My addiction to food started when I was a kid. I was abandoned by my mother and I locked that kid away and never grew up. I had to become a man really quickly from a very young age.
My first drug was sugar. I’d steal food and stash it so I could eat all day and night. I’d be getting slices of cheese and shit out of my pillows. That was the start of my ego taking over my life.
The ego is a self-defence mechanism we erect the moment we are picked on or trauma happens in our life. That trauma shapes us and we develop coping mechanisms that are often harmful or negative that stop us fulfilling our potential. Addiction – to food, to alcohol, to drugs, to drama, stress, anger – is one of the more common coping mechanisms.
If you read Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe it explains what happened to our diet. We were taken away from our natural food sources, our farming food, and put on the white man’s diet.
Before colonisation, once a year my tribe would go to the Snowy Mountains and hunt these huge moths. All tribes would meet up and do it. They gave us enough fat during winter to survive. We farmed our own natural potato, giving us enough nutrients to survive. We fished, we hunted, and if you look at the early European explorers and the way they talk, you can tell from what they were saying that we were already farming the land. Terra Nullius (“nobody’s land”) was always a disgusting lie. We were the first farmers before Adam and Eve.
There’s a saying if man made it, don’t eat it. Go get a fruit, go get something else. But sugar and shit food is everywhere and the poor and disenfranchised consume more of it than anyone. It’s set up that way. Good food is expensive and scarce. Toxic, addictive, processed food is abundant and cheap as chips, as they say.
Death rates from diabetes, linked to poor diets, are four times as high among Aboriginals than not non-Aboriginals. Many of us grow up on missions and in housing commissions, often located in remote areas on the distant outskirts of country towns. These places are food deserts devoid of any kind of fresh food or produce, where you only have barely drinkable water. All that remains is long lasting, highly processed food and drinks. Even if there were good quality food options nearby, which there isn’t, we couldn’t afford it anyway.
TV is god in western society. It tells us what to think, what to wear, what to eat. We watch advertisements about this juicy food and the next day we are cringing for it. Our mouth is literally watering when we see it because we’ve eaten it before and our taste buds are aroused. That desire is pumped into us from the day we are first plonked in front of a TV set. The advertising industry has a lot to answer for. TV and the mainstream media are the biggest psychological weapons used on humans.
My whole life I abused drugs. It started with food and it became alcohol and harder drugs, then I became a drug dealer. It wasn’t until I broke my back that I woke up. I hit a point where it was: either I’m going to die or I’m gonna fucken rise above this. My injury had taken three to four years to get as bad as it did and now that I’ve been on the healing path for one year, I can’t complain. I did this for three years I’ve gotta wait three years for it to be healed.
It was DMT that stopped me killing myself. I smoked DMT before rehab and it told me I was gonna go to rehab, I was gonna leave my missus, I was gonna stop talking to my father and my brother. I was gonna leave it all behind.
Going into rehab I gained a lot of weight. Because I had no drugs food became my drug again. Plus, I was going through a lot: working on traumas, writing out traumas, sitting with the emotion, then having to express them. I would go to a spot on the farm barefoot and drop to my hands and knees and beg Mother Earth for help. No one knows the real struggle until you’ve done that. And once you do that, you receive. If you’re gonna devote yourself to yourself, Mother Earth is going to start to work with you. She’s gonna give you everything you need.It’s part of the seven universal laws.
After rehab I started micro-dosing mushrooms. It made me sit with repressed emotions each day and I found my back would get better in little areas. Knots were releasing. Sometimes I would start crying and not know why and out of nowhere a memory would pop up.
While I was in rehab a friend went to Shamanic school. I visited him for a weekend to do some healing and went into dreaming with him. He’d healed other Aboriginal people before and told me about this black cloud we all have over our body that rains on us constantly. It’s from when we were colonised, a trauma that carries on through our DNA. But no matter what, everyone can restructure their DNA. No one can sit there and say, ‘I was born like this, that’s why I’m a drug addict,’ and keep running ‘emselves down. It’s a lie. It’s all ‘cos of trauma. This whole system is designed to break families apart with alcohol and the rest of it.
After rehab I moved to Bondi with a mate and got into fasting a lot. I had read a lot about detoxing the body of parasites and been introduced to Dr Sebi, who famously said, “A society that keeps cures a secret so they can continue to sell medication for huge profits is not a real society but a huge mental asylum.”
Curing addiction is all about curing yourself, which means changing people, places and things. Coming back from rehab, I wanted to change how I looked, I wanted to become the best version of myself. I devoted myself to myself. That’s when I started doing these diets. I got to 88 kilos in a few weeks just from running but I was still eating meat. I stayed at 88 kilos for three weeks and couldn’t drop anymore weight. I didn’t know why.
Dr Sebi says you can’t defeat any disease until the colon is cleansed. So that’s your gut. Dr Sebi has a juice which is: three green apples, one lemon or lime, one nub of ginger, mixed with boiled water and pink Himalayan salt. I fasted for three days and I was still 88 kilos on the third day. Then I had that juice and lost eight kilos in a week. It fully cleanses you. Our intestines are 40 foot long and you’re trying to tell me there’s not shit stuck in there from when you’re a kid?
I was like, ‘wow, what’s the potential of this.’ After that I tried a week and a half of only juices then I broke and went on a vegan diet. I noticed the burst of energy. I felt very lethargic from fasting for three days, but after the juice I felt very alive, very awake. I was like righto, this is a lot of energy from not even consuming food or fibre. After that I went to a vegan diet for two weeks. I was very fit, I was running Bondi Beach every day or second day, doing ten laps, and trying to swim afterwards at the Ice Bergs, to mix up my routine. After that I went back to meat for a bit and I felt sick nearly every day. You can tell how meat affects your body because afterwards you have mucus. That means our body is infected. Mucus is not normal for our body. Our membrane is not meant to have mucus flowing through it.
If you go into the Ayurvedic traditions, they believe every two hours we go into a new star sign. Every morning its Aries (ram) and Taurus (bull), which used to be the two most revered animals on this planet. They produced magic mushrooms. Ancients used to love them. We all used to be vegetarians once upon a time, now we’re eating the most sacred animals on this planet and we’re pumping ‘em full of steroids, which are killing all of the Australian native plants. We’re logging and creating all this free space for animals that are poisoning our water. In one 330 gram steak, there’s something like half a million litres of water. No one understands what we are doing for greed. We’ve all lost our way.
My Aboriginal people had a system that lasted over 100 000 years. There are over 2 500 languages in the Aboriginal system and not one of them has ‘Please’ or ‘Thankyou.’ It’s expected that you give what you’ve got because that’s human nature. Every man and woman on this physical plain, we are all meant to come here and learn lessons as we go along and we are all meant to help each other. – Gavin Longbottom
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