Tara Brach - Eating Addiction: How Meditation Helps Free Us (2018-05-09)

Episode Date: May 11, 2018

Eating Addiction: How Meditation Helps Free Us (2018-05-09) - Buddhist psychology views clinging as the source of suffering, and one of the great domains of clinging is compulsive overeating. For most of us the causes and conditions for compulsive overeating existed before we were born, during our early childhood, and in our surrounding society. We begin to release shame and self-aversion by realizing we are not alone in this suffering; and eating addiction is not "our fault." The talk includes an exploration of how, through RAIN, we can bring mindfulness and self-compassion to compulsive eating, giving us more choice in our behavior. Ultimately we discover that this deep prison of suffering can become a portal to realizing the freedom our true nature. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. There's a teaching story about two goldfish and they're swimming in the open seas and one says to the other, what is it that your heart really longs for? And the others just thinks a little and it says, well, you know, the fish bowl, the colored gravel, the plastic plants, the little castle, endless supply of powdered fish food. That's the response. Instead of celebrating our love or this great ocean of awareness, it's the fishbowl. And so it is when our attention is narrowed and we forget what really matters.

and we get fixated on what we might call substitutes. And we're going to be exploring that, and you might sense quickly, you probably know what I mean by substitutes, when our attention goes for what we think will bring pleasure or relieve pain. The common ones are, if we could only have that person approve of me

or if I could only check this off the list or achieve that or get more stuff done, you know, money sometimes. sex sometimes, drugs, food, possessions, the substitutes of cyber, you know, if I could just, you know, get online and, you know, whatever. Video gaming. When I wrote true refuge, I called these false refuges, not because there's anything bad intrinsically, it just they are not true.

They don't work. And they give us these kind of temporary hits of more pleasure or less pain, but they're super temporary and in the moments that we're going after our substitutes we're leaving presence and we're leaving our heart and that's the real suffering of it so we're actually we're grasping after the colored gravel and the plastic plants and we're just not here in the moment one of the most pervasive of all the false refuges or substitutes is overeating food and compulsive eating fixation on food

there's this one of my favorite little cartoons is of a Zen dog and he's dreaming of a medium-sized bone is the middle way you know so the teaching is that our freedom is when we're not grasping and we're not pushing away and then we are available to find eating as a nourishing and satisfying and pleasurable experience

But as soon as we have to have or we shouldn't have, we contract. It becomes a false refuge. And it's actually described in the Buddhist tradition when it's extreme. We become like hungry ghosts and it's depicted as this narrow little neck and this huge belly that describes how we have this endless craving that can't be satisfied. We're just going at the wrong thing. we're getting a lot of noise tonight. Which brings up a short little reading called Inner Peace.

Doctor proclaimed the way to achieve inner peace is to finish all the things you've started. So I looked around my house to see things I started and hadn't finished and I finished off a bottle of Merlot, a package of Oreos, the rest of a cheesecake, a half gallon of mocha fudge ice cream, Gadiva chocolates it goes on. You have no idea how good I feel right now. which of course we don't because it doesn't sound like a person would feel really good

but you never know so this talk what I'd like to explore is compulsive overeating eating addiction and I'm gonna from the context of Buddhist psychology I'm not an expert or going into great strategies for breaking habits from a Western perspective more the larger context, a broad understanding of addiction as some form of grasping that ends up causing suffering. And so we'll explore how meditation and how the teachings we explore of presence and heart of homecoming can help to free us. This is the first time I've given this particular talk, really,

ever, but especially as a podcast did Wednesday night talk. And it matters a whole lot to me. I find it really important because I've experienced so much suffering around food myself, around overeating, and I know so many people have it so pervasive a suffering that I want to do it justice and yet not try to over-extend. There's so much to say. So a little bit on my own background to begin. When I was 10 years old, I went with a family, friends of our family, on a trip to Quebec, and we were going to San And de Bopre and going to be going around Quebec. And we went up the coast, going to Maine and so on. My parents gave me this little diary to keep track of all the adventures. And when I came back, they asked if I wanted to share it, and I said,

sure. And they looked through it, and they were very surprised to see that everything in my diary had to do with what restaurants they went to and what I ate, everything, 10 years old. So that's the beginning. At 12 years old, I was drinking carnation slender and trying to lose weight on purpose. It was the Twiggy heyday, and, you know, that's just we were, if those of you were young, Twiggy was just what you think,

Twiggy. And by senior year of high school, I was binging and restricting, binging and restricting, full gear, I was ashamed, I was out of control, hated my body, I was at war, and my self-identity had a lot of that sense of

being addicted and the embarrassment around it. I was secretive about food and on and on. Senior year of college, and it kind of, it was there in college. At senior year, I started doing yoga, and then that continued. I moved into an ashram. And the big emphasis there was health and yoga

and a vegetarian diet, and a lot of exercise. And it started to slow down. But it wasn't really until I deepened my meditation practice that I started feeling more free. And I want to say what helped was learning mindfulness. I started watching, not being so inside it. So I could start noticing the patterns.

And it wasn't so much me. a pattern that I was watching. The big one, self-compassion, learning how to truly nurture myself. And indispensable, absolutely essential in the process was relationship. So those are the three big ones. We're going to go deeper into each one of them.

But being able to share with others was absolutely essential for de-shame, for sensing my belonging and so on. Along the way, I ended up doing my doctoral dissertation on mindfulness and binge eating. Mindfulness as an intervention. And I found that it was as good or better than the leading technology, which was cognitive behavioral, in some ways better.

And I didn't do any longitudinals, but what I kept finding was the big difference maker was do you have community? Do you have support in the process? So come up to current time, over the years, the suffering went away. The erotic thoughts to this day, to this hour, you know, it just stuff always rolls through clinging thoughts, eating too much and then being really bummed out by it, but not suffering because the difference now and the different from then was it was part of my identity. I perceive myself as an addicted self or a overeating compulsive self and out of control self. Whereas now there's not an identity that rests there. So I can see feelings come and go and thoughts come and go but there's not suffering.

We're going to again circle back. I just kind of wanted to give you a little taste of that's going to be the metaphor for the night, a taste of everything. Yeah, so you could digest things a little better through the evening. I'm going to get off of it, though. Okay. So then I asked you, and I was going to ask, you know, ask, you know, an honest, whatever of who's experienced what, but I want to kind of flip it and say, how many of you have moved through your life and eating, the issues around eating too much, too little, shame, guilt, whatever, have not really been at play for you that you're aware of.

Can I just see by hands? Yeah. So this is really important to say that it's big and deep in our culture, and not everybody, naturally. So as I speak, I'd like to invite you to, if there's an area you feel is more your thing that you clutch onto, I was talking to one friend earlier and her thing was she's attached to appearing a certain way to the world. And when she feels she's not, there's a lot of suffering.

For some people it could be another substance or it could be an activity. It gets subtler and subtler, which brings us to a definition because I'm not going to be going by the traditional medical definition of addiction as a brain disease focus on substance, but instead a repeated and compulsive overuse of a substance or an overdoing of a activity that causes us harm. Okay? So it's what we do that we end up getting hooked on

that's causing us harm. And it could be as big as, you know, the binging, purging, you know that could lead the anorexia that can kill us to the more subtle levels of thoughts, judgments, guilts that just confine us, make, have us living in a smaller sense of our being than who we really are. So there's a spectrum. In Buddhism this is part of the larger domain of well what is suffering. It's whole holding on. Rather than letting this life live through us, it's that clutching to something. And it can be just a mild holding on being a bit attached, to grasping, to clinging.

So there's levels of intensity and you can begin to sense in yourself how that plays out. A few areas that are easily misunderstood that I've run into. And one is that phases or seasons of overeating, does not necessarily some sign of some harmful or addictive behavior. I may be part of a transition that many are wisely making from controlled eating to more intuitive eating. We don't know how we're balancing things out. You know, maybe in some way we're moving towards more balance.

And when I'm speaking about overeating, I'm talking about compulsive overeating that we sense is causing us harm. Okay. The second, and I think most important, is that large body size is not a sign of addictive overeating. And there is huge, huge pain in this contemporary society about body size. And there are different body sizes. We don't know what really determines health. And so having those two be commingled is confused.

the basic sign of addictive behavior is a subjective sense of suffering. You know it. When it's addictive, when there's grasping, you can kind of feel you're living from a smaller place. So next piece. What are the understandings? What's the wisdom that can help create the grounds for healing when there's any level of grasping? So this is true for eating an understanding. all addiction, again, addiction is any form of grasping, is that we think we should be able to control it with willpower and we can't. We think we can will our way through things. Nobody wants to be addicted. Nobody wants to act compulsively in ways that cause them harm. And most of us, when we do, think it's a moral failure. We think we're bad. And this is

part of the spiraling of any addiction. So interesting to me, Obama, known to be super, super disciplined, struggled greatly with nicotine. I'm not sure if he's quit or not, he might have, but he struggled greatly. So the understanding, all forms of grasping are caused

by forces that are outside of our control. And if you walk away from tonight or turn off your computer, whatever it is. With any single deepening, it's not my fault. This does not, it's not my fault. That's not what I meant. It's knowing to yourself, it's not your fault. It's not my fault either.

It doesn't start with you. It's beyond you. So it's not our fault. And that doesn't mean we can't respond in a way that heals us. In fact, it's not until we get it's not our fault that we actually can be responsible, we can respond from a more wise place. Okay? And I'd like to unlayer that a little, like how come it's beyond our control?

I mean, some of us are born with a genetic predisposition. And you can't blame this baby that comes from a womb that's got some genetic predisposition. predisposition. Our food preferences are set when we're in the womb and in the very early days of our life. So what our mother was eating and if our mother was eating, you know, heavy carbs, sugars and fats, which is, you know, and so being a very powerful combo, when we're in utero, it changes the reward pathways in the brain. We get addicted to food. Over exposure to these kind of foods puts us as risk. Our emotional makeup drives overeating,

and it's both genetic and created a lot in our early years with our kind of parenting. So our parents aren't really attuned. There's a sense of being cut off, severed belonging. Something's wrong with me. The fear of separation. That stress drives eating, eating in an addictive way.

unmet needs. A lot of it's before we're even verbal. Emotional stress drives us to overeat. There's fewer dopamine receptors in the brain's reward circuit. The more we're stressed, the fewer the receptors, the more we need a dopamine hit. What gives it? Certain kinds of food that have a lot of fat, sugar, some salt. It's a lot of food. It's a lot of food. It's It's the very first way that we have of self-soothing. Before we're even verbal, it's the one way we can start trying to regulate how we feel is our relationship with eating. The very first.

So we're eating to relieve that stress, to numb feelings, to feel better, to soothe and so on. It's exacerbated hugely in this contemporary society. There's a reason. It's so out of control. One of the reasons is that the capitalist marketplace is conditioning addictive behavior. I mean, you know, our Facebook algorithms that govern your news feed, they pop up these ads, right? Things that they think you want. Well, junk foods with just the right balance of fat and sugar, it has that ratio that

hooks us. I remember seeing in a giving guide around Christmas time this advertisement it said, chocolate Buddha gets in a dose of antioxidants with a solid dark chocolate Buddha, Neiman Marcus, only $60. Okay. So our culture both revs up the addiction and then revs up the shaming right because what happens in our culture, we're fed these ideas of how our body should look. We're given these unattainable body shapes mostly to be hankering after. One woman described walking down Fifth Avenue, New York, and she said, for the last 20 minutes, I've been comparing my body to every other woman's body I saw, I see. Did I say 20 minutes? I mean 20 years. There's huge

shaming and pressure. So addicted to food and then shamed about it and then there's this multi-billion dollar diet industry that has us diet and most of it doesn't last, you know, you lose and then you gain again and then feel like a failure which is more shaming. There's a little piece I love called dying to diet on nutrition and health. The Japanese eat very little fat. and they suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. The French eat a lot of fat, but they also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Japanese drink very little red wine, they suffer fewer heart attacks than the Brits of the Yanks. The Italians drink huge amounts of red wine, and they suffer fewer heart attacks than the Brits and the Yanks. Now, the Germans drink a lot of beers, and they suffer. And it goes on and on and on. The conclusion, eat and drink what you'd like, it's speaking English that kills you.

So there's the compulsive eating because of the different types of stress, and then there's the shame about it, okay? The shame about not being able to control, the shame about how we look. That's a wicked compound. I want to read you a story that I read years ago in the Sun magazine, and I just thought it was really powerful that really shows how these elements fuel overeating as a way to soothe.

My mother always assured me that unspeakable punishments were bound to befall any child as naughty as I was. If I were you, she'd say, I'd be afraid to go to sleep at night for fear God would strike me dead. She would speak these words softly, regretfully, as though saddened by her errant daughter's fate.

I thought myself unlovable and unloved, not only by my own mother, but by God himself. In addition to threatening me with thoughts of eternal damnation, mother also gave me a fear of strangers, germs, food poisoning. A precocious and imaginative child, I added to the list some bizarre fears of my own, rare ailments learned from medical dictionaries, spontaneous human combustion.

When I was suspended from my private school's girl school at the age of 15 for a harmless prank, the head mistress referred to my behavior as dam. This was no big news to my mother army. What was news was I had the highest IQ and the lowest grades in the entire student body. I took pride in the fact that although I was dysfunctional and an underachiever, at least I wasn't stupid. The most devastating words my mother ever spoke to me came when I asked her if she loved me. I'd just been escorted home by the police after one of my many attempts to run away. It was bad timing on my part. She answered, how could anyone ever love you? It took me almost 50 years to heal the damage from all her ugly remarks. Recently discussing eating disorders with my therapist,

I related a childhood ritual of mine, intending it to be an amusing anecdote to illustrate how far back my eating problems went. I even laughed as I spoke, poking gentle fun at myself. It was only when I noticed she was watching me with sympathy rather than amusing that I was aware of the tears on my own cheeks. Here's what I told her.

From the age of five or six until Will into my teens, whenever I had trouble sleeping, I would slip out from under my covers and steal into the kitchen for a bit of bread or cheese, which I would carry back to bed with me. There I'd pretend my hands belonged to someone else, a comforting, reassuring being without a name, an angel perhaps. The right hand would feed me little bits of cheese or bread as the left hand stroked my chest stroke my cheeks and hair, my eyes closed. I would whisper softly to myself,

there or there, go to sleep. You're safe now. Everything will be all right. I love you. What's powerful to me about the story is you can actually see in the eating behavior that the deep intent is to take care of ourselves, that it's not some evil devil in us.

it's that place in us that's trying to find some peace, some comfort, some love, some ease. It's just because we're going about it in a way that doesn't work, the more we get hooked on that way, the less we're able to heal the wounds and really find true refuge, find what we're really longing for. So you can see the woundedness that leads to the eating addiction in this story, and it's a more extreme one, but for many of us there's some real feeling of I'm not okay that's deep in us that creates an agitation our system that we're trying to calm down. And from there we reach out to food. So the suffering is that the behavior, the addictive eating is a trance, that we're living

in a trance, we're living in a narrow fragment of reality, in the thoughts and feelings, the looping, that create a sense of a self that's an out of control, bad, shameful self. And again, I'm using the extreme. It may be some level of that and not all the time. But it keeps us really from trusting and inhabiting this mystery of awareness of love that's really our nature. It keeps us from that. William Moyers put it, it's a hole in the soul. We forget who we are.

Just as it's great suffering, the good news is that we have neuroplasticity, we have neuropathways or pathways of being that are changeable, and we can learn to pay attention in ways that authentic nurture our heart and spirit. We can learn that. So I'd like to explore that. There's two

key domains that we learn it, how we learn it, and one is in the relational field. We were wounded in relationship that's severed belonging in some way and we need to experience our healing in a relational field. That's one level. The interpersonal and the other is the intracycic that we also need to be able to bring that nurturing inside. So on part one with others, there are a handful of deep, profound levels of healing that happen when we're with each other and trying to heal an eating addiction. And one of them is that we find that company soothing,

healing itself, just being with other people. There's all this research on, you know, when we're afraid, and we hold hands with a dear person, it lights up the part of the brain that actually reduces the fear and the hurt. So it's just connection,

helps bring us home. The second thing that happens when we're with others is that we can actually start releasing shame. And there's one man that was writing his experience of working with addiction. He said, my healing started at my first 12-step meeting. The message was, it wasn't just me. That alone. When we're stuck in the suffering of an addiction, it feels like we're bad,

we're alone, we're the only ones. Or if there's others, they're way out there, but they're not anything to do with our lives. So for years, I led groups, I led workshops and so on, on bringing together addiction and meditation way back when I was active as a therapist. And what I kept finding is that when people really were honest and shared their vulnerability, the more real they were in their vulnerability, the more they collectively were freeing each other and themselves from shame. by naming the vulnerability, they really got it, that it's not my addiction, it's the addiction.

I'm not alone. It's not so personal. So I'd like to do a brief reflection on this level of where we can bring healing, if you will, just to close your eyes. So take some moments to bring to mind a situation where you feel your eating behaviors from some degree of compulsive or harmful and if eating is not the place where you get fixated there may be another behavior

perhaps related to a substance or maybe a behavior like anger like gambling like buying like shopping whatever it is where you feel you get hooked to take some moments to come close in, bring the lens close to a situation that really illustrates this, where you have recently perhaps felt like you were caught. It might have been when you were alone or with another person, where you felt some sense of out of control, doing something that wasn't good for you.

And let, as you're viewing this in your mind's eye, you kind of freeze the frame, right where you feel most dock or hooked in it, kind of compelled like you don't have a choice. Sense how you're relating to yourself in these moments, the feeling you have towards yourself. You might notice judgment or shame or aversion, disgust. And then let yourself see if you can right now step into the, what you might call the witness,

or maybe your future self, that in you, which is really awake, wise, kind. Allow yourself to sense that there's a bigger picture, there's a deeper truth. Sensing how many of us experience the same thing. This feeling of out of control doing something that's not good for us. It's not my addiction, it's the addiction,

the addictive tendencies, the grasping, the clinging. Sensing how the cause the causes for this were planted really multiple causes too many to be able to track, perhaps before we were born or an early life reinforced by society. It's not like you want to be an out-of-control self-harming person. So sensing all of us, dealing with these energies. And then for yourself, sensing whatever message, whatever truth can help to wake you out of shame,

out of feeling unworthy or bad. What's the message from your high self that you most want to remember? In the Buddhist tradition, one of the basic prayers of the bodhisattva, the awakening being, is that whatever is arising, it might be the cause for waking us up, for waking up our hearts, waking up wisdom.

You might sense, may this addictive behavior be a portal to awakening compassion. May it serve to awaken compassion. So the first domain is to realize we're here, we're in it together, it's not personal. And then just to have that prayer, may this serve awakening. Now the second domain I mentioned is the intra-psychic and you can open your eyes if you'd like or continue with your eyes closed but this is really the domain of how we bring the wings of wisdom and love to our inner life when we're hooked okay when you're feeling stuck how do you find some freedom and I thought I'd share one one

woman's story using these practices, many of you are familiar with Rain, which is really recognizing what's happening, allowing it, investigating what's happening, and bringing nurturing. It's the wings of mindfulness and heartfulness. Recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. So I'll show you how one woman worked with Rain in a stuck place. And the background, this is a university professor who was, you know, would struggle with compulsive overeating and periodically binge, and she tried every diet. She tried OA for a bit, liked it, but it said she didn't have time. So, and she called herself a food addict. This is one I saw quite a while ago. And she agreed to explore with meditation and also to go back to OA to have some group support. And the background as she had,

her mother was very depressed. She struggled with eating, and she was a professional and emotionally unavailable to her daughter. Her father was really critical of her mother. They eventually divorced. So this woman, her life was organized around struggling for his approval,

and she was very ashamed of her mother and ashamed of how she saw her mother in her. A lot of self-aversion. Her approach to food was controlling. She was trying to have wellpower to control. things. So she'd have really, very few calories at the beginning of the day. This is really, really common, be really good, so to speak, through a lot of the day, and then she'd get home. And then as she was preparing dinner for her partner, her husband on the day, she was on for

dinner. She would be snacking away. Then she'd eat really light with them. But then when she got into her own office, that's when trail mix and cereal or go down and get a bullet of ice cream, whatever it was, that's when she'd start taking in all the calories and the carbs. So she felt a lot of shame about this, and there'd be times she'd fully swear off, you know, and she'd no sugar, no flour, and she'd last, you know, a week or two. And then when she'd slip, she'd say, oh, I blew it. Well, I might as well go for it, and it'd become a full binge and set her off. And just a side note here.

one of my friends who's no longer alive Alan Marlatt, who wrote a lot about relapse prevention. And he describes this as the title he called it is Absence Violation Effect, which is that when a slip-ups perceived as an innate lack of willpower, like I blew it, a slip means I blew it, then it becomes a full relapse. It's much more inclined to do that. if it's seen as just, oh, this is a slip-up, just that, then we can kind of regain our footing. Okay, so for her, the trigger to eating, if we're looking at mindfully looking at triggers, was her home office when she had lots of work, she was tired, and she was anxious.

That's when the cravings would become strongest. So we practiced together rain, and so here's how it'll go. And again, try to translate this for yourself. If you know the trigger for you of when you get set off and whatever, whatever the overdoing is, keep that in mind. So the recognizing is just naming what comes up. For her, she would be naming that, you know, I'm feeling tired, anxious, craving, wanting food, visualizing it, imagining it, and so on.

The allow, recognize allow, is a pause where you just go, okay, this is what's happening. let it be for a little. It's like you just don't do anything. You don't judge. You just pause. That gives you the chance to deepen mindfulness with investigate. So investigate means deepening attention to the experience of craving. Maybe that deepening attention, that sense of half to have, that pressure in the belly, that the building heat, some belief that, you know, if I can't get through the night, it's not going to work, I can't do it. So you're you're having these beliefs and you're feeling in the chest more and more of the pressure, heart pounding.

And for her investigating, she felt like she was very young, she was alone and overwhelmed. Part of investigating, and this is a key question if you're practicing this mindful inquiry, a key question is what is this part in me really need right now? How does it want me to be with it? What does it need? And that's the beginning of, you know, for her it was, I need someone to be with me, to hold me, to comfort me. That was the need of that part that was so compelling.

So she's recognized, allowed, investigated, now nurture. So I invited her to really see if she could, just for a moment, just like open and sense her high self, her most wise or awake heart, and offer that to herself. that comforting, that holding. And she said, no, I can't. I don't even know where that high self is.

It doesn't exist for me right now. And I'm sharing that with you because often when we're hooked, we're really regressed and we're cut off. So then I asked her, you know, well, if you can't offer that to yourself, what would be a source you would love to receive it from

that you really trust? And for her, she had some sense of a divine mother, some sense of a kind of an all-loving, maternal feminine presence in the universe that's loving. So I said, call on her. Call on her and ask her for that. And she did that. I said, visualize and imagine what it would be like.

Just pretend. And as she did that, she started to begin to sense this being held in loving, having this loving presence surrounding her and filling her. And she began to sense, and as she put it, this loving presence is really who I am.

It's what I've forgotten. For her, the recognition is, I'm not a food addict. This presence is what I am, but the suffering is when I contract into thinking that's my identity. For her, it took many, many, many rounds of rain. I mean, it's never a one-shot.

We've had many rounds of having the beliefs and feelings that keep us in the addictive. cycle. So for her many, many rounds, and sometimes she would find that she couldn't go through the whole process of rain and she'd go off and eat. But more and more, and this is what I want to bring to you, rain interrupts the addictive process. We're in a chain reaction. And just by even interrupting a little bit, we're beginning to change neuro pathways. So if all you do is recognize allow and pause and then go off and eat, you've made a little bit of a shift. And with practice, the pause gets larger, deeper, and more transformational. For her, every time

she was able to sense that holding, being held in love, and that that loving presence was more of the truth of who she was than that addicted self-concept, she gained a kind of trust that kept her going. So current day, she puts it this way, it's not my will, it's my heart's will. She couldn't well her way through it, but when she could get in touch with that loving presence, she was able to make different choices around eating.

The pause. Some of you might remember, it's one of my favorite lines from Victor Frankel that really the... In between the stimulus and the response, there is a space, and in that space is our power and our freedom. If you can pause in the midst of an addictive patterning, you begin to reconnect with really the part of your frontal cortex that's correlated with wisdom and compassion. That's what it gives you access to.

So a few notes, and we're going to, we'll just close with a little practice. One is that with practicing mindfulness, it brings us above the line. Remember, below the lines of what's unconscious, above the lines what's conscious. And we begin to sense craving as a wave. It comes up and it goes down.

And if we can pause long enough, it comes and goes, and we start finding we don't have to follow it. The big piece here, though, I'd say, and without it, it wouldn't work, self-compassion. It can come from the outside, but ultimately, if we can forgive the behavior, it's not my fault. It's not my fault.

If we can forgive it, if we can bring kindness inwardly, we start discovering the heart space and presence that can free us. I found for people that do rain, if you stay after the rain and get familiar with that presence, some of you might remember 15 to 30 seconds, if you can feel a sense of a more spacious beingness and just stay and get familiar with it. You become entrained, you have more access to it over and over again. The last piece I'll say in terms of a commentary is that that in 12-step programs, there's been a whole lot of research, and one piece of research

shows that belief in a higher power has entered our life is what helps people go through what's when they hit relapses or the potential relapse when it's much more of a crisis type of situation. Now, there's all sorts of support and strategies that can work for less than those really super stressful ones, but in the super stressful ones, it's belief that a higher power has entered their lives. And in the Buddhist psychology, the comparable is that deep trust that there is a loving presence, a universal, pure, deep beingness that is the truth of who we are. It's trusting in Buddha nature. That is our higher power. That is our

future self that is the truth of who we are, the more we deepen that trust, the more we can get through the times that the old rattling that would make us go into the habit. The gift of attending to awakening through whatever place you're stuck in some addictive grasping, the gift of it is, the harder it is, the more stuck you are, the more the end up you are, the more the other side of it is realizing a profound sense of freedom, the more the stronger the addictiveness, the more freedom is on the other side and there's a really fascinating study. It was on cocaine where cocaine causes the loss of brain matter and gray matter and synapses in certain regions. And people that abstain for a while, that all grows back. But not only

that, and this is what's so interesting to me. After abstaining for a certain amount of time, there's actually a flourishing of synapses in other parts of the brain primarily in the parts of the brain that have to do with emergence of more advanced mental skills like self-regulation, mindfulness, and compassion. Those areas. I think that's really interesting that we think of addictive habits as a problem. they are a universal tendency and on the spiritual path if you choose to face them rather than going along with the substitutes if you choose to bring to them these

qualities of reign of recognizing allowing investigating nurturing not only can you kind of wake up out of the habitual patterning you can you get the blessing of shifting your identity from a small limited self to that truth, to that wholeness of being that is suffused with love, awake awareness. So that's, I'd like to stop there and ask you, if you will, just to close your eyes for a few moments. Let yourself feel this as a pause wherever your mind and heart has been. right here, right here. Feel this body breathing and let your senses be open when we investigate

our hearts. We sense our deep longing is not for the passing taste sensation or for the approval of another, any of the passing good feelings. It's really for a full aliveness. It's like the fish really, it's not the bowl or the fish food, it's being at home in the ocean. We long to be at home in love, in awareness. So I invite you just for a few moments to, again, allow yourself to bring to mind a place where you feel you get small because there's grasping in some way, grasping to have a certain appearance to the world, grasping to a substance,

grasping to an activity. We feel a bit hooked. Take a moment to sense what you're hooked self is like. What's the small self like when you're hooked? And if you could trace back a bit and sense, okay, so I'm wanting, I'm craving, and I'm grasping. But what is it I'm really longing for? You know, if I got this, then what?

What's the deepest thing I'm longing for? It takes tracing back. You might have to repeat the inquiry. Okay, so if I got bad, then what? What is I'm really wanting to experience? What right now do I most want to experience? This very moment. And you might sense, how is this already here?

How is what I'm longing for? already here. Rumi writes, this is how a human being can change. There is a worm addicted to eating grape leaves. Suddenly he wakes up, call it grace, whatever. Something wakes him, and he is no longer a worm. He is the entire vineyard and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks, a growing wisdom and joy that does not need to devour. I'm a stay and thank you for your attention. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.