The Craving Mind

Repeated action/behaviour ignoring long term harm.

We usually think of addictions as harm. It's like smoking but we suffer from more severe ones:

• Thinking, ruminating and generating anxiety that leads to bad behaviour.
• Love & approval from others
• Technology and social media.

We are seeing the world to the lens of our previous experiences. The more we repeat a behaviour, The more we learn to see the world a certain way.

If we are looking at a chocolate 🍫 bar our interpretation of this fact will be shaped by our previous experience with chocolate.

This is the scientific term for what the Buddhists call ignorance as we are not seeing clearly. Vipassana, the name of mindfulness meditation, literally translates to seeing things clearly.

Feelings feel different:

• Fear or anxiety are contracting. Which makes evolutionary sense, as we are protecting from a potential predator.
• Love, awe or curiosity are expansive.

Expensive feelings feel good 😄. If we get to notice them they connect us to the world and give us a sense we are all connected.

Nothing to do

Nowhere to go

No one to be

It is how we develop habits. It involves

• a trigger (for example, the feeling of hunger), followed by
• a behavior (eating food), and
• a reward (feeling sated).

We want to do more of the things that feel good and less of the things that feel bad — or stressful.

Breaking out of bad habits is can involve using a meditative practice to examine the reward: For example one may notice that the 🚬 they picked up years ago to look cool don't provide coolness anymore and actually taste terrible.

It's a mental hook that seeks to replace a bad behaviour by noticing that the current reward is not that rewarding after all. And to provide a better one through mindfulness. 

The main thing is to use curiosity to love from a contracting feeling, to an expansive one. Curiosity feels better than the craving.