We have been conditioned to think we are much weaker than we are! The human spirit is infinite in it's potential!
Any good spiritual leader, philosopher, scientist, or psychologist will tell you this!
We are also creatures of habit, and are 'pulled to the familiar'
This is why leaving situations that actually hurt us can be hard:
Situations like a bad relationship, even if it causes us pain, at least we know it!
The same can be said for jobs, careers, and all other habits such as eating.
Having vices might be 'socially acceptable, even fashionable' but what are those vices really doing?
If anyone has experience with vices, it's me!
Rewind a year:
I was a smoker
Heavy drinker of alcohol
I weighed 16 Kilos (35 pounds) heavier than I am today (and it was ALL lard, NOT muscle)
Was addicted to all manner of fast foods, pastas, breads (which are bad for you but sold as being 'healthy')
So the question is:
What causes us to need a vice, or indeed, many vices?
When I completed my Diploma of Counselling, one thing I learned that stuck with me was that:
Addiction is caused by shame (not guilt, guilt being, what I did is wrong, shame is - I as a person, am wrong, flawed)
I embarked on my personal development journey some five years.
I read heavily, attended seminars, and still do!
Every fortnight I have coaching with a paid coach, who has been teaching me for around 3-4 years (she is amazing)! Reply in comments for a link to her LinkedIn Profile if you want coaching (at $63 an hour its very fairly priced, some coaches I have paid $160 an hour for).
From my personal development journey, I learned that addiction, vices are also caused from 'pain', pain in the mind, body and spirit.
As I have healed my pain, I have been able to shred the vices I had. I have very few now, certainly am not perfect and have challenges and times where life is very hard, but that is part of the endless cycle.
Nature is beautiful, and brutal, watch a creature of prey hunting and how brutally their prey is torn apart (lions, hyenas, killler whales, sharks). Look at how we as people torture animals and are addicted to eating their flesh, I know I was for most of my life.
We know that nature is beautiful and brutal - go to the beach and feel the beauty. Sit in a forest and enjoy the scenery and blissful peace - that is nature!
It is great if we accept that life is a polarity: of challenging times, where we can grow and easier times where we celebrate achievement.
It is yin and yan, hot and cold, feminine/mother energy (earth, oceans - BLUE) and masculine/father energy (SUN - RED)
We become super powerful and become free to work on our life dreams when we just accept that 'bad' is not bad, 'good' is not good - they are just equal sides of the same coin - pain and joy just exist.
When we feel pain - if we can transmute the pain into healing if we would only allow our bodies to process the emotion so it can leave our bodies rather than be stored; 'held on to'.
We must LET GO - because sickness and pain are caused when we ignoring or suppress our emotions, try not to acknowledge them in order to avoid feeling them (by using our socially accepted - and indeed - socially encouraged vices/addictions)
The simplest way to rid ourselves of at least the highly destructive vices - is to REPLACE them. Every vice can only be left behind by replacing it with something else.
Each vice we have is meeting a perceived need, a need to feel love, or a need to NOT feel emotions we don't feel ready to deal with.
Examples of replacement:
Replace alcohol with being in nature - moving your body.
Replace cigarettes with yoga
Replace obesity and eating to numb pain with - processing pain, getting counselling or coaching, watching healing videos on YouTube
Keep your eyes out our follow me for more on this subject!
If you like this post, if it helped you, please feel free to upvote, my gratitude is yours in advance!