Close your eyes and relax your body. Remember a time when you were very happy, when you felt absolutely great! Actually step into the experience and feel the feelings that you actually felt at that time. Remember as many details as possible and feel the experience as vividly as possible. Now make a fist with your right hand and squeeze it tight at the height of your good memories. Already you are feeling better, but you can feel even better. Now remember an experience of being intensely, but pleasantly intoxicated. Again actually relive the experience with as many details and feelings as you can remember. Actually be there. Feel the change in your body and emotions. At the height of the sensations, again squeeze your right fist tightly. Now relax your fist and come back to normal awareness. Wait until you have completedy returned to your usual state. Then without closing your eyes or relaxing, squeexe your right fist again. Notice the effect. If you can feel that good just by squeezing your right fist, and that's only the beginning of what you can do, why would you spend all that money and take all that risk to use drugs, alcohol or food to do the same thing?

You are trapped by addiction when you believeyour desire is absolutely necessary for your happinessand you can't imagine being happy without it. So, when you don't have it, you suffer. Most of this suffering can be eliminated through awareness, letting go and reprogramming your beliefs. Usually being addicted to something originally had some sort of positive intention behind it. You wanted to get loved and accepted, fed, relaxed, rested, or relieved of pain and chose a way to do it that seemed to work. But when it worked, you then wanted to get more of it and the behavior that produced the pleasure or relieved the pain became a habit. Pretty soon you developed the belief that that was the only way to fulfill your desire, and you were hooked.

In order to get free of your addiction, you need to honor your original intention to feel good. Its not the intention that doesn't work for you, its the negative consquences of the method you use to satisfy your desires. If you want to feel pleasureably fed, but you only feel satisfied when you eat chocolate, and chocolate makes you overweight and gives you acne, that's a harmful addiction. You must find other ways to feel just as good by eating something that gives you a similar feeling without the negative consequences. This idea is why diet soda is so popular. It supposedly eliminates the negative consequences of eating sugar, while preserving the satisfaction of the original addiction to the sweet taste and stimulation of caffeine. A better way is to try a variety of more healthful foods which may substitute for the addictive food, like carob powder instead of chocolate, or natural sweeteners instead of white sugar. What is even better is to find out what the feeling of eating chocolate is a substitute for, like being loved or accepted, and try to incorporate more of the real thing in your life. If that isn't possible, or would lead to another addiction, then try to generate the state you desire internally through memory, visualization, guided imagery and meditation as above. These processes will also tend to help your desired state to manifest more easily in the outer world, if that is where you would enjoy it more. If you can go back to the time when the addiction started and find out what was needed then, you may be able to bring that into your life now, thereby satisfying the original intention. For instance, one person we treated for smoking addiction started smoking in order to be accepted by her peers when she was a teen-ager. But she found now that smoking actually caused her rejection by her friends. When she focused on accepting herself more and developing new and positive ways to be accepted by others, the smoking was no longer necessary.