Dopamine Fasting 2.0 : Overcome Addiction and Restore Motivation

He lists 6 basic behaviors like food, smartphone, porn, shopping etc. that addict us The sugar bit I got through ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting. Meditation helps to live more aware and this helps stop unconscious behaviors to slowly alter them positively. New trend concept here widely accepted. Generally speaking when you get control in one area the principle can be applied elsewhere. I think sometimes of Yogananda who wrote "Autobiography of a Yogi". He was a very feeling guy. He met a man who had fasted several days and did that often, who had control of himself and said that this helped in other parts of one's life. Yogananda wrote that he had trouble with being hungry. Later I read Yogananda met Ramana Maharshi and asked ' why must people suffer'. The reply was that suffering is the way to enlightenment. Yogananda was worried about people dying in such a brutal WWII in his book for example. Afterwards we discover that apparently, even though he was a monk, supposedly celibate, that he had long term affairs with female disciples at his American Ashram and purportedly had a son, who was disowned and whose DNA test to prove paternity by Yogananda was offfered other DNA than that from the deceased father to avoid scandal. Yogananda died relatively young. His so-called Mahasamadhi at a banquet for the Indian ambassador in Los Angeles was likely a massive coronary attack. According to studies Indian expats in the West are very prone to heart disease due to change of lifestyle. By reading up on famous guru scandals we find similar stories. Of course we are all human and Yogananda was a wonderful person, all the more for letting himself in for the culture and people he was attached to. However it is clear that, as in the above video, all human beings need to know how to deal with the monster of desire/dopamine. There is no exceptions for saints or spiritual people, as I can attest to. It can even be worse as your instincts, feelings are heightened so that discipline and awareness must be higher. If all chakras get highly awakened in an unbalanced manner then maybe one or other sets of desires can overcome you until you learn to balance energy flows between upper and lower chakras( between sex/lust, anger/power/greed, love/ sentimentality, logic, bliss. This requires techniques like yoga, tai chi, fasting, diet, sport, reading and advice but not just ignoring or restricting desires. I imagine that a person who has an awakening has a particular duty in this life to work out lots of past life karma(fears, inner child) and desires still unmet. Kundalini chakra awakening lets that happen more quickly, getting to the roots of our surface symptomatic problems. Our inner hungers of which dopamine driven behaviors are the symptoms can be rooted out by fulfilling deeper needs like deeply felt love in the heart chakra or intense sexuality if never really lived out or creative feelings or deep bliss. All of these when felt deeply can bypass simple chemical responses, although on a moment to moment basis and long-term awareness of these inner chemical mechanisms(devil on your shoulder) is important for the streetwise, worldy wise spiritually involved person. Following the latest science like the above video, intermittent fasting, etc. is important as we all live in the same culture and are prey to advertising, bad life habits generally available. The generation which came out of the depression and WWII, my parents and similar were little aware of nutrition, exercise, modern spirituality. Boomers started experimenting with these but for much of the older generation it was too late. Half hearted measures were taken. Our supermarkets have been taken over by junk food. Suburbs and automobility plus increasingly obesity and screenitis plus loneliness, depression and pharmaceutical dependency blights the lives of Americans but increasingly those across the world. Without natural environment, foods, friendships how can we expect to contact, control deeper self in any sense? Essentially big corporations dominate ever more ourlives, marketing cars, clothes, food, gadgets, infotainment which controls us for profit. These products feed on dopamine drives on purpose( porn, sugar, tobacco, hollywood films, cars for laziness). Lobbyists capture government regulators, writing the laws according to their own needs with their own lawywers. So essentially we have a larger political and social problem and not just a private spiritual one. Greed of the sociopaths has becoming the driving force in society generally. We cannot all become monks of course but a culture with balance as in traditional societies fulfilling health, family, nature, spiritual needs would be better. Essentially our society has destroyed the basic human structures and is quickly undergoing collapse through a decline in health, morality, self control and an increase in debt at all levels to fulfill insatiable desires. Rome went through this and collapsed under environmental, social, military pressures. We see these bugaboos rising around us and how badly we cope. Likely society will restart in the next century or two after a gradual collapse of current forms and population decline. We must as individuals get back to basics as in the above video. Spiritually minded people, no matter how advanced in our practices, as shown by the pitfalls Yogananda fell for in Western society, must follow such sage scientific advice as well as thd degenerate culture we live in demands it. Pilgrim's Progress was an allegory of fighting through a wicked world to find paradise. Everyone has to do this but all the more so when the supermarket aisles are loaded with sweets and packaged foods, TV is loaded with violence, internet with sex, jealousy, outrage and shopping, disposability is normal regarding consequences for nature. In earlier generations before Charlie Chaplin became the first 'star' on a global level, before Hollywood, clergy, politicians and authors like Dickens were the most well known names. Their moral influence was important. The superficiality and amorality of the current influencers from Hollywood to instagram and the cesspool that is politics shows how the people have lost control of a formerly local culture to industrial, technical processes controlled by the few( auto companies, hollywood studios, internet giants, food conglomerates, pharmaceutical manufacturers, military companies) with their eye on the bottom line. CEOs are often socio-/psychopaths as well as others who climb the ladder of success to power in politics and elsewhere. A person like Trump is perhaps simply offensive to most as he is not as smooth talking as all the others. Don't be fooled by professionals schooled by decades in politics, hollywood over stubborn, rural morality preachers with primitive ideas. There is no moral neutrality. Both sides sin just as much although every Hollywood film on religion casts them as evil and every rural preacher prangers the dangers of city life. Essentially nature wins in the end as nature is destroyed by our 'progress' and we have no new worlds to conquer. Without America's discovery what progress would Eurasia have acheived since 1500? Some surely but not the meteoric technological and population surges. Essentially therefore we are at a dead end. The New World's resources and influence are being slowly absorbdd, adapted to and ameliorated by the Eurasian continental small powers, then giants as the Americans and their endless expansiveness hit limits literally. Balance will be found in a greater whole as after Rome declined middle Eastern mystery cults fused with European old religions as the basis of ideology in Christianity then Islam as a bridge to modernity, which is now on its last legs. We might expect Asian religions, cultures to unite with Western rationalism, scientific materialism to define a modern global culture in several hundred years with low levels of population and consumption in a sustainable future with little technology, consumerism.