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 now?"
Put another way, ask yourself:
"How would it feel to be without the judgment I'm making about myself right now?"
If it feels empowering to be without that belief, save your new discovery.
If it feels disempowering, delete it.
That's how powerful you are!
LEARNED BEHAVIORS. Know this too ... not only can you select your very next thought and make it your preferred belief about yourself, you can even select your next emotion and how you feel about yourself.
I agree, life would have been a whole lot easier if someone had just told you that great truth at the beginning, but they didn't. If it's any comfort to you, no one told me either, but since I discovered the difference it makes, I have felt duty-bound to let others in on it too. It is why I have written this book. I am delivering this life-changing message to you so that you may also discover how to select your own preferred thoughts and how to choose your own preferred emotions. When you master your discovery, you will also feel motivated to share with others the freedom it brings. You will then be living your truth and that will feel so much more fulfilling than living your learned behaviors.
Don't forget to remember ... Before there was ever a time when you were in addiction, there was a time when you were not. Before there was ever a time when you did not know the truth of who you are, there was a time when you did. My effort here is to remind you not to forget to remember the truth of all that you are. Consciousness is the all that you are and as you remember this essential truth, everything changes! Nothing new needs to be learned, only to be remembered. From your place of remembering, your conscious awareness will expand and from your expansion, your limitations will dissolve. That's how powerful you are!
BEING NOT DOING. Transcending your addictions is not a task you learn to do. It's not a doing thing at all. You cannot DO happy, you can only BE happy. You cannot DO joyful, you can only BE joyful. You cannot DO peaceful, you can only BE peaceful. You cannot DO sober, you can only BE sober. You cannot DO free, you can only BE free. Transcending your addictions is not an intellectual exercise for the head to master, it's the restoration of truth which your heart will re-member. Transcending your addictions is a return from thinking yourself the Do-er of your life to Being at one with it. It is the process of giving yourself back to your Self. That is how to be free.
Can you imagine how different AA or NA meetings would be if a person felt empowered enough to share the truth about their Being, rather than their upside-down learned behaviors. The more right-feeling-way-up person might declare themselves like this:
"My name is __________ and I am infinitely greater than my thoughts would otherwise have me THINK I am."
Wow, that would be some meeting to attend wouldn't it? From that new-found truth about yourself, every kind of change is made possible. All you would need to do thereafter is not to forget to re-member it!
LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE. For a time of course it will be easy to forget to remember the truth of your own power. I mean, just think how long it takes some people to profess how power-less they have become. There are people all over the world professing that they are power-less against drugs or alcohol, and, for as long as they make that their belief, it will indeed remain their experience. The "laws" of the universe will see to that. It's just the way the universe works.
Now, I'm aware that there are many universal laws and truths that haven't been explained to you either, have they? In fact they aren't understood by many people. No wonder life can seem such an uphill struggle. However, all that is about to change for you.
As you go from chapter to chapter, I'll be introducing you to some of the key laws that could change everything; things about your addictions and things about life, your life. From this point on, simply be consciously aware, that you are infinitely greater than who you have learned to become.
CHAPTER 2
There's so much more to YOU than you
There is a place that you are to fill and no-one else can fill, something you are to do, which no-one else can do.
–Florence Scovel Shinn
This is such an exciting time that you have reached in your life. It is also ironic. For oddly enough, it has taken your addictions to bring you to this place of discovery. Yes, it's taken your most unwanted experiences to bring you to your most wanted experience. Life is just like that and that is why it is unnecessary for you to spend time faulting your past or blaming others for your experiences. It is sufficient to simply be aware of them and to be aware of the thoughts and emotions that are associated with them. Judgment is not required.
Everyone discovers differently and your addictions have now done their job. They have been there to remind you of who you are NOT. It has taken time for you to first of all experience your upside-down version of life before you could next discover how to place it the right-feeling-way-up. Now you are becoming aware that you can do that.
As well as your addictive behaviors, there are many other things that also remind you of who you are NOT. You have not been able to identify them before because they had not been brought into your conscious awareness, but now they are and so now you can. That's how powerful you are!
ALL YOU ARE NOT. You are not your thoughts, you are not your beliefs. You have thoughts and you have beliefs. You are not your body, you have a body. You are not your mother, you are not your father, you have had the experience in your life of being parented. You are not hopeless, you are not a failure, you are not any of the things you have learned to become. You are more powerful than the victim mentality you have settled for and the manipulative behavior you have become so skilled at. You are so much more than who you have come to THINK you are and so much more than who you have come to THINK other people THINK you are.
Only after sifting out all the things you are truly NOT, can you at last make the fulfilling discovery of all you truly are. From that discovery, you begin observing your life from an entirely different starting place to the one you have been trying to solve all your problems from before now. Until you received this message, you have been believing that you are your problems and that your challenges were far bigger than any solution to them. Why have you been doing that? Only because it's the way you were shown how to do life. It's the way you learned to understand and to experience everything.
You have been convincing yourself that there is life and then, quite separate from the rest of life, there is you. You have been living in the illusion of separateness, where everything can become a potential threat, where everything becomes that which has to be overcome. It is how you learned to fear and it is in fear that you have continued to make sense of your life. It is of course the way those who introduced you to life were trying to make sense of their own. You have just been following suit. You have not stopped to question, you have simply taken up from the same starting place that was given to you. In doing so, you have forgotten to re-member how to be in alignment with life itself.
THE STORY ABOUT YOU. You have been feeling like you are up against life, having to prove your worthiness of it. You have been unwittingly empowering your addictions and disempowering yourself. You have been magnifying your thoughts of lack and convincing yourself of unworthiness. You have been living the story created in your head about yourself over the truth known to your heart. You have been depressed about your past and living in anxiety that it will continue as your future. You have been living who you thought you were, or, who other people thought you were, while forgetting to re-member the truth of all you are. From that fear based belief, it's hardly surprising you would have reduced your life-choices down to one of only two possible options:
the constant repetition of a life-time in addiction or the unending experience of the need to be in recovery
It's quite possible that neither will sound very appealing to you. One may be more preferable to the other or less miserable than the other. Of course, many people find they slip from one into the other, this is known as "relapsing". However, my heart, like your heart, knows there must be more to life than this. And indeed, there is.
Try this experiment:
Cut your whole past away from you—no memory. You don't know who your parents are, you don't know to which country, religion or culture you belong. You don't know where you were brought up or where you were educated. Just cut the whole past.
Now, remembering how powerful you really are, speak out your newly discovered truths about yourself:
I am not my body
I am not my thoughts
I am not my mother
I am not my father
I am not a job
I am not a failure I am not my addictions
I am not my recovery
I am not my judgments, nor the judgments made about me
I am not the I fantasy created about myself
And keep adding to the list as more of your new realizations come to you. When you are done, check in again with yourself ... You will find that your heart is still beating, your eyelids are still flickering, your pulse is pulsating, your breath is still breathing. You are still intact, without the need to keep in place anything else you had conjured up about yourself.
You are. Obviously you are. But who are you?
Having just cut the whole of your accumulated past away, you cannot feel an I. That is because there is no identity for you to associate with I, you have just cut it away, made it disappear.
