An Essay on Addiction, Consciousness, and Contemplative Practice
The “God” Word
The “God” word hit me like a punch to the ribs the first time I sat in a 12-step meeting.
I could handle the lingering aroma of burnt coffee, the cheesy slogans, even the bad folding chairs. But God? Mix that with a chart that reads Bipolar I with psychotic features and you’ve got a double shot that burns on the way down.
Here’s the truth: I’ve been the guy who thinks he’s the Holy Spirit having an earthly experience.
I’ve stood outside a local temple at 2 a.m., watching one stubborn light in an upstairs window and deciding the elders were up there gaming out my destiny.
Me and a woman I’d dated twice, cast as married and destined to be future pillars of the church.
That’s not faith. That’s cray.
Recovery taught me to call it what it is: spiritual dehydration.
Just a parched soul chasing mirages to drink from.
So I started small.
One honest breath. One honest step. Less drama.
If God wanted my attention, maybe God wasn’t in the spotlight upstairs.
Maybe God, or call it what you will, wasn’t in the storm of my mind but in the stillness.
The Problem Beneath the Problem
It starts small.
A drink after work. A hit to sleep. A scroll to forget.
At first, it works. The edge softens. The room feels warmer.
Then one night, you see your reflection on a dark screen. It’s tired, haggard, empty.
Addiction doesn’t come roaring in; it whispers.
It rearranges the furniture of your mind until your own thoughts don’t sound like you anymore.
Neuroscience calls it a remapping of the brain’s reward system.
The mesolimbic dopamine circuit, your ‘feel good’ loop, starts chasing counterfeit highs and stops noticing real joy.
The prefrontal cortex, the part that says “wait” or “maybe not,” grows quiet.
Impulse outruns intention.
Doctors can measure it. Therapists can label it.
But the wound goes deeper than wiring.
Your addiction is a hunger. Cheap dopamine highs can’t feed a spiritual homesickness deep in the bloodstream.
When Jung Wrote to Bill W.
Picture a man standing in a Swiss office, hat in hand.
He’s tried everything: treatment, talk, prayer, pretending.
Dr. Carl Jung looks him in the eye and says softly,
“Your only hope now is a spiritual awakening.”
No prescription. No guarantee. Just an invitation into mystery.
The man, Roland H., leaves broken but listening.
He joins the Oxford Group, learns to sit in silence every morning.
Somewhere between surrender and stillness, the bottle stops calling his name.
Years later, Bill Wilson hears the story. He follows the same path.
That spark becomes AA.
Jung later wrote:
“His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, at a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness.”
Spiritus.
Same word for alcohol.
Same word for spirit.
Same thirst. Different well.
Modern brain imaging tells a similar story.
Meditation and prayer reduce activity in the brain’s ‘default mode network,’ the circuit tied to self-talk and ego loops. When it quiets, a person feels connected.
Maybe Jung just didn’t have an fMRI.
In Exile
We all know the ache.
Driving at night with the windows down, a song hits different, not nostalgia, not sadness, just that unnamed ache that says, you’ve been gone too long.
Sometimes the world cracks open, the first laugh of your child, a sunrise that feels like forgiveness, and for a heartbeat, you’re home again.
Then the feeling slips. You chase it. You use whatever tools you have to get it back.
Addiction isn’t rebellion; it’s longing misplaced.
A compass spun by trauma, pointing you back toward numb.
Neuroscience agrees.
Rejection, loss, and loneliness activate the same pain centers as physical injury. The brain literally bleeds in silence.
So we reach for an anesthetic, not because we’re weak, but because pain, spiritual or social, burns like fire.
Counterfeit Gods
The first high feels holy.
The second feels like chasing the ghost of the first.
Every dopamine hit promises peace and delivers panic.
The brain rewires for ‘wanting,’ even after it’s stopped ‘liking.’
You keep coming back, not for joy but for relief from the ache of not having it.
That’s the cruel math of craving.
Meanwhile, the world keeps selling altars: status, followers, success, hustle.
We kneel before screens and call it progress.
But the truth is simple.
Pleasure isn’t the problem.
Mistaking it for peace is.
The Mind’s Unfinished Work
Try sitting still for five minutes.
No phone. No playlist. Just you and your pulse.
The first minute is noise.
The second is panic.
By the third, you meet the wild animal that’s been running your life.
That’s the start of recovery.
Not the meetings or the meds, but the moment you stop running and face the noise head-on.
Science calls this neuroplasticity.
Long-term mindfulness practice thickens the cortex in regions tied to awareness and emotion regulation — the prefrontal and insular areas.
Every breath is a rep. Every pause, a rewiring.
Stillness becomes rehab for the soul.
Between two thoughts, a gap opens.
Inside that gap, peace breathes.
That’s the awakening Jung meant, not robes or incense, just raw presence.
Recovery as Consciousness Training
The old hustle is escape.
The new one is endurance.
People swap vices like shoes: alcohol for control, pills for performance, relationships for distraction.
The hunger moves. It doesn’t heal.
Contemplative practice flips the script.
You don’t numb the pain; you study it.
You learn its accent, its shape, its origin story.
You stop confusing discomfort with danger.
Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention has data to back that up.
In studies, it reduces craving and relapse by reshaping cue-reactivity — the brain’s automatic response to triggers — and strengthening top-down control.
That’s not miracle talk. That’s training, mental muscle forged in silence.
The Bigger Truth
Most folks think addicts are the exception.
They’re not. They’re just the ones who ran out of ways to hide.
The rest of us binge on busyness.
We call it ambition, but it’s the same loop: stimulus, relief, repeat.
Behavioral science calls it the hedonic treadmill. Each reward resets the bar, pushing us to chase more and feel less.
Mindfulness breaks that loop by teaching us to enjoy simplicity again: the taste of a strawberry, the weight of sunlight, the sound of breath.
The path home isn’t up or out.
It’s in.
And it’s narrow, but it’s honest.
The Mind Hustle
Here’s the thing no one prints on recovery T-shirts.
Peace takes practice.
You show up. You breathe. You fail. You show up again.
You sit through the noise until it breaks.
The body learns too.
Mindfulness training raises heart-rate variability — a measure of resilience, adaptability, and parasympathetic balance.
Peace stops being an idea. It becomes a pulse.
The Mind Hustle isn’t about chasing spirit through a bottle.
It’s about finding it between two breaths.
Not running from pain, but walking through it, slowly, awake, unarmed.
That’s where the healing begins.
Recovery Rule
Addiction is a mistaken search for the divine.
Recovery is remembering you already are.
References
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