O B S E S S I O N

 We are not always healthy.  We are sometimes broken and easily triggered.  We are sometimes depleted and feel we need to fix something, add something, change something or devour anything. What is actually devoured is our capacity to satisfy our needs. The more our wants cannibalize our needs, the more our wanting becomes an obsession.

 

Humans are funny. To a great extent we have everything we need. Yet, there always seems room for us to want more. In our healthiest moments, that ‘room for more’ can be left as is. A space where ‘more’ can come to us, rather than reaching for the same old tropes, to which we seem hopelessly attached. It’s odd, but actually waiting a beat, can help us connect to spontaneity.  We think leaping into the pit blindly is living in the moment, when actually it may be escaping the moment. When we pause – even for an instant – we allow the space to see what comes next. Then we have the power to step into our next moment and the lateral space to see alternatives. Then we can let life come to us, rather than grasp blindly at the same old patterns.

 

Naturally, this creative space is dependent on feeling balanced and content. This is where a daily meditation practice comes in. We learn to become aware of ourselves and our tendencies. We see the moment of our panicked gripping – eventually before it comes – and we can relax into space, rather than react in programmed panic. Then, rather than needing to fill the open space with our wanting, we can simply appreciate what is already there.

 

With space we see more clearly. Intriguingly, this allows things beyond our contextual frame to dawn. For instance, the phenomenon we call an “a-ha moment” usually comes from open space.  It’s not that these moments appear out of nothingness so much as when the mind is released from its obligation to look for answers, it has the capacity to see what is already there.

 

Maybe these “ah-ha moments” are everywhere, just waiting to be recognized.  Maybe the same can be said of all of life’s genuine moments. These are the fresh takes that bring a sense of awake to the mind. We can’t figure out these moments, nor can we strategize our way to them.  They simply come as gifts to an open mind and vibrance to life.  And though these moments are often a result of having trained the mind toward an objective, it is not in the tension of training, but in the release that follows, that authentic contact comes. In our healthiest times, we can allow ourselves the room to open to authentic experience. In order for that to happen we need to not fill every space by compressing our life around objective “things.” When we are healthy and balanced we are not gripped with need and we can wait for the game to slow down and come to us.

 

But we are not always all that healthy, are we?

 

When we lose balance and become lost in the mind, we loose awareness and, now blinded in the carnival swirl, have no recourse but to rely on familiar memory patterns. We fall for the same reflections in the mind’s hall of mirrors again and again. As they are not real, these images provide little sustenance. This only increases our neediness. It’s as if the universe only understands verbs. We pray to a higher power “I want this, I want that.” But, all we get back is WANT.  So we grab harder to what we want. Only there is no substance to what we get. We have bartered our needs for what we think we want. In this way, we become ever more depleted as we reach out in panicked loneliness and cling to baseless imaginings that return us only further wanting.

 

When we are healthy, our awareness rides within us.  We are not split apart and we are able to rest in the flow.  In this way, our life force moves evenly within us and we are able to see into the creative space and touch genuine moments of life.  But, we are not always healthy.  We are sometimes broken and easily triggered.  We are sometimes depleted and feel we need to fix something, add something, change something or devour something. The more we actually need, the more our wants become an obsession. The feeling of obsession is initially soothing. Rather than fall into the dark corners of mind we reach for straws until we’ve constructed a strawperson savior.  We teach for the junk, chase that dragon and swoon into a sense of false euphoria. We become enveloped in a protective batting that promises to save us from the sadness of life. In this way, we fill all the space and leave room for little beyond our obsession. At some point, we turn ourselves over to the power of our desire, lose our present, and so doing, loose our mind and our life.

 

And all the while life is going on nonetheless. Bills are piling, friends are leaving, life is calling but we are too obsessed to listen.

 

I call the opposite of “ah-ha moments our  “aw-shit” moments.  Aw-sit is when we CHOOSE – knowingly or not – to abandon ourselves, abdicate authority over our life and hand ourselves over to obsession. Obsession can be a momentary thing, as when we stuff the pain in our heart full of chocolate.  It can be a bowl of shut-the-fuck-up, it can be a mind-set we cannot shake, or it can be an addiction that controls our body spirit and mind. But, whether it be large or small the obsession is gripping to a false image that eclipses the rest our life.  The reality is never what we think. But in that moment of clinging we shut out the lights, lose the space to see and choose the fantasy of escape over the reality of what is actually there. Its like squinting our eyes shut and jumping off a cliff in order to save ourselves. In the words of the guru Bugs Bunny, “that trick never works.”

 

Whether our obsession has become the raison d’etre of life, a recurrent escape or a toxic philosophy that lies sleeping in the shadows of mind, we have taken a simple experience in life and fetishized it into an object of disproportionate importance.  We loose context and completely blind ourselves in a misguided attempt to save ourselves.

 

Save ourselves? From what? Our life? Is it that bad? Or has it simply become bad because we’ve mistaken the rush of dopamine for the value of actually commanding our life?  And, of course, the great irony is that the more we escape our life, the harder it becomes.

 

The alternative is to wake up into the flow of our life. By training in mindfulness of body we can feel the moment of gripping. By developing mindfulness of spirit we begin to gain contact to our emotional world, understanding wants and needs. Mindfulness of mind is the awareness of our thinking, the past layers of programming to the momentary blips that refocus – or unfocus – reality. Once we understand the difference between projection and reality, we can relax the body past grabbing onto projections and into the space of choice.

 

With synchronicity of body, spirit and mind we can relax into a healthy and productive connection to our life.