The Healing Power of Surrender: Addiction, Spirituality and Coming Home to Yourself with Austin Rampt

Hello and welcome back to the SoulSync podcast.

Now, addiction is something I've spoken about before on SoulSync because it's also something I'm still learning how to speak about honestly.

Because addiction isn't simply a subject that interests me.

It's been a huge part of my own story and my own awakening.

I've struggled with drug use.

I've known what it is to reach for something outside of myself because I didn't know how to sit with what was happening inside of me.

And I know what it feels like to promise yourself that this today will be the very last time.

And tomorrow I will start to convince yourself that you're still in control.

To replace one substance with another, one behavior with another and call it progress because the new thing appears slightly less destructive than the thing that came before it.

And I know that because my journey of getting off cocaine was to move myself on to cannabis.

Not a healthy route to take, but it was the lesser of two evils at the time.

And my journey of addiction, I tell you this, my darlings, it's been a very difficult one.

It has taken me into some really dark places, but it has also forced me to confront parts of myself that I might otherwise have spent a lifetime trying to avoid.

Because beneath addiction, there is so often pain.

There is shame, there is loneliness, and there is trauma.

There is the desperate desire to escape ourselves, even if only for a few hours.

And yet the very thing that seems to initially offer us freedom can slowly become the thing that literally imprisons us.

Now, my guest today, Austin Rapp, understands that journey in a way that very few people ever could because Austin took his first drink at just 13 years old.

By 15, he was addicted to opioid painkillers.

By 17, he was smoking crack cocaine.

His addiction would take him through overdoses, repeated attempts at rehabilitation, the destruction of his family home, relapse, and eventually to Mexico, where he found himself surrounded by drugs and drawn into the world of the drug cartels.

From the outside, some might even have mistaken it for excess excitement or partying, but Austin describes that reality very differently.

Sitting in a room alone, drunk and high, crying because he missed his children, this is not simply a conversation about drugs.

it's a conversation about what happens when achievement becomes our measure of worth when success convinces us that we no longer need the practices the routines the people the principles that once saved us and austin says so powerfully in this episode that the gifts of sobriety eventually took him away from the things that had given him sobriety So this is a journey from crack addiction and the cartel to spiritual freedom, a story of recovery, fatherhood service and the courage to finally stop running.

Hello and welcome back to the SoulSync podcast.

Now, addiction is something I've spoken about before on SoulSync because it's also something I'm still learning how to speak about honestly.

Because addiction isn't simply a subject that interests me.

It's been a huge part of my own story and my own awakening.

I've struggled with drug use.

I've known what it is to reach for something outside of myself because I didn't know how to sit with what was happening inside of me.

And I know what it feels like to promise yourself that this today will be the very last time.

And tomorrow I will start to convince yourself that you're still in control.

To replace one substance with another, one behavior with another and call it progress because the new thing appears slightly less destructive than the thing that came before it.

And I know that because my journey of getting off cocaine was to move myself on to cannabis.

Not a healthy route to take, but it was the lesser of two evils at the time.

And my journey of addiction, I tell you this, my darlings, it's been a very difficult one.

It has taken me into some really dark places, but it has also forced me to confront parts of myself that I might otherwise have spent a lifetime trying to avoid.

Because beneath addiction, there is so often pain.

There is shame, there is loneliness, and there is trauma.

There is the desperate desire to escape ourselves, even if only for a few hours.

And yet the very thing that seems to initially offer us freedom can slowly become the thing that literally imprisons us.

Now, my guest today, Austin Rapp, understands that journey in a way that very few people ever could because Austin took his first drink at just 13 years old.

By 15, he was addicted to opioid painkillers.

By 17, he was smoking crack cocaine.

His addiction would take him through overdoses, repeated attempts at rehabilitation, the destruction of his family home, relapse, and eventually to Mexico, where he found himself surrounded by drugs and drawn into the world of the drug cartels.

From the outside, some might even have mistaken it for excess excitement or partying, but Austin describes that reality very differently.

Sitting in a room alone, drunk and high, crying because he missed his children, this is not simply a conversation about drugs.

it's a conversation about what happens when achievement becomes our measure of worth when success convinces us that we no longer need the practices the routines the people the principles that once saved us and austin says so powerfully in this episode that the gifts of sobriety eventually took him away from the things that had given him sobriety So this is a journey from crack addiction and the cartel to spiritual freedom, a story of recovery, fatherhood service and the courage to finally stop running.