When we fast from those emotions, those voices that come up, the cells are literally sending nerve impulses up to the brain, to let it know that it’s starving, the body is starving from what it’s depending on chemically. And those chemicals are very powerful information carriers.
My definition of an addiction is something really very simple. It’s something you cannot stop. If you can’t control your emotional state, you must be addicted to it.
Joe Dispenza
What Dispenza is saying is very important to our purposes here, and definitely worth repeating. The chemicals produced by our emotions contain important information. In other words, our feelings tell us why we’re creating the life we’re living.
The reason we have these addictions is that we are continually trying to recreate the experience we had the first time we first felt the emotion. Even if the emotion is unpleasant! Let’s look at how this works.
Something “bad” happens in your life. You get involved in a relationship with someone who is absolutely “wrong” for you. He (or she) is mentally, emotionally and verbally abusive with you. You tell someone, they feel bad for you (so now they’re suffering too) and so to relieve their own pain, they help you. After all, isn’t that what friends are for?
You feel good, you feel important. It satisfies a need. On a subconscious level you wonder, “I wonder if I can cause that feeling to happen again?”
Next thing you know, you’re living through the drama again. People start taking pity on you. They’re supporting you emotionally. They’re sympathetic to what you’re going through, and are available for you anytime you need them. Even though the drama feels bad, you feel important, perhaps for the first time in your life.
It’s the feeling that you’re important to others that you want. So you allow the drama to continue happening over and over again, in order to get it. You start justifying staying in the relationship by telling yourself that things will get better, when the reality is that you’re staying in it to get sympathy and support.
When the rush of good feelings that your saviors feel wear off, and they lose interest, you find new people in order to rediscover your addiction, and the cycle goes on. That’s one of the reasons addictions are so damned hard to break. It’s easy to find people who are willing to participate in our drama because of their own need for drama in their lives.
So how do you break an addiction? By bringing your motivations out of the darkness into the light. Rather than saying that “bad, unfair things always happen to me,” you can start admitting the truth. Start saying instead, “I constantly create circumstances that will cause people to feel sorry for me, so I can receive sympathy from them, and be rescued by them, which makes me feel important.”
Do you want to feel important? Decide that you are important – to you. That’s the whole idea behind what I’ve been talking about to you over the past 5 weeks. Coming up with goals that are important to you. Visualizing living your life in a way that’s important to you. Asking questions that demand answers that are important to you.
The most liberating day of my life happened when I stopped blaming my unhappiness on what was going on “out there,” and starting taking responsibility for the fact that I was creating all of it. All of it.
I stopped looking at others with judgement and started looking at them with love instead. I started weeding toxic people out of my life when I realized that they weren’t “bad,” but that they were in my life because I needed them to feel bad about myself. The only reason to even keep them in my life was because I was addicted to feeling bad about myself.
When I realized that the reason I was having financial difficulties was because I was addicted to feeling bad about myself, I decided I wanted to “retire” those emotions. I wanted to be addicted to feeling good about myself. My financial strife magically started to disappear very quickly after that.
When I started feeling better about who I am, and I started becoming addicted to feeling better about who I am, I started seeing more reasons and opportunities to feel better about who I am. I started attracting people into my life who reflected my own healthier feelings about who I am. Of course, I also started feeling better about the people who were in my life as well.
Now, whenever I find myself feeling fear, I quietly sit with it, waiting for the message it has for me. Fear isn’t always a bad thing. It can be a sign that I’m stepping out of my comfort zone, and into a better place, but I’ll never know that if I’m blaming someone or something else for the way I’m feeling.
I’ve found that there’s a lot of wisdom contained in emotions.
Remember that list I asked you to write in my last post? What’s the message behind each of those fear based emotions you’ve admitted your addicted to? It’s there. When you accept the message, the messenger will disappear.
I began this post with a quote from Joe Dispenza, I’m going to end it with a quote from him as well –
The whole purpose of this game: We prepare our body chemically through a thought, to have an experience. However, if we keep preparing our body chemically, to have the same thoughts, to have the same experiences, we don’t ever evolve as human beings.
And that, my friend, is the reason we chose to incarnate into this existence to begin with. To evolve spiritually through our human experiences.
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