Aliveness Is the Antithesis of Addiction.
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It is said that addiction is the opposite of connection. That we are so isolated and disconnected that it is a cause of addiction.
And trauma, which is what creates disconnection in the first place — disconnection from self, Self, Spirit, the Mother function and a trust in love and life.
We can be addicted to disconnection too. Isn’t that what we are doing when we dive into the bardo of our phones? But I digress.
When I explored this for myself early in my healing process, I found that it wasn’t really just connection that helped me, but that I needed loving connection.
Loving connection with myself, with the Divine, with other people who saw me, recognized me and supported me to love myself. And, sadly, when we are in our lowest and darkest, the places available tend to reflect to us our illness, our pathology and frankly, connection based in shame actually made me want to sink deeper into my addiction consciousness than get out of it.
I ended up sitting in Nature for days and weeks on end. By myself, asking Nature to help me heal my relationship to Her — She who has been all but cut out of culture of the Western world.
What I discovered was that for me, my addiction was the opposite of aliveness. It was the opposite of trusting the life force energy of my own soul. Of being in the flow of my genius, the daemon of seeing, knowing, creating and writing. It was the opposite of the nourishing, wise voice in me that guides my purpose, flourishing and work in the world.
It was the opposite of union with myself. It was me stuck in the crossroads of death and life, trying to free myself with personal growth tools and spiritual identities that didn’t work and I didn’t get why. I thought I was broken. So, I spent a lot of time praying, asking, listening and grieving. So much grieving. Something I’d been afraid to do and felt it hard to find support for.
Grieving brought me back to life.
If we look at the archetypal energy of addiction and the shadow of the Mother, it brings us straight into the crossroads of transition where we encounter the Crone, Kali, the energy of transformation that is the initiation of rebirth. Energies we are taught to fear.
Rebirth requires a sacrifice, a death of the old ways, the past, the ego, the patterns, the shedding of skins, grieving the traumas and releasing energies in order to walk through the fire into a new relationship with life.
This is a natural component of being human.
If we are in the flow of life, engaged with our own life force and creating and really living, we find that we go through these crossroads all the time — in the creative process, in the healing process, in the everyday process of building our lives. Everything is built, destroyed, renewed, built again, and on and on.
This is the function of an aspect of the Divine Mother function we can tap into.
She is the flow of nature. The very quality of nature we are nourished from the most is that she thrives. This is the essential balance and quality of nature, her dance with eros and the interconenctedness of all the things, including the ebb and flow of life, for the sake of flourishing.
For me, addiction has been the complete opposite of this. It was staying stuck at the crossroads. Trying to fix the past, change without really changing, create without new energy, fear of life, distrusting my own life force energy or the capacity of life to regenerate itself into anything new, life-affirming, good, loving or safe.
It was the utter fear of leaving behind what wasn’t working, because if I did, that meant it was gone forever and I just didn’t trust that something better could be or that I could be anything other than what I knew myself to be. This is often why we stay stuck in things we know are bad for us.
Trauma and addiction consciousness keeps our nervous system only knowing one kind of reality is possible, no matter how much we could imagine differently.
When we surrender ourselves to the flow of life, we have to heal our nervous system and tend to all the things that love brings up in us so that we experience a deeper well-being in our own skins.
Because, in the consciousness of addiction, we can still live in the energy of it through connecting with life through our trauma, shame, or bonding through our commonality of illness and lack of aliveness that continues to breed more of the same thing.
Staying stuck in the crossroads invokes the death mother songs.
The pull of stagnation, death mother as addiction herself, truly becomes the crossroads of life and death. And, anyone who has seriously recovered, as I have, knows this place of life and death, that hovering there makes it harder to let go, to surrender, and often we meet Kali at the rock bottom who throws us into the fire if we are not willing to go.
The opposite of addiction is aliveness. It is love. It is embodiment. It is surrender to the Divine Feminine energy of constant rebirth and transformation, not the kind I have to force, but the kind that happens naturally when I open my heart to life. It is the freedom from trauma loops.
It is mothering ourselves well. It is restoring the Mother function within, helping to heal the Mother function of this world disconnected from her and feeding off empty, mother-like energies.
It is seeing creativity as a path of aliveness and spiritual freedom. It is self-love. It is adventure. It is grieving and letting go, and trusting that the only constant in life — change — is ultimately the most trustable thing when we align ourselves with our true essence.
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Dr. Mia Hetenyi is a psychospiritual healer, soul mentor and writer. She has carved out her own path based on 20+ years of clinical experience and an equal amount of time studying and practicing Buddhism, yoga, meditation, shamanic healing, ritual and energy healing. After recovering herself from addiction and experiencing an awakening to her soul, she fused her knowledge of psychology and trauma with both her studied and lived experience of shamanic and Buddhist healing modalities, creating an innovative approach to healing the soul wound at the root of so much addiction, shame and ongoing trauma. You can follow Dr. Hetenyi on Instagram and find out more about her work on her website.
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