Kimberly Steele

In the study of music, there is the concept of tonic or the root note of every scale, chord, and tune, whether it is a two bar ad jingle or a symphonic poem. When I talk about tonic to my music students, I tell them to think of tonic as the home base of the scale, song, or sonata. Tonic is the star of the show: if the song is a sports team, then tonic is the captain. If the song is a movie, then tonic is the title character. Tonic is the most important component in every piece of music with only one exception: atonalism. Atonalism deliberately avoids tonic and perhaps that is the reason it is garbage and always has the same menacing, clangy, abhorrent vibe no matter what the instrumentation or ostensible style of the work. Tonic is the center of any song's universe and the sun to its planetary system. It is that important. When I ask any given student out of the blue "What is tonic of C?" they often don't know because the public school system teaches them to believe every question posed by an adult is either indirect or a trick. Tonic of C is C -- it's an answer that is stated within the question. To get them to remember what tonic is and how important it is, I ask them who is tonic of themselves. Meaning, Kimberly Steele is tonic of Kimberly Steele and you, dear reader, are tonic of yourself. I ask the students who gets them up in the morning, and if they say "my mom" or "the alarm clock" I disagree and inform them that they and they alone get themselves up in the morning. They are tonic of themselves and ultimately the decision to get up, to get dressed, to insert food in mouth and chew and swallow, etc. is solely theirs. We are all autonomous beings, and though some of us enjoy much greater freedoms than others, in the end, nobody can force you to be. That is what makes the human will so dangerous.

There are three facets to healing an addiction. If any one of these three factors are not addressed, and most of the time they are not addressed at all, the addict will have the odds of a snowball in Death Valley in July of staying clean. The three factors that must be present to heal an addiction are these:

1) The addict must have the sincere desire to live without addiction
2) Strength must be built more than weakness is defeated
3) Etheric depletion and starvation must be recognized and treated

1) The addict must have the sincere desire to live without addiction

Any addict who is going to recover has to sincerely want to recover, full stop. An addict who refuses to see she has a problem is never going to solve the problem. I am from Gen X. I grew up with dozens of friends who had addictive behaviors. To this day, they still have those behaviors because they have never had the honest, genuine desire to change them. Don't confuse whining with genuine desire for change. Humans love to whine and addicts are often top tier whiners. Unfortunately, whining does not alleviate pain; it only spreads it like an infectious germ. I have known many addicts who enjoyed whining nearly as much as whatever group of substances or negative behaviors represented their addiction. Don't believe the hype!

Addiction and infection have a great deal in common. All of the addicts I have known were literally and metaphorically infected with more than the usual load of bugs. Addicts are infected and the will of an infection is to spread. Gossips want you to be fascinated by the same petty dramas that hold them in thrall. Drunks want you to have another round. Everybody must get stoned, according to potheads. Addiction takes many forms: rage addicts will do anything and everything to enrage others, and when they are ignored, it is far worse for them than being physically fought and getting their butts kicked. Addiction wants polarity and it wants reaction -- when it is ignored, it cannot spread.

I have walked away from addicts when it became abundantly clear they loved their addictions more than they could love me or anyone else. As painful as it is, I suggest you do the same. I think we must leave addicts out in the cold when they clearly demonstrate through actions and not words that they do not want to be helped. The complications arrive, of course, when you feel responsible for the addict or when you feel it is somehow your fault he or she became an addict. No matter how the addict became an addict, please keep in mind we are all tonic of ourselves and the devil on our left shoulder has the same amount of influence as the angel on our right shoulder. If the addict only wants the kind of enabling help that perpetuates her disease -- I know one addict whose father bought her a house and car and she still ended up dead in a gutter -- in my opinion, the only choice is to walk away and cut and clear her from your life.

When the addict truly wants to stop for good and avoid whatever seedy banquet of consequences addiction has in store for him, you will know. You will not have to stage an intervention or walk in on some grotesque scene of self-destruction. The addict will show up at your door and it won't be to debase himself for cash or to steal from you when you go to the bathroom. He will be repentant, humble, and genuine. He will be ready to change. Until that happens, I don't suggest helping addicts at all. Again, if you had a large part in creating the addiction, for example let's say you were an indulgent, absentee parent, well shame on you, but there isn't much you can do about that now outside of examining your issues in discursive meditation. Sometimes the only thing you can do is to fashion yourself into the kind of role model you should have been years ago.

2) Strength must be built more than weakness is defeated

For the addicts willing to put in the daily work of overcoming addiction, the strategy to heal them needs to be one of restoration and rejuvenation and not amputation and prosthesis.  The trouble with modern allopathic medicine is that it takes the latter approach.  Modern medicine is not medicine.  It is a racket of trickery and obfuscation haphazardly designed to squeeze desperate and misguided people for their wealth.  When modern medicine tries to heal addiction, it immediately jumps to amputation or drugs as a strategy just as it does with routine illnesses such as cancer or anxiety disorder.  In the case of cancer, slash and burn is not just a method of clearing rainforest for cattle grazing -- it is the primary way allopaths attempt to bring cancer patients to wellness.  It is tragicomic in its naivete and misunderstanding of the way nature actually works.  In the case of anxiety disorder, look into benzodiapene withdrawal if you're in the mood for horror stories to keep you awake at night.

Healing seldom involves the removal of a failing organ or limb or burning out what "doesn't belong", that's triage.  Healing is the much slower process of building up the patient's strengths across the planes by support, work, therapy, and encouragement.  Eventually, the patient's strengths defeat her weaknesses by their naturally accumulated force.  Ozempic will never cure diabetes or obesity because it is the drug form of stomach amputation (otherwise known as gastric bypass surgery).  Both work by disabling the working digestive system so it cannot do its work, treating nature as the enemy instead of the weak will of the tonic self within.  

People used to go to bucolic retreats in the country to heal their ailments, hence the old tradition known as "taking the waters" at a beautiful lake or hot spring.  Being surrounded by natural beauty is healing and encouraging.  Sunlight and fresh, clean, flowing water are healing and encouraging.  Triage is fine and good, but it is not healing.  Healing must take place in a pleasant and gentle environment with increasing tests of strength.  The soon-not-to-be-addict who is willing to work towards healing needs to have his best habits, hobbies, and interests buttressed while negative ones are eschewed and ignored.  For instance, if the recovering addict was the sort who liked to read before the addiction took over, her healing should involve being surrounded by books.  She should go to the library at least once a week.  If the recovering addict has an affinity for dogs, we should arrange for him to spend time training or caring for dogs.  If she is a workaholic, we need to arrange meaningful, fulfilling work for her, even if it means she will spend the rest of her existence carrying buckets of water uphill in a Buddhist nunnery.  

Addicts are often encouraged or forced to talk it out with a psychiatrist, psychologist, or group of addiction sufferers in regular meetings.  I don't know if this is helpful.  When I voluntarily had myself hospitalized for depression in my teens, the psych ward herded us into regular venting meetings where we aired our sob stories in an effort to get to the bottom of our melancholy.  For thousands of dollars per week, it seemed very odd to be engaging in an emotional circle jerk with a group of near-strangers.  The reality show had yet to be invented when I went through the psych ward but that is exactly what it felt like.  If I had an addiction problem, I don't think going to meetings would be the way out for me.  Of course I could be wrong and I hope I never find out.

Again, if the will of the addict is not driving the recovery process, all efforts are useless and should be abandoned along with the addict.  Yes, I am a hard ass and abandoning an addict to die from being shut out is cruel.  I have also always been ahead of my time in the most unfortunate sense of the term.  In civilizations in the future, I am confident that the kind of addiction that is routinely tolerated now will be grounds for expulsion into the harsh wilderness.  Society's resources will not be wasted on futile people.  Just as infanticide used to be a brutal reality in lands where the winters were hard and too many mouths to feed meant starvation for all, unrepentant addicts will receive as little mercy as Icelandic utburds.  

3) Etheric depletion and starvation must be recognized and treated

Etheric depletion is typically the root cause of most addictions.  It follows that we must address the etheric plane if we are to have any hope of helping addicts climb out of their Earthen hellholes.  Addicts have the feeblest etheric bodies of any mortal being, and that is truly saying something in this era of endemic etheric starvation.  Addicts often act like vampires for this very reason, stealing and pilfering the actual and etheric wealth of others in order to survive.  It is telling how many addicts treat their surroundings: trashing their rooms, apartments, and houses and leaving wakes of visual and etheric chaos.  Their outside state is the same as their inside state: disorder.

The very first thing I would have a recovering addict do is to make the bed immediately after rising from it, no matter how badly he or she slept.  I would then instruct them to thank the bed for the comfort it provided or at least tried to provide.  Addicts suffer from dulled etheric senses -- I have yet to see an addict who had any reliable psychic ability or the capacity to talk to land spirits.  By learning to talk to their mundane environments, the recovering addict can begin to sense what she was missing and what most modern people long for and cannot name: a connection to the world around them.  There is also the power of gratitude to heal.  By tasking the recovering addict to recognize and respond gratefully to simple, taken-for-granted objects such as beds, pillows, blankets, and sleeping quarters, we introduce her to the subtle language of cooperation that links every one of us to the pulse of the Earth itself.  Addicts need to clean up their acts in every way, and if this orderliness starts on the physical plane by tidying the bed, so be it.  

Addicts must have a daily ritual of eating at least two moderately portioned, home-cooked meals a day.  Food is the most obvious way of healing the gut, which is the main organ where we process and sense etheric energy, hence the term "gut feeling".  Cooking is another form of etheric healing, and any recovering addict who has any talent at all for cooking should be encouraged to cook.  

Recovering addicts, more than anyone else, should spend time with trees.  Whether you hug a tree, sit down under it, or walk in the woods, it becomes clear that trees and people have a symbiotic relationship that goes far beyond the exchange of oxygen for carbon dioxide.  Every recovering addict should spend daily time with trees with the goal of learning to converse with them.  Trees restore etheric polarity to humans and vice a versa.  This is a phenomenon a human can only know by bonding with trees in real life.  

Going back to the idea of building strength above and beyond tearing down weakness, daily exercise is essential to recovery.  The tiniest amount of exercise, such as five minutes of chair yoga, is better than none at all.  The best kind of therapy combines exercise with good habits and beneficial hobbies such as planting a garden.  

Massage has amazing benefits for the etheric body.  Many addicts become dependent upon drugs for pain relief, and often pain can only be relieved by treating the etheric body.  Massage is often called "energy work" because it moves and transforms pain energy into healing energy.  I believe the reason this happens is because the polarity of the masseuse's etheric body combines with the etheric energy of the person on the table and changes the pattern of flow into more benevolent shapes.