Takeaways & Reflections | The Energy of Addiction

SHOW NOTES SUMMARY: 

Addiction isn’t just applicable to a substance use disorder. Often the anxiousness of learning to live life as a griever can lead to overdoing, busyness, workaholism, etc. We can become addicted to being busy in an effort to avoid feeling our feelings.  “Keeping Busy” is actually one of the 6 Myths of Grief.

In this week’s Takeaways & Reflections episode, I reflect on alcohol and the other ways addiction may be impacting life as a griever. I also dig deeper into the energetics of addiction and emotions; sharing about a healing modality in which I recently got trained, too.

Shame and guilt are often two emotions associated with addictions of any kind. Participating in behaviors that are used in an effort to avoid only exasperating the guilt and shame that already existed. This cycle continues and makes it that much more difficult to get out of the pattern of addiction.

Of course, addiction can become a mental health disorder; however, an important question to ask anyone who is struggling with addiction of any kind is: “What happened to you?” The origin of addiction often can be traced to something that happened, a circumstance, or a situation the person was exposed to long-term. And for so many, memories of pain often stem from childhood.

To break the patterns and cycle of addiction, one must be honest with themselves and others, expose the shame and guilt for what it is so the emotion loses its power and grip, and take positive action with support.

If you are struggling with addiction, substance use disorder, or another mental health challenge, I’ve recently added a “Mental Health” resources tab on my website. If you are a Military, Veteran, or First Responder, there’s a section just for you as well.

RESOURCES:

• Book, Tuning the Human Biofield: Healing with Vibrational Sound Therapy
• Book, Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior
• Biofield Tuning
• Interested in Biofield Tuning, Email: victoria [at] theunleashedheart [dot] com
• Ep 6 | The Manifestation of Grief

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NEED HELP?

• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
• Crisis Text Line provides free, 24/7 support via text message. Text HOME to 741741 to connect with a trained Crisis Counselor

If you or anyone you know is struggling with grief, substance use disorders, or a mental health challenge, free resources are available HERE and HERE.

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The Energy of Addiction

Looking at using alcohol in my early 20s as a way to cope and numb out and band-aid my emotional pain. But we don’t typically connect the dots of our present-day experience, to grief and to trauma, and things that we’ve experienced, likely as children, we really don’t think about either the environment that we grew up in as being the catalyst for our behavior as adults, which our childhood environments directly impact our belief system and how we cope with adult life. And we learned from our parents how to do that. And it can be unhealthy, or it can be healthy. But for the mass majority of us, our parents did not receive healthy coping skills, either. And so these patterns and the cycles of unhealthy coping continue through the ages, through lineages through generations. Today, I’m also going to dig deeper into the energy aspect of addiction. And that will be the focus of today because it’s really important that we look at our emotional and physical bodies as it pertains to energy as an energetic beings we are energetic beings.

Healing Modality Training “Biofield Tuning”

Recently, I completed a new healing modality training called biofield tuning. And so this episode is very timely in what I’ve been learning about energy, and particularly are biofield or the energy that extends five to six feet all the way around us. And it’s like this toroidal shape. So if you were to slice an apple in half that is what our energy fields are biofield looks like. And we have this earth energy that’s below our feet that helps us to stay grounded and feel grounded and connected to the earth energy. And we have this energy center at the top of our crown that connects us to the sun’s energy and is all about our relationship to time in nature. And connecting to this power source, the positive power source, whereas you the earth energy is this negative terminal. And so if we think about ourselves like a battery, that’s essentially what I’m saying here is that we are like a battery. And just like you plug in an electric car or any device to charge, or you have to charge your battery on your car, there’s a positive and negative terminal.

Our bodies are energetic bodies or act in the same way. And so if we are not grounded and are not centered, this energy flow that goes all the way down the center of our bodies that down our spine are meridian. And if this is all new or unfamiliar to you, I’ll just briefly explain what these points are down in Meridian and they’re called the chakras and at the Root Chakra. That is where the base of our spine is the root chakra. Moving up, the next point is the sacral chakra, which is a few fingers below the navel. The next chakra up is just a few fingers above the navel is the solar chakra or the solar plexus. The next chakra up is the heart chakra, then the throat chakra. The third eye chakra is above the brow, and then the crown chakra is above your head. And so we have these chakra points all the way down in Meridian, but we also have chakras in our hands. And our feet are like her ankles, knees. In other points, we call them half steps in biofield tuning. And so that’s what we are looking at and addressing when we are giving a biofield tuning session. 

What is Biofield Tuning?

The term biofield actually refers to our body’s electrical system in its entirety. So as I kind of described earlier, it’s both the electrical current that runs through our bodies and also the magnetic field that surrounds it, that toroidal shape that I had mentioned biofield tuning. It’s a sound therapy method that works directly with the system as it’s connected with our conscious and subconscious minds, including our memories, and the theory of it is that our memories aren’t actually stored in our minds. They’re stored in our biofield and the biofield informs the body and the body informs the biofield. So all physical, mental, and emotional disorders can be perceived as dissonance in our electrical system.

Biofield tuning is able to locate, diminish and resolve this dissonance and in doing so alleviate and even eradicate the corresponding physical, mental, and or emotional symptoms like Reiki energy healing. Biofield tuning sessions can also be conducted from a distance. So during a session, if it’s in person or otherwise, the client is fully clothed on a treatment table or comfortably in their bed or in their chair. And the practitioner activates a tuning fork and scans the biofield slowly beginning from about six feet away because as I mentioned, our biofields extend five to six feet out from our physical bodies, what we’re actually listening for or feeling for is this resistance or turbulence in the biofield we’re listening for a change in the overtones and undertones of the tuning for and when we encounter a turbulent area, we continue to activate the tuning fork and hold it in that specific spot. And research suggests that the body’s organizing intelligence uses the steady coherent vibrational frequency of the tuning fork to literally tune itself just as we tune a piano or tune a guitar. So the dissonance resolves in the sense of resistance gives way. And this appears to correspond to the release of tension within the body. So people relax, they breathe more freely in the body enters into an increased flow state and that’s where the energy is actually flowing and moving where the body can function at its optimum.

As a result, clients often report that they have they feel lighter, they’re able to breathe more freely, and have a diminishment or resolution of their symptoms. If you’re familiar with other energy work or other healing modalities this might sound like it’s somewhat of a targeted nervous system, biofeedback, and the founder Eileen McKusick has come to see this process as consciousness hacking. It’s almost like a side door entry into the psyche working with what has been hidden in plain view, which assists people in making changes they otherwise could not on their own. Some conditions do respond very well to biofield tuning and others do not so much. But with these tools in our toolbox and practitioners who are sharing this with clients, we are increasing our voltage. We are increasing our body’s voltage as we do this work and as we address our energetic bodies, and so if we can clear that dissonance in our bio-field which informs the physical body, imagine how much better you can feel. Imagine the problems that you can solve just by laying on a bed or on a practitioner’s table. So I do encourage you to look into this more I will put a link to it in the show notes. I don’t have this just yet as of this recording on my website, but I do offer Reiki energy healing, I will be offering this soon to the masses. So stay on the lookout on my website if you are interested or reach out and I can connect with you once I get everything up and running. I do highly recommend the book tuning in the human biofield. It’s written by Eileen day, McKusick, the founder of biofield tuning.

The Energy of Addiction and Emotion

When we speak to the energy of addiction and emotion, any emotion we repress will suck a lot of juice out of us depleting energy from our body systems. And there is the energy of the emotion itself. And then there is the energy required to keep it repressed, right, it takes a lot of work to repress our emotions. And we often create these energetic walls, which appear to be like these high energy frequency barriers that block the perception of the conscious mind, from even going to that place, going to that emotional place. And so when we use sound, to deconstruct those constructs, and to free up that energy, and then we give it back to the system as a whole, we suddenly have reserves of energy that we didn’t have before to get things done. This is where often so many clients will report feeling not just lighter but have more energy, some people can experience some detox-like symptoms, like headaches or fatigue initially, and things like that in the first day or two. But that’s a good thing. Because detoxing is is good, it’s out rather than in we, you know, we want that stuff to come out rather than staying in.

And so once we’re moving that energy, and it’s coming out, that’s a good sign. That means the energies moving we’re getting clearing up those dissonances in our biofields. And so with substance use disorders and alcohol and things like that guilt and shame are often a huge aspect of addiction. The right side of the second chakra, which is the sacral chakra speaks of guilt and shame, guilt and shame are similar, but they are different. And the simplest distinction is reflected for guilt is I did something bad. Whereas shame says, I am bad. There’s a psychiatrist named David Hawkins. And in his book power versus force, he says that of all the possible human emotions shame is the heaviest and it’s the lowest on the frequency scale. Shame is a very difficult emotion to feel because it feels so terrible. 

And so what a lot of people do instead of feeling that is we repress it, and then we displace it onto others through finger-pointing and blaming and blaming other people instead of feeling shame is a very common phenomenon, particularly among alcoholics. And there tends to be a lot of repressed emotions in that sacral chakra that second chakra, and it’s not uncommon to be jam-packed with a lot of stuff. But the root chakra and the second chakra are very much connected, everything is connected, but they tend to couple each other. So the result is either guilt and shame, driven, overdoing or frustrated nondoing, or a pattern of going back and forth between the two. Either way, people generally accumulate heavy imbalances in these parts of their biofield and these energy centers and because everything is connected, we can’t ignore the third chakra or the solar plexus when it comes to substance use.

Eileen’s Book Tuning the Human Biofield

‘I’m going to read a little excerpt from Eileen’s book tuning the human biofield because I think there is a very important aspect here and maybe, particularly for men but not always, but the right side of the third chakra relates to the father and one’s relationship with father and also to the emotion of anger and the liver stores and metabolizes anger. So many people who have had or still have a difficult relationship with their fathers, whether they’re a stepfather adopted father, or grandfather have a tendency to repress the difficult feelings associated with this by engaging in the consumption of what Eileen calls liver, pacifiers, such as sugar, excessive amounts of carbs, alcohol, chocolate, and dense dairy products, such as ice cream or cheese. And obviously, in small amounts, these substances are fine, but in excess, they have the effect of dampening or even eliminating our experience of anger, the angry drunk she calls it would be an exception to this. Eileen had discovered that there seemed to have been more father issues with clients than mother issues, and a lot of the fathers had been alcoholics or rageaholics or workaholics, emotionally unavailable in prison, or just not around or otherwise present to their child’s needs, and she adds the fundamental things that people seem to need from their fathers. acknowledgment, approval, and affection are rarely if ever received and this seems to give rise to some real problems for people now she’s not talking about she’s talking about people seeking help and dealing with issues not necessarily the population at large.

But in the absence of the reflection of our own inner brilliance that a healthy relationship with one’s father can provide. Many people end up unconsciously seeking to get these needs met as they go through their lives engaging in guilt-driven overdoing, experiencing feelings of low self-worth seeking approval, and routinely putting others’ needs ahead of their own. She adds that in Chinese medicine, the liver is seen as the general in the army, that is the body is responsible for overseeing all operations and pays attention to digestion, respiration, circulation, subtle energy flow, elimination, the immune function, and probably more also in Chinese medicine. It is said that the liver opens to the eyes and we say that the eyes are the windows to the soul. It is also the organ of discernment, it decides what in the self needs to be recycled, and what is to be disposed of. In her book, she also speaks of a term she coined purple washing, describing the tendency people have to gloss over, repress or deny uncomfortable emotions, usually by spiritualizing the situation or by being nice about it, and that’s an air quote. I’m going to read an excerpt from her book, where she describes what emotion is, and she says it’s an electoral chemical event in any emotion that is repressed or denied is repression and denial of one’s life force.

Neurologist Candace Pert has shown that different emotions have different chemical compositions. And when we experience any of these emotions, their vibrational and chemical counterparts are generated and circulate in our body. When any emotion goes unexpressed or unrecognized the body does not digest or recycle it, it stores it or as part says, emotions are buried alive, and never die, emotions always find a way of expressing themselves. What this means is that the energy of our emotions is always trying to be heard and expressed in some way, like anything buried alive might, if we don’t recognize them for what they are and find healthy ways to express them, they will find a way to express themselves anyway, in sickness or disease, tumultuous life situations, or eventual mental or emotional breakdowns, and quote, and I speak a lot to this in Grief Recovery.

Biofield Tuning along with Grief Recovery It’s Transformational

We talk a lot about this we call them stirpes, short-term energy relieving behaviors, and we speak to the energy of the feelings that we hold in and repress and bury Grief Recovery is all about giving those emotions and those feelings of voice and biofield tuning is really addressing the event itself in an energetic level. And so I really feel like biofield tuning along with Grief Recovery, man, it’s transformational. And it has been transformational for me. Biofield tuning has helped me to understand the energy that is really stored in my own field when you see someone or you’re around someone, and you just feel like they give you a vibe like you just get maybe icky vibes from that person, your energy field, your biofield is kind of bumping up against if your antenna is sharp, and you’re tuned in to your antenna, you will pick up on what that person’s energy is trying to tell your energy, it’s your energy field, reading their energy field, we just don’t pay attention to that our antennas up but it’s discombobulated. And it’s got this film of yucky stuff on it. Because we are so disconnected and disassociated from our own bodies. We’re not even in our own bodies, because we’re so overwhelmed with emotion. And we’re using coping skills that are harmful, such as alcohol or other substances, and behaviors that only lead to more shame and guilt and all those in more emotions that just really exasperate and repeat the cycle. This is why it’s so difficult to get out of these patterns of behavior of addiction because the cycle just repeats itself over and over and over until you address the emotion itself. Read it, get it from the root and pull it out. That’s the only way the only way is it out is through just like the buffalo in a store.

A Lot of Things Can Be An Addiction

You can gambling shopping, again, refers back to the STERBS (short-term energy relieving behaviors) and I’m gonna link to the show notes in that episode where I talk about that but you can also have an addiction to doing this is probably more like me in different phases of my life where I’m overworking over busyness, which can be an addiction and it looks good. Right from the outside. It looks really good. You’re getting things done. You’re impressing people, and you’re keeping up with them but it’s I’m also handy because you don’t even need any substance, right? You don’t have to have wine or chocolate in the house, there’s no end to the ways that you can go off the rails with busyness I’m particularly prone to like I have a busy mind, I have a very busy mind. And I like the stimulation of the mind. And so it’s not a challenge for me to like, stop and pause. I meditate every morning and can really have swathes of inner peace, like noticeable feelings of inner peace within me, but my energy comes in bursts as well. But for someone who is doing in constantly doing it in order to not address their emotion, not to feel what they’re avoiding to feel that’s addiction. And when you’re so busy doing for everyone else, you’re not doing the things that matter, you’re not going to get your art or your music or your poetry is written your walks in nature, or even launched with your friends in liens, another book, Electric Body Electric House, she talks a lot about this, if you’re avoiding doing things that you enjoy, because you’re busy, because you’re busy doing other things you’re busy doing for everybody else, you get into this martyr, drudgery. She calls it the drone of must get everything done. And we don’t ask for help. And she calls this the doing virus and it has this isolating effect that makes it difficult for us to connect, and receive and especially in grief.

Actually, that’s one of the myths of grief is to keep busy. That’s so unhelpful when if you know someone grieving, don’t tell them to keep busy, that is not helpful. That is not doing them any favors. This ties into exactly what I’m talking about. It’s that propensity to keep busy in order to avoid the strong emotion that doesn’t serve someone from moving forward in their lives. Some people use alcohol, some people use food, but a lot of people in our culture use motion. We keep going so that our emotions never have a chance to settle. She goes on to say as long as you’re listening to the voice in your head and manically trying to make your way through the bottomless to-do lists. You don’t have to listen to the sound of your own pain. She adds a hyperactive mental body overrides the emotional body. This is a huge part of why people spin out in their heads. Many bodyworkers have noted a correlation between the right hip and the left shoulder the right hip imbalances of overthinking and overdoing are often the counterpoint to the issues of the left side of the heart chakra, which is where we hold unprocessed sadness, loss, and grief. She goes on to say when you start to quiet the mind and slow the busyness down, the feelings you’ve been avoiding will come up. And that’s a good thing. Because those emotions are stuck energy that’s creating resistance and drag in your field, your mind, and your life. It can be uncomfortable, and it does take a little time to settle back to neutral. But as you move through your own emotional backlog, you liberate a huge amount of your own potential you free up energy to be expressed in creative and fun and pleasurable ways you start to return to the juiciness and magic and depth of the moment that you are you were missing out on when you had the right side of your field all scrunched up in a bunch and quote, I absolutely love that because it really does truly speak to everything that we talk about. I talk about when it comes to Grief Recovery when it comes to our emotions and the energy that we contain within us that is stuck. That’s not going anywhere. It’s not being utilized. It’s stagnant.

When I Saw My Own Potential

And when I talk about my personal story about when I had finally addressed my grief when I addressed my emotional body and I addressed it and released it and that energy started to flow man I saw the potential I saw my own potential. I speak about that a lot at you see opportunity where you instead of lab you see your own potential where you would before say I can’t do that I don’t want to do that that resistance would come up so much resistance and I can spot my own resistance a mile away right now. In fact, my next newsletter is all about resistance because I’ve been resisting something. And that’s a video and I’m hoping to I mean I have a challenge right now to change that to show up on video more but we have to address our emotional bodies. And this is the thing if this message today gives you anything I hope it gives you hope itself that once you look at yourself as an electrical being there is nothing you cannot do or accomplish in your life. If you address your emotional body and the electrical stagnancy the stuck energy that is in your field and within your body because when we untangle that and clear up that dissonance it’s an amazing feeling. 

My friend, I’ve personally experienced it I’m seeing my clients experiencing it. I’ve had to do a lot of I’ve done a lot of sessions with biofield tuning, incorporating Reiki and biofield tuning. As I’ve been learning and growing in this new modality I’m bringing to my clients and they’ve all loved it. They appreciate it so much because I don’t think I’ve had a client yet that hasn’t said they haven’t had more energy than I was actually using, there’s a new fork that I have that Eileen just recently came out with.

The 144 hertz

It’s the 144 hertz and its kind of like our belt sander of tuning forks, it gets to the nitty-gritty, and it digs deep. It’s the emotional grinder, and I was using it on my husband, which it should not be used if you’ve only had, shouldn’t be used on your first session. And it wasn’t but she calls it also the spring cleaning tuning fork and I kid you not the next morning after I used it the night before and my husband the next morning, the very next morning, I got out of bed at eight o’clock in the morning, I am not sitting on the couch, enjoying a cup of coffee and watching CBS Sunday Morning like I normally would. That’s been my routine for years. Like that’s my time I am cleaning, I put on some hip hop music and 90s Hip Hop 80s music and I started cleaning and I clean for the next seven hours straight and I’m talking deep cleaning, I scrub down like the kitchen cupboards, I went to town on deep cleaning my house, that has never happened, especially on a Sunday morning.

So it really truly is the spring cleaning fork. And I’m not the only person that’s reported that after using this fork, she said that herself. And actually, I was like halfway around my kitchen cupboards, scrubbing them down. And I thought I think she mentioned that this is the spring cleaning fork. And I actually had to go look for that where she said that. And she had shared that actually in our Facebook group, because I thought it was in the fork description, but it’s not she had shared it in the Facebook group. And I thought well, I’ll be darned. So this is amazing work, this energy work that is available to you. If you are struggling today, I encourage you to find a biofield tuning practitioner near you or reach out to me and we can set something up. But I’ve seen such fantastic results with this modality and I have no doubts, it will help you no doubts, you know, a lot of people are not ready for the really, really deep emotional stuff that comes with Grief Recovery. And I get that but with biofield tuning. It’s almost like this baby step. It’s just a baby step. And when you’re ready to really dig deep, then you can go into Grief Recovery. So I’m really excited to bring biofield tuning as another tool in my toolbox to my clients, whether it be addiction or trauma or just needing a reset to our adrenals because that’s actually something I can do as well.

P.S It’s there’s something called an adrenal rhythm reset, which is all about your adrenals because in our society today in our Western culture, it’s always like doo doo doo doo doo right and our adrenals get burned out and fried, which affects our thyroid, which no surprise thyroid medication is the number one prescribed medication in the United States today. Why is that? Because we are burning out we have so many things coming into our biofields, our systems from external influence, social media, the news, and so many toxins that are coming at us every single day in the homes in which we live neighborhoods or the environments. it’s really fascinating work again, checkout islands book, I’m going to put both books I’m going to put the links in the show notes and check out biofield tuning and reach out to me through my website.

If you want to hop on a session when I finally get it up, I can let you know. And check out episode 101 with Drew because we both talk about how our grief in childhood really did lead us down a path of using alcohol to cope. So whether it’s alcohol or shopping, or it’s food for you. I think this episode will be helpful and I hope this one was so please hold on to hope. Hold on to hope it’s there. And your actions today will determine what your future looks like. So I encourage you to take action today just a small action read her book checkout biofield tuning do something today to learn more about your energy field learn more about your emotional energy body and what your emotions are trying to tell you there is an alert system. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you found this helpful. And if you did, please share it subscribe, or leave a review. And remember when you unleash your heart you unleash your life much love.