yet never moved beyond the same starting place.
HEART AND HEAD. My intention for bringing this message to you is to explain why your experience of life has been the way it has been and to open up to you an entirely new way of experiencing it. My message to you is to take heart, for the answers to your challenges and the new experience you've been looking for are to be found not in your head, but in your heart. I also realize you will have to be taught how to be attuned to your heart because that won't have been shown to you before. Once it has, you will wonder how you ever missed it.
I remind you that your frustration at yourself for not knowing the way is no bad thing. It may not always feel nice to be frustrated, but frustration is the emotion that is indicating two things to pay attention to, so you may be free:
1. The solutions you have been looking for certainly exist. Your heart knows this, but until now, only your head has been consulted about the matter. Your head does not know all that there is to know. Your head can only give you information it has already been supplied with and the different starting place you are seeking is not amongst its supplies. In the absence of that knowing, you'll feel frustrated.
2. Your head has not accepted that it cannot provide you with the different starting place you have been looking for. It has only ever learned that what it doesn't know, is not worth knowing. You have settled for that, but your heart has not. Your heart is aware that what the head calls different actually means everything not known to it. Your heart has yet to be consulted about the matter. In the absence of that consultation, you'll feel frustrated.
The first thing to grasp and to accept about the addictions in your life is that they were learned (collected along the way) and stored as memory in your unconscious mind. They created a behavior (that you mistakenly came to think was you) and you are now ready to change that experience of yourself (meaning you would like to un-learn the behaviors that have made your life the way it has been). Let me reveal to you the first truth you need to bring into your awareness, so you may have the freedom you seek ...
You are infinitely greater than your thoughts would otherwise have you THINK you are. You are infinitely greater than your beliefs would otherwise have you BELIEVE you are. Just because you've got used to your beliefs, you don't have to continue THINKING them. Just because you've got used to your thoughts, you don't have to continue BELIEVING them.
Isn't that a freeing discovery? I suggest you read that last paragraph again because it contains truths that are freeing and they are truths you've possibly not been aware of before. Go ahead now and re-read it. It describes the different starting place, from which comes a whole new way of looking at life, your life.
BELIEFS AND JUDGMENTS. Just because you had come to THINK of yourself from your old ways of looking at life, you don't have to BELIEVE it's the only way to experience your life.
Just because you have got used to your addictions being so central in your life, you can soon not be-having them. That's how powerful you are!
A belief is just another word for a judgment. Beliefs (judgments) always come from some place else. They were on someone else's lips, before you made them your own. Once you make them your own, it becomes harder to differentiate between you with the belief and you without it. Ask yourself now in terms of your addiction:
"How would it feel to be without the belief I'm believing about myself right...
