WEEKLY MEDITATION
Everybody remembers but not everybody recalls.
-Gabor Mate
Recovery from addiction is so much more than simply creating a state of abstinence. Granted, maintaining abstinence will often solve many logistical problems associated with the addiction lifestyle, but it doesn’t solve the underlying patterns that ultimately fueled them to begin with. To do this we must learn about the emotional programing running beneath the surface of our conscious understanding. Often we are talking about reactions we made to circumstances that occurred before we started creating conscious memories. But because these reactions happened before our conscious understanding had evolved, they caused automatic patterns of protection that we can’t be aware of without really looking for them. Often, in fact, to really address this level of change we will need to avail ourselves to some kind of therapeutic process that will give us a deeper understanding of ourselves than we can access without this help. But it is important to remember that although we may not be able to actually recall the details of our early lives, we are still reacting to the consequences of these details. And at this vital level, we never forget anything.
