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Twenty Years Clean - Still Not Free
Guidance, Recovery, Spirituality

Twenty Years Clean – Still Not Free

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She came to me with twenty years clean. Respected in her fellowship, A sponsor to others, The kind of person people called a ‘miracle.’ But in private? She was exhausted, Her marriage was collapsing, Her body was breaking down, She couldn’t sit still without reaching for something – food, scrolling, service, anything to fill the silence. And the shame was crushing. “After all these years, why do I still feel like this” This is the hidden side of recovery no one talks about, Clean doesn’t always mean free, Abstinence doesn’t always mean healing, You can follow the rules perfectly – and still feel like you’re dying inside. When we worked together, we didn’t chase another tool, another fellowship, another identity. We slowed down…. We listened to her body…. We made space for the grief she had been carrying since childhood…. We stopped trying to manage the symptoms and finally touched the root…. And slowly, the frantic energy softened… She began to feel safe enough to rest…. Safe enough to stop performing…. Safe enough to be human again. This is why I say… Addiction is not the problem, It’s the body’s best attempt at survival. And healing? It’s not about getting clean. It’s about coming home. (shared with permission) Our first group is full or possibly 1 spot left I believe, so there are groups every week from then on, feel free to book a place if you want to look inwardly. To the real source of power, yourself. https://learning.infiniterecoveryproject.com/live-group/   Get the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1068323302  

The self-Hypnosis of Concepts
Guidance, Recovery, Spirituality

The self-Hypnosis of Concepts

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In spiritual communities, you hear it over and over…. In non-duality: “There is no self.” In the 3 Principles: “You’re only ever feeling your thinking.” In 12-step rooms: “Turn it over, let go, let God.” These statements can sound profound, they can even feel like lifelines in the moment, but repeated too often, they become a kind of self-hypnosis, a loop that convinces you your most tender, human experiences don’t matter. “A truth that is alive has no fixed form. The moment you give it a form, it is already dead.”- Osho Concepts become forms. And once we give life a fixed form, we stop listening to the raw, living messages that don’t fit inside. Pain arises? “Just thought.” Dissociation shows up? “No self to be fragmented.” Anger flares? “Must be my defect, I’ll turn it over.” Nervous system bracing? “You’re only ever feeling your thinking.” The young, sensitive, lonely parts of us knock on the door – and we dismiss them as illusion, ego, thought, or defect. Rupert Spira said: “What we reject in ourselves doesn’t dissolve, it waits. What we welcome is integrated.” But in the hypnosis of concepts, we never welcome them. We exile them further, we silence the messengers, we live smaller lives without knowing it, in self hypnosis. Syd Banks said: “The intellect is always looking for form. Wisdom is found in the formless.” And yet people in his name cling to form – repeating the same words to reassure themselves. It works – in the short term. But in the long term, it bypasses the body, and the body always keeps the score. And then there’s the contradiction: “You don’t need techniques.” But also: “Follow your own wisdom.” What happens if your wisdom leads you to therapy, yoga, or meditation? Suddenly, it’s not wisdom anymore. That’s not freedom – that’s control disguised as clarity. Carl Jung said: “What you resist not only persists, but grows in size.” What happens when we exile these parts? We lose presence. (The hallmark of trauma is absence from the body – Bessel van der Kolk.) The escape into concepts and attempts to indoctrinate, convince others that you are right, to speak with certainty is a trauma response in itself. So, we lose vitality. (The childlike, playful energy gets buried under the performance of being “awake.”) We lose power. (Our choices are unconsciously run by the parts we refuse to see.) And When you’re inside the hypnosis of a concept, you can’t know what you’re missing. You think you’re free, but you still have 1 foot in jail. Integration is what’s lost. The ability to bring all parts of yourself home, so that nothing in you is exiled. Without that, you can be “conceptually enlightened” while still fragmented and powerless. Bypassing is always innocent. It’s just what we do when the rawness of life feels unbearable. But staying there keeps us cut off. The paradox is simple – Yes, everything arises in awareness. And yes, the young, tender, frightened parts of us are real experiences asking to be felt and integrated. Both are true and Both matter. Without integration, we never meet the fullness of being human. and in case this bothers you, I am not against concepts, I am all for embracing life to the fullest. Ask yourself, does this land, can you be really honest with yourself?   Get the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1068323302

To really live
Guidance, Recovery, Spirituality

To really live…

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To really live – you have to stop trying to be safe all the time. Life is insecure…. No matter how much you plan, heal, or control – there’s no ultimate safety here. Things fall apart, People leave…. Bodies ache, The ground shifts… But underneath that? Something else wakes up. Aliveness… The kind that can only come when you stop protecting yourself against life and actually feel it. Feel your body, your breath…. The ache in your chest when someone meets your eyes and really sees you. The tension in your gut when you’re scared but showing up anyway. We weren’t meant to escape this life. Not through perfection… Not through productivity… Not even through spirituality…. Because if you’re using a concept to avoid life – you might look calm on the surface… but inside, something starts to go numb. You start to disappear from yourself. And you don’t have to…. You can be here, In this body. Imperfect… Uncertain… Awake. You can ride the waves. You can touch beauty – real beauty – the kind that doesn’t need to be captured or understood. You can love, be loved, accept it, Let it land, Even while things are still messy. You can cry and laugh in the same minute. You can stop abandoning yourself in the name of being okay. You don’t need a new identity. You need presence, embodied, trembling, scary.. And the miracle is: when you meet yourself here – truly meet yourself life stops being something to survive. It becomes something you’re inside of…. Alive Awake Free ——- Our Tues group is full this week, looking forward to it, will you join next week? https://learning.infiniterecoveryproject.com/live-group Get the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1068323302

Absence of Light
Guidance, Professionals, Spirituality

Darkness (pathology) is just the absence of light, it does not exist on its own.

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They have come realise that, the darkness of ages, cannot shroud the glowing sun-Osho In the same way that darkness has no existence of its own – it is only the absence of light – suffering, too, is often not what it appears to be. We speak about dysfunction, disorder, addiction, depression, and trauma as if they are entities in themselves – real, fixed, diagnosable problems to be eliminated, yet they are man-made, attempts to label the darkness. And what if they are patterns that emerge only in the absence of something deeper? Connection This is the core misunderstanding at the heart of pathology-based models. They assume that what’s wrong needs to be fixed, eradicated, treated, or managed – as though it has independent reality. In doing so, we spend our time battling symptoms, labelling behaviours, and analysing the structure of what hurts. But we rarely ask – What’s missing? What has this person lost touch with? When we look for what’s wrong(pathology), we strengthen it, we bring all of our attention to the darkness – and in the process, forget that darkness has no substance. It’s not something to be fought, it’s something to be illuminated. This Changes Everything Rather than approaching someone as a collection of disorders, compulsions, or maladaptive strategies, we begin with the assumption that there is something already right within them – not in a conceptual, motivational sense, but in a real, experiential way (we have to know this in ourselves first). There is something underneath the pain, the survival strategies, the behaviours – a deeper intelligence trying to adapt, cope, protect, or express what was never met.As professionals, our role is not to diagnose the dark, but to help someone find the light. Not to remove pathology, but to reveal what has always been whole. When we do this – when we work from a foundation of well-being rather than brokenness – we stop relating to people as problems and start seeing them as possibilities. We stop pathologising trauma and addiction, and instead recognise them as intelligent responses to unbearable conditions, we stop reinforcing shame and start reawakening self-trust. This doesn’t mean we ignore pain, or bypass the complexity of healing. It means we shift our starting point, we no longer ask ‘What’s wrong with you?’ – we ask ‘What happened to your connection? Because healing isn’t about fixing what’s broken. It’s about remembering what was never truly lost – only forgotten. And the more we point people toward that light, the more the illusion of darkness falls away on its own. That is a description of what we do in Infinite Recovery Free Webinar, Addiction as an adaptive intelligence – will you join?   Get the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1068323302

Guidance, Recovery, Spirituality

Why Getting Clean Isn’t the Same as Healing

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You can stop using, You can go to meetings, You can stay out of trouble, get a job, even say all the right things…change your life on the outside And still feel like something isn’t right… Like part of you is still carrying a weight you can’t name. Like no matter how “well” you’re doing, something deep inside still aches. That’s because addiction was never the real problem, It was a solution, A way to survive, A way to cope with feelings you couldn’t face at the time. Getting clean doesn’t resolve what’s underneath. It might stop the drinking or using but often the addiction just shifts, porn, money, food, relationships, sex, gambling, more.. Different behaviour, same pain. Real healing means turning toward that pain – gently, slowly – and starting to see what’s really there, not to fix yourself, not because you’re broken. But to finally meet the parts of you that never felt safe, seen, or loved. And underneath even that pain… There is something deeper still. A part of you that’s never been hurt, that was always whole. You may have glimpsed it – in silence, in nature, in a moment of peace – when the noise quiets down. That place is real, and recovery can lead you there, not just back to “functioning,” but to feeling fully alive. This isn’t about being in recovery, It’s not about getting it perfect, It’s about finding your way back to something true in you – Something that doesn’t need to escape anymore, that doesn’t need to be in recovery, that is just free. Would you like to be free? fully? If you’ve ever wondered why you’re still struggling, even after doing everything right… Maybe this is why. Healing isn’t just about stopping the addiction, It’s about remembering who you were before the pain began. And that’s possible – because it has been for me and many others, so, for everyone and anyone, no matter the crazy you once were. Yes, even you Get the book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1068323302

Guidance, Spirituality

They Said You Haven’t Had Enough Yet

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“You’re not ready.” “You haven’t hit bottom yet.” “You’re still in denial.” This is what gets said when someone doesn’t follow the rules. When they question the process, when they walk away from a model that didn’t meet them. But what if you weren’t resisting healing, – what if you were resisting being told what healing had to look like? People don’t resist truth. They resist being controlled. When someone tells you that you have to surrender – without asking if you even feel safe, that’s not healing…. That’s placing a demand on a system that’s still in survival. You can’t surrender if your body still believes you’re in danger. You can’t let go when you’re gripping on for dear life, because no one has ever made it safe to soften. And that’s the part people miss. We assume ‘readiness’ is a mindset. But often, it’s a state of the nervous system. When you walk into a room where someone’s quoting the right books, saying the right words, using the right techniques – but your body feels tense, guarded, like you’re being handled and not held – that’s not resistance. That’s a message: something here still doesn’t feel right. People who haven’t done their own deep healing work often mistake that message for stubbornness, they’ll say you’re not committed, you don’t want it enough, you’re not willing to change. However, you might not have ever felt truly safe in a space that said it was about healing. And that’s not on you. Because healing doesn’t begin at the bottom, It begins in the moment someone stops trying to fix you, and simply meets you with, no agenda, just presence. The tragedy is that so many people internalise the failure of a framework as a failure of themselves. But you didn’t fail the process, the process may have failed to honour your pace, your truth, your body’s intelligence. This isn’t about rejecting every method, model or modality, some paths definitely do help. But the moment a system becomes more about compliance than connection, more about language than listening, it loses something essential. You are not broken for walking away, You are not resistant because you didn’t feel safe, You are not failing because you couldn’t make someone else’s definition of recovery work for you. Maybe you just need a new place to begin, A place where safety isn’t earned through abstinence, clean time, compliance or vocabulary, where healing begins when you’re ready – not when someone else says you should be. And maybe the bottom isn’t some dramatic collapse, maybe it’s just the moment you realise you’ve had enough of not being met.

Professionals, Spirituality

Where Addiction and Recovery Don’t Exist

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There’s a space we rarely speak from in this field. Not because it’s unreachable – because it doesn’t fit the frameworks we’ve built. It’s the space before addiction ever became a label, Before ‘recovery’ was something to strive for, Before your nervous system got interpreted as pathology. In Infinite Recovery, we don’t aim to improve the model, we step outside it entirely. This isn’t rebellion, it’s remembering, not fixing, not managing, not even healing in the way you’ve been taught. It’s the recognition that you were never broken in the first place. How Disconnection Happens Disconnection isn’t a flaw – it’s a natural response. It happens slowly, silently, through things the world doesn’t always call trauma: A parent who couldn’t attune A culture that rewarded independence over connection A system that saw survival strategies as symptoms Beliefs we built just to feel safe being here Eventually, those patterns become the identity, you forget there’s a self beneath the coping. And then we name it, diagnose it, treat it, and wonder why the relief never really lasts. What Really Keeps You Stuck? Your belief in the story, and your nervous systems conditioning. Your belief in the separate character you call ‘me’ or ‘I’ That’s what keeps you in endless recovery. Because as long as you think that story needs fixing, you stay on the treadmill. Healing, in this light, is twofold: Spiritually, it’s seeing through the stories of the mind. Somatically, it’s returning to the body and learning to stay. One brings clarity, The other brings capacity, Both bring you home. What You Get From Seeing This You don’t become perfect, you become real. A natural peace of mind Connection – to yourself, to others, to life The ability to feel again, to stay present, even when it hurts A deeper compassion for your own mess and everyone else’s Less reactivity, more perspective And most of all – you become more okay with your own humanity You stop needing to perform, You stop needing to get it right, You show up in the world without being scared to be yourself. To Practitioners If you haven’t seen the illusion yet – it doesn’t mean it’s not there. It just means you’re still inside the frame. That’s not wrong, but it limits what we are offering to people. Because real safety doesn’t and absolutely can’t come from protocols, it comes from presence, and that starts with what you see when you look past the model. Before addiction, Before recovery, Before the story, There is only you, Already whole.  

Guidance, Professionals, Recovery, Spirituality

What Does Real Transformation Actually Look Like

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Not every therapeutic space is healing.. Some are just softer forms of control dressed in the right language, wrapped in the right tone, but still telling you what to believe, how to feel, and who to be. That’s not transformation, that’s indoctrination with better branding For years, I kept walking into new rooms that told me they had the answer, each one had different language, some clinical, some spiritual, some wrapped in science. But the pattern was the same – learn the model, agree with the method, repeat the script. At first, it felt like growth, but underneath, I was still efforting my way. Still looking for the right thing to believe instead of facing what I actually felt. – Indoctrination tells you what’s true, transformation helps you discover it. – Indoctrination makes you repeat ideas, transformation makes you question everything even the people guiding you. – Indoctrination feels clear, transformation feels disorienting. – Indoctrination rewards agreement, transformation begins when you start asking uncomfortable questions. – Indoctrination wants you regulated, predictable, fitting the framework, transformation lets you rage, grieve, shake, go silent – without needing to be ‘on track.’ – Indoctrination calls triggers resistance, transformation sees them as intelligence – a body remembering where it wasn’t safe. The thing about indoctrination is, you usually don’t know you’re in it. It feels like clarity, It feels like you’ve finally found the thing that makes sense, You’re ‘on the path’ You’ve got language, Identity, Community. but… – How do you respond when someone challenges your framework? – When someone says something that doesn’t fit your model, do you lean in – or shut down? – Do you feel the need to convince, correct, or defend? That’s how you know… Transformation doesn’t need protection, It doesn’t panic when someone’s experience looks different, it listens, it softens, it stays curious. Indoctrination defends its turf, Transformation doesn’t need one. This post is informational, not confrontational, although you might find it that way Infinite Recovery is for those who want to go deeper – not toward another method, but into themselves. It’s not the, or a way, It’s your way. Not about steps or scripts, but about returning to who you are beneath all of it. If this post triggers something in you, consider it an invitation – – What does your title, your identity, your PhD or your lived experience say about me? – Who would you be without it? – Are you willing to go there? We’re not following the map, we’re burning it, would you like to join us?

Professionals, Recovery, Spirituality

Recovery isn’t healing – and healing doesn’t always look like recovery

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There’s a big difference between not using and being free, between managing symptoms and resolving what caused them, between changing behaviour and transforming your relationship with yourself. Most recovery frameworks teach people how to cope: How to manage urges How to avoid relapse How to make it through another day But that’s not the same as healing Healing is what happens when you stop asking ‘How do I stay clean?’ and start asking – ‘Who am I when I’m not coping?’ ‘What have I never questioned because I was too afraid to look?’ I’ve sat with countless clients who were years into recovery… Holding keyrings, wearing titles, doing all the ‘right’ things – and still suffering silently inside, because while they’d changed their behaviours, they’d never healed the story underneath them. (i was this person too) According to a 2022 report by the UK Government’s Office for Health Improvement & Disparities, only 47% of people in structured addiction treatment achieved abstinence at discharge – and long-term recovery rates drop even further when trauma and somatic integration aren’t addressed. That’s not a failure of will,  That’s a failure of approach. Rupert Spira says: You are not a bundle of problems to be fixed, You are the open presence in which all problems arise and dissolve Until we understand this – recovery will continue to treat the symptoms of disconnection, not its cause. Recovery often focuses on the outer world, while healing requires going inward, meeting what hurts, and seeing it clearly enough that you don’t need to run anymore. One isn’t better than the other – but they are not the same And if we confuse the two, we risk keeping people in lifelong management… When what they truly need is the chance to uncover who they are beneath the pain, this may come about from recovery ie being sober, but without good direction its not guaranteed, and quite often healing does not look all las vegas clean time. If you’re in this field, ask yourself – Are we treating what’s wrong – or guiding people back to what’s right in them? Are we keeping the recovery system alive – or helping the human being emerge? Because healing cannot be prescribed! But it can be uncovered, And there is a place beyond the disease model – where people are no longer seen as broken, but as whole, waiting to be remembered.

Guidance, Recovery, Spirituality

The Recovery Lie – You’re not Powerless

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You’ve been told you’re powerless over addiction, That the best you can do is surrender, That as long as you don’t drink or use, you’ll be okay….. But… is that really true??? What if powerlessness is a belief system, not a fact? What if you were never powerless at all? To be clear – in the depths of addiction, surrender can save your life. It saved mine, it’s a valuable belief for a time, but continuing to believe you’re powerless – years later – is not healing. It’s limitation. That belief becomes a ceiling. You keep outsourcing your power to steps, meetings, sponsors, clean-time chips – instead of asking, what’s still unhealed in me? I am not making this wrong, are you ok with it though? Addiction was never the real problem, It was a solution to pain, trauma, disconnection, And what you were truly powerless over was your conditioning – your story – your nervous system’s reaction to life. But now? the story can be questioned… That identity of ‘I’m just an addict in recovery’ can be lovingly undone, You don’t need to keep surrendering your power…you need to reclaim it, on the journey home. Ask yourself: (if you are willing) What would happen if I stopped calling myself powerless? Who am I beyond the label of ‘addict’ or ‘recovery warrior’? What if freedom isn’t about control – but about seeing through the illusion? After 22 years of saying “I’m powerless,” I realised it wasn’t true. Now, 31 years into recovery – I am powerful I realised I was always powerful, And I am free. Are you ready to question the recovery story you were handed? Would you like to experience your own freedom? to be you? to speak your voice? to own who you are? to not lean on frameworks, common ideas? belief systems?

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