OxyContin 👉🏽 oxytocin

OxyContin is just the 👉🏽 pointing at the 🌙 of oxytocin

I’ve been suss for a while now about the connection between oxytocin (the love and bonding hormone) and OxyContin, the trade name for oxycodone, an extraordinarily potent narcotic and opiate prescribed for chronic pain such as terminal-cancer patients suffer.

Is it or is it not a bit suss that OxyContin (a powerful and highly profitable painkiller contributing to the prescription-opioid addiction epidemic) is a very-near anagram of oxytocin!? OxyConti … an nth of difference.

OxyCunti … I mean, could they be a bit more transparent with their marketing manipulation!?

Did they not think for a moment, “Hang on wait, people are going to clue on pretty quick that we’re literally pulling their subliminal heart strings and call us out for heinously exploitating pain for profit!”

Opiates can soothe emotional and psychological pain as well as physical pain because they replicate our endogenous opiates ~ endorphins, and oxytocin!

OxyContin replicates oxytocin 👈🏼 it’s something you can’t unsee 🤦🏼‍♂️

Please reach out if this resonates with you or if you’re concerned about yourself or a loved one’s relationship with addiction, because helping others transform this is where I’m heading with Heartwards and the peer work training I’m doing.

forgiveness dispels victim mentality

a journal entry about how forgiveness is
loosening my attachment to a victim mentality

I have been doing a near-daily forgiveness training in my sadhana lately, and as I near the end of a 30-day rotation I was pleased to realise that a forgiveness practice can release us from the victim mentality. I had read about this in my research about this elusive heart quality, but I hadn’t yet really felt it. Now I have!

After nearly 30 days of this practice, having exhausted the people I could think of who I needed to forgive, I found myself moving on to the culture as a whole.

Now that’s a nebulous beast, the whole culture, and because I didn’t have one person or institution I could hang on to as the sole thing requiring forgiveness, the one distinct entity I felt resentful about, I found that I started moving into states of … let’s call it “resentment Teflon”!

In this state I recall once thinking of myself as a duck in the waters of resentment.

Point is, the resentment had nowhere to stick.

When I realised I could let go of all the resentment I hold for our culture and society being generally deficient (especially, for example, for being spiritually bankrupt) I found that a whole new sense of empowerment and personal responsibility + agency filled the void where resentment had been.

I was no longer the victim of a culture that didn’t meet my spiritual needs and was now an agent who could serve the spiritual needs of that culture.

This phrase comes to mind from a guy I met through men’s work: it’s not our fault, but it’s our responsibility.

This usually applies to the victims of trauma, abuse, neglect, meaning it’s not our fault we were traumatised, but it’s our responsibility to do the healing. No one else is going to do it. I feel the same now about the lack in our culture. I no longer feel let down by our culture because it doesn’t immediately meet my spiritual needs, and instead feel agency to meet my own, and empowered to help others meet theirs.

It’s not like there was ever a Golden Age of Spirituality. Maybe there were (and still are) traditional societies whose culture is based on spirituality. But these are not the cultures or times I live in. And generally speaking these pursuits were always marginalised, initiated and led and maintained by the few who decided it was their duty and honour, their way of serving humanity.

I had no idea this would emerge out of a sustained practice of cultivating forgiveness, but I’m grateful it has.

such are the vicissitudes

Today I had the scent of the buddhas in my nostrils, after a brief and powerful breathwork practice with Keagan Bizzell and the Samford Valley Brotherhood.

Yesterday I experienced the hell of my own anger, but narrowly avoided the vortex of shame and self-loathing that often follow such destructive emotional episodes. I did so by catching myself in time and remembering to practice self-compassion, knowing anger is often a conditioned substitute for sadness. I wrote myself a love letter. It worked. It’s a technique I highly recommend.

The point is, I posted here a while ago about doing really well lately, and since then I have had some really shitty times because I wasn’t able to catch myself in time. By “shitty times” I mean “very difficult internal reactions to triggering external events”, and I don’t at all want to paint a half-truth on the socials.

I’ve been doing well lately, but there’s also been a lot of struggle. And sometimes I experience flow. Mostly I struggle, but the flow state is happening more frequently.

Such are the vicissitudes of life … uphill, down dale, etc. Happiness is rolling with the goods and the bads.

Today is good, but anything could happen. Anything could happen, and today will still be good if I can see the space where interpretation is made, and if I can find choice between happiness and suffering before reaction kicks in.

We can do this, and choose happiness. That’s what I’m learning, and that’s what I want to impart through Heartwards, which I wrote about recently here. And I started a Facebook group / page.

Today I had the scent of the buddhas in my nostrils, yesterday I experienced the hell of my own anger, and such are the vicissitudes of life …