Ayurveda and Addiction
Addiction comes in many forms; sugar, food, alcohol, sex, shopping, gambling, drugs, smoking, working, TV and Internet. Some people go in and out of their addictive behavior easily. Some struggle an entire lifetime trying to destroy that demon. There is a purpose to your addiction that you will only be able to see once you get to the other side.
Getting to the other side is the hardest thing you will ever do. It takes acknowledgment of your helplessness, surrender, education, support and sheer brute willpower.
This is how addiction works from an Ayurvedic perspective in body and mind. The energy of the addiction is the force of the Wind (Vata). The addiction initially creates an uplifting and euphoric feeling. The Wind begins to blow through your body and mind and you feel enthusiastic, creative and wonderful. You have increased energy. However, the Wind tends to burn out quickly, so the feeling doesn’t last. You have to consume/do more and more to continue to get the uplifting feeling.
All addictions have a “sweet” taste to them. The sweet taste makes us feel nourished and loved. A little bit of the sweet taste can make you feel safe, secure and comforted. We naturally crave this sweet taste to balance and ground the energy of the Wind. The sweet taste is heavy & dense. It is the comfort food and the heavy American diet of meat, starches and sugars. In excess, it causes you to gain weight, accumulate toxins and ultimately leads to diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and depression.
Back to the Wind…you are craving the euphoric feeling…you consume more and more of the source of the addiction and finally that Wind energy gets really aggravated. Sleep patterns are disrupted, digestion becomes very irregular and shakiness may develop. You may become very exaggerated in your speech; have an inability to focus, to concentrate and especially to listen to others. You may find yourself talking excessively…even rambling. Your dreams may become chaotic and if you are deep into your addiction, you may even have a distorted sense of what most call “reality”.
Your life starts to go out of control, yet this demon has you so firmly in it’s grasp, that you can’t even see that your life is out of control. In fact, you may feel awesome thinking you can take on more and more. Long-term thinking is impaired and you find you are making “spontaneous” decisions that your deluded reality believes to be good. At this point, loved ones and friends may start to make little comments about your behavior that really don’t seem significant. You blow it off.
Over time, the Fire or Pitta gets involved. You may find that you are beginning to feel stressed. The life you have created for yourself is becoming a bit hard to manage. Perhaps your grumpy and short tempered with those around you. You start to feel that there is not enough time in each day to get everything done and you become resentful of the happy people floating around you in their stupendous state of bliss. Clearly they are idiots without purpose. You believe that people just can’t understand you and aren’t supportive of you. You become critical, judgmental and controlling. You are living in fear, but you can’t define the feeling as “fear”. It simply comes out as anger.
At this point, your health starts to really suffer. Your skin is ruddy. Perhaps you are breaking out with acne or suffering broken capillaries, redness or irritation. Your eyes are bloodshot and glossy. You’ve put on some weight from your overindulgence or you are malnourished because your digestive fire has been extinguished. Your blood pressure may go to “high” and you experience headaches, stressful sleepless nights and upset acid belly. You are convinced that no one really loves you and whether you will admit it or not, you are even more convinced that you are unlovable. You begin to alienate the people in your life, perhaps even eliminating them. You make really bad personal choices that can even put you in harms way.
If the Fire doesn’t completely burn you up, the Earth or Kapha moves in. Now you feel like total hell. You may be fat. You are lethargic. You are depressed. You are full of despair and perhaps even suicidal. You now know without a doubt that no one loves you and that life is not worth living. You begin to accumulate clutter. You lay on the couch. Every movement seems like impossibility and you can’t imagine a way out of your current situation. You are drowning and can’t even get the energy up to raise your hand to greet any of the hands still being offered to your for support.
At this point, something needs to happen. A lot of times, this is the point where your addiction…that demon living inside of you and controlling you… begins to fail. Now it doesn’t even matter how much you consume/do, you never feel a high from it. You never get a euphoric feeling. Your health may completely give out. Your loved ones may abandon you. If you are lucky, you’ve hit rock bottom. This is your turning point to get down on your knees and pray. You have a divine spark inside of you and it does not want to go out. It’s a survivalist. Rely on that spark to get you on and off your knees.
GETTING OFF YOUR KNEES
This part sucks and is bliss all at the same time. You surrender. You simply give in. You know that you can’t stay this way. You seek out help in the form of prayer, education, group and therapy. Now the real work of getting those elemental forces under control can begin.
This part is really hard. You can break a behavior in 30 days giving you an amazing opportunity to fully recover from your addiction. Breaking an addictive behavior in 30 days requires a ton of willpower. Some people can do it on their own. Most can’t. Most people need support of others. The energy of the out of balance elements (doshas) is very strong and it takes time to bring them under control. While you are busy bringing them under control, they are fighting you as well as that demon that doesn’t want to lose its host.
This is what happens to your elemental forces when you quit your addictions. All of the forces become simultaneously aggravated in an extreme way. You feel numb, super stimulated and out of your skin all at the same time. You sleep a deathlike sleep of exhaustion interrupted by insomnia. You crave sweet and are repulsed by its taste. You can’t taste. Lights are too bright. People talk to loud. Silence destroys you. You worry, you stress. You are grumpy and overwhelmed with loving-kindness. You are excited and depressed.
Imagine an ocean experiencing a tropical storm. You can imagine the force in that ocean creating those waves that are crashing onto the beach. The wave pulls out and then comes tearing back in. Now imagine you put up a wall about hundred yards from the beach. The wave continues to pull back, but when it comes crashing in, the wall stops it abruptly. The wave surges over the wall and then recedes only to begin it’s approach again. In time, the wave adjusts knowing that the wall is there, but initially, the wave is just as powerful and wants to take the wall out of its path. This is how the energy works in your body too. The elemental forces are in full swing; they want to take your wall out.
The elemental forces will come back to balance the same way that they went out. Wind…then Fire…then Earth. The Wind element will initially become very aggravated. Your thoughts will race and your cravings will feel insane. You will find you have tons of nervous energy and nothing to do with it. You make shake and experience tremors. Sleep patterns are interrupted and you will be very become anxious and worried. You will crave sweets and salts. This is a critical time for distraction, rest and support. If you are addicted to a substance, you will withdrawal physically and mentally during this phase.
The Wind will begin to calm and the Fire will move in. Now you will feel like taking some kind of monumental action. You may get really mad at yourself, others and your life in general. People will annoy you. You become short tempered. You may experience heart palpitations, sweating and heat throughout your body. You may begin to feel empowered and this is when the ideal of “trying out” your new status will appeal to you. You become sure that you can have just one drink, one cigarette, one cookie, one shopping trip, etc. You fail and fail again and finally come to terms that your source of addiction must simply be avoided at all costs.
The Fire begins to settle and the Earth will move in. A “now what” feeling settles over you. You’ve gone awhile without your source and you begin to address the real dysfunction of your addiction. This is a boring time of hard work. You realize that you are just like everybody else. You realize that you’ve made a mess and only hard work is going to get you out of it. You suffer through your regrets and past mistakes. You get quiet. You get alone. You do a lot of soul searching and shifting.
You wake up one morning and the birds are chirping with the energy of the Wind. You feel okay. Your first thought is not of your addiction. You notice this. Your second thought is that your addiction actually served a purpose.
You can’t do this alone. The Elemental Cleanse is a 28-day Ayurvedic cleansing program that will get you in touch with your addictive behavior and help you to break the pattern. Sessions Now Forming>>
