Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

by Russell Brand

If you’re like me, you like to ‘half-arse’ things. Me, I’ll buy a book on healthy eating or meditation and that’ll be enough, I will use the social tool of ‘consumerism’ to satiate a need and leave the matter there. A book on healthy eating untouched on the shelf will not improve my Body Mass Index, whatever the hell that is. A book on meditation, flung to one side, will not elevate my consciousness and attune me to the Great Oneness behind my thoughts and feelings. If you’re not going to do the things suggested in the book you may as well spend the money on cake or blow it down the track. It also, and I don’t really want to tell you this, isn’t easy. This isn’t ‘How to change your life in ten minutes while sat on your arse writing messages to the universe and popping them under your pillow.’ It’s bloody difficult. It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Actually no, the hardest thing I’ve ever done is toil under the misapprehension that I could wring pleasure out of the material world, be it through fame, money, drugs or sex, always arriving back at the same glum stoop of weary dissatisfaction.