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Pema Chödrön on shenpa and addictions
Sep. 28th, 2010 08:28 pmThe Mark Otter-edited Issue #4017 of the Nonduality Highlights contains quite a lengthy selection from a talk by Pema Chödrön, the wonderful Tibetan Buddhist nun and senior student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The excerpt deals mostly with something called shenpa, which is usually translated as attachment, but which she imbues with a meaning related to that which triggers our tendency to close down or withdraw for whatever reason.
She lists many reasons and examples for why we might close down, such as someone saying something insulting to us or our children, whatever. The parts of this passage which resonated so strongly with me relate to addictions, both to drugs and to food and binge eating. She talks about how we all feel this tension or unease about different situations in our life, especially those dealing with reminders of past traumas, and that when we get these feelings of unease, we react to them by trying to remove that unease in the fastest way possible.
I've done that with drugs and with food for years. With drugs for 10 years, and with food for more than 25 years. This constant and habitual drive I have had to dull negative emotions with food or drugs has made me tremendously unhealthy from a physical and mental perspective, and the solution as she sees it is to simply learn how to experience those emotions and then let them pass through you without hanging on to them. When we do that, when we just stop and breathe in and check in with ourselves and let ourselves really feel whatever the emotion is that's trying to make itself felt, then we don't have to fight against it anymore by zoning out with drugs or food or whatever else our addiction is (TV, the internet, sex, whatever).
This is really ringing some bells with me right now, because it also sits directly in line with what Geneen Roth teaches in her books about overcoming emotional or compulsive eating. She teaches that the only way to overcome the urge to overeat compulsively is to face directly whatever it is in our lives, our past, or our emotions that is driving us to escape from the moment by eating. When we do that, and when we do it in a very gentle and friendly and loving way towards ourselves, we will discover that the feelings we're trying to escape from are most likely very ordinary and understandable and justifiable human emotions or reactions to something in our lives, and that if we allow ourselves to actually experience those emotions, that they'll pass on through us and leave us relatively unscathed.
In other words, it's our attachment to the idea that we have to avoid these feelings at all costs which inspires us to overeat or to overindulge in any addictive behaviour we might have. Pema goes on in a similar vein in the selection I mentioned above, and I've copied the most relevant parts of that selection below:
She lists many reasons and examples for why we might close down, such as someone saying something insulting to us or our children, whatever. The parts of this passage which resonated so strongly with me relate to addictions, both to drugs and to food and binge eating. She talks about how we all feel this tension or unease about different situations in our life, especially those dealing with reminders of past traumas, and that when we get these feelings of unease, we react to them by trying to remove that unease in the fastest way possible.
I've done that with drugs and with food for years. With drugs for 10 years, and with food for more than 25 years. This constant and habitual drive I have had to dull negative emotions with food or drugs has made me tremendously unhealthy from a physical and mental perspective, and the solution as she sees it is to simply learn how to experience those emotions and then let them pass through you without hanging on to them. When we do that, when we just stop and breathe in and check in with ourselves and let ourselves really feel whatever the emotion is that's trying to make itself felt, then we don't have to fight against it anymore by zoning out with drugs or food or whatever else our addiction is (TV, the internet, sex, whatever).
This is really ringing some bells with me right now, because it also sits directly in line with what Geneen Roth teaches in her books about overcoming emotional or compulsive eating. She teaches that the only way to overcome the urge to overeat compulsively is to face directly whatever it is in our lives, our past, or our emotions that is driving us to escape from the moment by eating. When we do that, and when we do it in a very gentle and friendly and loving way towards ourselves, we will discover that the feelings we're trying to escape from are most likely very ordinary and understandable and justifiable human emotions or reactions to something in our lives, and that if we allow ourselves to actually experience those emotions, that they'll pass on through us and leave us relatively unscathed.
In other words, it's our attachment to the idea that we have to avoid these feelings at all costs which inspires us to overeat or to overindulge in any addictive behaviour we might have. Pema goes on in a similar vein in the selection I mentioned above, and I've copied the most relevant parts of that selection below:
( Read more... )
