Build Your Self First Before You Argue With It

If you a reader of mine, you’ve heard me say that “not all craving control strategies are created equal.”  I still stand by that.  But here’s  a related thought.  The less potent strategies (such as self-talk) can be leveraged in utility as your sense of self crystallizes in time.

Here’s what I mean.  Some of us have not yet developed a particularly firm sense of self: the self-structure is a little fuzzy so to say, not enough informational-conceptual ego.   If you are getting easily flooded with emotions, if you happen to recognize yourself in the Borderline Personality Disorder diagnostic criteria, such craving control strategies as self-talk are a bit premature.  To put it bluntly, you just don’t have a firm enough self to argue with yourself (because that’s what self-talk is, a kind of inner dialogue, a tug-of-war between the wise mind and the not-so-wise mind).  Self-talk is a bit too destabilizing, defragmenting for a self that is not neurotic enough to argue with itself.

If you are recognizing yourself in this, then mindfulness-based craving control is a better option.  Mindfulness-based craving control allows you to build the very self that is required for self-talk.  Say, you are craving ice-cream.  Instead of arguing with yourself, you simply notice the sensation and just as you notice the sensation, you inadvertently notice yourself noticing it.  This is the process of differentiation, or identity-building, or structure-building.  When you notice yourself being separate from your emotions (and craving is just a state of desire), you are actually actively engaging in the process of self-construction.  You are building a firmer, more conceptual sense of self.  

With this in mind, mindfulness-based craving control is a form of self-work, a process that firms up your sense of self.  So, by witnessing a craving come and go, you are also getting to see the self that triumphantly remains intact.  As this sense of self firms up in time, self-talk craving control strategies become a plausible option.  But not until…

In sum: self is a prerequisite for self-talk craving control.  So, build your (neurotic) self (ego) first before you start arguing with it or try to transcend it.

Resources:

Mindful Eating Tracker

Craving Control Training

Interrupt Patterns to Anchor Yourself in the Present

To increase presence into an otherwise mindless activity, interrupt the usual patterns.  For example, try eating with your non-dominant hand.  Notice how this minor manipulation suddenly anchors you in the present.  Incorporate pattern interruption into all kinds of otherwise mindless routines to leverage more mindfulness.  Do dishes with headphones on.  Vacuum with a sombrero on.  Do bills with a quill pen.  Switch up the routine, turn on the awareness to anchor yourself in the present moment.  Challenge yourself to do something wild, out of the ordinary, atypical.  Create a Kodak moment.  Mind is a pattern: interrupt it!

Hello, Eating Zoolander

Hello, Eating Zoolanders

Matilda: "Did you find the files?"
Hansel: "I don't even know what they loo--What do they look like?"
Matilda: "They're in the computer."
Hansel: "They're in the computer?"
Matilda: "Yeah, they're definitely in there. I don't know how he labeled them."
Hansel: "I got it."
Matilda: "You gotta figure it out. We're running out of time. You gotta find them and meet me at the show."
Hansel: "Roger. In the computer. It's so simple."

Mind is a zoolander: a fashionable savage hypnotized by society to run random programs without self-awareness. Mind is a cliché-making machine starved for food of self-awareness. Who programmed you, eating zombie? Who'll reprogram you, eating zoolander? The answer to the former question is lost in antiquity, the answer to the latter question is reading this sentence. Guess who!

De-Programmer is Re-Programmer

If you had all the money in the world, would you hire a virtual Zen master to pop into your consciousness three times a day to help you go off the autopilot, if only for a moment, to take a look at the programming files that you are running your mind-computer on? No? I figured you'd say that. So, here's a once-in-a-lifetime special for you: would you still hire a virtual Zen master to help you restore your mind-flow if he/she/it were... free of charge? Too responsible? Too freeing? Confused a bit by the offer? Congratulations: confusion deprograms, cleans the slate blank, enlightening clarity and re-programming ensues. What? When? What's this drivel I am reading?! Wait, did I, the reader, think that or did I, the reader, just read this? Is there a difference, reader-writer? No worries: confusion's on the house, so is the enlightenment. Consider it as an appetizer to the main course, eating Zoolander, which you'll find in the next paragraph.

Mindful Eating Rascal Sage

Mindful eating is underutilized. Sure, to the extent to which mindless eating leads to mindless overeating, mindful eating is a way to shed a few pounds. Whoopty doo! You could just go on another diet, right? Nothing's new here. But here's some deep-fried turkey-leg of wisdom for you to sharpen your teeth on (no, not from humble mini-me, but from eons back, from rascal sages with meta-minds that wrote in riddles and ate with moderation). Mindful eating - dating in its history to Jainist ahimsa-style ethical eating and Buddhist oryoki-style meditative eating - is more about noticing the Eater than paying attention to food. Next time you eat, ask yourself: "Who is eating?" Notice your Zoolander mind choke on the question. As your mind says "me" or "I" or "Mr. Smith, on an endless filibuster lunch-break," recognize that you had a thought and, of course, you are not a thought or a word or a name you call yourself. And ask again: "Who is eating now?" Wake yourself up: go off the autopilot, take off your grass-skirt, eating Zoolander-Zombie, throw on something a bit more civilized, say, a meditative hoodie of a Silicon Valley code-breaker busy self-reprogramming. Come to the table of presence before it pushes back away from a belly full of acid reflux. Cultivate a reflex of overriding the reflex of mindlessness. Start all your meals with an appetizer of mindfulness.

Open Your Mind Before You Open Your Mouth

Most of us eat at least three times a day, each meal like the last meal, in a hurry, like we are on death row. Eating is inevitable, mindfulness isn't. Let each meal be a meditation on self-presence. Let each meal be an alarm clock to your consciousness. Let eating be your rascal sage that knocks on the door of your consciousness and you open not knowing which side you are on: eater or food or one with all. Eating Zoolander: the files of your mindful eating re-programming are IN the computer now, pre-installed: use the key to let yourself out of this zoo of mindlessness. Feeling a little blank or mind-full? Enough mindless reading about mindful eating, time to re-program.

Pavel, part-time Eating Zoolander, part-time Mindful Eating Rascal Sage, pleasantly full, if not mildly stuffed with words...

Resources:

Mindful Eating Tracker

References:

Zoolander (2001), Paramount Pictures

Keeping Cool When Mind is On Fire

There's thinking... and there's thinking about thinking as a stream of thoughts...

Think about it...

Here goes a thought... Here goes another... And so it goes... On and on and on...

Consciousness has been compared to a river: like a river, mind flows, from one thought to another, incessantly, irrevocably...

Here's one of the thoughts that Buddhism built its psychological salvation on: "there has never been a thought that didn't go away."

Hmm...

No need to try to not think about what I don't want to think about! No need to resist the thoughts that I am already having! No need to push the thoughts I don't like out! No need to do anything but stay and watch the thoughts go... After all, if it's true that there's never been a thought that didn't go away, why do the river's work? The river knows how to flow...

Wow...

"There's never been a thought that didn't go away..."

What if... what if I let go of every thought except this one? What if all I thought was "there's never been a thought that didn't go away?" What would that be like?!

So, here I'd sit, on the bank of this babbling brook of consciousness, watching thoughts pass, thinking "there's never been a thought that didn't go away." What would that be like?!

Swami Vivekananda, in writing about Dattatreya, the author of Advahuta Gita, a Vedanta text on Nonduality, wrote: "Men like the one who wrote this Song <...> they care for nothing, they feel nothing done to the body, care not for heat, cold, danger, or anything. They sit still <...> and though red-hot coals burn the body, they feel them not." (1)

Such people are sometimes called "non-returners" - having left the stream of consciousness, having found a place in the shade of the meta-cognitive distance, on the bank of this babbling brook of consciousness, they never re-enter the river of the experience. They think of thoughts as thoughts, and, thus, remain un-touched by the never-ceasing evanescence of their mind-states...

Is that possible?

Journalist Malcolm Brown witnessed one such "non-returner" in 1963 when a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc performed an act of self-immolation. The man sat down, poured gasoline over himself and lit himself up. What's amazing - to me - is not the cause, not even the decision, but what happened after... Nothing happened: the man sat, in a lotus position, while burning alive. The skin of his face coagulating in flames... Dying... Burning alive...

Thich - a real, historically-documented non-returner... He didn't return because he never left the place of his here-and-now presence.... even with a river of pain-lava flowing through his mind...

How's that possible?

It is.

Imagine you had a chance to ask Thich this very question: "How is this possible? How are you able to just sit while you are on fire?"

My guess, Thich would've asked in return: "What fire?"

"There's never been a thought that didn't go away..."

In this myriad of fleeting thoughts, perhaps, this one is the only one worth holding?

Pavel Somov, Ph.D., author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time"(New Harbinger, 2008)

www.eatingthemoment.com