What’s your ‘favourite poison’? What do you tend to indulge into? Sweets, smoking, alcohol, social media, work? How random do you feel our addictions are?
Sure, we ‘inherit’ a lot from our family and early environment in general – we see what people around us do and we absorb everything as a sponge for a long time, before we develop our own critical facility. Sure, we can decide against it later and then we end up in a silent internal conflict of various degree between our own choices and values as adults and our life-long, though not always entirely conscious loyalty to our family values and so our need to belong.
So, how random are our addictions and most importantly, what does it take to overcome them – without picking up a different addiction instead? There are many layers to this question as to many others in our multilayered being, but one of surprising windows into our understanding of addiction is looking at it through a prism of Five Elements and emotions related to each Element.
Traditional Chinese Medicine, TCM has an elegant system of 5 Elements where there is not so much difference between the physical health of a human being, their internal – emotional – environment and their surroundings or living conditions. What we are instinctively trying to do when we indulge in some activity or substance is to connect with a particular Element. The beauty of Colourpuncture – ‘Five Elements Colourpuncture’ in particular – is that we can start recognising, feeling and understanding multiple facets of a particular Element which we are trying to connect to, and we can treat an imbalance of this Element at the same time.
Here is the video transcript:
“So, for example somebody has a smoking addiction. Smoking damages the lungs. If somebody is smoking in particular I would check their Lung health in terms of predisposition to lung diseases in the family. And I would also check the presence of grief or melancholy or sadness or depression of any kind – because grief and sadness and melancholy are inflictions of the lung system (according to the TCM) and if somebody picks up smoking and I did have people who actually had really deep-seated grief who started smoking. And of course they came to me because they wanted to drop smoking but then we discovered all these things that they didn’t even know how they were connected with this particular habit. And of course when you really look into an origin of the habit and then the habit can go – and only then it can go when you really look into what created it. If somebody for example overeats or they eat wrong type of food, wrong kind of combination – especially if there’s a sweet food or anything like that, I would check against system of Stomach Pancreas Spleen because this is more Earth (TCM element). In case of smoking – lungs and large intestines – this is Metal element according to Chinese medicine, with stomach spleen pancreas system it’s a different involvement. And one interesting implication here could be that people could at some point have lost what is called ‘sweetness of life’… When we’re children we have this sweet feelings, expectations and very often children are fed sweets for that matter. I had several patients who had absolutely terrible childhood in all these shapes and forms; but as soon as we started working on this with Colourpuncture, unraveling the whole story and family history and all this we would come to the point where they still had this sweetness of life feeling as children – in between all these terrible events at home. They would have a play somewhere; they would spend some time in the nature; in the wild, in the forest, in the fields; somewhere; with other people, with other family members – away from abusive family. They all had this sense of sweetness of life and then at some point that sweetness of life might have gone. And then we can have this totally ‘normal’ person – with totally normal childhood, now a grown up, who for example just worked a lot; or there was a problem in a relationship for a long time; or there was something else – some problem which went on for a really really long time and that created this loss of hope that life will ever be sweet again. So overeating problems – I would always check against the sweetness of life situation and so so on. So for every addiction you really need to see what is a background.”
This video is a fragment from our October 2021 Colourpuncture Q&A – thank you for your great questions!
If you are interested in learning Colourpuncture (with our Modular Colourpuncture there are now several entry points throughout the year) or have any questions on how you can benefit from Colourpuncture in your daily life, contact me with your questions using the form below – I’m happy to help 🙂
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