My substance of choice may have been painkillers, but all substances of abuse are emotional painkillers. Addictions begin with pain and end with pain, and all addictions are attempts to soothe that pain. The question here at CMI is not why the addiction but why the pain? Philosophy teaches us not to try to escape from the pain, but to be with it. Because the attempt to escape from pain is what cre
ates more pain, and it’s only when compassion is present and can be felt that people will allow themselves to see the truth inside them, which is what CMI provides: a way to experience pain without having to run away from it, among others. CMI is not a rehab. The opposite of addiction is not simply to be sober, but to find the root cause of the individual’s distress and discover new ideas about life and its purposes to solve the emotional triggers to be able to not use substances to escape distress. The idea is instead of to remove yourself from the responsibilities of everyday life, to place your feet in the practical ground of experience. It is about connecting with yourself, and the success lies in how it positively changes your life and relationships. It is a science, an art of mastering your life, not running away from it: a constant effort towards a state of freedom. It is an opportunity to be curious about and to know who you truly are. The nature of CMI is to shine awareness into the darkness of the mind and body, not only for self-improvement, but also for self-acceptance. It’s not about wanting to be something for me anymore, but about accepting my Everything and appreciating the beauty of my complexity. If there is one thing that I have learned through life’s trials and tribulations, it was that my heart is big enough to hold both sorrow and joy, and that my mind was strong enough to allow both peace and chaos to coexist. Suddenly, it all makes sense. Each day I look back and know exactly why it had to happen in the way that it did. As I build strength, I start to believe more and more in my own potential. We live in a society that in one way or another is about instant relief, quick satisfaction, distraction, and instant gratification. We live in a culture that is both economically and psychologically based on not supporting people to be with themselves. We have a whole system of preparation for the individual for life, which is always preparation and never actually gets there. We condition ourselves in a way that sets us up for a life problem which is accompanied by constant frustration because it is perpetually postponed to the future, and in that way, one is educated to live in the future and never for today in the present moment, which, in reality, is all there ever is. The same technology that brings us closer to those are far away, takes us far away from the people that are actually close, and the connections we think we have through social media and other technologies are almost like an imitation of human connectedness. It is used as a supplementation for social interaction as opposed to a complement, which is what they were designed for. We have made it all the way to the moon and back, but now we struggle to start a conversation across a room or even across a table, and in this way, we have become one of the loneliest societies that have ever been.