Have I ever sat down and wondered how the effects of addiction have manifested in me – physically and mentally? There may be a number of effects of addiction : apathy, a draining of internal resources, health, (for example diabetes), a lack of motivation, a lack of commitment, a lack of grit. Have I become socially withdrawn, introverted, emotionally numb, hypervigilant or distracted ? Am I unable to be present in my life ? What solutions have I looked at to manage the effects of my addiction ? Have I looked at Rational Emotive Therapy (RET), spiritual solutions, have I asked for help ? The be ..read more

4. Self-centrredness How does the self-centred part of my disease affect my life and the lives of those around me? Selfishness, the centre of it all The cure for selfishness More concerned with my loss than a tual being Allowing the ebb & flow or what is real Am I giving because at some point I would like to receive? How unaware am I of the impact i have on others or more concerned with my hurt ..read more

COGNATIVE DISSONANCE is justifying why I’ve made the choices I have. Explaining away any doubt, when I don’t even fully believe myself. This explanation is a radically over simplified and I got into much more detail in this podcast. I draw on parallels, using examples from the not too distant political past and doomsday cults. We are aware of many of our biases but we still fall into traps. I hope you enjoy this podcast. This podcast was recorded as a series of lectures given to people in 12 step addiction recovery treatment. The purpose of these talks was to teach and motivate individuals to ..read more

What Are My Priorities? Do I know what my priorities are? How much time do we spend doing the things we love and how much time do we think about the things we want to get to but aren’t that high up the list. Perhaps we want to get that degree or get to the gym but its just not that import. Then we have the things we are passionate about. We spare no expense and will willingly sacrifice time to get to these things. Whether it be playing music or computer games to doing volunteer work. Just how do we reconcile these two? In this podcast I look at motivation and how to use motivation. Just how im ..read more

# 23 Fear Of The Dark Fear of the dark. We have a long relationship with the dark any many people have used this fear to their advantage. It’s important because it can give us some perspective over how much control we have over our mind, versus how much of what we do is based on our genetic coding. There is a field of study that has looked at how much of our behaviour and actions are directly tied to our genes. This is important if you suffer with any addiction, whether its food, sex, alcohol or drugs. Are we able to win the war against our base natures or are we doomed to suffer eternally? Th ..read more

You have to earn your serenity. It would seem that we can be as surrendered as we like and willing to accept our consequences, this doesn’t exempt us from the stress and anxiety though. The real deal is learning to live with our consequences and that is no easy task. Doesn’t matter who you are, you are going to face challenges that take you to your darkest fears, it seems unavoidable. When talking about spiritual solutions, what I refer to is our spirit. How is your spirit? What about the times you feel worn down with the weight of the challenges you have to bear and bear them you must? The ul ..read more

Faced with no options, where do we turn? If your life is going to pieces and you are doing everything right and what you are experiencing shouldn’t be happening, how do you survive? As a person who has experienced therapist or executive burnout, it can be a total nightmare. It feels like you might just loose it completely. No matter where I looked there where no answers and I felt total alone. I had no idea what to do. I didn’t want to use chemical, my experience being they don’t work. The ultimate sacrifice wasn’t an option because over a period of many years, I had begun to love my family an ..read more

In this episode of the podcast I discuss the idea of effective practice. Everybody loves and winner and we all like to think that people become talented because they are born that way. Sure there is an element of winning the genetic lottery. Research is showing though, that peak performance can be earned. Hard work in isolation is not enough. There needs to be more & science is showing us how. Whether it be a chess grand master or a virtuoso musician, there are basic similarities in the way extra-ordinary performance is achieved. This is of particular interest if you are trying to manage y ..read more

Mental Recovery In general, we have a tendency to make a lot of assumptions about a variety of issues. We think we know all there is to know about using drugs or how our minds work. This couldn’t be further from the truth. We might know certain aspects of various subjects but unless we really apply ourselves to discovery, these can be very biased to reinforcing what we already believe. Using the experiences of freediving as a metaphor, I look at how closely it parallels mental processes and recovery from entrenched belief systems. How placing ourselves in hostile environments impacts on our su ..read more

Physical & Emotional Comfort The way we approach our physical comfort and the way we approach our emotional comfort are remarkably similar. When things get a bit uncomfortable, we try our very best to avoid them. This can be a surprisingly unhelpful idea. If we look at the physical side of thing, because emotions can be so hard to work with, we can see certain patterns. If its to cold we hurry out of the cold and put the heater on. If we feel a tinge of hunger, we eat something. The list is endless and we find ourselves in a kind of homeostasis zone or comfort zone. We become emotionally b ..read more