Craving and Meditation

Meditation in Blue and Yellow, 36 x 52 inches, oil on linen

Craving is my desire to fill myself with something to mask the pain of emptiness. That something can be an object, like a new car, an externally sourced process, induced by a drug like ice cream, or an internally sourced process, like love and sex. Whatever the type of craving, the result is that the vessel in me that is capable of holding the real world is instead filled temporarily with something other than the real world.

When I experience craving my false self tells me that I must have the object of my desire or something bad will happen, and that is often true. If I don’t fill myself up, then I will be left defenseless against my own uncomfortable feelings. For me, some of the deepest uncomfortable feelings are that I am fundamentally wrong, insufficient, and not good enough.

If I am able to sit with my uncomfortable feelings, they eventually dissipate. When they weaken, I can learn from them, and learn how to have compassion for myself and for others.  I can learn that we all have a reason to be here. My voice and thoughts are important, and so are yours. They are good. We are supposed to share them with the world.

Two seemingly contradictory things are true about the world. The first is that our world is beautiful, wonderful and amazing. The second truth is that the civilization that we created is very good at provoking cravings in us and delivering things that offer fast temporary relief from our uncomfortable contact with our emptiness. Unfortunately, when we try to avoid contact with our emptiness, we are also avoiding contact with what is wonderful about the world.

In Tara Brach’s book Radical Acceptance, she tells the story of the Buddha welcoming Mara, the devil, to tea. The Buddha instructed his gatekeepers to let Mara into his hut whenever Mara lurked nearby because the Buddha knew that Mara is our best teacher. Without our cravings bedeviling us, and without the ability to sit with them, we will not learn from them.

This is why meditation is so important, and yet so often misunderstood. We do not meditate to remove ourselves from the world, rather, we meditate in order to learn how to be in the world.