JJ: Welcome back, Lynne.

Lynne: Thanks, JJ. Thank you for doing these shows. They just help so many people. I just really want to applaud you.

JJ: Thank you. It’s really fun, first of all, because I get to talk about all the things that I think are important and share that with the world and see who’s interested. And our Freedom Fridays are definitely one of the most popular shows of my 6-day a week podcast show. And your first show, “Connection between Emotion and Disease,” has been a very helpful show for me to spread the word about the connection between our feelings and what manifests in our body. And today’s topic, addiction, and understanding it and healing it and just talking about the idea of addiction, is so important to me because, obviously, with the work that I do and the work that you do, we help people uncover these things and work through them for a better life, a healthier life. And from your point of view being a clairvoyant, because I don’t have the gift of sight that you have, I really appreciate the time and energy that you’re taking to be on this show in order to help educate and spread the word of the powerful work that can be done to heal every part of our life.

Lynne: Yeah. Thank you. I think that when we say addictions that people mostly think about food and alcohol and drugs and the hardcore ones. And I want to talk today about what in my view addiction is, and that is, whatever keeps us distracted from our movement forward in our lives, from having what we want, from connecting with our true feelings within ourselves and with others. It’s anything that keeps us out of our authentic self, our true self-expression. It’s so difficult to have a close relationship with ourselves or others if there’s something in the way that is taking up our time, our energy, our focus, our attention. Consciously or unconsciously, that energy will be going towards what we are doing to create distance and maybe hide out or feel safe. We can’t find what we’re looking for in a bottle, or as I call it, anesthesia in a bottle, at the grocery store, or in a pill. It’s inside of us. Learning how to connect with what is driving the need for distraction from the soul is the answer. The addiction is just a symptom. And today, I want to talk about going a little bit deeper into understanding the symptoms, reading the symptoms, and knowing what they are saying about you and how they may be taking you off-course from your soul’s journey.

JJ: I want to go back for one second because I know that you answer kind of the top question of the show, which is “What is addiction?” So if we had to put it in really simplistic terms, and I know you continue to talk about anything that takes you away from your soul’s course of what it is you’re supposed to grow into, how would you describe what an addiction is?

Lynne: It is a repetitive use of something. It could be an electronic device. It doesn’t have to be food and alcohol. Anything that takes us away. So anything that’s got your attention that you can’t put down for 24 hours that feels like a craving or keeps coming to your mind. It’s your unconscious saying “Oh, do that,” instead of maybe understanding something or connecting with somebody. Addiction is a circular movement, if we’re looking at it in energetic terms, of doing the same thing over and over and keeps us in a loop. If we don’t do the addiction, we can’t do something different which may move us forward in our journey towards happiness and having what we want.

Lynne: Addiction comes from protecting our wounds. And this whole conversation that you and I, JJ, may be having right now may be unfamiliar to many people because we’re so guarded and so protected, we think that’s normal. So in protecting our wounds, when we don’t want to feel pain or anger or grief of what we didn’t have as a kid or what we did have, addictions are an unconscious way of protecting wounds that we have from the past. So maybe you wanted a more loving relationship with someone in your past, and it didn’t work. What we usually do is turn to food or alcohol (those are the two big ones) to fill that void. So addiction comes from a void. There’s something that we don’t want to feel that’s either happened or we’re afraid of it happening, when we don’t live in our heart.

There is a choice to live in our head or our hearts. When we live in our heads, this is one of the ways that addictions are born, because we’re listening to the ego, the critical voice, that negative voice inside of us that is telling us to do things that distract us. Just distract us from our path and distract us from our souls. So we are either in our heart or in our head. We can’t be in two places at the same time. And you know when you hear that voice, “Oh, don’t do that. You’re not smart enough. You’re not good enough,” all of those negativities bring us back to that place within us that bring us down and lead us away from what we came here to do, lead us away from the soul’s path.

JJ: So it sounds a lot like a deep wound and then fear.

Lynne: A deep wound, fear, grief for what we didn’t have. Some people sit in the longing. And longing is another feeling that leads to addiction. If you’re longing to have a mate, if you’re longing to feel feelings of love, and you don’t have that, you may pick up a chocolate bar and use the serotonin that you get in that to keep locking the feelings rather than go in and experience them and move through them, so that that feeling of longing is not there. If it’s not, you’re not going to reach for the chocolate bar.

JJ: You know I’m a huge law of attraction user and sort of honing that mental focus. Is it unexpressed emotion that needs to be processed and released? Because couldn’t somebody also have a pattern that they just keep repeating and embedding both subconsciously and consciously, that maybe someone consciously can start to chip away at, maybe they’re not going to heal the deepest part of that wound with their conscious mind, but that the conscious mind can play a role in reframing, in releasing, in easing any of that?

Lynne: Yes, absolutely. But I’m not so sure that people… You can see the behavior, so it’s fine to see the behavior. But I think that there are what I call soft addictions that people don’t understand. They think they’re a part of life, and they don’t understand that those are taking them away, because again, people think of drugs and alcohol. But if we can, let’s talk about some of the soft addictions that might keep people into “Oh, I do that. I didn’t know that was an addiction,” because they may think it’s part of their everyday life rather than moving them away from what they really want.

JJ: So let me guess. Soft addictions (and we did not have this conversation prior to this show) are things like technology, constantly being attached to that anxiety of that need of being needed and you always have to attend to something outside of you. Would that be one?

Lynne: Yeah. Perfect. Now, that addiction can be either a soft or a hard addiction.

JJ: Explain the difference between how technology (and I’m going to include television on that), so between your iPhone or your computer or television, what’s the difference between if that is soft or hard?

Lynne:If you can’t put it down for 24 hours, there’s a problem.

JJ: So that’s a hard addiction. Anything you can’t stop for 24 hours.

Lynne: Yeah.

JJ: Okay. And soft addiction would be just that choice. Now, let’s dig into that one just a little bit because it is so much more common or acceptable or people are unaware that that would be considered an addiction. So on the soft addiction, and someone using television or their iPhone or whatever…

Lynne: Let’s go with the iPhone.

JJ: Okay. The constant attention to that is that dismissal or numbing or refocus of “I don’t want to deal with something.” Is there a difference between the hard and soft addiction in correlation to a wound or a feeling like, let’s say, a trauma? Would it be like a more impactful trauma earlier on that would help to cause a hard addiction versus sort of low-level, surface, ego-minded feeling of insecurities or something in the present that would cause a soft addiction? Is there a difference?

Lynne: Yeah. There’s a difference in how it sits in the body. So if you had a slight injustice, maybe it’s not so deep. But if you didn’t feel loved, you didn’t feel wanted, you didn’t feel needed, and you had an iPhone, and the iPhone provided you thoroughly with the satisfaction, the perceived satisfaction (because it’s all perception) that you didn’t have, if the iPhone filled that need that you didn’t have as a child or felt like it filled the need, then that could be a hard addiction for somebody because it keeps them out of resolving the core feelings. So the iPhone is just a symptom.

JJ: Right. And the television, all of that is just sort of avoidance. And so we’re going to consider maybe soft addictions, that slight irritation, but the large injustices, the things you can’t stop doing for 24 hours are the hard addictions.

Lynne: The harder addictions, yeah. Or the long-term.

JJ: Let’s move on to other soft, because the hard addictions you probably can blow through quickly. It’s basically drugs, alcohol, and food.

Lynne: Yeah. Pretty much.

JJ: Okay. So other soft addictions between the television and your technology.

Lynne: Yeah. We’ve got sugar. We’ve got shopping. We’ve got chaos, perfection. Perfection is a big one for a lot of women, and the needing to look good, keeping that proverbial to-do list that never ends. All of these are accepted as normal.

JJ: Thank God I got over that. I laughed, I chuckled when you said to-do list because in the first couple of years of my business, I had a never-ending to-do list, and I got to the place where I thought, “This is ridiculous. I am never going to get all this stuff done, and it’s creating an anxiety in me.” And I literally, since that, have not done a traditional to-do list. I’ll do maybe one during the day of things that I might need to get done today, but I literally avoid to-do lists for that very reason.

Lynne: You just touched on another piece, too, JJ. Soft or hard addictions, how much anxiety do you have if you have to stop them? That’s another way to tell. How much anxiety do you have if you had to stop doing that behavior? That will also categorize it as a soft or hard.

JJ: So by providing relief for me and saying “I can’t do this anymore” was a soft addiction.

Lynne: Mm-hm.

JJ:  And for someone that feels that the lack of structure and the lack of routine leaves them in limbo and causes greater anxiety. There was comfort in the chaos. That’s a hard addiction?

Lynne: That’s a harder addiction. The biggest addiction, I think, is the one we all have to control. We are addicted to control. We didn’t feel we had it in our earlier years and we try, consciously or unconsciously, to gain the illusion of control with people, power over people. In our daily activities, that to-do list creates some type of control for all of us.

JJ: So really, everyone probably has an addiction.

Lynne: Yeah, at least.

JJ: Some kind of soft addiction. And the first step would be being conscious of it and understanding it, correct?

Lynne: Yes.

JJ: In order to heal it.

Lynne: Yes. I think this, too, is another place where we can look at “Where do addictions come from?” And that is, it’s the addiction to the beliefs that we have about our past, about who we are. It’s the addiction to the perceptions and the beliefs of what has happened, because we’re going to have a reaction to what happened based on our interpretation. So these perceptions create addictions. So these perceptions create some type of a hole inside of us. And the hole needs to be filled. And so what do we fill it with is things that keep us stuck so that we’re not feeling the addictions, because feeling is the F word to a lot of people. It’s all about running and moving and going and doing so that they’re not sitting with themselves.

JJ: I think people are terrified. A lot of people are terrified of feeling because of the lack of trust in what’s on the other side of expressing the feeling or releasing the feeling. Now, I want to touch upon what you just said about beliefs and perceptions and interpretations because, to me, that is conscious mind and that’s what I think the power,whether it be law of attraction or conscious therapy, of being able to understand or reposition or re-interpret something from a different perspective. Can we talk about… because I know from your work, being a client of yours, that feelings also get stuck in the body. So not to disconnect the head from the brain, but the effect, and maybe if there’s an order. Do we start with the heart, or do we start with the head, or do we start them both? How do we marry them together? Because from my own work prior to working with you, I know, I totally believe that the work of law of attraction and paying attention to my thoughts and the conscious mind and being present with that and how I believe and what my beliefs are and understanding all of that on a conscious level has been able to shift, maybe not unroot the deepest feeling that has stopped me from whatever in my life, but has been able to suddenly start to shift all of that because I know I’ve had a different experience. But I know from our work that there is a deeper feeling and heart and releasing and feeling and expressing. So can you talk to that?

Lynne: Yeah. I think one of the ways we can begin to look at it is to start with a symptom. If you have a body symptom that you’re not happy with. And I’ll give an example. A woman came to me, and she was 20 pounds overweight, and she just couldn’t understand why she was overweight. So she was sitting there, and what I saw is her as a child. She was about 10, and she was in her bedroom, and she was eating M&M’s, and she was very frightened, a little bit shaky. And she was eating M&M’s. And so I said, “Hey, I’m seeing you in your room as a kid eating M&M’s. Can you tell me about that?” And she said that she used to go to her room and escape from her mother who was verbally abusive and eat M&M’s. And that was how she calmed herself down. And so we worked to clear those feelings of aloneness and fear and anger and longing to be loved. And a week later, she had no interest in the M&M’s.

So I think this body-mind connection, it’s pretty strong for people. So one is if you have a body symptom that you don’t like. It could be a body symptom, or even bigger yet, a way that you think about yourself, a way that you think about others. Is there judgment? Is there self-judgment? Is there lack of drive? Is it ho-hum? What’s going on inside of you? And are you sitting in front of the TV? I mean the obvious ones. Are you watching too much TV? Are you on an electronic device? Are you using sugar? Are you using food? What’s going on inside of you? And I think if you take a moment and you stop and you ask yourself, “Is my life the happiest it can be? Is my life the best it can be?” and if the answer is no, ask yourself, “What have I been not willing to look at to bring me those things or move me in that direction?”

And I think you’re going to begin to notice some repetitive behavior, things that may feel normal to you, like chaos, like excuses, like blame, like overdrive, all of these things. If you have tension in your body, that’s a huge tipoff that there’s something not right. The body should have a chi to it. It should have a movement to it, a feeling of in the moment rather than worry and focused on “Will the past be my present? Will the future bring me bad things?” So it could be a body thing, body symptom, something you’re not happy with. It could be something in your mind that your ego is talking to about in that negative critical voice. So I think those are some of the ways we can look at “Hey, there’s something going on here.”

JJ: Let’s go back to hard addictions, because I think at the end of the day, when I ask you to help us for those people who want to try to start to make a change themselves… Let’s say before, maybe they’re in a place where they’re not really ready to reach out for help, even though they know they need it, but they want to try and change their behavior on their own, or deal with and process some of these emotions. Before we get to a few suggestions on how everyone listening can start to do that, I want to go back to the hard addiction and ask you about the body’s physiological relationship to those hard addictions, because I know I’ve gone through other people in my life getting over certain addictions and learning about, let’s say, smoking for instance and how the nicotine is only in the body supposedly for about three days, and then after that, it’s all really just that mental conversation.

There’s a book. I don’t know if you know the book. It’s called “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking” by Allen Carr. And I read it, and I found it very interesting because this man smoked over a hundred cigarettes a day and had done everything, all kinds of therapies and hypnosis and detoxes, if you will, to try to stop smoking. And he had a story from every angle of that conscious mind about smoking. And I found the book to be very effective. But I also know that some people’s complaint upfront for some of these other addictions. Let’s say something harder than tobacco. Maybe it’s a much stronger drug, and there’s a neurological component that someone can say or a doctor says that you need medical supervision to come off of this. Can we talk about that?

Lynne: Yeah. I mean, I think it can go either way. I saw a guy years ago, and he wanted to get off cigarettes. His doctor had told him, “It’s time. You got to stop smoking.” And so while he was talking about smoking all these years, I saw him hiking with his dad, and then they got to the top of this hill. They were sitting out there. They were looking over the city. And they were both smoking. And so the smoking had bonded them. And when I was talking about his father, he started to cry. And so we worked through the grief of losing his father, but he had connected the cigarettes with the connection of his father. Once the grieving was done, he no longer had any desire for cigarettes. That was his case. But I do think that when there is a hard addiction, that care needs to be taken with someone in helping them come off the substance. But I also feel that the deeper work is, once you get to the wound, they can release the physical addiction much easier once the emotional pain is gone. When the emotion releases, my experience is that the physical addiction releases.

JJ: Absolutely. I believe that 150%. And I also know that a lot of the treatment centers out there don’t necessarily do that kind of work. I mean, they do therapy, but it’s all about the substance and focus on the substance and then the diet and exercise. Can you speak to that?

Lynne: I want to go back for one second and say that it’s the energy of the wound that creates the addiction. So if you stop one addiction, let’s say you give up drinking and somebody begins to smoke or the smoking becomes more or they drink a lot of coffee every day, the energy from the wound, when it is not healed, just moves to another way to suppress the emotion. So until that core emotion is dissolved, resolved, let go of in the body, there will be addiction energy. The person may become a sex addict or they may up whatever else they’re doing. If they were smoking, they may smoke three packs a day or two packs a day. So let’s think about this for a second that if the wound is not healed, that the addictive energy is still in the body. They’re still going to be looking for it, because removing a hard addiction, the energy of it will just either branch off to many addictions or it will go into something big. It usually goes into another big addiction for somebody.

JJ: And I see that every day in friends and clients and people who have released one behavior of an addiction and replaced it with another “more acceptable” behavior, but the addiction energy absolutely is still there. And it’s obvious the wound has not been healed yet. So that’s a great point. Thank you for bringing that up. Now, I do want to talk about some things that people can do, because this could scare people. I think there’s two ways to interpret or receive this information, or more than two ways. For me, as I’ve said before, I know I’m not necessarily the normal person. I see this and I know, because I’m on the other side, that there’s freedom, there’s an ease, and there’s a trust on the other side of dealing with whatever that addiction energy was caused from, whatever that wound is.

So for some people, they might be feeling very motivated and inspired right now to go work on that. And I’m going to encourage anyone who’s considering that to call Lynne, first and foremost. If you don’t live near California or in California, it doesn’t matter. She works with people over the phone, because as you can hear, I work with her and there isn’t anyone I’ve met more accurate in her clairvoyance than Lynne. And maybe there’s a need to do more work with personal people around you when you can find out who that might be. But for the people who are listening to this and you’re considering it, we’ve planted the seed. It’s going to grow. And now you think, “What can I do myself?” Lynne is going to address that. But first, we need to take a break so we can thank our sponsors… Okay, Lynne. I want to start helping myself in any way possible, heal that wound, or become conscious of it. What can I do?

Lynne: Okay. So one of the things you can do is to ask yourself. Really sit in a meditative state. Get quiet. Let all the distractions go. Do some belly breathing. And ask yourself, “What is it that I really want?” When you get that answer, move on to “Why don’t I have that? How come I don’t have that?” Let your intuition come through. Let it guide you. It’s really full of wisdom. Ask yourself, “How can I accomplish what I want?” whether it’s a good relationship or whatever that is. But again, use your intuition. It’s such a great resource inside of each of us.

Then, whatever your answer is, check yourself during the day and make sure your actions are congruent with what you have been wanting. Make sure you’re not using a substance or food or whatever in moving away from that feeling. So let’s say you’re feeling so and so, “Just hurt me,” look at your behavior. Stay very present with that, and look at what you’re going to do with that. Are you going to make that be a judgment about them, about you? Or are you going to breathe and ask yourself, “What have I not been willing to do around this type of interaction with someone?” And I think you’re going to begin to find a pattern that you can begin to work on.

Next, I would ask yourself, if you know what the soft or hard addiction is, ask yourself, “How does sugar food, Internet… How does that serve me?” So ask yourself, “How does that addiction serve me?” Next, what part of you is getting served? Ask yourself, “What part of me is this serving? Is it the part that’s afraid? Is it the part that doesn’t want to move forward? Is it the part that’s angry?” And so then you can work on that. So what is it that you don’t want to feel, deal with, know about, or be responsible for? Somewhere in those, that last question, “What is it that you don’t want to feel, deal with, know about, be responsible for?” you will find the answer.

JJ: And once they have an answer, what would be some recommendations on how to process that so they can release it and move past the addiction?

Lynne: Well, I think it’s going to differ, JJ, for each person. Some people may want to just know what it is and then check and make sure that they’re not doing the behavior. Others may want to work with somebody and get to it pretty quickly and move through it because, as JJ was saying, there is an amazing amount of freedom once you are past what the piece is. And it doesn’t take a long time. For most of my clients, it’s a couple of sessions. Once you are past that, you are so free. You feel so good. You feel out of that box.

JJ: And healed and on to bigger and better things. As a client of yours, I can definitely vouch for that. Now, just so that everyone who’s listening, if you’re interested in all the things that Lynne has been talking about, her first show was called “Connections between Emotion and Disease,” which was Episode 11. And we did a whole show on strengthening your intuition, which was Episode 41. Check back to fit2love.tv. We will have available for you a downloadable version of how to listen to your intuition in the near future. So make sure that if you’re not in a place where you can call in and have one of her CDs mailed to you that we are working on, creating a downloadable product so that everyone everywhere in the world can also benefit from the instruction of listening to your intuition and letting that guide you and empower you to heal whatever is going on with you, so you can live the life you’re supposed to be living. So any remaining comments or ideas or thoughts, Lynne, to share with everyone?

Lynne: Yeah. I would say, if you’re living in your head, you’re way more prone to addictions. If you’re living in your heart, you’d be home right now.

JJ: That’s nice. I just want to ask, though. Don’t you think a lot of people are living in their head because they’re so afraid of the pain in their heart?

Lynne: Yes.

JJ: And once you heal the pain in your heart, it’s a lot easier to access it?

Lynne: Yes. Fear is a life-crippler. It just drains the life out of what you want, out of joy. Once you move past this, you would feel like a completely different person.

JJ: Amen. Lynne, thank you so much. Of course, I’m taking notes and I’m thinking of five other shows we can do. But I just really appreciate your education, information, clairvoyance, gift that you have to share with the world. I’m so grateful and appreciative that I connected with you and manifested you in my life as well as for everyone else who’s listening so that you can help let people know, share with them what’s possible, because I think so many people get stuck in, like you said, just the fear and the belief of what they’re living when there is another way and there are answers to freeing yourself into the life you’re supposed to lead. So thank you so much.

Lynne: Thank you.