Our heart chakra is our centre of love and compassion- both for ourselves and others.
This heart energy can relate to sexual love, but it also relates to all the other ways that we feel love and compassion, for our children, for the earth and all her creatures and beings.
Addictive behaviours are often misunderstood as lifestyle choices, which are willingly entered into, and by the same token, can be stopped by force of our will. This is partly true, but once in the grip of an addiction, whether it is to drugs, alcohol, gambling, cannabis, or whether it is an eating disorder- which have some similarities to addictions, it is a choice and a spiritual path out of them.
Often addictions or eating disorders arise at a time of high stress in life, whether this stress is fully realised and perceived at the time or not- and they serve to ‘medicate’ or remove the self- temporarily from mentalising about the stress. The relief that they provide as the substance or behaviour is used more to cope with stress can become habit-forming, and we may feel we have less and less choice about whether we do that thing, and the servant may become the master as we lose control over that aspect of our lives.
Addictions or eating disorders eventually lead to considerable mental and physical distress, and this may extend from us out into our immediate family and circle of friends and colleagues or wider society. We may feel a lot of guilt and shame about our behaviour, and at a loss to find our way out of them- a process that may end up taking a number of years to recover from.
Addiction recovery is a journey- not a sprint. We don’t suddenly wake up one day, for example, with no cravings for the addicting substance or behaviour, or from an eating disorder with a perfectly healthy attitude to our body-minds and relationship to food.
We also feel what I would call ‘natural shame’ (as opposed to ‘toxic shame’ put upon us by others. Natural shame happens when we do something that goes against our interests of the heart- taking good care of our bodies and boundaries of intimate processes such as sex, birth, excretory functions, and in some cultures, nudity. So in our addicted / eating disordered behaviours, we can feel compelled to act in a way that we know is unhealthy for us. But even after we have changed our behaviour, our mindset may still be locked in feeling shame about it.
One of the important aspects of recovery is forgiveness. We need to be able to forgive ourselves for getting trapped in the addiction in the first place, for what we may have done as a result of the addiction or eating disorder. This relates not only to others, but we have to forgive ourselves for the harm done to our bodies and any perceived damage we have done to our life’s journey. We can come to the awareness that we did the best we could at the time, given the information, opportunities, life circumstances, mental health and choices we saw at the time.
Forgiveness is a way of putting in the past, moving on, ending that chapter of our lives, and we cannot truly move on if our mind is still attached to berating us for the addiction, its long term effects and so on.
Our mind may become stuck in these stories.
Cacao allows us to open our hearts to ourselves and our self-compassion, and quiet the workings of the mind that might tell us we are guilty, and should feel ashamed. Plant spirit medicine work also helps to release from the body energy that can not necessarily be released in talk-therapy, that blocks the flow in our emotional and spiritual bodies.
I am drawn to offer this work through my work in psychotherapy with drug, alcohol and gambling addiction and eating disorders recovery work.
I offer them as small group ceremonies but they can also be one to one sessions if you feel you would like to work in more depth, or would like the privacy of talking about what you want to let go of without being witnessed by anyone else.
