WEEKLY MEDITATION
Live life as if it is rigged in your favor.
-Rumi
Recovery from addiction has many facets. There is the initial and difficult step of breaking the bond to the substance or behavior that manifested as the addiction, itself. Then we must discover what it was we were attempting to use our addictions for and replace them with more direct and healthy growth processes. And we may also need to heal from the emotional consequences of our addicted lives. But it is also important that we develop a helpful attitude, one that will aid us while approaching all of this work. It may help to look at our addiction as our helper—a pattern that parts of ourselves created in an attempt to help regulate our experience of life. In this way we can continue to honor the underlying process that our addictions were trying to provide us. Eventually, we may be able to functionally answer the call that our addictions dysfunctionally tried to address. Through this view we may see that our addictions had been working in our favor. In ways, so were the dysfunction and chaos that clarified the need to address this problem. Maybe, if we learn to see it, our lives—even our problems—are all rigged in our favor.
