The Walk Back Home

So this is a bit personal share but also one of the craziest things I've experienced in a while and I thought it might offer an interesting perspective into the life of a recovering drug addict, especially for any of you out there who are still thinking that the opiate use won't eventually catch up to you. It will. It will be beautiful, and sweet, and you'll feel amazing the whole time. Then you'll wake up one day and you'll realize that you've been lied to and that you're not only paying the financial price for your dope, you're paying with your fucking life blood. Last night I had the most ridiculously vivid and insane dream about heroin addiction. For me this has been a fascinating and somewhat terrifying metaphor/analogy for the struggle of addiction. I figured I would share it in case anyone's ever wondered why addiction is so hard to push through - or if anyone just wants to hear a crazy story that my subconscious decided to unleash on me last ...

 That depends on the individual, really. Ultimately it's a matter of recognizing and acknowledging the underlying issues that lead to addiction in the first place. It took me 8 years of active addiction to realize this on my own. Once that became obvious, I simply gave up using and shifted my focus to self-improvement. Drugs are filling a niche, or a lack, which can be satisfied by recognizing what is lacking and doing the necessary work to get rid of the lack. But unfortunately most addicts haven't reached this point of awareness, which isn't surprising because most PEOPLE haven't reached this point of awareness. Swaths of people live and die without taking the time to self-reflect and acknowledge their childhood wounds, the traumas they carry, and the way that they continue to affect their behaviour. This is common among people from all walks of life. Only drug addicts are demonized for it. People who aren't ready to consider this sort of thing will reject the sug...

  In these stressful times of political upheaval, pandemic, and fear, it's important to be aware of how we're moving forward as individuals and as a society. As a society, we certainly have some healing to do. We have been trying to do this healing for centuries, and while there has been some success, we are still facing the same issues that we faced hundreds of years ago. One of the reasons for this is because our society tends to look at the SYMPTOMS of our problems, rather than the ROOT CAUSE. This is just like our modern medicine system. Antidepressants, for example, target the SYMPTOMS of depression but do very little for the ROOT CAUSE, which can only be dealt with through introspection, therapy, self-reflection, etc. These tools allow you to figure out the many possible causes of your ROOT ISSUES – such as trauma, neglect, bullying, environment, and so on. Once you work out the ROOT CAUSE, then the SYMPTOMS DISAPPEAR. The same is true for our global society. ...