What’s Your Underlying Belief?

I continue to benefit from the insights of Dr. Gabor Maté, both personally and professionally, and am immensely grateful for the opportunity to study and teach with him. One of the areas in my own life that I currently bring awareness to are the mostly unconscious beliefs that show up when I feel self-pity or want to blame others. Both of these states cause internal discomfort. Here's a recent example. I was in Utah last week on a family vacation, touring around in my son's new-to-him 1992 Volkswagon camper van, hiking in gorgeous national parks and tenting at night, enjoying being together with my grown children, son-in-law and husband. On a particular long uphill hike to a natural hot springs not far from Salt Lake City, I found myself well behind the …

Reflections from a Beyond Addiction Support Group

For several months now, after completing the first round of the four month Beyond Addiction program, a group of committed students have continued studying Beyond Addiction, meeting on a weekly basis. We have dug into the process of self-discovery and deep reflection, spending one month on each of the sixteen modules. In this summary below, you will have a glimpse into the inner workings and musings of this group. The excerpt below is taken from the reflections after a group meeting where the group reviewed Module One and with deep self-exploration, tenaciously pulled apart the material on the complexes as we explored our edges and growth. Attachment to Our Complexes Four of us spent an hour going deep into the meaning and the overcoming or transformation of complexes/identities. We discussed complexes such as …

Beyond Addiction Gathers a Research Team!

We have some exciting Beyond Addiction research opportunities on the horizon and wanted to tell you about the current research that is underway. York University’s Faculty of Graduate Studies and Knowledge Mobilization Unit have teamed up with KY-WHA and the Beyond Addiction (BA) program to research the long-term efficacy of the Beyond Addiction program. York PhD Candidate in Education, Stacey (Amardeep) Bliss, has recently come on board as a student-intern to collect and analyze data with the newly-organized BA Research team. Other members of the research team include Heather Good from Calgary, Ellen Winofsky from BC, and Dr. Wendy Harris along with our statistician, Richard Casey from Los Angeles. Thank you, all! Our gratitude goes to Brian Rush Ph.D., and Dr. Sat Bir Singh Khalsa Ph.D., who have helped us formulate the research instruments …

The Regeneration Project: Connect with Your Essence and the Earth

By reconnecting we can begin to work on regenerating ourselves, our relationships and the environment in an integrated sustainable way. The Regeneration Project aims to do this by integrating the Beyond Addiction program with organic, permaculture based and/or Biodynamic farming, cultivating a healthy relationship between people and the environment. "When we heal the Earth we heal ourselves"  ~ David Orr “We can calculate in approximately how many decades agricultural products will have degenerated to such an extent that they can no longer serve as human nourishment. It will certainly be within this [20th] century. We can see how necessary it is to derive forces from the spirit, forces that are as yet quite unknown. This is necessary not only for the sake of somehow improving agriculture, but so that human life on …

Give Yourself Space to Feel

Sadness will not determine your life. What will determine your life are your attempts not to feel the sadness. What will determine your life are your attempts to compensate for the sadness by not feeling it, by developing coping mechanisms that keep you from allowing you to experience yourself the way you really are. That’s what will determine your life. If you don’t want your life to be determined by what happened, allow yourself to feel exactly what’s there. Developmental trauma happens when there isn’t space for us to feel what we feel. The fact is, there was never space in your life for you to feel what you felt. There was nobody there to hold you; your mother wasn’t there to hold you. She was too busy trying to soothe her …

The Gut, the Brain and Addiction

Who Knew We Had Three Brains? The gut has its own independent nervous system, known as the enteric nervous system, that consists of about 500 million neurons. This system is embedded in the lining of the gastrointestinal tract, beginning at the esophagus and ending at the anus. Amazingly, the enteric nervous system can operate independently from the brain – it can function without it, and has been dubbed our “second brain”. It has a two way communication with the brain and central nervous system via the parasympathetic fibers of the vagus nerve and the sympathetic fibers of the prevertebral ganglia. This channel is known as the gut-brain axis, and links the emotional and cognitive centres of the brain with intestinal function, and vice-versa. The gut-brain axis is modulated by neurotransmitters, hormones, immune …

Yoga and Addiction

I am not a stranger to the struggle of addiction or the trauma and negative thought patterns that it typically stems from. I’ve been affected by and intrigued with this limited realm of the human mind and the mysterious ability we can have of disassociating from our (true) selves to fill an unmet need or emptiness despite the consequences. It beguiles me how we can be in a state of constant maneuvering towards some sense of perceived safety, with the capacity for both truth and denial, often expressed simultaneously. We’re masters at this, while often yearning for compassion and a sense of belonging to ourselves and those we love. In my search and experience I have discovered that Yoga can be a pivotal tool in healing from addiction. It’s an exciting …

What is Your Addiction Doing For You?

Let’s look at addiction not from the point of view of the harm it does, which is obvious for all of us, but what did it do for you? What did you get from it? What was right about it? The American researcher, Dr. Vincent Felitti, said that the problem was dismissing addictions as self-harming behaviour. He believed it ignores their functionality in the life of the addict. Begin this question with yourself, whether the addiction pertains to yourself, your friend, your family member, or your client. Don’t think about what’s wrong with this; they already know what’s wrong with it, unless they’re in deep denial. The question is, what is right about it. Let’s find out from you. What did it do for you? What did you get from it that you …

Be Compassionate Towards Your “Stupid Friend”

Eckhart Tolle says that many people live with this terrible judge in their minds, that’s forever tormenting them with all kinds of negative evaluations. Some of you say, “I just don’t want that anymore.” But consider that the inner judge, that negative self-talk, actually helped you survive. It helped you survive, because when you are a child and stuff is happening to you that you suffer from, what you cannot do is to fight back against the environment, because if you do you’re going to get pulverised. It’s that simple, you’re going to get pulverised. You don’t have the strength, you don’t have the power. The child, therefore, as a matter of survival, makes themselves wrong. Says, “The environment can’t be wrong, because if it was I’d have to leave it, …

Move Beyond Addiction: Come Home to Your True Self

To move beyond addiction, it's essential that we come home to our True Self. One way of understanding the separation between our human and spiritual selves is to compare our “soul” or “essence” to our “personality”. Our “essence” is whole, beautiful, undamaged, ever-present, loving, linked to all that is, intuitive and connected. Our personality forms in infancy and childhood in response to the people and environments around us. When our “essence” isn’t received, cherished, loved or acknowledged, our personality creates armour and coping mechanisms to protect it. The personality is created to help us survive. It’s a set of reactive behaviour patterns that have become a habit, and includes feelings, body sensations, particular thoughts, words we use to define ourselves, images that occur in our minds, memories, projections and reactions. From the …