So the King said ‘Why do the voices not come to me, I am the King, not you.’

Joan say’s ‘They do come to you, but you do not hear them. You have not sat in the field in the evening listening for them. When the bell rings, you cross yourself and have done with it.

But if you prayed from your heart and listened to the thrilling of the bells after they stopped ringing, you would hear the voices as well as I do.’

So I do get that it is not about what anyone else will teach me or what I will teach you. Because if I stayed around, you would never learn because you would be looking to me.

So when it comes to addictions or any other problem you are facing, it does not do well to look for the solutions on the outside. That is a clue. There are no solutions from the outside.

There needs to be some courage and a willingness to look at how it actually is, not how you think it is. And there has to be Awareness.

Again, Jesus said in order to heal you have to bring outside of yourself what is inside of yourself. And what you bring outside of yourself will heal you.

And finally, you have too dis-identify from the experience. I am very much in favour of the 12 Steps, but when someone says ‘I am an alcoholic’, something in me does not like that language.

Because the language identifies the person with the experience and says ‘I am that experience.’ You’re not that experience.

Addiction is not a person and it’s not who you are. When you say ‘I am an addict’, no one is an addict. It is not who you are.

Even when people say someone is a survivor, but as long as we do not take those categories as defining anyone, because if you say you are a survivor then you are defining yourself in terms of the past.

In the present you are not a survivor – you are whoever you are in the present. The fact that you survived something doesn’t make you into a survivor.

Those statements are both true and untrue. But you have to dis-identify.

You have to let go of the identification with the experience. If you understand that addiction is not who anybody is, it’s just an experience – and who you are is never an experience.

Even if you are 49 years old and you have had the experience for 40 years, that still does not mean that you are that experience.