Here's part 2 of my interview with best-selling author, Thomas Moore, where we discuss addiction and how it relates to spirituality.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
My patients come into my office and they say, "I go to AA" and they say, "I have to have a spiritual awakening". What do I do?
Thomas Moore:
One thing I think of personally, I tend to think of addiction as a form of love. It's really loving something so much you can't do without it. And you get to where you have to always be with it. It looks to me like what the Greeks called Eros. Not sexual, but meaning a drive for a union for connection with something. That's an Eros. That's what that is. So it's a love of some kind. And then the question is then, "If this alcohol is an image, it's a little bit of poetry in your life. That's how I would see it. It's a bit of poet poetry. What is it? What is it saying?" What is it saying that you're looking for, like a poem might about your addiction? What would that say? And I would think you'd want to explore other things that you are yearning for, that you don't have in your life.
And those yearnings ultimately always end up to be end up being spiritual because no limited, no particular earthly object of love is going to satisfy. This is a very ancient teaching, especially among mystics that are particular loves. Like, if you love chocolate, if you love swimming. Whatever you love and you just have to do it. That represents a deeper, faster love, too. And so when you're looking at your life, you have to find out, you have to look at those things poetically and see what do they suggest about a much greater love that I'm yearning for. And with alcohol, the tradition there that this is what they call it, Dionysian, the alcohol, the spirits are Dionysian, meaning it it's particular kind of spirituality where you just need more life. You need more vitality. You need, in other words, doing things that really make you feel alive.
Thomas Moore Bio:
Thomas Moore is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Care of the Soul. He has written 25 other books about bringing soul to personal life and culture, deepening spirituality, humanizing medicine, finding meaningful work, imagining sexuality with soul and doing religion in a fresh way.
In his youth he was a Catholic monk and studied music composition. He has a PhD in religious studies from Syracuse university and was a university professor for a number of years. Thomas is also a psychotherapist influenced mainly by Carl Jung and James Hilman.
In recent years, he has returned to his role as a non-aligned theologian, publishing his translation of the New Testament gospels, Writing in the Sand, Jesus' Spirituality and the Soul of Gospels and the Soul of Christmas.
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