Some moments, I am okay, thankfully. Some moments I am good, content, grateful, peaceful.
Sometimes, however, I suddenly feel like I’m starving for something. It’s an emotional or psychological something, but it feels like intense hunger, so I might eat something, even though my body is not hungry. This is how addiction works: we are hungry for one type of nourishment, but we don’t know how to get it, or may not even know what it is, so we unconsciously seek something we can get—something easier to control and understand—like cereal.
Knowing an addictive behaviour from a healthy one can be challenging. After all, there is nothing inherently wrong with eating a bowl of rice puffs—it’s hardly even a real cereal! It’s just puffed rice. But that is not the point, really. What’s worth looking at is what drives me to eat when my body is not hungry.
I’ve noticed something interesting in my own addictive patterns. When driven by addiction, I am not inhabiting my body with any conscious awareness. I’m not aware of my breathing, of gravity, or of what my body—not my mind—needs or wants in a given moment.
If I listen to my body it tells me when I need to eat, stop eating, drink water, go for a walk, dance, hug someone, stretch, work out, sleep, meditate, take a bath, be with a friend, and so on.
One problem in our society is that we rely too heavily on our mind to tell us what we need or want. But the mind does not have all the answers. In fact, it may have far fewer answers than we tend to think. Moreover, the mind can convince us that we want something that we actually don’t want at all. Do we really ever want to eat when we are not hungry? Does it ever feel like it was a great idea after the fact?
I’ve also noticed that any time I am taken over by addiction, I harm my body, because addiction is always an excess of something. Addiction involves excess, and it involves a lack of conscious awareness, and it interferes with the body’s self-regulating functions.
So, I implore every person who struggles with addiction—that is, with excess in any area whatsoever—to pay close attention to the sensations and movement of their body, even for a moment.
Realize that you are not your mind with a body below. You are the whole being. You are as much your toes as any other part of you. Don’t try to intellectualize your wholeness; try to experience it. Let go of living as a “me” in the mind for a moment. Be the rhythm of your breath instead.