The cure, in black and white …

 

This is the final part of my saucy mini-series that ends up with you, totally free of your overeating tendencies and assorted food issues.  But, you’ve got to read the other parts first (start here) otherwise you won’t have the foggiest what I’m banging on about, and this is too important for you not to get.  When you’ve done that, come back and we’ll knock this thing out of the park.

 

If you’re up to speed, let’s go.

 

Again, it might seem like I’m making it sound all too easy when your desire to eat that cake is less like a suggestion and more like an order from the leader of your local street gang who’s armed to the teeth and has a face covered in teardrops.  However, what you have to understand about thought is, it can’t make you do anything.  It’s powerless.

 

It doesn’t matter how many metal pipes it waves in your face The Nudge to EAT! can’t force you off your chair and into the fridge.

 

The lower brain can make you think you want to do something, but it can’t make you actually do it.  For that it needs to draft in the higher brain.  The part of the brain with a touch more class and decorum.  It’s the bit that’s called on when you’re in need of logic, reasoning, you know, the grown up stuff.

 

Which means, those nudges are all bark and no trousers.  They’re like the school bully that gets all up in your grill, but the moment you square up to him runs off like a snivelling weasel.

 

See the thing about thought is, it knows where it’s not wanted and when it’s not wanted, it at least has the decency not to hang about.

 

If you’ve given The Nudge the finger, as in, you’ve watched it land in your chest but done nothing with it except have a little chuckle to yourself about what a silly sausage your lower brain is for getting itself in such a muddle, it shoves off.  Then, do you know what happens?  The next time it comes around, it isn’t quite as strong.  Yes sirree, with a little bit of direction from you, your brain will untangle itself just as easily as it turned itself into a jungle.  The term is self-directed neuroplasticity.

 

The nudges go away completely after you’ve stared them down a few times.  You know what though?  You’re cured way before that.  You’re cured when you see that no matter how strong the feeling is that settles in your chest, no matter how tempting the buttery toast, the feeling that comes over you to engage is coming from inside you, it’s thought, it’s not attached to the external circumstances.

 

Thought, without the decision to take it seriously, has no power.

 

Close your eyes for a second, take some deep breaths.  Feel your inner body as though there’s one continuous force field in there.  That is where the feeling is coming from.  In there is as far as you can ever feel.  You can’t feel anything from outside of that space.  In that space inside you, is where you live all day long.  Feeling.

 

The feelings that come out then create the experience in front of you.  If anger comes out, you’ll see things to be angry about (even if that’s only in your memories).  If happiness is there, everything, past, present and future will be covered in glitter.

 

The nature of thought is it’s fleeting.   Unfortunately that means while you can’t force the happy vibes to stick around, on the plus side, you don’t have to worry about the unpleasant stuff digging its heels in either.  Once you’ve told The Nudge to go fuck itself, by not acting on it and instead having a little chuckle at its expense, it dissolves quicker than a rich tea in a cuppa.  No more nudges, no more habit.

 

I’ve typed it so often I’ve RSI, but I need to drive it home.  We do not feel the world, we feel our thinking and that creates the world we experience.  We live in the feeling of our thinking.  What we’re thinking creates our moment by moment experience “out there”.  It’s like we live in a clear, plastic ball that we push around with us throughout the day.  We might be running up a hill in the park, but we’re running inside our ball.  What’s going on inside our ball, with our thoughts, directly creates our experience outside the ball – out in the world.

 

This isn’t a I wish to visit Japan and win a free trip two weeks later law of attraction type garbage.  This is, oh look, I’m feeling like crap this morning, my thoughts running in the background must be in the gutter, so just because that thing my husband did is really, really, super annoying, I’m going to pause before I call my divorce lawyer, because actually that egg that he’s spilled all over the cooker and has left for me to clear up, again, isn’t touching me at all.  I’m only feeling my thinking.  I am responsible for my feelings.  He cannot make me feel anything, he doesn’t have the power.  Nobody does.  The egg certainly doesn’t.  I’m pushing up against my own thinking, from within my ball.  So I’ll hold off from serving him divorce papers right now as it’s possible I’m reacting so severely because the thoughts whirring away in the background are in the sewer.  It’s possible, potentially, that had I woken up with something resembling bon humeur, I might have laughed at his uncanny ability to miss the frying pan when breaking in an egg, as I did last week and the week before.  I’ll wait for my thinking to rise (which I’ll know by the state of my feelings) and then, if I still want to divorce the egg-spilling cretin, then I’ll call the lawyer.

Annnnnnd ….. marriage saved.

 

We are not powerless against thought.  We are not slaves to our own thinking.  We might not be able to decide what shows up but we can choose whether to take what shows up seriously or label it temporary garbage that if we just wait a while will blow on through to be replaced by something better (which it will because the sun always comes out from behind its cloud).

 

Bottom line – we can choose to take our thinking and subsequently our feelings and experiences in life as objective fact thereby fretting when we feel depressed, fearful and angry, or we can recognise the impermanence of everything, that our experiences and feelings have no inherent value or meaning, thereby letting us poke fun at the gruff stuff and be grateful for the good.  Believe me when I say that is the sensible option.

 

The severity of a person’s habits are directly in proportion to how hard they cling to their thinking.

 

Those who cling the hardest, suffer greatly.  Those who roll their eyes at their thinking, or shrug off their thoughts as meaningless thought junk, suffer barely at all.  They don’t smoke, or drink to excess or eat until their stomach’s in danger of popping.  They also don’t get angry at others or try to force their will, opinions and judgement onto them either.

 

We can’t stop thoughts from turning up or stop them from creating corresponding feelings.  But we don’t need to.  All we need to do is see how the system is working.  With that we automatically stop breathing life and power into the thinking that hurts us or trying to rearrange our life situation, to make it go away.

 

Thought pours through us all, all day long.  We don’t create thought or decide what drops by.  Some are positive, a lot of them aren’t.  Some we’re aware of but a lot more we aren’t.  The crucial point is none of our thoughts have any inherent meaning.  They are all neutral.  The good ones, the bad ones and the vicious, nasty, spiteful ones.  They are literally bubbles of transient energy.  Unless we start believing them, then we breathe life in them and they become real.

 

Let’s say you have the thought “I’m such a fat failure”.  Lovely.  Now, on its own this thought doesn’t mean anything.  It’s a blob of nothing, one of thousands of blobs of nothing that rush through you every day, thanks to Universal Thought doing it’s thang.  If you witness that thought and roll your eyes at it, realise it’s a meaningless blob of nothing, it will roll on through your system and disappear back into the soup within seconds.

 

No drama.

 

If on the other hand (a given when we don’t understand about these principles), we grab onto that thought by believing it, then it sticks around.  When we claim it means something, that it’s true, that we are in fact, fat failures, then all of a sudden, thanks to Consciousness, we’re living in a reality where we are fat failures.

 

We look back over our lives and see us being fat failures, we look at our current situation – yup, fat failure – we project ourselves into the future and see us, still being fat failures only with wrinkles and a zimmer frame.  Meanwhile of course everyone around us continue to have the brains of astrophysicists, the looks of underwear models with the cash of Warren Buffet, lol.  We cry, we stamp our feet, we grumble and wail and become wracked with depression, guilt and worry.  We possibly even start meddling with our life situation trying to become less like a fat failure.

 

Eventually the feelings subside, not because that one trip to the gym means we are no longer fat failures, but because the thought that underpinned that feeling has finally poddled off.  As in, we stopped wallowing in it thereby loosening our grip on it so it could leave.  We no longer see our past, present and future starring us a fat failures.  Phew.

 

Until it happens again that is.  The whole circus will come to town again, because that is the nature of thought.  Cue more wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Further meddling, maybe this time a therapist or prescription pills.

 

Basically when you don’t realise you’re only ever feeling your thinking, not objective truth, you let thought drag you around the yard, treating you like it’s bitch, when all you’ve got to do is wake up and smell the daisies.

 

YOU ARE NOT YOUR THOUGHTS. YOU ARE THE SPACE WITHIN WHICH THE THOUGHTS ARISE.

 

The thoughts you value, come to life.  Those you don’t, won’t.  It’s that simple.  The answer to all of life’s problems are contained within that last sentence. (Again, I’m not talking about coming to life physically, I’m talking about experientially).

 

Thought is transient.  It flits about.  Sometimes our thoughts are up, sometimes they’re down, sometimes they carry severe nudges to engage in harmful behaviour that we know is going to kill us, but none of it lasts for long.  Barely a few seconds even.  So when you can see what it’s doing and you know it can’t continue if you don’t let yourself get carried away by it, you reclaim your power.  That is how you rid yourself of compulsive eating.

 

The Nudge can’t make you act.  Not without your say-so.  I don’t care how much you want that bread roll, still warm from the oven.  It’s a neutral, meaningless thought coming from inside you that you accidentally taught your brain to send on the sight of bread rolls, still warm from the oven.  It’s there because every time you’ve seen a bread roll in the past, you’ve gobbled it up and then gone for another.  If the bread roll wasn’t sitting there, you wouldn’t be feeling what you’re feeling.

 

If you own the thought as “you” though, like say it’s not just a thought but your genuine, heart thumping desire, the chances are you’ll take it seriously, give in to it and reach for the bread roll.  The next time you’re faced with a bread roll, warm or otherwise, guess what, The Nudge will come back even harder.

 

When you see The Nudge as the transient thought it is however, an impersonal message from your lower brain that will take a hike if you just sit with it for a moment and don’t fret about it, then you won’t cave. You’ll laugh at it, if anything.  How you choose to see The Nudge will determine your behaviour.

 

It’s only as your perception of The Nudge changes that your habit goes away.  Think of it as some massive, dangerous, permanent, worrisome monster that has you under its thumb and you’ll stay a victim, totally at the mercy of its omnipotent power.  A slave to a bread roll.  See it as the transient, temporary, meaningless, confused thought wiring it is however, and you’ll reclaim your decision making ability.  Then it doesn’t matter how often or how hard The Nudge stops in for a visit, you just sit with it, laugh at it, tickle its ribs, poke it in the eye, and the next time it dares to rear its ugly head, it’ll be all limp and puny.

 

Eventually, when you’ve stopped giving in to its demands, when you’ve laughed at your pesky lower brain enough times, it stops sending The Nudge.  The lower brain isn’t a moron, it does what’s directed. Then it’s job done.  Case closed.  Class dismissed

 

Is the dust falling from your eyes?  Is your vision clearing?

 

As a society we have labelled habits and addictions tricky little suckers and that’s because we literally argue that black is white.  We say “out there” creates what’s going on “in here” whereas in fact it’s the other way around.  That’s why the world and all of us in it are so messed up.

 

We don’t realise we’re totally immune to the outside world and everyone in it.  We blame others for our feelings, we blame our circumstances for our feelings and we set about trying to force it all to change so that we can feel better.  Often by yelling, judging or making someone feel small.

 

If only we realised we’re utterly perfect already.  We are totally mentally healthy and habit free.  It’s only our surface level thinking – which we didn’t know we had the choice to disregard – that tells us otherwise.

 

Our overeating isn’t a problem in its own right.  It’s a perfect representation of the relationship we have with our thoughts.  That’s the real problem right there – us not understanding that a) everything is thought and b) thoughts has no power.

 

Thought is like a cuppa soup, nothing without the boiling water.

 

The value we place on a particular flavour of thought, is the boiling water.  We don’t need to change our thoughts to change our eating habits, all we need to do is change our relationship with our thoughts AKA stop treating them like all powerful beings that we have to obey.  Then the habit of eating too much goes away on its own (and as a bonus, we stop yelling at people, judging, or trying to make them feel small).

 

It’s never the external substance or behaviour or activity that’s the problem, it’s our powerlessness over our own inner thinking life that is. We are totally immune to the outside world.  We have always had the power to disregard any thought we don’t like or that is not helpful to us – from “Sheila’s a bitch” to “pass me that muffin” – but nobody told us.

 

Until we wake up to this truth we’ll stay weak, small and angry, blaming others for our feelings, constantly hardening the habits we already have, while adding to the pile with yet more.  Collectively humanity will continue to drift towards the cliff edge.  It’s dangerous when you believe the outside world is responsible for your feelings.

 

Feel your inner body again.  That is the extent of your world.  You feel nothing beyond there.

 

The outside world is the effect of what’s in there, not the cause.  If anything the outside world is a symbol of the quality of the thoughts you value.  Any experience of the outside world we are having we are creating, on the fly, with the thoughts we have circulating inside.

 

It’s like the world is a fish pond, and our thoughts are the net. Whatever we scoop for, we bring up.

 

This means of course that anything we do bring up, any experience we have, isn’t objectively right or wrong, true or false, good or bad.  It’s just transient thought coming to life as though it were real thanks to the three principles in action.  So we don’t need to panic about it, if we don’t like we’ve scooped up, we just need to choose again.

 

Because thought is fleeting, so is the content of the present moment.  It means the present moment is a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of experience, with thought turning the wheel.  You and the ever changing scene in front of you are the patterns.  With a little bit of self-direction, you can make those patterns much more beautiful than they are now.

 

To put it another way … recognise there’s a bridge of thought between you and the outside world and you get to decide how you walk across it and what you see when you get there.  Refuse to accept the bridge is there at all and you’ll stay the heifer in the tunnel, a powerless victim, waiting for the bolt gun and frankly grateful for it.