It's time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the F-word here: Freedom. We'll share, straight from the trenches, what we have learned from leaving our own addictions behind, and coaching hundreds of others to do the same—and since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it.
(00:36): And welcome back to the alive and free podcast today. Let me start with asking you a question, right? Or let's explore this, this idea together. Imagine for some odd reason you received a gift, it was a brand new puppy. It's a new pet. You didn't really ask for it. It wasn't on your mind. You didn't really want one, but somebody dropped one off and it was like a hit and run a gift and run. And so now you're left with this brand new puppy and it's so cute or right. So fascinating, curious, like you get involved with it and stuff, but you also have to start taking care of it. Right? So in the beginning, the puppy as cute as it is as cuddly as it is, you wanna take it everywhere, but it's peeing on the floor. Some it's Yiping and barking at things that you wish you wouldn't yip and bark at.
(01:21): It's also biting and chew on things that you wish you wouldn't chew on and so on. And then as time goes on, you get accustomed to it. Now there's some things that start to happen right along the way, because you have this brand new pet you in an interesting fashion, your life starts to revolve around this pet and it starts to control the kinds of things that you can do well. Okay. If we want to go outta town, we have to make arrangements for the, a dog. Do they, can we be there with a dog? If we wanna rent a certain place in town, do they accept renters with pets or do they not accept renters with pets? If the dog is, if I go out, the dog needs to be walked. So now I gotta take this thing on a walk and I gotta make sure it's healthy.
(01:58): And then I gotta take it to the vet. And I got all the vet bills associated with it and I gotta make sure it's, it's nice around the neighbors and everything else, but even then, despite the annoyance of it, despite having to pick up its poop, despite all that other stuff, there's still a certain level of familiarity and comradery that comes with this pet as it ages, despite how much it tends to kind of control your life to the point where as people get older with their, with their pets, all of a sudden when the, when it dies, there's a sense of loss. There's a sense of loneliness, almost like a family member, right? And in many ways a puppy would be a family member. And even though during its life, there was a lot of complaining and frustration with it. And then fun times when it's gone, like there's a sense of sad, a missing of it, fond memories and all that other kind of stuff.
(02:49): What I would submit to you is that what people call addiction or what people call depression or anxiety or trauma or any of those things is basically like this unwanted pet. Some of them like addictions, addictive behaviors, generally start with this sort of like curiosity, right? Or sometimes it's not always that way, but often kind of curiosity, you know, we're out having fun. We're having a good time. It's and then all of a sudden, like I'm hooked on this thing, but there's still some, some kind of curiosity around it. Well with depression or anxiety or trauma, those are not things that start with curiosity. Those are like, you know, the old boyfriend or the old girlfriend left their dog there. And now you're constantly reminded of them every time the dog's there, but they didn't leave a forwarding address. And now you're left with this dog and you, you, you don't want, you can't put it out of its misery, cuz you'd feel like a bad person and all the other things that come with it.
(03:40): And often when people are dealing with the struggles they dealt with, it it's often like an unwanted pet. You know, they, they learn to get along with it. They learn to cope with it even to the point where they learn to be able to, to form and manage and control and operate and align and arrange their lives around that so that it can be taken care of an Amber who you heard from a couple weeks ago. At one point in time, I was talking to her about this. And she mentioned how, when she was really stuck in opioids and this is when it got really bad. And this is when she finally decided, no, I gotta get these outta my life was when her family had planned a five day vacation.
(04:21): And her prescription for these Oxycontin was, was due to be filled like a couple hours after they like within 12 hours of when they needed to leave. And so she called ahead to try and figure out, I need to make arrangements for this for my, you know, my habit. I need to make arrangements for it. I'm not left left on my own. And as she's trying to call the doctor to see if she can get prescription filled early, they refused to let her. So they ended up having to postpone their vacation a day, which, you know, everybody was fine with they, they arranged it, but she had to postpone her vacation a day just because she couldn't get her prescription filled on pain. Medications. People do this with diet as well. You know, if, if I have a special diet, then there's only certain places I can go and there's things I can't do.
(05:09): And so all of these things that we call diseases and pathologies and conditions and disorders and syndromes, they end up becoming this strange, like, sorry, here's this extra thing you have to take care of. And many of these courageous people who are dealing with this in their life, they figure out a way to do it. They figure out a way to do it well to train the dog. So it stops seeping to train it. So it stops peeing on the carpet to train it so that it asks you when it wants to go outside to train its way, it doesn't bite. And it's nice around the neighbors, but it still always there in the background lurking in the background. So a lot of the people who dealt with compulsive behaviors that I've worked with, whether that's with drugs or whether that's with pornography and lust and sex, or whether that's with food, even there's the, this worry, this nagging worry in the background, like it's just never gone.
(06:01): It's always gonna be there. And this is why in 12 step programs and they're not bad people. This is why they say things like you're always gonna deal with it. Quick backstory, 12 step programs, bill w William Watson, whatever his name was. First off I've mentioned before, how Leslie Keeley, he was the physician. He was actually an an army doctor for the union army. And he had a surgeon and he had come out and with the help of an Irish chemist, he had concocted a secret kind of AIX that was supposed and purported to cure addiction. And he was the first one to sort of mass mark had the idea that addiction was a disease. That idea had come, had been around here and there earlier. They blamed it on rum Benjamin Rush. The signer of the declaration of independence had a theory about this disease of dependence ironically.
(06:51): And so a lot of the religious kind of temperance movement showed up around it. And alcohol became one of the primary to targets at first, which is why Keely picked up on that turns out his, he made a lot of money off of this thing over 300,000 people. By the time by in the 21 years that he was operating over 300,000 people had in some way, shape or form come to see his cures. A few of them got better for sure, but there were a whole lot of 'em that didn't, and, and his cure was supposedly from some Renaissance manuscript from Paris Celsus who is kind of purported to be the father of toxicology because of the kinds of things he did. But parels was also a philosopher, a theologian, you know, an Alchemist. And so this, the secret ingredient in Keely's special cure, which was never divulge exactly what at the concoction was made of was gold.
(07:41): Only when he was finally selling this by mail order, there was no gold inside of it at all. He was basically like he was disbanded. He, his medical license was stripped of him within just a, a short time of him operating, but still because of the popularity of it. And because his concept had gotten into the public mind before addiction, the only way people were mainly describing it was like basically a devil had taken over some evil spirit had entered you, and that's still prevalent today in certain circles. I hear it a lot. And people cast out spirits. People who have come to my retreats have been involved in some of those things. And they've talked to me like I'm casting out spirits. So that's their explain nation for what's going on. Even though there's not anything about what I'm doing, I'm just working physiologically with the system.
(08:27): And there's an episode on that. I think it's called by what authority it was a, it was a while ago, if you, if you're interested in hearing the story about that. And so originally it was an evil spirit. That was the cause of addiction, you know, moral and temperance and whatever. And then you kind of get possessed and this happens well, now all of a sudden, a new quote, unquote evil spirit takes the scene in the form of a disease. And I'll submit to you that a lot of modern medicine, see, we think that we're more advanced than all of these mythologies of the past, because we don't have Passid in with his Trident and the ocean. And we don't have zoo with this lightning bolt in the sky. And we don't have all these things. We've brought it down to like molecules. And nowadays we talk about atoms and electrons and all of these other things that no human eye has really witnessed.
(09:12): We talk about gravity and they're just like facts of life for us. But gravity, isn't a thing it's not, it's not an actual thing. It's a label that we put on this pattern that we're seeing of attraction, but it's not gravity that pulls a person down. It's the planet and the proximity of the planet and the mass of the planet. That's creating whatever is happening. And that, that attracts us to the surface. So there's not have some mythological gravity. That's controlling people. It's literally the planet we live on. That's doing the, that is by virtue of its existence. It's happening. If you or someone, you know, is looking to drop the FBO of freedom in their life, whether that's from past trauma, depression, anxiety, addiction, or any other host of emotional and personal struggles, but they just don't know how or want some help doing it. Head on over to the freedom specialist.com/feel better now and check out some of the things we've got in store for you, or book a call. So we can look at your unique situation and get you the help that you're looking for.
(10:18): But we have all these labels in terms we put on things. They are just as mythological in many ways as the ancient Greek gods. And so then we have diseases. Many of these diseases are not real things. In fact, most of the DSM, they're not real things. There may be some genetic alterations, but, but most of these things are labels based on patterns of behavior. So they'll call you a narcissist based on a pattern of behavior. And they'll say you have narcissism, but that's just a mythological label. What's really going on is a person doing certain things. And if we say they have this extra thing on them, sure that's useful for psychologists, but it's actually just mythology. It's not a real thing we've gotten so wrapped up in our concepts that we can't see past the mythologies we've made. And that's what happened with addiction.
(11:05): Disease shows up, it's a disease, a DISE, literally a person is ill at ease, and they're looking for something to fix their DISE, right? That is a very good description. This is, this ex describes all coping mechanism, all compulsive behaviors, whether it's pornography or drugs or YouTube, or checking your email 10 times a day, or opening the fridge every five minutes, whatever it is, whatever compulsive behaviors we have, those are attempts to resolve some level of uneasiness or dis disease in the system that uneasiness could be bored. It could be apathy, it could be pain. It could be depression. It could be anxiety or panic. It could be a heartache and heartbreak. It could be any number of things that are, that create disease. It could even be your sick to your stomach, or you could be going through a detox from ingesting, some drug or some other substance.
(11:59): And that detox is making you wanna run away from the detox. And so you want more of whatever substance it is. We would call those withdrawal symptoms. Even though that that is a little bit circumspect in certain terms of the name that were, that is used either a way a disease shows up and people jump on this thing. Oh my gosh, yes, it's a disease. Now. They're not morally bankrupt individuals. Now they're not being possessed by a demon. They're actually alleviated. So Keely stepped in and did this brilliant marketing move and gave people an out a way of not being responsible for the behavior, which you know, eman also. But it didn't also mean that they were bad people. So I think that was also, it was brilliant. And I think in some ways it was a huge service to people, but then it created this entire disease model of addiction, which has been debunked a bunch of different times, but it's still the primary model that almost every addiction recovery system is built on predominantly because of 12, that programs and bill w now what happened.
(12:56): Okay. So Keely finally, he dies in 1900, but there's a bunch of other quack doctors or other doctors doing experimental cures. The be Donna cure was the one under bill w. So his cure was that he was using this some like trace amounts of this essentially poison to create these experiences to hopefully kind of rattle the, the system loose from its habit of behavior and thinking and all that other stuff and cure it. He claimed his cure could work in five days. And I think even at the time, way back in the early 19 hundreds, he was charging like $5,000 to go in and do it. Bill w went through that cure three times. Eventually the doctor associated with it quit doing that. I can't remember the doctor's name off the top of my head, but he quit doing it because his patients were having halluc hallucinations and all these other things bill did, the cure went off within a little bit of time, got drunk, again, came back, did it again, his brother-in-law's foot in the bill.
(13:53): And then the third time went in. And in that third time, he was finally like so desperate. He was crying out, but he had this hallucination, he had this psychedelic kind of experience with the Beadon that was there. And he had this tremendous, like healing experience that went through his system and he thought, oh my goodness, I'm free. I'm a hundred percent free. And he felt so great. And you know, his friend that he was talking to who had tried to get him into this Oxford group and, and using a spiritual cure for it. So make something happen. The doctor was like, something's happened to you, stick with it, you know, keep on hold onto that. And so then he started it and it was a very spiritual experience for him. And so he kept at it and he kept working on it and he went with this sort of spiritual approach to it.
(14:42): But his experience had come not from any of the 12 steps at all, but had come from a psychedelic experience. And there's a lot of research today around the use of psychedelics in helping alleviate depression and anxiety. And there's, they're in experimental clinical trials all over the place. They've legalized it in a couple areas in the country and having had my own experiences with it. I can see why it would radically change a person's relationship to everything in their life, because ultimately there's just this pattern happening, pattern of behavior, pattern of thinking, pattern of brain activity and reaction that's been going on. That's sort of self-sustaining until there's something that kind of cuts it loose. And often that's a spiritual experience, not even with psychedelics for people. Sometimes it's just through prayer and, and fasting or other types of things. So it's not that those are bad all, but he has this.
(15:32): And then he creates this eventually 12 set program. But the bits of the 12 set program came through his use of oui board and through spiritism and having other spirits visit him St. Boas, I think was some Renaissance Spaniard, I think monk who gave him essentially all of the, the instructions for the 12 step program that he eventually put together. I've heard some people say that originally it was six steps and not 12. His Wei board has been auctioned off. I don't know how many times as just an interesting tidbit of history and the 12 steps came out of this and in their declaration, he was saying, look, you're never gonna be free of this. The is a pet you're always gonna have, sorry, once you're in it, you're in it. Why would he say that if he had already been cured and was free and the answer is this, even within a month or so, or a month or a couple months after he had that profound healing experience, he started getting the itch again.
(16:31): He started getting the urge again. He realized I need to go be in contact with other people, helping them out, or I'm never gonna be able to control the drink. And that's when he went and met with Bob Smith. And that's when they started creating all of these meetings and these other things. And that's where the tenants of the 12 step program came from. They came from his experience, was he really has to be doing all of those things in order to be free. That doesn't mean he's wrong. He didn't touch another drink for the rest of his life. He continued to experiment with Nin and high doses of Nin that he felt like were really helpful. And he tried to promote those and the board of the 12 step alcoholics anonymous kind of got on him. He tried L S D and invited other people to do that and thought that that was a, a, a spectacular way of doing things was in contact with, I think Carl Young and some of these other famous psychologists at the time.
(17:21): And so he was constantly, and I have deep respect for his constant search, but we have to note this, that the idea that addiction one is a real thing, is some allergy, which he had gotten from his, his doctor. The idea was that, oh, no, you have an inborn allergy. Some genetic predisposition toward this one is a thing. And two that it never goes away. Well, that's just because his experience was that he needed to do that. That, that was what he felt and his program that he built as a reflection, not of the truth as it stands, but of his experience in dealing with his drinking problem in his life. And so I think that needs to be stated every program. And I've stated this before every program that's ever been created, it is a reflection of the creator of where they sit, what they believe and what they think.
(18:13): And in one, where I was talking about how to have super memory and where I talk about how to really understand people and grasp what's going on so that you're not duped again. There's another episode on that one. I talked about really identifying what are the core beliefs of the person talking. Now you can listen through all this stuff. I'm sure you'll notice changes over time. It's been a couple years. I've been talking for a couple years on here and you you'll notice some changes over time in what I'm saying, but even from the beginning, everything that I've been pointing at is that one freedom is a hundred percent possible, complete, and absolute freedom. And two, it doesn't have anything to do fighting off addiction, but simply learning to operate the mechanism called a human mind and body and handling any core looping patterns, AKA root issues that may have shown up at some point in time.
(19:00): Cause we do sometimes need to do some intervention to measures and that's it, but everything around this is when you really live a happy life. When you really operate the building blocks your system. Well, freedom is an inevitable byproduct. You were built for it. It's your birthright. It's the way you were designed. And it's only in misusing that, that we're ending up with all these aberrations. Not because they're diseases, but because that's what you get when you misuse something. If I have a USB stick, I think I've used this example of before. It's a, I can plug it into a computer. There's tons of information on it and there's programs and other things that can be run off of it. And I can experience all kinds of different things. If I take that USB stick and I use it to stir my hot chocolate, it, it works.
(19:45): It really does work for that. There is no doubt that I can stir hot chocolate with a USB stick and that my also prevent me from experiencing everything else that's inside it. I just might miss it. I can use it to as a paper, weight to wake up somebody, if I need to, I can use it as a key chain. People use it like that. I can use it to scratch my leg. I can use it in so many different ways and the same with the human system. Even more infinite possibilities we have within our mind body to experience all kinds of things in life. And if you listen to what everybody on the planet is doing, and all the kinds of experiences that are happening that is clearly evident. But if you pay attention to the design, to how it's made to the way it's most to move and breathe and feel and all those other things, what happens is a whole new world, possibilities and experience opens up.
(20:36): It's not another dimension. It's not some superhuman ability. It's just using it according to design and then something else magical happens. And that's the, that's the case. So that hasn't been happening though, because one, people didn't know how to use it. According to design. And two huge theories have been passed off as truth as fact by larger industries, large they're, they're not doing it maliciously. That's been their experience. I don't think bill w was M at all. I think he was honest with his experience as best he could be. And he kept searching his whole life. But either way, those ideas got imprinted on very, very vulnerable populations, precisely because they're ready for anything that will help them. I certainly believed it for a period for a long period of time, several couple of years, because I thought that it was the, it was the only thing that seemed to make sense of my situation until I really started questioning things.
(21:38): And so we we're down to this idea. Addiction's not really there. So then what the heck is this compulsive use of anything? What is it actually okay. Instead of it being this pet that you always have to live with and you gotta take to the vet and you know, many people get a new dog after they let go of the old one. And that happens so often when people, their identities become wrapped around their pathologies and the things that they're struggling, when that goes away, they don't feel like themselves. And so they end up getting something else. I can't tell you how many dogs my dad has had that doesn't make him a bad person. I can tell you how many I remember him having 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 now. And I remember him saying he wasn't gonna get another one, but they've replaced it since then. And my mom might be an influence.
(22:24): I don't know, good people having a good time. And they, their lives all are really focused around their dogs. They now have a great Dane and her name is violet. And they have the adventures of violet. They had blogs on the last two dogs that they had, who were two standard poodles. And a lot of their life is kind of revolved around this dog. And that doesn't, there's not a bad thing, but what if that dog were a disease, you know, cancer patients, their whole life revolves around that. And they don't have as many options as people who are struggling just with emotions have cuz they have to deal with their emotional stuff and a physical deterioration. That's happening in a world where there aren't that many answers. Most of the answers are chemotherapy. Let's kill everything off in your system and hope it kills off the bad stuff, too antibiotics.
(23:09): You know it most broad spectrum antibiotics kill off a third of your gut bacteria, which makes it hard to make it a place where the bacteria that you need is there to give you the nutrients you want. So all of this stuff is happening and those people, you know, that's the diagnosis they're given is lifelong. Even though many people have come out of cancer without even using chemo and some with using chemotherapy, my dad was one of 'em. And so instead of considering that addiction or compulsion or depression or anxiety or any of these diagnoses, that labels that people give you, what, if we rip the labels off the jar and start actually looking at what's inside, the more you have a label on the jar, the less you can see what's happening. You don't know what's in the jar. It's just a fancy label.
(23:49): If you rip the labels off, admit it's not anxiety you're experiencing, it's a certain breathing pattern. It's a certain tension pattern. It's same with depression, same with addiction. In this moment, I'm experiencing some level of unease UNE, and I'm looking for something to help me feel better. That automatically simplifies the problem. And every compulsion is the same. It doesn't matter if you are a porn user. The only difference with pornography is that there's a lot of morality around it that makes people treat it as if it is the most heinous of all things on the planet. But there are people that use food in similar ways. People that use adventures and similar ways and money in similar ways, and society has certain stigmas around some of these behaviors and they can lead to negative things for sure, but any compulsive behavior is simply not really resolving the issue.
(24:38): So whether it is, it is binge watching YouTube or, or Netflix all the time, not as a conscious choice, but I sat down to, to blow off some steam. And this is what I do to unwind. That's not a conscious choice. That is, I am INE. I need to be UNW well, why did you wind yourself up in the first place? Nobody's taught you how to not live in a wound up way. That's why. And so you're using a mechanism to quote unquote unwind. Instead of, I want to watch this show just for the sheer joy of it just cause I don't need to unwind the, to cope with anything. I just wanna watch this show cuz I'm interested in it. Or I wanna go on this adventure cuz I'm interested in it. Or I want to eat this food because I'm genuinely curious about it.
(25:22): All of those things, conscious choice, not a problem, but it's the compulsiveness. That's the issue. And if you can step set aside all the, well, this one's worse than that one and get rid of the hierarchy and recognize that every single one of those behaviors is just an attempt to handle unease inside of yourself while I'm stressed. While stress is effective. Life that is called making stress into a disease. People have made age into a disease. There's a war on aging for crying out loud. There's a war on obesity. There's a war on drugs that like there's a war on everything. And every time you run a war, it that's not the way to run an economy. That's not the way to run the human system. If you're constantly at war, you, if you're constantly in fight or flight, you cannot regenerate. You cannot grow.
(26:08): You cannot build a flourishing human system, but there's a war on all this stuff. Stress is just a fact of life. No it's not. You just made it into a disease. I'm not talking about physical stresses or pressures on the system that come from engaging with the, the physical world or possible hunger or thirst or things like that. I'm talking about psychological stress. That is not a fact of life. That is a human creation, a possibility you can use the USB stick that way and you can definitely create a lot of stress out of it. You can use a USB to poke your eye B stick, to poke your eye out as well. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best use of that USB stick. And that's what we're doing to ourselves with stress addiction and anxiety and depression and all these things, we're creating it.
(26:48): And then we're telling ourselves it's a fact of life or it's genetic or someone else gave it to me. And I'm a victim of it. That is not the truth. Every single one of these compulsions is simply because we haven't learned to live a life with ease and that teaching you how to live life to where your system is at ease. Imagine if you were fully joyful right now, would you be running around? I've never heard anybody say, man, I feel great. I think I'm gonna go look at some porn because I feel so good. I haven't heard anybody say that. I feel amazing. I feel like I need some drugs to make this even more. No people want it, but because they want their life to be more incredible. There's a judgment of it. There's some kind of unease or DISE or fear of missing out or something.
(27:29): That's making them crave and search for more and they do it with work. They gotta go work more and they gotta achieve more and they gotta make this much money. They do it with everything. So if we step back and go, wow, why haven't you learned to live your life with ease? If, if you would like to learn how to do that, I'm happy to share what I've discovered. I'm happy to share it. I've built programs to do this. We run these incredible retreats that have helped people set down decades of burden that they thought they had to carry. And we'll talk a little bit about more about that next week, which is gonna be a really cool story. But for today, I want you to consider the fact that everything you you're struggling with right now feels like it's one of those unwanted pets.
(28:08): It's not, it's not actually, it doesn't have to stick around for a long time. It's not the real issue. It's not, what's really going on. And if you just focus on the building blocks and working on what's really going on, you'd be surprised how much freedom you get to experience and how quickly it starts to show up and how much more enjoyable life becomes. And that's it for today's alive and free podcast. If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your earbuds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcast from. And while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you. Plus it's just nice to be nice.
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