Be Recovered: Breaking free from the Disease of Addiction | Dean Taraborelli | TEDxSedona

Beautiful introduction and the only part that wasn't there is that I have a 30 year history with

addiction

and during that time I learned that

addiction

is a lifelong incurable

disease

. I heard it thousands of times and I believed it and I'm here to tell you that maybe that's not true just like science and it takes a while to catch up maybe that's not true maybe addiction is a calling for something more and since We're talking about addiction, you know, we often think of the person who's hit rock bottom and you know the homeless, ten percent of the US population is addicted and I can tell you it's much more widespread than that. because it's based on shame, we hide it, so at the end of the day an addiction is when I'm doing something that I don't want to do and I can do it.

I don't stop doing it no matter the consequences and I think we can all resonate with that, so that's how I got so interested in all of this when I was 12. You know I'm a boy. The next thing I do is ride a bike. I know I have a joint in my hand and fast forward 30 years and at the height of my addiction I had a $200,000 a year drug habit that lasted I don't know six seven years and I can tell you I could fill a book the size of the world war at peace with all the drama trauma you know injuries accidents herds near death experiences hospitalizations overdoses you know I'll spare you all that but my dark night of the soul you know I'm the last six or seven years of this process I'm in my dark night , which means I don't know what to do and I'm alone and no one knows I'm working every day and I'm doing my thing and I'm in this hell inside and I don't know whether to kill myself or if I'm going to overdose or if I'm going to crash my head against the windshield again but something is going to happen and those are many sleepless nights and since I was getting very close to the end of my life and you know when it comes what bothered me the most was that I was not going to fulfill my purpose and not even I didn't even know what it was but that hurt me enough to get to my last treatment experience and at the same time when this didn't work I went to treatment so I spent 20 years in treatment and I've been in all kinds of treatments for months.

I've been to doctors and all kinds of experimental drugs and medications. protocols and I've been in inpatient, outpatient, outpatient, outpatient, you know, you name it, I did it and when that didn't work, I toured the world. I have been to 50 60 countries on planet Earth speaking with shamans, mystics, clerics and teachers. doctors and anyone I thought could help and this is what I came up with: the treatment is not working, the treatment model and I'm not just talking about inpatient treatment, the way we handle this situation is not working because I wanted to get better and I paid a lot of attention in the treatment when I went to my first treatment experience I said tell me what to do and I'll do it and I did it right around the time I got high again and I was watching everyone and I thought I figured it out. that I wasn't the only one who didn't understand it, nobody understood it, almost nobody was doing it.

I had been on treatment with thousands of people and no one was getting it, so I did a little Googling because I just wanted to check it out and make sure that was the case. It was out of my head and I googled the success rate and treatment which is terrible. As I was doing it, something called spontaneous remission occurred to me and I thought, wait a second, what is that? That's where people just decide to stop using and they do it and I thought I want to do that I want to get it back recovery doesn't work for me I want to get it back up so while I was googling I also found a word iatrogenic and I said Genesis means death by medicine and Medicine is the third leading cause of death in the United States and that means I go in, I have problem A and I die from complication B, so a staph infection, you know, I would go to the hospital to have my appendix removed, I get staff and die, that's an iatrogenic response, so medicine waits a second.

I can't just go to my doctor and go to the treatment center and say here, tell me what to do and do it there, third leading cause of death, holy smokes, so let's get back to treatment. for a second, why isn't it working right? One thing I noticed is that the treatment and the medical model are pathologizing the normal processes of life, so the pain, the loss, the grief of life, that we need to grow and process, and those are things of the soul that we now they've turned them into diagnosable mental illnesses followed by a pill and someone shared it with me yesterday, they're watching a commercial for, you know, a family is packing to move to a new city and their little son is in the back of the car and he's saying hello to his best friend and oh my gosh he's crying and of course he needs a pill, no, wow, how is he going to navigate life, how is he going to deal with that loss and change, and friends, so I'm staying on Contact with all of life's questions.

I know, we are going to medicate you and take medications here to tell you that you have no qualms about taking medications, but unfortunately medications have become a lifestyle, it is no longer an intervention, it is now a lifestyle, how many times have we heard people say you know you'll take it? this the rest of your life and the problem with that is the side effects and every medication has a side effect and some of those side effects are worse than the actual condition that I'm taking the medication for and we hear about them on TV, they're quite drastic side effects you know, death, heart

disease

, your head is going to be blown off, you're going to kill your parents, stuff like that and people say you know what hurts me, I'll take it anyway, that won't happen to me , that is not like that.

It's very different than a heroin addict who knows he's going to get in trouble too, but the only side effect we don't hear about is the side effect of numbness, so I have something in my external world, a condition that makes me unhappy, so I take a unfortunately, so I'm numb to other things, love and life, and my intuition. I'm disconnected from that, so I take more numbness pills because numbness is painful, so I realized in treatment that we weren't getting to the core issue that we were managing the symptoms, it's all about symptom management, so that I will let you know that anxiety and depression and Bill Wilson, the founder of a band, said that alcoholism is a symptom, it is not the problem that it is. a symptom, so we're not getting to the root cause and I didn't even think I had a root cause, you know, I grew up, my family was kind to me, they fed me, thank you, they took care of me, you know everything. that I didn't have the trauma that I heard all these other kids in treatment had, so I thought I didn't have a core problem, but everyone who does anything related to drugs has a core problem and what we do is hide our wounds.

We protect them, so if I were standing here and I sprained my ankle, my body would rearrange itself to take weight off that ankle so I could heal something hurts me deeply. I will hide it so that no one inflames it. I go to protect him and eventually he gets relegated to the unconscious mind where I now forget him but he doesn't forget me so I thought we have to get to the root cause so I am in treatment. I think to myself to wait a while. Secondly, I know what to do, I will leave treatment, and since I have been pursued around the world, I know more about treatment than anyone I have ever met, including most of the counselors I have sat with, plus all of these healers and everyone. these different things, I have this gigantic body of wisdom, I'm going to recover and I'm going to develop a program to help other people recover and of course I called my parents and told them this was a great idea. a little skeptical, so I left treatment for the last time and came to Sedona and actually went through this process that was the source, the foundation of what we're doing now and I

recovered

and when I say that, what do I mean?

That's why, well thirty years old, I would tell you that 90% of my life forces my time, my energy, my thoughts, my money to be used and I have to tell you that I don't even think about that anymore, it doesn't cross my mind. I'm in the recovery business and it hasn't crossed my mind to do it yet, so here's the model and the model has to do with integration, we are integrated beings and we have become disintegrators, so we have a body, one mind and one soul. and a spirit and these things work together in a very synergistic way and unless we work on them in a synergistic way, we're missing out on the power, so you know, holistic or integration, it's all the hype now, it's a big thing about marketing and When I started this process, we were the only holistic center that existed.

Google it, it was like us, that's it and now it's coming, which is great, people are noticing and you know, add some green juice and some yoga to the mix and some mindfulness and , unless these practices are integrated so that the body, mind, soul and spirit share information, they are like a database that shares information, so we have to work on all of them if I want to delete something so that We can talk about the body, so the body is this colony of trace cells and every time I have a thought it tells the body how to feel, so if I think about something a lot, I'm instructing my body how to feel and especially if I have something. traumatic of what I'm thinking, so sometimes he thinks about it over and over and over and over.

I'm instructing my body and then when I forget, my body reminds me that you know I'm at the beach and I'm having a great time and my body says, oh yeah, you're depressed, remember, oh yeah, okay, so We have to clarify that we have to cleanse the cellular memory in the body, we have to detoxify the body, so today we listen to food. Much of the food we eat is toxic, meaning it is loaded with chemicals, hormones and antibiotics that my body can't recognize and creates inflammation, and the inflammation is affecting all of my organs and sending signals to the brain. that I'm NOT okay and I can't pick up on those signals, but they're creating this underlying feeling that I'm not okay, so there's a ton of peer-reviewed science now about the condition of the gut and conditions like depression and anxiety.

D I was reading the other day that bipolar disorder has a link to mitochondrial dysfunction. Wow, my cells affected how I feel. At the end of the day, our brain needs nutrients and minerals to metabolize and function well. If I don't get them, then my brain. It's going to start to fail, so I have to work on the body and I have to change my relationship with food and the things that I put there so that we have mind, body, mind and most of the time we think in the mind, that is what I am. using to give this talk actually that's about 5% of my mind, the other 95% is back here, it's unconscious and my unconscious mind is programmed like a computer, so all the programs run in the background and I They make me react, so I watch my parents. when I'm growing up and I say, you know, I'll never grow up to be like my dad, did anyone ever hear someone say that and of course what happens, they grow up exactly like their dad because they're programmed when I have a situation on my hands a trauma something I develop a reaction I invent a strategy to deviate to deal with it then it gets filed in my brain so I know later the brain is efficient then it stores things it says oh that's what I thought happened so I know what to do I'm going to react so most of our lives are actually unconscious reactions, so we have to get to the unconscious part.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is great, but it's only about 5%. I have to lower my soul here and now and this is where the juice comes out. This is how I have sat with hundreds of people over the years. I tell them what this soul is and they say you know it's my essential self, it's my truest, most authentic self and I ask people to give me some words to describe them, that's what they will invariably say. Love, passion, community and contribution, these are all things that sound like luxuries because we are on the verge of death or I am stressed during the day, but these are basic needs of life, they are important to who we are.

We are an example as young people. They'll join gangs, then they'll join a gang, and all of a sudden they'll have structure and meaning and purpose, and they'll have rules and regulations, and they'll structure all the things they don't have at home, and they'll take enormous risks to get into gangs. these things. and break the law and they could go to jail forever but they do it anyway it's that important another example is the people in the tragic crisis of 911 and the hurricanes people come together and there are no more racial or socioeconomic differences we are in our best moment I am at my highest point in crisis, why do we have to wait until the crisis for the soul and when we are disconnected from our authentic nature we have something called soul sickness and soul sickness while I was preparingto die, that was my big problem, that it wasn't there?

I'm going to do what I came here to do body mind soul spirit so we live in the sea of ​​energy if you want to talk about the Earth's magnetic field or even the entire quantum field and the field affects everything that is in the field so I have a energy field that is generated by my nervous system and this field interacts with the 'larger field but it does not do so consciously. I cannot feel this field with my five senses. I have to do it with my intuition, my consciousness through my energy system and when my energy system is compromised, then I'm not going to take that prana, that information that informs all of life to let you know that the sperm and an egg permanent come together at the moment of conception and a baby comes out, you know, all the birds fly south at the same time the song of life that is my antenna sobody mind soul spirit these are not new concepts but we have to work on them synergistically and when we do that we can come out of recovery and really be

recovered

, so people ask me a lot at these types of conferences, okay?

I am recovered, can I consume again? These are counselors who ask me this mostly correctly, so I think, look, if there's something wrong right now and you want to use just one solvent to change it, you might need a little more. recovery because for me being recovered means that I am aligned with my highest purpose, that I am no longer defined by the past and I can let it go and people keep talking about the past because they haven't resolved it, so "I have resolved the past now I can Being defined by who I am becoming and what is possible for me, that is my new definition and being reclaimed means that I move from chaos to peace, that I move from scarcity to abundance, that I am on my hero's journey and The hero's journey is where we take our deepest, darkest problems, then turn them into medicine and that is the journey we all have to go on as part of life, so addiction could just be the wake-up call to enter the hero's journey and Become more than you ever thought you could be and when we do, then we will be recovered and we will tell you that you only have one journey and you can decide to live with passion, recover, thank you.