Choices are our choices so I am not taking away anyone's personal choice, but we run into difficulty when we're having choices made for us rather than making our own.

There is a place of imagination, and it is entirely real.

On a psychic level, we could be carrying energies and entities and cravings and habits and confusion and patterns of behavior from generation to generation that we don't want. We could also have picked up loose energies or entities from places we visit or live, and this could be very confusing. It could reinforce or even produce addictions and cravings that don't really belong to us.

Australian Aboriginees say that the big stories - the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life - are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting prey in the bush.

There are chemical and other explanations for addictions, but speaking from my own observations (and I am a shamanic type), there is always some sort of disembodied spirit causing some of the addiction, riding your energy field, trying to impose their needs and addictions onto you.

Our ancestors are looking for us even if we're not looking for them. And by our ancestors I mean our bloodlines and the ancestors of the place where we live and our spiritual kin who go beyond our biological families. We could be walking around carrying an entire ancestral history of the wrong kind for us.

When bad things happen, part of us might go away. It's a survival technique. You can't stand to be around when there's so much grief or pain in your life so part of you goes away. Shamans call this soul loss.