Can yoga help with addiction?

In his book "Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy," yogi Sadhguru tells the story of his own awakening and presents a philosophical and practical introduction to the power and profundity of yoga.

Sadhguru, founder of Isha Foundation, an international, volunteer-run, nonprofit organization dedicated to human well-being – as well as the Isha Institute of Inner Sciences in nearby McMinnville, Tenn. – looks at the root cause of addiction, and how yoga can create a blissful experience that allows addictions to fall by the wayside.

Q: Sadhguru, I work with addicts, and in America, there is a concept that addiction is a disease, and once a person is an addict, he or she is always an addict. I am struggling with this idea. Addiction may be a medical condition at some point, but is it a permanent disease?

A: It depends what kind of an addict you are talking about. There are food addicts, drug addicts, alcohol addicts, sex addicts, suffering addicts, gossip addicts – so many compulsive types of behavior about a variety of things.

Any compulsive state takes away the ease from you; in that sense, addiction is a disease. Is it permanent? No. Even being alive is not permanent – so why would you question if addiction is permanent?

Those who say that addiction is a permanent disease and treat it accordingly are themselves in a state of addiction; they are compulsive about doing something in a particular way. Each addict has come into addiction in his or her own way. Only to some extent can there be a common treatment. You need to look at each human being and treat him or her the way it is necessary for that person to be treated.

Do we have the care and concern to attend to each one of them the way it is necessary? That is something we have to check. And above all, is it a person's right to always get into problematic situations and expect others to treat them? This also has to be looked at. If people do not take responsibility for their own well-being, no power on earth or in heaven can fix them.

The most important thing is to help them establish a sense of responsibility for their own lives and to show them a better option. Otherwise, you will not get them off alcohol and drugs. Right now, this is the biggest experience in their lives. You have to show them something better.

Unless you teach them something better, they are not going to give up what they have found. It may damage the body, but they feel they have a bigger experience than people who work through the day, come back home, eat, sleep, and go back to work again. They think that is rubbish, and what they are doing is better.

When they become helpless, when they get broken, you may be looking down upon them, but when they are high, they are looking down upon you. If they did not think what they are addicted to is better than whatever else is available around, they would not do it. In their perspective, it is good. Only when things go bad, when the body is broken, do they come to you.

If someone comes up with a drug that does not damage the body much but keeps one in a hallucinatory state all the time, the whole population would go on it. In some way, human societies have failed to make the experience of life worthwhile for a whole lot of people, so they are using all kinds of deviant ways to find something fulfilling. We have to offer something that is more powerful than any drug and that leads to everyone's well-being.

Recent research into the human brain has yielded some incredible results. An Israeli scientist spent several years researching certain aspects of the human brain, and he found that there are millions of "cannabis" receptors in the brain. Then neurologists discovered that at different times of the day, if you closely observe the system and what happens with the brain chemistry, the body develops its own "cannabis" to satisfy the receptors in the brain. If a person is in a certain state of blissfulness or ecstasy, he produces these chemicals, which the brain is constantly waiting for. Even your brain is waiting for you to be blissful – millions of cannabis receptors are sitting there and waiting – not for you to smoke or drink or do drugs, but for you to become blissful!

To remain calm, to remain in an extreme sense of pleasure all the time, is available to every human being if he just explores his own system a little more. The science of yoga gives this pleasure to you. Yogis are not against pleasure. It is just that they are unwilling to settle for little pleasures.

Yogis are greedy. They know if you drink a glass of wine, it just gets you a little buzzed, and then the next morning you get a headache. They are not willing to go for that. Their goal is to be totally drunk all the time but 100 percent stable and alert, because you must be alert to enjoy the intoxication. And nature has given you this possibility.

About Sadhguru: Sadhguru has dedicated himself to the elevation of the physical, mental, and spiritual well-being of all people. In 1992, Sadhguru established Isha Foundation, headquartered at the Isha Institute of Inner Sciences and at the Isha Yoga Center, located in India at the base of the Velliangiri Mountains, near Coimbatore.

Supported by over 3 million volunteers worldwide, the Foundation's activities aim to empower the individual to realize his or her own inner potential, and to promote a global climate of inclusiveness and harmony.

Noteworthy:

"To remain calm, to remain in an extreme sense of pleasure all the time, is available to every human being if he just explores his own system a little more. The science of yoga gives this pleasure to you." -- Sadhguru.