WEEKLY MEDITATION
Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
-Carl Jung
Our addictions represent a dream. When we find ourselves stuck within the rigid emotional structures erected by our addictions, there is an underlying attempt to temper our experience of life to be more comfortable and predictable. Through our addictions, we look outside ourselves to improve our felt experience of life. And it is a dream to expect that our experience of life can be successfully tempered or tamed. So after we have broken the initial bond to these external dependencies, we may need to turn our attention to the parts of us that we used our addictions to dysfunctionally cater to. In effect, we will still want to cater to the very same parts of ourselves that we unconsciously tried to tend to with the substances and behaviors that formed our addictions. But if we learn to do this from the inside, if we learn to use the nature of our very consciousness to alter our experience of life—if we learn to live from the inside out—we will no longer rely on those strong external forces to find a living sense of equilibrium. And in this way, we awaken.
