addiction

Motivation may be what starts you off, but it's habit that keeps you going back for more. Are your habits working for you or against you? Are your habits helping you to achieve your goals or hindering the process?

The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind.

It was painful to contemplate the distance between the future of accomplishment I'd imagined for myself twenty years earlier, and the reality...it was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug had made me oblivious to my inertia. And it was painful to have to define myself again, at an age when most people are happy in their own skins.

Honesty can force any dysfunction in your life to the surface. Are you in an abusive relationship? A refusal to lie to others _ How did you get that bruise? _ would oblige you to come to grips with this situation very quickly. Do you have a problem with drugs or alcohol? Lying is the lifeblood of addiction. If we have no recourse to lies, our lives can unravel only so far without others noticing.Telling the truth can also reveal ways in which we want to grow but haven__.

The high is what you crave, what you would kill for... and believe me, you will lie to yourself until it's to late to stop.

So much of the theatrical can leave you with a yearning for the real. The real is suddenly and starkly there right at the city__ edge and extends for thousands of square miles of desert and mountain and canyon with which human beings can do almost nothing profitable other than to leave it be and just look at it.

But I came to see that Las Vegas is not a freak but is, instead, deeply integrated with the rest of the country, and the world beyond. It is symptom, mirror, metaphor.

You give the shirt off your back, no questions asked, and you stand alone at the cavernous mouth of your suburban closet__our entire life spent wonderingwhere your clothes went.

There's so much I should say, so many things I should tell him, but in the end I tell him nothing.I cut a line and my losses, and I light a cigarette.

The more we have, the more we realize can be taken from us, and that__ when our lives border on insanity. We live in fear of losing what we think we possess. Once we let go and let God, then we gain a peace that surpasses understanding.

What every man should desire is an ugly woman with a beautiful heart, not a beautiful woman with an ugly heart.

To stay true to ourselves and remain kind to others is an art. It does require daily vigilance and, at the same time, it__ important to remember that art can often get messy.

No one can control their results. We can, however, control our attitude. When we practise compassion, it is most effective when it is unconditional and free from seeking an outcome _ compassion is a matter of choice rather than a self-seeking action. And so, if we assist another human being from a place of presence and compassion, we are not looking to find our happiness off the back of others_ suffering. Nor are we trying to control them. Compassion is a conscious choice rather than an emotional knee-jerk reaction.

In my view, compassion takes empathy to another level. With compassion, there is an internal calling to move empathy into action. Compassion is love in action.

Part of me felt deep compassion. And another part felt like, You fucker.

It is not a coincidence that you and your partner are together. You each have something to learn from one another _. The most important thing you can do to support your partner in his [or her] recovery is to show that you are truly supportive and on his [or her] side.

Compassion is the most powerful tool you can have when it comes to healing addictions of any kind. Put simply, what your partner needs most from you is compassion.

No one consciously chooses addiction to a substance or behavior over his partner. There are always reasons _ powerful ones _ why a person retreats into addiction.