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addiction, Attachment, Awakening, awareness, Buddhism, Desire, Duality, emotion, Emotion resentment, Enlightenment, forgiveness, hope, Inspirational, love, motivational, Non duality, Pain fear, Peace. Tranquility, Presence, Recovery, Religion, Samsara. Change. Awakening, Serenity, Zen
. The feelings we have in dealing with certain situations that cause us to act in a manner we regret is a example of “Cyclic Behavior”. Cyclic Behavior is mentioned in the previous blog entry “A Ghost In You”.
That behavior in us that responds to fear is not recognized for what it is. That is the ghost in us we don’t see. The thing that is controlling us but we think of it in a way that it doesn’t appear to us as it is. It hides in us in a shell that is chamelion and we react in a way to push the fear away because we experience it in a emotion and don’t see it in us as a ghost but instead we think it is real. It isn’t real however and the fear that it traps us in, lives in a manner that survives in us by pretending to be something it isn’t. We push it away by reactions of anger, judgement, depression, excitement or any manner we act in that causes us to feel remorse after it because of how we reacted to it.
That cyclic behavior we manifest is a pattern of behavior we created in our childhood to deal with feelings we were incapable of at the time because we weren’t given the right emotional childhood development and as such we never created the correct coping mechanism to deal with things like confrontation, criticism and maintaining boundaries of behavior that allowed us to have self confidence in addressing life in all its expressions in appropriate ways.
The remorse, the depression and excitement are all part of the cycle of behavior that creates itself over and over again. This is how we continually push the fear away in ways that allows us to avoid addressing it and thus letting the fear continue to control us.
Addiction is looked at by many as the use of exogenous substance to create a euphoric feeling that we become dependent upon. Addiction however is not limited to the use of some external substance that creates “the high”. Addiction is the coping mechanism we find to dull our pain and medicate ourself with not only a external drug but also a endorphin response to stop the pain. That metabolic release of endorphins created by certain behavior is the coping mechanism we use to feel better about situations in life we do not know how to address. The addiction, what ever it is, is the coping mechanism we use to treat the emotional pain we experience from our cyclic behavior. Even if we are able to stop the addictive behavior we use to treat our emotional pain with and don’t learn how to treat that pain in a appropriate way we will find another addiction to deal with the fear in us.
Addiction is often thought of as illegal or antisocial behavior but it is much more then that. It is any behavior we engage in to “feel” better that causes us to feel remorse from it afterwards. In that awareness we can see addiction in a different light. It’s quite common for us to view many as a success in a figurative sense from a societal standpoint. Be it wealth, fame or recognition in many different ways but often as we learn a more deeper view of the person we can see how there life was filled with fear and the succes we saw them as having was merely a way to hide from the fear or the ghost they did not wish to see in them self.
We have to first see the fear in us before we can address it. If all we do is react to our fear and then put a bandaid on the remorse we feel because of it. We then do not do anything to treat it. It’s seeing the fear or looking at the chameleon it hides behind and responding to the situation that triggers our fear in a “correct” manner is what enables us to create the appropriate coping mechanisms we need to resond to life and not react to a fear in life. The pause that we embrace when confronted with fear is the space we need to have to say no to fear and yes to what is appropriate. It isn’t a magical wand that we somehow find in life that heals our fear, pain and addiction. It is the ability we find in us to pause before we react that allows us to respond to life and not react to it with a behavioral defense to fear.
Einstein, “The same mind that created the problem can not fix the problem”
The “strength” we find in that pause allows us to respond to life and not react to it, is how we discover a connection to something innately in us. It’s a connection we have to life and not our thinking that frees us of our own limitations and allows us to grow in ways we never knew. It is because we allow our thinking to trap us in our our fear that creates the cage that holds us. It is letting go of that thinking that allows us to know something greater then it and then be directed by life and not how we think. Our thinking is the crux of our problem so being able to step out of the thinking that our fear lives in is what frees us of it.
Buddha, “no one saves us but ourself, no one can and no one may, we ourselves must walk the path”