Karma Is Not Fickle!

Any time someone goes through something like opiate addiction the issue of faith seems to bubble to the surface. At least for me it did. I would not call myself “religious” by any stretch of the imagination. Oh sure I go to church occasionally and on holidays but I’ve never been a person with a tremendous amount of faith. I’m not agnostic or against organized religion but I’ve rarely called upon the Lord or God to help me in any way.

I guess I’m one of those people that likes to steal the good stuff from all religions and form my own “franken-religion”. It’s very convenient and makes sense to me. Well when I was battling my pill addiction, I began to truly wish that I DID have a lot of faith and that I could lean on that when I was having trouble. At that point in time however, Karma became more than merely superstition to me…it became my guide and spiritual measuring stick.

Over the course of my addiction, I truly believe that the pills lowered my moral threshold…my internal alarm clock that told me that what I was about to do was not particularly wholesome. I won’t go into details and it’s not like there was all sorts of behind the scenes debauchery; it was more of an attitude. I was more selfish about getting and doing what I wanted without concern for others. My moral compass was just a bit off. I think you can probably say this for anyone addicted to alcohol or cocaine but as with all things “opiate addiction” this was a bit more subtle. I wasn’t robbing banks or creating illegitimate children everywhere; but there was definitely a certain amount of deviance in my brain that made it very hard to say “No.” Right or wrong, I feel that Karma always kept score.

Going through opiate addiction and withdrawal can be one of the most difficult things one will ever go through in their life. There’s certainly a “honeymoon” phase when you first start taking pills but that passes and things get dark pretty quickly. And then came the point in time in every addicts life when things started to “happen” to me. At first it was just little things like losing car keys or saying something really idiotic at a party. Then I graduated to everything from marriage problems to money problems and it became clear after it was all too late that my pills had a lot to do with all of these things that “kept happening” to me.

As fate would have it, I also had a run of truly, legitimate bad luck. At the time, I was unfortunate enough to have business partners that were ten times more morally bankrupt than I and “friends” that weren’t really my friends. So I did have some truly unfortunate circumstances to deal with during this time but who knows: if I wasn’t on painkillers, maybe I would have been stronger or smarter or just more well-equipped to mitigate the damage that some of this bad luck had visited upon me. ALL of this however, I attributed to a very intimate brush with Karma.

Karma is like a credit card; it’s easier to spend it than it is to pay it back. I always had this sense that after all of the pills and the screw ups and the things that “happened” to me, that I would have to pay it back some way. I always knew that as far as my pills went, “something had to give and when it did, I was going to be busy paying.”

And that my friends is how we met. Once I got off pills, I truly believe that my moral compass began to right itself once again. I got my moral mojo back. I’m not a Saint, but quitting pills really gave me back my sense of self and my core beliefs. That’s when I realized that by trying to help others and truly concentrating on other people’s problems I would eventually get back everything I had lost and possibly more. So now I have been blessed to be able to start a company like Withdrawal-Ease, make a great product, help people and make money (err…well sort of..my wife would disagree with this!) at the same time. It’s been a truly amazing journey. And it’s just getting started!

I think I’m square with Karma right now and I know that I never would have been able to do that if I hadn’t quit the pills. Things would have just kept “happening to me”…and I didn’t want that anymore. I wanted to be in control of my fate once again.

Take stock of your life right now. Are things “just happening” to you as well? It could be a sign that Karma’s keeping your score as well. If so, get off the pills. If you do it cold turkey or have to go through withdrawal, use Withdrawal-Ease. It does what it says; It works.

-George