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Tara Brach
Desire and Addiction: Voices of Longing Calling You Home, Part 2
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Desire is intrinsic to all living forms – the urge to exist and flourish. It turns to suffering when, due to unmet needs, it contracts, intensifies and separates us from our full aliveness and awareness. These two talks guide us in awakening from...
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Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com Namaste. Welcome, friends. Thank you for being here. Some years ago, I heard the phrase the big squeeze, and it really struck me as a powerful way to describe our human predicament. How our lives are shaped by two different evolutionary poles. Every day we get pulled and caught in the small, reactive self. It's grasping and the anxious and the acting out of old habits and limiting beliefs. And when we're in the grip of this evolutionary pole, we fixate on substitutes. You know, trying to prove ourselves and impress others and be right. You know, we get hooked on being online, on snacking, on overworking. These are substitutes for feeling connected and alive and they block us from true happiness. So that's the primitive psyche, the survival brain, evolutionary force. And then each day, in some way, and sometimes we're not that conscious of it, but in some way, our awake heart comes through. We might pause for presence. There might be a moment of beauty, of humor, of caring connection, of gratitude, of remembering what matters. I often think of Zen poet Ryo Kahn, who writes, if you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things. So this is the second part of talk on desire and addiction. And we'll explore how we get hooked on chasing after substitutes, that pull of that first evolutionary force, and how we love ourself into healing. How we evolve to live more fully from presence and awake heart. So, friends, I hope that this serves you well. Thank you. We are discussing tonight the second part of what's now a three part series on working wisely with desire and addiction. And I start with Buddhism because the Buddhists talk about the middle path, as many of you know, in approaching desire. And it's to meet desire with, without any grasping, but living it fully, living fully what our hearts are experiencing with an open heart and wide open hands. And I love the cartoon of a Zen dog. And the caption is Zen dog dreaming of a medium sized bone. This is our opening to exploring some more how we work with desire and addiction. In the Buddhist cosmology, one of the universal psychic domains is called the realm of the hungry ghosts. The hungry ghosts are beings who are drawn. They're pictured with these narrow necks and these large bellies. It represents the fact that they're riddled with desire, but they're unable to satisfy themselves. Really, this refers to the universal way that we humans suffer, that we all experience to a degree. That sense of something's missing now is not Enough, I need something more. And there's a kind of leaning forward so that the next moment contains what this moment does not. When it's intense, it leads to craving and to addiction. So whatever the degree of wanting mind that you may discover in yourself, grasping when you investigate will take you from the one place where love and awareness and realization is actually possible. It takes us from presence any amount of wanting. And we're not really fully here to contact what we truly long for. I remember a long time ago, I heard a little story of a conversation between a man and God. And the man said to God, you know, how many, how long is a million years to you? And God said, a million years to me is one second. And then the man said, how much is a million dollars to you? And God said, well, a million dollars is one penny. So the man screwed up his courage. He said, God, can I have one of your pennies? And we know it that when we're caught in wanting mind, we lose sight of what truly matters to our hearts. So the key inquiry, and we'll explore this in this class, is what and grasping an addiction. And when we examine what we find is that under all of them, there's the stress of unmet needs. In other words, when our needs for belonging, for love, for feeling seen when they aren't met, then we're wired to grasp after some substitutes give us a sense of reward and we get just enough reward from the substitutes to keep us hooked. Now, some grasping and addictions to substitutes are culturally accepted. For instance, the unmet needs for feeling loved and respected and secured might fixate on accumulating wealth or on workaholism, or on powering over people, control and dominance. Or maybe in deception, spinning things, it's assumed that'll happen. Or maybe our substitute is exercise and we over exercise, we're addicted to exercise. I can speak personally that over the years, Jonathan, my husband and I have kind of tracked where we go for substitutes. And the paired substitute we both end up going towards are a combination of caffeine and then overwork. I mean, there's some soothing and pleasure and reward from feeling productive. And we have shifted our caffeine intake over the years. We both now drink matcha tea, which in many ways is a very healthy green tea. And it's still a addiction. It's not for us because if I stopped, let's say tomorrow, I would have a headache and I'm attached to it and I wouldn't be as productive. So Jonathan, because of different challenges of sleeping, has decided he's going to try to wean himself and experiment for a month without the matcha tea. So I thought I'd share with you. I just sent him something I encountered. It's a cartoon and it's got these two homeless guys that are sitting on a park bench and one is saying to the other, I used to be a CEO of a multinational, had three homes, private jet, and then I switched to decaf. So here's the deal with substitutes and substitute gratifications that are condoned. We can still be hooked, and we're hooked for good reason. We're afraid of being without them. They satisfy something. But some substitutes, as we know, are considered bad. They're not societally condoned, and they cause more obvious harm. And this is where we're talking about the addiction to substances, to gambling, to sex, to violence, to anger. And when an addiction to a substitute is not condoned, not only is there the suffering of the addiction, but then there's the added suffering of social condemnation and self condemnation. We're going to spend some time with this piece here because you might consider if the cause of addiction is unmet needs, how do you imagine condemnation impacts the addictive patterning? What we find is that it intensifies. It. It intensifies our needs for feeling worth and value and belonging. And then it just drives the cycle of addiction. The single most crucial part of healing addiction that I have found in my life and in working with others is removing condemnation. I can speak for myself that probably the most challenging addiction for me in my late teens and early 20s was overeating, binge eating at times. And really through the years, the single factor that most unhooked me was learning truly the process of self compassion. So that'll be the focus for this talk, is how do we bring compassion to ourselves when we're caught in addiction? And it begins for some people, or maybe let's say it's most helpful when there's some understanding about how biologically and psychologically compelling addiction is beyond any sense of our own control. Let me read you a quote. This is Robert Friedman, and he's from Cornell Medical College. As a psychiatrist, I have yet to meet a patient who enjoys being addicted to drugs or compulsive overeating. Then it goes on to say we now have a body of research that makes the connection between stress and addiction definitive. Neuroscientists have found that food and recreational drugs have a common target in the reward circuitry of the brain and that the brains of humans and other animals who Are stressed undergo biological changes that makes them more susceptible to addiction. Okay, now, stress is a kind of a vague, big word. So let's anchor this a little bit. What happens when the brain is stressed by unmet needs? So let's say as a young child, you've been neglected or abused. And what that does is it creates biological changes in the brain that then will make you more susceptible to addiction. And the way it happens is that that stress as a young child creates fewer dopamine receptors. That means that you then become more driven to seek substitute rewards to compensate. Rewards like sex and food and money and drugs, because they release dopamine and they give a sense of pleasure. So craving fixates on behaviors that will light up the pleasure centers in the brain. And here's what happens after that. In time, the brain rewires, and the use of the substitutes further decrease the number of receptors. So it takes more and more to get a reward, and the craving gets stronger. In other words, there's less sensitivity to the rewards Also, and I didn't know this until recently, with less dopamine receptors due to that stress, there's less activity in the prefrontal cortex, which means that impairs critical thinking and the capacity for restraint. This neglected or abused child grows up to have a brain with less dopamine receptors and an addiction to something. Food, drugs, sex, that gives temporary rewards, but less and less so. So they're completely hooked. And then there's the condemnation that I mention from the society and from the self as a moral failure, as weak as a bad person. So I've been talking about how the stress of early parenting or the lack of good parenting drives us to substitutes. It also comes from societal stress. And it's really important to look at this. That poor job prospects, financial strain, the erosion of social status, the loss of a meaningful role in family and society, those are huge stressors. And the reason for our contemporary soar in addiction is a combination of those societal stressors and that we have such a high availability of high fat, sugary foods. They're designed to hit the pleasure centers. They're just readily available. So we have an obesity epidemic. Are we have readily available opioids, or we have readily available very, very potent recreational drugs. The reason I'm spending time on this is, is this isn't a matter of discipline, of ethics. When there's unmet needs, when there's a stress of unmet needs, either from early childhood or from our society, it creates the propensity for addiction. Anyone with a certain mix of adversity and stress can become addicted to harmful substitutes. Now I name the suffering of self condemnation and social condemnation, But I want to say that the most extreme expression of this added suffering is societal punishment. I'm thinking right now mainly of the war on drugs because it's had such a pernicious effect on low income African Americans. Although the rate of drug use and selling are comparable across racial lines, people of color are far more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, prosecuted, convicted, incarcerated for drug law violations than are whites. So it creates a whole added layer of suffering that's conditioned by a racist society. When we talk about addiction for people of color, okay, so while it's clearly worse for some groups in our population, for all of us there's a vicious cycle with addiction. And although I'm talking about addiction also for very strong craving for the habits that we really don't like. And here's the vicious cycle, we have the stress of unmet needs, then our organism is wired to go seek substitutes that can activate pleasure centers. And then we get the added stress of condemnation. So that's the setup. And now the question for us, for the rest of this particular class, is how do we begin to decondition that vicious cycle? And you know, if we were looking at just the societal level, we'd be talking about all the ways of have bringing a more equitable, fair, just society, meeting needs for education, for meaningful work, for social justice. But our major emphasis here on the individual level really asks the question, given that addiction and harmful habits come from unmet needs, how do we begin to meet those unmet needs in healthy ways? Because that's what's going to undo the addiction to substitutes. That's the question. And I want to share with you one of the quotes that I return to most often from one of my favorite teachers, Srinir Sargadatta. And he basically addresses the way that we grasp after things in a very powerful way. He says, all you need is already within you. Only you must approach yourself with reverence and love. Self condemnation and self distrust are grievous errors. Your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of love you bear for yourself. All I plead with you is make love of yourself perfect. Deny yourself nothing. Give yourself infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them. You are beyond. It's very powerful to just reflect on that a bit. I know for me, when I unpack it, it becomes so clear that when we're seeking substitutes, it's really our primitive limbic system loving ourselves it's the limbic system's way of trying to thrive. We can't help that. The longing to be fully alive fixates on substitutes. It's not our fault. For many of us, that fixation happened way we are, maybe even verbal. So the first teaching from this quote is, don't condemn that. All I ask of you is this. Make love of yourself perfect. It's a kind of immature love of ourselves or an ignorant love of ourselves that goes chasing after the substitute. Make love of yourself perfect. And that's not another standard to meet. It's saying, let that be the core spiritual intention to address your deepest needs. We need to feel forgiven. We need to feel forgivable and lovable and understood. We need to feel belonging. If we felt all of that, we wouldn't be grasping after substitutes because we'd be already home. So to make love of yourself perfect means really to discover who you are beyond a separate, deficient self, to trust that, to live from that. So we need to love ourselves into healing. And this is the message we're going to talk about how. Because it requires engaging with others. It's not a lone project. I think often when I explore this sense of really recovery from addiction as a spiritual path, awaking up to who we really are, I often think of William Moyers, because he was such an ardent recovery addict, still is. And after being free of crack and alcohol, I think 12 years, he was invited to speak at an MIT conference. And so all these scientists and addiction researchers were there. And he then spoke in a way that went way beyond any of the kind of traditional, academic, scientific kind of formulas for addiction. And here's what he said. I have an illness with origins in the brain, but I also suffered with the other component of this illness. I was born with what I like to call a hole in my soul. A pain that came from the reality that I just wasn't good enough, that I wasn't deserving enough, that you weren't paying attention to me all the time. And maybe that was because you didn't like me enough. So he's saying this in the conference hall was quiet, really, they said, as quiet as it had ever been. He said, for us addicts, recovery is more than just taking a pill or maybe getting a shot. Recovery is also about the spirit, about dealing with that hole in the soul. So I think of that and I think, well, so what is that hole in the soul? And we can sense that it's that unmet need, that unmet longing for belonging, for connection, for Communion for oneness. And that as long as we take false refuge is one way I think of it, in the substitutes, we can't discover that belonging. It's always there. There's that beautiful quote, love is always loving you. The love is always here. But we can't discover it as long as we're fixated on the substitute. So whole in the soul. Basically, he's saying recovery, spiritual. It's a shift from identifying as this wanting, addicted self, a shift from calling ourselves an addict to sensing our whole being and our intrinsic goodness. So the next. What I'd like to do now is just look more closely at what is the process of moving from condemning ourselves for an addictive or addictive behavior we might call a bad habit, from condemning ourselves to really making love of ourselves more perfect. And I often teach, using the metaphor from the Buddhist tradition of the second arrow. Many of you might remember the first arrow when we shoot ourselves, when we get shot with the first arrow, we're shot with the arrow of the unmet needs, the suffering, the grasping. That's the first arrow. The second arrow is, I'm bad for this. I should be able to control it. There's a sense of personal failure at being stuck. And what happens with the second arrow is it strengthens the whole pathway of clinging because we feel bad about ourselves, and then we want to get away from that bad feeling, and we go right for that same POS reward that has caused us trouble. So we need, if we want to break the addictive cycle when we're caught in self aversion, we need to be able to love ourselves into healing. And there are many processes that, you know, can help us to bring kindness to ourselves in those moments. I'll share one story of a man who was at one of our residential retreats, and in a meeting, he told me about his addiction to anger and his temper, both at work and at home, and how he hated himself. He said, there's a beast in me and I hate it. It's ugly. You know, he really. I could feel the aversion for being so out of control. And I asked him at one point, does that help to hate yourself that way? And he looked at me, said, no, I get it doesn't help, Tara. But how am I supposed to forgive myself when I'm hurting people I love? Well, I'll pause here and say that's the challenge is that we condemn ourselves. And it's very hard to step back from that condemnation when we're feeling we're hurting ourselves or others. So I talked to him about what I've shared here, about the second arrow, about how it actually locks us into the very behavior that we are so aversive to. And I asked him, for now, just to simply deepen his mindfulness to how he turns on himself. So he's. So he's really awake to those moments because we, we can't change being at war with ourselves until we get familiar with it. So he did. And for a few days he was paying attention to that. And in one of his meditations, he remembered a recent event where he had come home from work and he saw this wife had not mailed a letter that he had asked her to mail. And it just brought up a rage. It's like, you know, if you cared about me, if you love me, you would have done what I asked. So he really creamed her, you know, he really went at it. And. And then she reminded him that that was the day that she had gotten the result of a biopsy that she had been very, very afraid of. And she was okay in terms of the biopsy, but not okay with what had happened between them. And he was worse. He went back, he was reflecting on this in the meditation hall. He left the hall, went to his room, he. And he started crying. And he said, I can't help it, I just can't help it. Because, you know, just he had burst out at her and it had been just so out of control. And he had a memory. And his memory was of his father and his father's temper and being an 11 year old and kind of standing at the doorway to the kitchen. And his father and mother were in the kitchen. His father was raging at his mother. And. And he took all these wine glasses and started throwing them one by one and, you know, shattering them. And then his mother was appalled. And then afterwards he remembered his father begging for his mother's forgiveness and realizing his father couldn't help it, he was possessed. And then realizing, wow, I'm possessed. So he shared that story with me and I mirrored it back. And then I said, this anger, this rage that comes out, it's not your fault. It's really not your fault. And at that, he began to weep deeply, really weeping. And we went on to talk. You know, I said, you can learn to be responsible for your anger, you can learn to respond differently, but it's only possible if you let go of that blame and that self hatred. And that was the beginning of him being able to relate to himself with a self compassion that actually helped to meet the very needs that were driving his anger. It's not your fault. It brings up a lot for people when I share that. There's such a fear that if I forgive myself, if I say it's not my fault, it means I'm not accountable. I'm not going to be responsible. But what I've seen over and over is that when we really are in touch with what's going on and we offer compassion to that part of ourselves that was so out of control, that part of ourselves that was seeking to meet those unmet needs but doing it unwisely, when we can hold that with compassion, we actually discover more balance and freedom and intelligence to then move forward in our life in a much more healthy way. It's not a condoning of unhealthy behavior. Of course we need to do whatever we can to protect ourselves and others, create boundaries, to get all the support we can in changing behavior. But the bottom line is self hatred will not inspire us to do so and it will not heal us. Self hatred will keep the cycle going. So for this man, it's not your fault. Was it kind of cracked that looping of behavior? Shame is profoundly binding. It's isolating. It's really self reinforcing of everything we don't want to be living from. There's a real power to others being with us through the addictive process. And in the story I just shared with you, I was the one that mirrored back, it's not your fault. He needed to hear that from another person. He needed to sense that he was part of something larger. And I've seen so in such a deep way, whether it's 12 step groups or we have in the Buddhist community, our spiritual friends group called Kalyana Mitta. I've seen it through group therapy and the affinity sanghas and between friends that when people share their vulnerability, such as the vulnerability of an addiction, what happens is it opens in a way. So it's not my grasping so much. It's really a sense of this universal wiring that's living through us. One man was describing his experience in 12 step groups. He was saying how isolating addiction is. And he said that when I finally went to 12 step group and got the empathetic 12 step ears, what was most powerful was the me too reaction when I shared my experience with alcohol. I can't describe the power feeling. Not alone, not so deprived, not so personally sick. Knowing I wasn't the only person who was suffering this way. Cut my angst about admitting my alcoholism nearly in half. We need each other. Otherwise, if we're alone with it, it seems like no matter what we're doing, our thoughts keep telling us we're bad and we're much worse than others, and we're really sick and. And we become more severed from belonging, which then reinforces the addiction. So we can actively bring self forgiveness into our meditation practice. Of course, I'm encouraging all of us to be in relationship with what comes up. But we can also be in relationship with our own being and actively intend to make love of ourselves more perfect. We can see the pain of the addiction or of the harmful habit and offer ourselves compassion, offer a message of care. For one woman, she was binging on alcohol and having a really hard time stopping. And it was affecting her family, affecting her life. Her pathway to making love of herself more perfect was that she. Every day she wrote a letter from her future self, or what you might call her high self, her most awake heart, to the part of her that felt addicted. She wrote a letter every day from her high self to the part of her that felt addicted. And she shared some of the phrases that she. That she would. That she'd write. And like this, you're trying to feel better. It's not your fault, but it's not working. Please remember what your heart truly longs for. Remember your pure heart. I love you. I'm with you. I'll always love you, no matter what. And she described after months of just writing this daily letter to herself, that something softened and there was more heart space for her to hold the vulnerability within her. She started letting go of that second arrow, the shame. And that again, was the opening, as so many have experienced, into being able to make choices that really served her life. Now, you might be listening and saying, well, I don't have a major addiction, but we all have habits we wish could change, ways that we consume or exercise, ways we get with others, defensive or blaming. So easy to judge these habits and to have an undercurrent of kind of cynicism towards ourselves, not liking ourselves, and to be able to remember, no matter what habit we're looking at what addiction, it's still a misguided effort from our more primitive brain to thrive and that the healing is by making love of ourself more perfect. So enough words in this way. I'd like to invite you to explore this with me and have a chance this class to explore letting go of the second arrow. So take a few moments to find a way of sitting, becoming quiet, and we'll practice how to work with addiction. Loving ourselves into healing. Take a moment to feel your breath, taking a few long deep breaths, then letting your breath resume in its natural rhythm. Scan through your body and just notice if there's any places of unnecessary holding or tightness. You might see if you can let go a little to the shoulders, letting the hands be soft, letting the chest be open, the belly soft and relaxed. Then scanning your life, bringing to mind some addictive behavior or maybe some other kind of stubborn, unhealthy behavior that does feel out of control in some way harmful to your life, to your body, to relationships, or your spiritual life. It might be a behavior of over consuming food or addiction, overuse the substance. Maybe anger, maybe something where you feel a kind of codependence with others, blame. And when you've chosen some habit that feels harmful, take a few moments to go to a recent situation where it was being played out and so you can get a little more close into how it's harmful to yourself or to others. What's the worst part of this for you? When you pay attention to this, notice how you're relating to yourself. What's the sense of who you are when you're caught in that behavior? What kind of person are you noticing? If there's that second arrow of self condemnation, if there's anger towards yourself, aversion, shame, notice what you're believing about yourself. And as you become mindful of that second arrow, can you sense this as a suffering? Can you sense this turning on yourself for the habit that you're focusing on, this turning against yourself as a suffering. Now call on your most awake, wise and caring heart, your high self, who you're becoming. As you wake up and look through the eyes of this high self, witness and feel at the heart of this wise self, so that you can see the part of you that's hurting, the part of you that's trying unsuccessfully through this habit to feel better, to avoid pain, to find gratification. And from the perspective and heart of this wise self, what do you most need to remember? What is that part of you that feels addicted or attached or grasping? What is that part of you need to remember? What is the place that's judging? Need to remember? What will help you to forgive and embrace the part of you that stuck again? What will help you to forgive and embrace the part of you that's attached to a substitute, that's stuck in some addictive way? Can you feel your commitment to that, to loving yourself into healing? We'll close again with the words of SRI nurse. All you need is already within you. Only you must approach yourself with reverence and love. Self condemnation and self distrust are grievous errors. Your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of love you bear for yourself. All I plead with you is this. Make love of yourself perfect. Deny yourself nothing. Give yourself infinity and eternity and discover you do not need them. You are beyond. So, my friends, thank you for your attention, for engaging with what can be some of the most challenging domains of the human heart. And I'm wishing you all blessings. Namaste.