Addiction: What Are You Really Craving?

Real compassion, real validation does heal. And validation is the clear seeing in the moment of what it is you're actually wanting and searching for, and completely acknowledging that with love. In that state, addictive patterns just melt away. They just melt. You are self-liberating yourself in that moment. Awareness and the love inherent in Awareness is self-liberating, because it's clearly acknowledging within the depth of that struggle and suffering and pattern that, "Wait a second, what I'm searching for is wholeness." How to govern every aspect of your life, including your relationship to food and eating and so forth, and emotions. How to govern that from the presence of awareness, correct? Yes. And what happens exactly? And this is a relevant question for everyone, what happens at those moments where our quote, unquote blind spots or conditioning or charges or impulses or urges take over to an extent where we do something that we know is ultimately not of highest benefit to ourselves and/or others, and it's an expression that we, in a sense, prefer to see gone or transmuted. So what happens there? And often, you will find at the very root of that quote, unquote, condition or order or disorder, there is a bias, there is a judgment, you could say, of the condition. So for you, I would encourage you to look more closely at, "Okay, where am I still holding a judgment of this eating disorder or condition? Where am I still judging the fact that I express in this way when the charge has built up and have not caught it early on enough, or I've not been able to balance it out before it discharges, before it releases, all that, in a moment of lack of seeming control?" So what could possibly be the bias that slants the otherwise purely balanced surface of my mind, where the water can just rest in stasis, in balance, the moment it slants, all that weight is going to go more and more and more and more in one direction, right? So in the beginning of something slanting, it's still quite balanced. All the water on that surface, it's still quite balanced. But the more it starts shifting left, the more it starts shifting left, the faster. So then you get the discharge. You get the out of controlness. You get the you get the angry abusive husband, or you get the manipulating, screaming wife, or you get the whatever it is, or you get the, you know, emptying the fridge in two hours. So whatever it is, we all have different expressions of this, but I would say nobody is psychologically free from this altogether. It is a very common normal part of how we're sort of conditioned and wired, but it can be managed, and it can be beautified and it can be transmuted. And just a side note, on the other hand, what you see in society right now is people arriving at this sort of understanding that they don't want to judge themselves for their disorder. Let's say it's an eating disorder, which is also very prevalent in our society. And though then we then we get this, these interesting expressions and fads and groups promoting, for instance, what's it called body positivity. So now suddenly, you know Sports Illustrated should consist of of fat women that are obese or even unhealthy according to normal medical standards. And we get this whole like, if you even dare say anything about this, or if you don't love this, then you're racist, or you're whatever it is. So we get these extreme expressions from people who understand they don't want to judge themselves anymore, because it makes the whole situation worse. But then somehow they don't have the full awareness needed. So they go in the direction the other, opposite direction of, you know, my body is beautiful, and I'm going to eat even more and just indulge. So we go in the direction of indulgent indulgence. We don't want to control. We don't want to judge too much, because in control and judgment, we're charging that thing. We're biasing that. We're slanting that balance. We're not happy. Whenever we're not happy, we become less happy. We become less happy. We become less happy. Happiness really is a barometer for balance. Are we in balance, naturally? Are we connected? Are we aware? Are we governing our mind-body-spirit complex with presence and awareness? If so, we'll be happy. There's a happiness, there's a joy, there's a cheerfulness, there's a spontaneity, there's a naturalness. And we seek that, when we don't feel that, we start seeking it in permission slips, in different things. In your case, maybe food. In someone else's case, it might be sex or gambling. So this really is about the phenomenon of addiction, ultimately. It's the same, like some people call it Addiction Disorder, whatever, but it's this human misallocation of our seeking impulse. So, okay, how to avoid binge eating out of an imbalanced state? First of all, look at the judgment you have on this condition, like I said. You will probably find that there's a judgment and there is an emotional, sort of traumatic relationship to that judgment that feels charged, so it doesn't feel neutral, it doesn't feel free, it doesn't feel light hearted, it doesn't feel completely supportive of yourself. It doesn't feel totally self-loving. And again, in my book, self-love does not mean indulgence. It doesn't mean the other end of the spectrum of control and judgment. It just means self-love, it means the love to stay in the presence of knowing your sufficiency exactly as you are, and not outsourcing it to any substance, any experience. Substances are also just appearances in my world, so food or alcoholism or whatever it might be, those to me, are not real things any more than people that get lost in building fantasy worlds in their minds and kind of get disconnected from reality. To me, it's all the same seeking. Therefore, there's a beauty to addiction. For me, there's a beauty to your what you call your eating disorder, because what I ultimately see in that unstoppable urge or a pattern, is the seeking for the Creator.That's really the golden thread throughout all this. But the moment, we have a judgment on it, a label on it, whether it's, you know, backed up by medical diagnoses or Social pressures or our family, or some promise we made that we're not upholding, but then we're lying about it because we don't feel good about whatever. All these sayings, they will compound into a not self-loving set of judgments that are then emotionally charged. We already feel bad about ourselves at the core of that whole topic. The moment we think of that topic, we feel weakened, we feel disempowered, we feel lonely, perhaps we feel judgmental. So again, then we can, okay, we can just throw that all in the wind and go over indulge, but then we create the same issues on the other side. So what's the solution? First of all, for me, it's validation of what's at the core of this, not so much validation of like, "Oh, poor child," like whatever, I mean, validation of the seeking impulse that's driving this that has somehow been confounded, confused with some concept, with some association in some of my teachings, I call this our search for Essence Q. It's just a random thing I came up with, but Essence Q represents the real thing that we're really searching, that often we don't even know we want, but it's what we're actually searching for when we want that financial situation, when we want that partnership, when we want that fitter body, when we want whatever we want. So what is your Essence Q? What is it that you're actually looking for, that you have somehow associated with a certain forms through experiences and conditioning? So let me pause here for a second, and just ask you, what in your eating disorder experience, in that appearance, which is all it is, and I'll bring you to a deeper awareness of that in a minute, but in that situation, in your relationship to the pattern you just described for us so honestly, what is it your heart's actually seeking in that equation? I think it's love. Beautiful, and if, I agree, and if love was even still a permission slip, a symbol of something even deeper, then what's the search for love? What's the Essence Q behind the search for even love? Or through love, through that real love, what is it that we hope to ultimately find? The word that is coming is wholeness. Beautiful. So in my terminology, that would be, although I use the word as well, but, Source, the Creator, the One, which is the whole, it's the wholeness. Beautiful. So we seek to find our wholeness, or our singleness, our source, our home, our oneness, which indeed, when it is tapped into, found it expresses this energy, profound energy, that we tend to call love. We cannot really describe, but we call it love. So that's very close to the wholeness. The wholeness expresses itself as that feeling of love, so great. So I would with any addiction, sort of pattern that I've ever had to deal with, if it if it got to a point where it bothered me, where it became aware, like, "Hey, wait a second. Am I like programmed here? Am I conditioned? It doesn't feel like I'm in charge of this completely. Let me check this out." So then what worked for me was to see the whole thing for what it really is. And that's what I meant with the word validation. Because the moment, because, why does it help sometimes to just give somebody who's in distress a hug instead of give them a teaching, right? Like, and I love teaching, and it's very easy for me to teach people, but sometimes somebody in distress just needs a hug, and they completely recalibrate, right? There's just that energy of love and like, "It's okay, just let go. Don't worry about it. You're totally perfect." You know, if you can exude that in a love, sorry, in a hug, transmit that, then that's really what they need. And that relaxes their their whole pattern in that moment, at least because they have found Essence Q instead of, you know, the sandwich or the salad or the whatever, candy. I don't know what you binge on when you binge on, few people binge on salads. But the reason why the hug helps people more than the teaching, the teaching could be super clear, right? I could say the exact scientific thing to say that is exactly the issue and whatever. But why does the transmission of love or wholeness in the form of a hug, maybe, the hug is also just symbolic, it's not really the transmission, but it's a means, right? So why does that relax their system? Is because we help bring them in contact with that energy of love, which is an expression of the One or the wholeness that they seek. And so the need, the addiction, the false seeking, the misplaced seeking impulse, disappears, at least for that moment, because it's now aligned to what they were actually seeking all along. So to break through this, there's really, there's no hard work way, in my opinion, there's no struggling way. I've never been able to overcome anything through hard work, not to be mistaken for laziness, to not work hard. There's a distinction there. Laziness is a big sin, meaning it will ruin our lives, it will cause a downward spiral. So I'm not advocating for laziness here. I want this to be very clear, but I'm saying hard work implies there's a lack of understanding. Hard work implies there is an upstream direction, or swimming upstream. There is some idea, there's some misperception that's causing us to struggle, and that's a fighting energy, and it will typically only quote, unquote, wound us more psychologically. It will add further charge to that trauma, to that nasty taste in our mouth whenever we think of the topic of our eating disorder, like, why can't we think of our eating disorder and be cheerful and joyful and be like, oh, cool, yeah, that topic again. Let me, let me look at what that is. Why, the moment it comes up, we feel like we shrink, we feel like we shrivel up. We feel like we're less than ourselves, and we go into judgment, and we start building that charge, and we start slanting our balance, and all that momentum goes in a direction until the discharge, and then we feel bad about ourselves afterwards, because we were out of control again, and we broke our promises, or whatever it is. Trying to work your way through that, I don't think is the answer. It's never been for me. For me, the shifts have almost always been instantaneous. Maybe there would be some cleanup afterwards, some you know, the need to be present, to remember if the habit kind of tries to come up again. But for me, any kind of psychological pattern or issue like that was always solved virtually overnight, once I got the real understanding. And this is what I mean by properly validate what's actually happening. When you validate it, like the hug validates their wholeness when they're seeking for trouble, when they're seeking for wholeness and trouble, and you give them wholeness, that's validating what they're actually seeking for, and the whole system recalibrates. Then the balance resumes itself, and the charge is naturally, gradually transmuted or discharged, and it just doesn't arise. But if we're in a low self esteem mode, if we're in a self-judgment mode, if we're in a bias mode, and if we're trying to then work our way through it by promises and attending AA meetings and so on and so forth, which, for some people, genuinely help. For me, it just never really worked in a holistic way. It tends to create more friction. So for you, look at whatever judgment you have and dissolve that judgment, not by going to the extreme of indulgence, and everyone should love me for my binge eating, but go towards the real validation, not the fake validation. Like, "You should love me. You should call me, they them. You should call me beautifully fat. You should call me whatever." No, no, like no, don't go seeking it elsewhere again. The real validation that heals is the recognition towards yourself in the midst of that pattern being active what it is you're really looking for, and it calibrates the system be your own person, giving yourself a transmissive hug of wholeness. Acknowledge to yourself, what I'm looking for here in the fridge, and you can look all you want in that fridge, you can have the most expensive fridge you want, but what you're looking for is wholeness, and it's not packed in plastic. And but just by acknowledging that without judgment of the pattern, and the judgment disappears the moment you validate yourself truly. And this is why people seek for validation from other people. This is why we have the whole cancel culture bullshit thing, the whole snowflake minded, weak minded stuff, like it's your fault when I feel bad. It's because we do know at some level that compassion is the answer, but now we're trying to enforce compassion which is not compassionate. So real compassion, real validation, does heal, and validation is the clear seeing in the moment of what it is you're actually wanting and searching for and completely acknowledging that with love. And in that in that state, addictive patterns just melt away. They just melt. You are self-liberating yourself in that moment. Awareness and the love inherent in awareness is self-liberating, because it's clearly acknowledging within the depth of that struggle and suffering and pattern that, wait a second, what I'm searching for is wholeness and the clearer you distinguish that, and you acknowledge that, you validate it properly, there is an energy shift that happens, that just changes you, like it shifts you into a different kind of personality. It literally alters your grooves and your brain waves, your electromagnetic field, which will affect how your brain is wired as well. So that will then happen very quickly. So in this pattern, I would like you to try this for a while and feel free to update me in some future session, maybe see how it goes for you. Maybe some other nuances needed, I'm not sure, but for me, this has always helped. When I truly understand the situation, when I get to the heart of it, there is a forgiveness that arises naturally and in the forgiveness of myself, in the clarity of seeing what I was doing, what I was hoping to attain, and seeing the, you know, the silliness and the foolishness of that attempt, but with so much understanding and compassion that I'm validating myself without this weak, victimy, slimy like "Poor old you." No, it's a liberating, it's an empowering validation. It's like, "Oh, my God. Of course, I was addicted to that, or I was seeking for that in this place." And of course that was sincere. It wasn't a disorder. It was a misallocation. That's very different. You don't have an eating disorder, dear, you have a misallocation, a classic misallocation, of Source, seeking for Souce in the fridge, and it's silly, yes, and it's stupid, yes, and it doesn't work, no, and it's not good for your body, no, and it doesn't make you feel good about yourself. But so who cares? It's completely understandable from the point of view of what you're looking for, and that there's such a drive behind something so deluded and silly is validating, like to your love for the Creator, to how activated you are as a seeker and how much God is knocking on your inner door. You just didn't know where to look. You didn't have that clarity. But if you can validate it in the moment of the urge that what you're looking for is Essence Q and it's wholeness that will redirect all the energies that will regovern, and it will rewire and your addictive pattern will disappear very quickly to a point where your balanced state, your true self-loving, self-validating essence, will remain steady and stable throughout the day, and there will be less and less of the tilting. And when it starts to happen, you notice it, and you can kind of, instead of trying to slap it back, you kind of go like this, oh, wait a second. You catch the wave, you go with it for a second, you validate, you acknowledge it, and then you bring it back to balance. So it never has to do that anymore, but if it does, do that again, the same applies. Try not to go into judgment. Seek for the real acknowledgement of what you're looking for, and give that to yourself in a powerful way.