Russell Brand is an award-winning actor, comedian, presenter and performer, and recently came out with his latest book Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions.
According to Russell, everyone is an addict in one form or another. Whether we are addicted to food, money, and power, the suffering of feeling absence is instilled in our culture.
“This is inevitable in a capitalist consumer culture. We suffer from the notion that something is missing in our lives, that we are inadequate, and our culture relies on this. Capitalism relies on people that need things,” says Russell.
This is so true. We often get wrapped up in the idea that we need material things to make us complete or satisfied. Russell counters this and awakens us into the process beyond addictions of relationships and concepts that do fulfill us.
Russell provides us a number of shocking statistics:
- Over 20 million Americans over the age of 12 suffer from addictions.
- Even worse, 142 people a day die from drug overdose.
- 21 million men think they are addicted to pornography.
- 90% of people start drinking or smoking before the age of 18.
Freedom of Our Addictions will help provide everyone with a program for implementing change in your life. It gives clear steps for recognition and solutions that help you to be the best version of yourself.
“You don’t choose between having and not having a program. You choose between your conscious program and your unconscious program,” says Russell. He believes that the steps to recovery are all internal, and all try using external things to hold our life together, and those things will not work.
“I don’t want to come at you with a book that goes I’ve been famous, successful, sorted myself out, various experience, sexually, anatomically. This program works because I am messed up.”
Interviewing Russell was a pleasure because he was very transparent in admitting he had his own flaws. The book allows one to recognize and look deeper into oneself in order to resolve things internally and externally as a person.
“How people view us, how people look at us, it is an illusion,” Russell explains. Knowing who we are and what truly completes us will help us realize our reality.
The main takeaway from my discussion with Russell is that by deeply looking at your own consciousness you are able to move to the aspects of yourself that are positive and beautiful. In Russell’s progress and awakening, he was able to consciously realize it was internal when he has relationships with other people, when he talks to someone he trusts when he accepts help from others and offers help. He explains that getting rid of heroin and crack cocaine, and realizing promiscuity, fame, and materialism weren’t healthy for him, helped to continue his reform program.
On page 54 a quote from his book reads, “here is a postcard from the other side, fame, luxury items, and glamour are not real and cannot solve you. Whether it is a pair of shoes, a stream of orgies, a movie career, or global adulation they are all just passing clouds of imaginary pleasure.” Clouds are always moving, and in order to move on you must let go of the pain.
One of the lines that resonated with me the most was “stop judging your parents.” What does that mean? Russell says you are recommitting to the pain. By justifying your past, no matter how bad it was, you are going back to the pain rather than forward.
If Russell could say any advice that would hopefully work it would be, “You have enough, you have everything you need, you are beautiful.”
Listen to more of Russell Brand and I on #FollowTheReader.
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