Welcome to Sober is Dope Podcast with your host, POP Buchanan. This episode explores how spirituality can help with overcoming addiction. Please enjoy. Watch full video here 👉🏻 https://youtu.be/JvRmU8PmOIo

Overcoming Addictions by Deepak Chopra, M.D.

https://shop.chopra.com/books.html

Most human behavior is nothing other than the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure. Whenever we experience an event, whether it’s a visit to the dentist or going on a joyride at the carnival, our consciousness registers that experience internally on a spectrum with great pain at one end and extreme pleasure at the other. Once completed, the memory of that experience is tagged to either pain or pleasure, and it continues to exist in our body-mind.

Memory is useful because it gives us a sense of continuity. But memory is also imprisoning because it conditions us in predictable ways. The great yogi Lord Shiva said, “I use memories, but I do not allow memories to use me.” We have to use memories; otherwise we wouldn’t find our way home. When we use memories, we are creators. But when our memories use us, we become victims.

Are you ready to step out of the prison of memory and conditioned responses into the experience of freedom? If so, then observe your addictive behaviors without judgment. Addiction is the number one disease of civilization, and it’s, directly and indirectly, related to all other diseases. Besides physical addictions, such as the addiction to food, tobacco, alcohol, and drugs, there are psychological addictions, such as the addiction to work, sex, television, shopping, appearing young, suffering, anxiety, melodrama, perfection.

Why are we addicted to all these things? We are addicted because we are not living from our source; we have lost our connection to our soul. The use of food, alcohol, or drugs is essentially a material response to a need that is not really physical at its foundation. Drunkenness, for example, is really a forgetting of personal memory so we can experience the joy of the non-personal, the universe. What we are looking for is pure joy rather than mere sensation, or even oblivion of sensation. Self-destructive behavior is unrecognized spiritual craving. All addictions are really a search for the exultation of spirit, and this search has to do with the expansion of consciousness, the intoxication of love, which is pure consciousness.