Adult ADD: Control Your Outer Limits
Adult ADD: Control Your Outer Limits to Control Your Inner Limits
Many of us are guilty of taking our physical interactions for granted. We may have forgotten the last time we enjoyed the tastes, touches and smells that are part of a healthy, sensual life. If you have ADD, or there is some other reason why you are not able to keep your outer life under control—that is precisely when you need to focus on it most. When we take care of ourselves outside this world, we can also take care of ourselves within it more easily. This means that we are less likely to experience all the hazards of time and space in a disorganized, scattered way. It is so easy to be trapped by your own body and lose touch with what is happening outside yourself.
When you spend less time tangling up life with your brain, you find spaces where you can relax and recharge. You can take advantage of these "windows of creativity" even when you are too busy to think about yourself as someone separate from other people or animals. When you are more playful, you find it much easier to be inventive. That is the time when it seems like you can do anything and everything. Playing is not necessarily a retreat from life, but just the opposite; it is actually an immersion into life because it opens up your mind and senses. In fact, playing is a matter of survival for human beings as well as for all other species of animals. If we want to live in a complete and full way, we need to regain our natural ability to play at any age. When we play with each other rather than against each other, we can trust that there will be good feelings all around us instead of constant tension between us. As Dr. Garth Kravitz says, "When you feel that you have been ignored, insulted or hurt by another person, what you are really feeling is not an emotional pain but a loss of your sense of self-integrity. You are now 'less-thanness' in their mind and they want to 'make it up to' you."
The intensity with which we play may surprise us. As scientists and psychologists have always insisted, reality is our subjective experience. It never exists outside the mind or the body; it is always filtered through our senses and perceptions. If we are not conscious of our subjective states of being, then we can easily become confused with regard to both our bodies and our environment. As long as we are caught in the cycle of our own thoughts, we can find ourselves trapped in confusion and forget about ourselves, our place in the world and the reality that lies around us. We may not be aware, but the way in which we play is a message from "deep within" to "deep without." It is a beacon—a message from beyond our physical boundaries which tells us where we really belong and point us toward health, joy and freedom. When you play with yourself, you are engaged with all your senses—with sounds, smells and tastes just as much as touch. You are at once in the body and outside it. There is a sexual aspect to all this because you are providing physical pleasure for yourself, but you are also communicating with the world around you—with flowers, with colors and even with movement. You can cross over into new territory when you play.
If we are talking about ADD, we must be aware of the fact that our bodies are not our entire world. We have more friends who live in different areas of awareness than our physical bodies do. Our minds are more alive than our bodies can ever be. Our thoughts and emotions never stop moving, even when we are at rest. They are always setting off on new adventures. We notice them more readily in our dreams than when we are fully awake, partially because they can seem so bizarre at those times. If you have ADD, you cannot afford to lose the sexual fun that is free play and a chance for you to explore your own mind as well as your own body—even if it does sometimes feel like there is too much going on outside! To stay balanced and healthy, it is important for you to understand that you must take control of your subconscious mind as well as your conscious mind. They are forever interchanging and always interrelating, but the conscious mind wins out in the end. If you can keep a grip on your conscious mind, you will have a very good chance of controlling your subconscious mind effectively and completely. In this way, you can keep it from doing things that are harmful to yourself or anyone else. This can be very important for many reasons. It is all part of learning to "eat to live" instead of "living to eat.
If you let your mind run wild, you can end up with many problems which are difficult to solve. Some of them will be physical in nature, but even those will seem worse than they really are if you do not take the time to understand what is really happening inside your body. You may feel threatened and frightened by this type of thinking because it goes against everything you have learned about yourself for so many years. If it seems like a scary proposition, that is normal; this little article is not meant to scare anyone. The purpose here is to help you recognize that some of the ways in which your body responds physically can teach you much more about yourself than any physician or psychologist ever could. The only way to solve your problems is to learn to understand them and help yourself. That is where your own wisdom and medicine come into play.
What causes the reaction? The cause of your problems has nothing to do with other people, but everything to do with how you deal with yourself—and, in some ways, how you are even responsible for having them in the first place! We do not choose everything that happens in our lives; however, we have a great deal of control over our reactions and actions. We can change the way we perceive each moment without ever knowing what caused it in the first place. The reason why some results seem so mysterious is that they are not really mysterious at all. We may not always know why some things happen, but knowing how to solve our problems is a matter of practice. Our minds are like trees with many branches. If a branch snaps off, the tree will still live on; however, it will have to remain in its birthplace instead of spreading out and becoming bigger and stronger. It is the same with our minds; we cannot control everything that happens around us every moment of every day. We can only control our response to each occurrence. This takes practice and patience, especially when it comes to physical reactions which we do not always have control over.