Let’s imagine it’s 3pm, you’ve been at your desk all day. Lunch was 2 hours ago and was a little carb-heavy, so not only are you sleepy you’re also munchy (because carbs, especially bread always seem to have that effect on you).
You want to eat. Scratch that – you yearn to eat. You tell yourself maybe it’ll perk me up, make me less likely to slump my head onto my keyboard and take a power nap on the space bar.
There’s a noticeable pining feeling inside you as you mentally take stock of what potential snacks you have on hand that could quench your hunger.
Except you know it’s not really hunger, it’s compulsive desire. It’s The Nudge rearing its grizzly head, trying to get you to go and see what the fridge can offer.
You really want to do as it says because that would not only take the unpleasant feeling / urge away, it would also kill some time (bring on 5pm), and potentially give you a much needed boost of energy to cope with the rest of the workday slog (except it’s not like you’ll go for a piece of fruit, so you know it won’t).
Anyway, what do you do?
You slap yourself around the chops, that’s what.
That feeling of wanting to eat is thought. It’s transient energy coming from inside you, shoving the feeling of desire in your face as it passes.
It’s a thought-created feeling. It’s not a food-created feeling.
The half-eaten loaf of bread in the kitchen hasn’t created the desire and pushed it into your body to brainwash you and force you towards it, arms outstretched like a zombie. It’s the other way around.
You’re the one who has inadvertently created the desire and pushed it onto the loaf, all the while insisting that because it’s caused by something outside of you – the loaf in this case – you are powerless to resist it.
Not true. Illusion.
You, unwittingly, created the desire. So you can go ahead and un-create it by changing your mind about it. By deciding to see it as it really is – as thought (something internal).
Because once you perceive it that way, as it really is, as thought, it can no longer hold you prisoner.
Put your attention on the inside of your body for a moment. Feel the aliveness that’s there. The power that’s there. Become aware of your fingers and toes.
The desire to eat is coming from in there, via thought. The bread is a neutral, lump of nothing. It’s not causing you to think anything, desire anything, feel anything. It’s totally unrelated to your thought-created desire to eat it. The loaf and the desire to eat it are separate entities.
Do you see how that makes the loaf powerless and you powerful?
You have permission to perceive that loaf as a lump of nothing. You have permission to perceive the desire to eat it as transient thought from inside you.
You have the power to feel gratitude and power when you experience a craving. The mechanism, or power, is within you to do all of this, it’s just a question of waking it up.
Consider this your very loud, irritating alarm.