Why Metabeing exists
I lost a large part of my life to addiction.
I tried to quit hundreds of times and failed, not because I lacked willpower, but because I lacked understanding. I did not understand the nature of the mind. I did not understand the nature of craving. And I did not have a framework that went deeper than behavioural change.
If I had possessed that understanding earlier, I may have saved myself years of misery.
Metabeing exists to ensure those years are not wasted for nothing.
This is a way of giving something back: build a free, open platform that helps people develop mastery over their inner world, especially those in recovery from addiction.
Metabeing is not about promotion, platitudes, or recycled self-help. Everything published is grounded in lived experience and insight from being nearly 20 years sober.
Who is Metabeing for?
Metabeing is primarily for people in recovery who are seeking non-religious spirituality and practical philosophical tools to gain self-mastery over their inner world.
It could also be relevant to so-called “non-addicts,” though I struggle to think of anyone who is not addicted to something. Addiction does not only mean alcohol or drugs. It includes excessive internet use, shopping, overeating, validation-seeking…one could increase the list ad infinitum.
Addiction is a spectrum. Suffering is universal.
The Metabeing message
Tagline: Self mastery after addiction
Metabeing explores how to build a resilient internal world using philosophy, especially Stoicism and Advaita Vedanta, so that life after addiction is not merely survived but lived well.
Active addiction is a battle fought almost entirely in the mind. But this internal battle is not exclusive to addicts. The Bhagavad Gita uses the battlefield of Kurukshetra as a metaphor for the psychological struggle that defines the human condition.
We live in a culture obsessed with external appearances, yet all experience is internal. Thought and perception are everything, and any recovery that doesn’t recognise and address this, is fragile.
The core premise of Metabeing is that if you get the inside right, you cope better with the outside.
Metabeing does not compete with therapy, rehabilitation, or 12-step programs. Those approaches matter. But a lot of recovery work stops short of addressing a deeper issue: identification with the egoic mind.
Many people quit one addiction only to replace it with another because the root problem has not been examined.
Metabeing explores a deeper layer of inner work, drawing on:
- Stoicism’s focus on perception and one’s sphere of control
- Advaita Vedanta’s idea that you are not your thoughts, emotions, body, or personality, but the awareness in which they arise
At its core, Metabeing points to this recognition:
- You are not your addiction
- You are not your thoughts
- You are not your personality
- You are the consciousness in which all of these appear
The Metabeing framework
All content fits within one of three perspectives:
Participant
Purpose: Help readers recognise they are trapped inside the mind without shaming them for it.
Most people are participants in their own minds.
This is the “monkey mind” described in Buddhism: constant internal dialogue, judgement, rumination, regret about the past, anxiety about the future, and relentless self-criticism. The noise becomes unbearable, and relief is sought through distraction or numbing.
This is the psychological soil in which addiction grows.
Addict
Purpose: Reframe addiction without moralising or medicalising it.
Substances and compulsive behaviours provide fast, effective relief.
- Drink the drink
- Take the drug
- Disappear down a scroll hole
The internal struggle pauses, but nothing is truly resolved and the relief is only temporary. In essence, addiction is not the problem. It is a solution to an unbearable inner state and identification with the ego.
Witness
The only way to truly win the battle is not to fight it.
If the mind is the source of suffering, then the way forward is not better thinking, but disidentification from thought. This requires nurturing the inner witness, the observer of mental activity.
Greater awareness of thoughts creates the space needed to make better decisions on how to react and perceive those thoughts.
Advaita Vedanta makes this explicit: freedom comes not from controlling thoughts, but from realising you are not them.
In essence
Metabeing is about is about mastering the inner world rather than endlessly managing symptoms. And ultimately, it is about remembering what you are beneath the noise.