I’ve always believed in the power of the mind over our lives. I’ve also believed that we find truth when we seek it, so long as we’re willing to listen. That reality is what we make it, according to the whims of the mind. That choices must come from within and should never be dictated. And that we as humans seek harmony wherever we can find it.
The problem is that with addiction, all of these beliefs just sort of disappear or are tamped down by what becomes a one track mind. A mind consumed by first ensuring that we remain addicted and secondly, that nothing gets in the way of that addiction. It’s a gradual thing, the removing of our principals, and the thing is, we rarely fight this once we begin smoking.
For me, as the time passed with me and my addiction, I actually lost much of my belief system. I forgot that I was the master of my own reality, and that I make choices to create that reality. This is because my choices were being dictated to me by my nicotine receptors, and as such I somehow created the false belief that I was actually seeking harmony by continuing to smoke That the smoking actually created harmony within me.
As proof to myself that this was indeed the case, I’d think of those times when I somehow forgot to plan right and ran out of cigarettes. The mind went crazy and as such I think I changed one of my core beliefs and began believing that harmony could only be achieved by continuing to smoke. It was a firm belief in the core of my addiction. Feeding those receptors was the only way to create the needed harmony in my life.
And so, like a lot of addicts, I smoked more and more, completely forgetting my old beliefs and before long, or rather after way to many years my core belief system changed.
I think this happens for a lot of us. We fall into the clutches of addiction and never look back. But there’s one thing I have to tell you. The core belief system does return the moment we get the addiction out of the way. It never disappears, it just changes. As our minds evolve into the mind of an addict, we lose our core values because those values would never allow us to smoke.
But in the same way, those core values return once we’re free of the addiction. The hard part is finding them in order to quit in the first place. But I never lost sight of the belief that we will always find truth so long as we listen to the world around us as well as to ourselves. But we must first seek it in order to find it.
I think that this one value remained. The part where I always believed that we will find truth so long as we seek it and listen. This was the crack in my addiction. The single part that was left that allowed me to see a reality that I’d hidden from myself for so long.
I think that just as quitting is a process, so too is becoming addicted. We spend time
changing our core beliefs in order to keep feeding those receptors and creating the fake harmony that addiction creates within us.
That’s why I always saw my addiction at tentacles, wrapping themselves around every part of my being, and every day that we smoke, we create more of these tentacles and in order to quit, we have to learn and pull these tentacles out one by one until our core beliefs return to us, allowing us to see a new reality that was there all along.
Once we’ve cracked the foundation of our addiction just enough to peer at a life of freedom, the hardest part is already done. For me it wasn’t the quitting that was so hard. It was finding that crack that allowed my core beliefs to once again shine through, if even for a moment. The part that allowed me to take that first step into a world where once again, my foundation of life was complete.
And just like when I became addicted, when I felt the freedom, I never looked back!!
Never give up and never give in and you too will find that freedom that you’ve dreamed of for so very long! That core that you know is there, just waiting for you to fight for it. Go for it! Your future awaits you. I know you want that future to look bright and free and it’s within you to make it that way.
ONWARD TO FREEDOM!!!
Chuck
