Addiction may be described as a situation where you have entered into a dependent relationship with something outside of your self. It is something that brought relief or a heightened sense of joy at the beginning. Now, it negatively affects your life and you experience difficulty in letting go of this dependency.

Although we may have the impression that addiction is something removed from our lives, or that it happens to someone else, many of our behaviors, in one way or another, are addictions.

The wrong way home

Surprisingly, addiction occurs because we try to regain our center, our sense of joy and aliveness. It occurs because, in one way or another, we find ourselves identifying with being caught in a stance far removed from that joy, from that aliveness. We seek escape from being caught in our issues, and at the same time, we seek to taste some of that joy.

The problem for most of us is that when we choose an external agency to accomplish this, our joy or escape tends to be short lived. Often, we are brought back to where we started, except that we are brought back with a fall, a crash. Our escape did not solve our problem, it only postponed it. We may have gotten a taste of joy or expansion, but that taste came with a price.

That price was that we didn’t achieve that experience out of ourselves, but out of an external agency. In a sense, we gave up a little of our will in exchange for a little bit of release from our burden . . .