Recently I have given up cigarettes, again, and I am really getting a first hand view of addiction and what it entails in its experience.
The dictionary defines addiction as: being physically and mentally dependent on a particular substance, and unable to stop taking it without incurring adverse side effects.
I have found this to be true. In looking at my addiction to cigarettes I have surely felt a physical and mental desire.
Physically, I can feel it most in my chest and mouth, when I want a cigarette. My mouth starts salivating in anticipation of tasting smooth tobacco. And my chest begins to ache, almost pulling me, to inhale smoke. My arms and legs begin to tingle for the stimulation and arousal from the nicotine. I have felt these things hundreds of times and I am sure I will feel them hundreds more.
To me, however, I find it much more difficult to deal with the mental traps. When I talk about mental addiction I am simultaneously talking about behavioral, or pattern based, addiction. In my experience the times when my mind plays a large role in urging me to have a smoke, are the times when my mind is reflecting on the situation at hand and my experience similar ones in the past. For example, when I am at a bar, enjoying a beer. Somewhere after two beers a voice in my head encourages me to have a cigarette. It tells me how buzzed I will get from drinking and smoking, and the body wants to follow.
The mind is king of memory and association making. Because of its unrelenting search for comfort, it is always seeking ways to make the present situation more enjoyable. And in cigarettes, the mind has an easy tool to enhance a variety of experiences. That cigarette was a perfect end to that filling lunch. That cigarette made the morning's coffee, invigorating. I needed a cigarette to cap off that amazing sex.
We can see that there is also a pattern developing. A cigarette comes at the end of a stimulating activity. It is used to make the feeling last, to settle more deeply into the enjoyment of the moment. But in practice it becomes more like a reward. It is something we look forward to after the activity. And soon the the smoking becomes intimately paired with the activity, almost as if the two cannot go without each other. From there on, every time we do our favorite activities, there is smoking.
We instill in ourselves, patterns and habits that fly under the radar of consciousness. And because of these unconscious patterns, the habit of smoking, becomes very difficult to break. We are only conscious of our enslavement to cigarettes when we try to stop. And only when we try to stop, when we give our deliberate attention to the cessation of smoking, we see how tied in smoking is with the majority of events during the day.
I have come to the opinion, that this is why people have such difficulty in quitting cigarettes. Because it is not a mere giving up of tobacco, but a re-organization of how we experience much of our day. Not having cigarettes plunges us deep into the sensation of a given experience. Boredom, stress, restlessness, loneliness, and anger all become intensified when we do not have our normal, habitual, outlet for relief. We are forced to sit with our unpleasant emotions and thoughts as they are. When smoking is not an option, we cannot use our normal means of pacifying ourselves.
The good news is when we give up cigarettes we are given more presence to actually see the causes and conditions of what initially caused us stress. By eliminating our unconsciously driven pattern of our normal quick-fix solution to our discomfort all that is left in consciousness is the present moment. We are forced to see our discomfort for what it is and we can either try to eliminate it, by discovering and eliminating its causes and conditions. Or we can let the suffering continue into its limit; infinity.
And this is the difficulty in quitting; attempting to change the very pattern of one's life while at the same time fighting the extreme mental and physical cravings. When faced with the unimaginable task of re-inventing one's life it is always easier to fall back into old patterns; especially when those old patterns involve strong drugs.
So here we are. Stuck with a decision so profound it literally embodies the choice of life or death. And the right choice is as simple as doing nothing. Yet, there is still a world of struggle. Everything is pointing to one solution and the patterns fight tooth and nail to perpetuate themselves.
For now, I will act as I always do, in true wu-wei style, and do nothing.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Monday, September 7, 2009
Death
I have recently finished a year-to-live practice and wanted to share with everyone what little knowledge, and insight, I have gained in my short investigation of death.
First, and foremost, death is the one thing that we cannot control. It is the one thing that we cannot barter or plead with. We cannot overcome it with title, accomplishments, money, or status. We cannot defeat it by being either a saint or sinner. It encompasses all. It is a universal law; if it is born it must also die.
Knowing this to be true, it is our habitual tendency to fear it, fight against it, and deny it.
I have learned that death is the house of all fear. If we take a moment to really think on fear, we realize that, all fear, is really the fear of death. Fear of heights is the fear of falling to our death. Fear of spiders is really the fear of receiving a fatal bite. Even fears that do not directly relate to death find their source in death. Fear of losing all one’s money, fear of being paralyzed, fear of public speaking, are all one’s fear of being unable to act, unable to live and participate fully in life.
The most important thing I have come to learn it to approach death in the same way you would approach life. By opening to it, and allowing whatever Is, to just Be. In death and in life, a myriad of thoughts, emotions, feelings, and perceptions, will arise. Some of them are pleasurable and some are very painful. But, whatever happens, it is the Truth of the moment and should not be rejected.
There is a story, in Tibetan Buddhism, about a master telling his student about two arrows of pain. The first arrow we are struck by is the actual experience of pain. It is the inevitable experience that we will all have because we are a sensitive, sensing being. The second arrow is the one we create for ourselves. It is the suffering around, the reverberation of, the pain of the first arrow. This suffering usually manifests as anger or some type of ‘why me’ experience, where we are fighting the pain at hand. This second type of pain is the one that our mind usually resides in and is often more lasting and morose than the original experience. But the good news is that we do not have to be struck by the second arrow.
The way to do that is to open to the moment, open to whatever is going on. The present moment requires awareness; pleasure invites it and pain demands it. But our experiences is always a result of exactly how much awareness we give the moment.
When painful experiences arise, we usually close around them. We become ultra-focused on the acute sensation of pain and in doing so intensify its effects. Ironically, we also lose sight of the entire picture of what the pain is comprised of. In becoming angry at our partners for doing something we don’t like, we tend not to think of our behavior that contributed to the action of our partner. Not to mention the effect of the environment in our lives and how it affects people differently. It is always beneficial, even if our anger or hurt is justified, to take a larger view and to consider multiple perspectives.
We see here, that a skillful approach, to any moment, is to provide as much awareness as possible. If we can open our heart and mind to whatever is going on we can take more fulfillment from pleasure and put pain in its proper context. We can see that pain is not a fixed, menacing, enemy, but that it is a dancing of sensations. Anger can be tainted with pain, frustration, guilt, vengeance, even love. Just as pleasure can be wholesome or vindictive.
All experience is incessantly changing; always moving. Thus, it is not beneficial to cling to specific viewpoints or experiences. Nothing last forever and we are only hit with that second arrow when we cling to one specific instance. When we long for things to be the way we desire and not the way they are. And the viewpoint that causes us the most strife, the most pain, is the general fear of death.
I have come to learn that open awareness is the proper way to approach death. In this way, all things have their place and all things can become integrated. In actuality, all of Life, is interconnected and mutually dependent. And the more we can expand our view to be aware of that interconnection, the more skillfully we can deal with suffering and live more fully in-love. Indeed, in all of the people lying on their deathbed’s, the ones that were most at peace were the ones that had fully opened themselves to life. Nothing was excluded from their lives even their deaths.
At some times it feels that I am beginning to attain wisdom into the nature of life and death. And at the times that I most feel like I know what is going on, I am always surprised and humbled by the spontaneity and infinite expression of the Universe.
The notions and views I have expressed in this essay are solely my own and are only true for me. I encourage anyone reading this to see for themselves what is true. To be courageous in the face of fear and uncertainty. And to plunge fully into all aspects of life with a tender, but open heart accompanied with an inquisitive, yet open mind.
First, and foremost, death is the one thing that we cannot control. It is the one thing that we cannot barter or plead with. We cannot overcome it with title, accomplishments, money, or status. We cannot defeat it by being either a saint or sinner. It encompasses all. It is a universal law; if it is born it must also die.
Knowing this to be true, it is our habitual tendency to fear it, fight against it, and deny it.
I have learned that death is the house of all fear. If we take a moment to really think on fear, we realize that, all fear, is really the fear of death. Fear of heights is the fear of falling to our death. Fear of spiders is really the fear of receiving a fatal bite. Even fears that do not directly relate to death find their source in death. Fear of losing all one’s money, fear of being paralyzed, fear of public speaking, are all one’s fear of being unable to act, unable to live and participate fully in life.
The most important thing I have come to learn it to approach death in the same way you would approach life. By opening to it, and allowing whatever Is, to just Be. In death and in life, a myriad of thoughts, emotions, feelings, and perceptions, will arise. Some of them are pleasurable and some are very painful. But, whatever happens, it is the Truth of the moment and should not be rejected.
There is a story, in Tibetan Buddhism, about a master telling his student about two arrows of pain. The first arrow we are struck by is the actual experience of pain. It is the inevitable experience that we will all have because we are a sensitive, sensing being. The second arrow is the one we create for ourselves. It is the suffering around, the reverberation of, the pain of the first arrow. This suffering usually manifests as anger or some type of ‘why me’ experience, where we are fighting the pain at hand. This second type of pain is the one that our mind usually resides in and is often more lasting and morose than the original experience. But the good news is that we do not have to be struck by the second arrow.
The way to do that is to open to the moment, open to whatever is going on. The present moment requires awareness; pleasure invites it and pain demands it. But our experiences is always a result of exactly how much awareness we give the moment.
When painful experiences arise, we usually close around them. We become ultra-focused on the acute sensation of pain and in doing so intensify its effects. Ironically, we also lose sight of the entire picture of what the pain is comprised of. In becoming angry at our partners for doing something we don’t like, we tend not to think of our behavior that contributed to the action of our partner. Not to mention the effect of the environment in our lives and how it affects people differently. It is always beneficial, even if our anger or hurt is justified, to take a larger view and to consider multiple perspectives.
We see here, that a skillful approach, to any moment, is to provide as much awareness as possible. If we can open our heart and mind to whatever is going on we can take more fulfillment from pleasure and put pain in its proper context. We can see that pain is not a fixed, menacing, enemy, but that it is a dancing of sensations. Anger can be tainted with pain, frustration, guilt, vengeance, even love. Just as pleasure can be wholesome or vindictive.
All experience is incessantly changing; always moving. Thus, it is not beneficial to cling to specific viewpoints or experiences. Nothing last forever and we are only hit with that second arrow when we cling to one specific instance. When we long for things to be the way we desire and not the way they are. And the viewpoint that causes us the most strife, the most pain, is the general fear of death.
I have come to learn that open awareness is the proper way to approach death. In this way, all things have their place and all things can become integrated. In actuality, all of Life, is interconnected and mutually dependent. And the more we can expand our view to be aware of that interconnection, the more skillfully we can deal with suffering and live more fully in-love. Indeed, in all of the people lying on their deathbed’s, the ones that were most at peace were the ones that had fully opened themselves to life. Nothing was excluded from their lives even their deaths.
At some times it feels that I am beginning to attain wisdom into the nature of life and death. And at the times that I most feel like I know what is going on, I am always surprised and humbled by the spontaneity and infinite expression of the Universe.
The notions and views I have expressed in this essay are solely my own and are only true for me. I encourage anyone reading this to see for themselves what is true. To be courageous in the face of fear and uncertainty. And to plunge fully into all aspects of life with a tender, but open heart accompanied with an inquisitive, yet open mind.
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