A Resilient Addiction: How the Truth Sets You Free

I remember learning in school about the harms of smoking and the nature of lung cancer. I went home and immediately launched an education campaign for my beloved grandfather. There were visual aids spread out on the floor as I tried to convert him. The cigarettes disappeared.

When he died of lung cancer two decades later, a “friend” gave me a pack of cigarillos. I sat down and smoked them all.

It took several years before smoking became a habit, and finally, the day came to try laser treatment for my new friend and me.

It worked for us both, and the weird part was that it hurt. Physically. How does light hurt? In a yoga class one day, two people were talking about The Field. That book explained so much, including how. If you don’t know what a biophoton is, I suggest you have a read.

An addiction is a behaviour we keep doing long after the point at which we should stop. At one time, it was adaptive, and now that we are still doing it, it is dysfunctional.

Remaining free of smoking requires confronting the feeling that would usually be pushed away by the flick of a Bic. Then there was snowmobiling, and having to sit still and pay attention no matter what was going through my mind or how my body was feeling.

Recently, I heard a blind man talk about an app he invented. Be my eyes. When he loses something and he needs eyes, just for a minute, he takes a photo. A sighted person looks and tells him.

It reminded me that we can’t clean something while peering through our fingers at it. Certainly, we can’t do it blindfolded. Truth sets you free from the blindfold, if you let it.

Conditions, Not Character

The environment around you has a larger impact on you than you may realize. What is the environment? It is the space around you and everything in it. It’s as big as the community and culture and it’s as small as color and design. It can trigger your addictions without your awareness.

It’s starting to smoke because they are simply there when there is every reason to avoid them. One co-worker, a lovely woman I’d just met, told our boss to f*!k off. Later, she explained that it was out of character for her to behave that way. Philip Zimbardo tells us in The Lucifer Effect that it is right, but it appears HR has a hard time figuring out what is fair.

The truth sets you free when you realize it’s not your character that determines your behavior, it’s the conditions. Designers and marketers use it to get you hooked. We click where we are supposed to, and react like well-trained dogs when notifications buzz. With tangible currency out of the transaction equation, we rack up credit bills like we never have to pay them.

In one shocking experiment, conditions turned university students into behaving like seasoned prison guards and prisoners. The shocking part was how swiftly and surely it happened. So quickly, so completely that the experiment was terminated early.

You can use your external environment to assist your goals, or it will undermine them without much effort. Mastering your environment is eliminating the random behavior it otherwise produces. You want to be the wizard of your world, not the pinball. Or at least, have your own hands on the paddles.

Triggering Moods

Environmental influences have such huge effects on you because they trigger your moods. What are moods? Unresolved memories with emotional impacts. They are feelings we’ve held on too long after the chemical has dissipated.

We keep going back to them for some reason. A reason only you know. If you find yourself distracted, unable to focus, or knowingly fixated on something that didn’t work out as you wanted, the best thing you can do with your time is to sit down with yourself and have a conversation. You would do it with your friend, and you need to be your own best friend at times.

Because only you know when you are spin-doctoring, avoiding, and otherwise hiding from the truth. The truth sets you free when you are willing to sit with it.

Moods help maintain our current perceptions, solidify our personalities, and give us a feeling of familiarity in this constantly changing world, helping us create, not what we want to feel, but what is familiar to feel.

It might not even feel good. Like surviving on coffee and sugar. You think it feels good. You feel worse when it goes away, so you must be right. However, then some people swear that kale and baked fish feels great. Just be sure that you are not lying to yourself or letting your body trick you.

Emotional quick wins include things like taking a deep breath when you feel the onslaught of anger. If feeling better is what you are after, hold a pencil in your teeth. The way it forces your lips to smile forces your brain to produce the chemicals of happiness. Or if confidence is what you need, stand like Superman.

Go ahead and get addicted to moods that serve you better: enthusiasm, love, joy, curiosity, and engagement. Your heart will thank you. Your head will join in when the proof that’s it just a smarter way to finally show up.

Healthy Selfishness

Every generation, every person decides for themselves where they will live on the spectrum from I to We. A narcissist on one end, a martyr on the other.

My boyfriend only says “we” when he wants something from me. I say “we” when I fantasize about a future in which we make decisions together. I know this show. I’ve done it once or several times before. It’s my survival mode.

In survival mode, our human brain feels fear, freezes, and at the first opportunity, flees. This is programmed into our limbic brains, the same part of our brain we share with every animal, and animal instinct is what it does well. It is ruled by belief, biology, and environment.

To survive, as a human animal, you must ensure that you do not get thrown out of the tribe. In caveman days, you depended on the other humans for food and shelter, among the absolute basic needs. For that reason, we decide, on our spectrum of who matters most, I to We, of how much risk we want to take with our lives, how far from the norm are we willing to live. Some look to their community to please tell me, instruct me, absolve me, protect me, fix me, friend me, validate me, and hear me.

Other people, rebels, outcasts, iconoclasts, seem to realize that humans don’t live in caves anymore, and it’s never been easier to find those who share your perspective.

The mind is a tool of consciousness, and while you might automatically assume you need a social media presence and all it entails, others are successful without it. To become conscious is the blast of insight that grants you freedom. This is how the truth sets you free.

A friend recently asked me what I would do if I had kids. I don’t because I think that’s not a problem I was put here to solve. I believe that not everyone should be a parent. However, we’ve created a society that spreads that expectation.

We license drivers, not parents; a car can do much less damage than a person.

Before we let society govern this, which would be a horrid idea, it’s time to stop telling everyone what to do and allow people who know they aren’t parents to find other equally valid contributions.

After all, we’ve got one planet, and we’ve already overpopulated it.

Maybe I’ve had too much time to learn instead of spending it raising kids and worrying about how their teachers, teams, and other parents are treating them.

No, I’ve been living in the luxury of time and attention on me and whatever I wanted to do. Except, of course, when I had to leave my mind and opinions at home and make enough money to survive.

When you get enough to survive, this is how financial truth sets you free. You get to change your endgame from surviving to thriving. You get to stay whole and complete everywhere you go. However, we don’t have the language to do this. When you want to know the opposite of survival, the thesaurus only knows down, not up. My flashbacks of wanting to write the dictionary are complete now.

When you become whole and complete, watch out. The body goes from trying to make it through the day to focusing on growth and repair. Genes regulated by stress hormones stop being signaled. Other genes activate instead. The body starts to fix itself. Bliss sets in where fear used to live.

The weight falls off in a miraculous diet that doesn’t involve sweat, sacrifice or restriction.

Choosing to Thrive

If we wiped out the collective board of society’s rules immediately, we could all get into thriving mode because there are two truths that we can smash together that change everything.

I’ve realized that not everyone understands the principles of science or society. When you say “truth”, it’s because it went through the fire and flames and lived. In science, we use a process to try to eliminate as much irrationality as possible.

Lies, opinions, and statistics without a big enough size, without triple blind protocols, without a long list of checks and balances, aren’t supposed to make it.

However, some leaks in. One report full of lies, darn lies, and statistics squeaked its way into a respectable journal, and the anti-vax movement began, creating the avalanche it is today.

Nothing’s perfect.

And that’s the name of progress.

You use what is best available with full and open eyes, knowing it’s imperfect.

The problem was that the School did an excellent job of hiding all the imperfections. Worse, it made us think that perfection was a thing, that marks mattered, and that competition was healthy. Yikes.

In engineering, when you get a problem, sometimes you first make an assumption to get started. Science is no different.

The truth sets you free when you form a hypothesis, design an experiment, follow the facts, and test the conclusion. Such is the nature of progress under the umbrella of science and the addiction to truth.

Stinking Old Notions

There are enough of us who are angry that the world is out of date and that things are starting to happen.

If I were a parent now, I’d know what I’d be doing with my kids: homeschooling them and teaching them to become entrepreneurs, telling them that the truth sets you free and conformity to social standards is the tie that binds.

I would keep them out of every institution while explaining the purposes they serve, especially hospitals.

I’d be able to kick them out of the nest and watch them fly away in no time flat.

The truth is, no one has all the answers. Not society, not your parents, and not your teachers. Sir Ken Robinson says that the education system teaches people to live in their left brain, and we are taught that’s all that’s worth anything—analytical, left-brain thinking.

Yep, then you have to learn to meditate, do yoga, and all kinds of work to remember how to move back into your body and tune into your voice of truth. Learning is never over. When you graduate, that’s when you start. First, you must let go of all that training in search of external validation.

Physical education isn’t about learning the rules of the sport, so we can spend our lives watching and cheering for things we think are statistically valid, but are ways to keep us collectively distracted so we don’t notice what’s happening. Organized sports are organized around a societal goal that no longer exists, one rooted in scarcity and the idea that there isn’t enough to go around.

We do now. World hunger is a problem of distribution, not quantity, which points a finger at all the ways we’ve defined “organized”.

Lost Lessons

Art isn’t about learning to become photocopiers of our environments. It is to learn how to see reality. This truth sets you free to pick up those crayons you put down in grade school. Perhaps you’d prefer a different medium.

Do you think you see reality? Draw your face. You know what it looks like and how to hold a pencil. When it comes to skill, that’s all there is. Can you do it? If you aren’t seeing reality, what are you seeing? You are not a video camera, and no movie theatre is in your mind.

Music isn’t about learning to entertain an audience. It is important to know about waves and frequencies because that is what sound is, and some people need that concrete form to understand how they work. Understanding how waves work is something everyone needs to apply. Not play an instrument.

Because when it comes to biology, that’s the second truth that changes everything.

There was a dude I will call the founding father of command and control. He looked at what happens in nature and said, “I forbid it.” Guess what nature did. Laughed, and kept right on doing its thing. Man, however, decided to blind himself collectively.

He was in a place where that’s exactly what he could do. And you think Hitler did some horrid things. Or that the Lancet should have caught the report before publishing it.

Finally, we are at a point where he’s been slain, but the reparation work is just starting.

When basic, foundational assumptions are proven wrong, you must return to the drawing board and start again.

That’s where we are as a human race right now.

We have to start again. But the people who benefited from the assumptions, the people who used them to get where they are today, are the very ones who are in the best positions to keep them in place.

Rose McGowan calls it the Patriarchy, and it’s not a gender thing. Women protect it just as much as men are helping to dismantle it. I use the term Establishment because it’s about what was established, a collective set of agreements and assumptions that inform how we live. Some people confuse these for truths. They are not.

Men like Gregg Braden are helping to dismantle it. Together with Dr. Lipton, these two presented to the UN the biggest opportunity for peace facing mankind right now, but only if we can conquer our fundamental irrationality and embrace it. The truth sets you free when you know it.

Would world peace be possible if people learned the quality of thought? I knew it was powerful stuff. Please, if you need it, download the guide.