In the last two months, I've made some very significant progress stepping out of my craving loop. I'm close to being at a healthy weight. I find it easier not to escape into Netflix, or shallow web surfing. I'm having an easier time turning off work obsessions and anxiety. I'm feeling more mastery over the present than I ever have.
Then there's my house. I know I made a conscious decision not to get too worried about that while I focussed on my weight. But now I need to get serious about it. I can't live like this anymore! I don't want to live like this anymore. I cannot think of a better indicator of my liberation, to know that I am no longer caged in chaos and squalor.
There I said it out loud. Squalor. Such a horrible word. It hits me in the most vulnerable part of my heart.
It dawned on me yesterday, as I was coming out of one day Vipassana, that my weight was the consequence of a craving loop, my environment is part of an aversion loop. The goal of Vipassana, Goenka says is to liberate us from the loop of craving and aversion. Through diligent body scan we make intuitive the knowledge that all sensations are the result of mind hitting matter, that all sensations are changing because they are a result of change. Every sensation is a loop that is iterating or de-iterating. The mind's illusion is that we can fix them in some way. Make the nice sensations run forever. Make the bad sensations disappear. Never going to happen, because we die.
These craving and aversion loops that we develop in our efforts to control sensations are the root of suffering. Stop the reactivity and the weeds die first.
Yesterday I had one of the best mediation experiences. Not because I felt wonderful sensation, though I did. But because I had a profound insight about the nature of meditation and hormonal balance. I realized that what I was doing, as a I brought more equanimity into my body scan, was activating and stabilizing my serotonin, much in the same way I have been stabilizing my insulin.
Much of my life I've been running on dopamine, the craving hormone. It's also the learning hormone, but it's not the wisdom hormone. In meditation we cultivate equanimity, the serotonin starts to pump from the gut, where we have the most serotonin receptors. Combine this with metta, lovingkindness and compassion meditation and we get a nice cocktail with some oxytocin mixer. Know this, and you know joy. Wisdom comes from creating the circumstances to keep all these parts in the right balance.
One of the reasons I had a such a great meditation was that I really focussed in the morning, on the bus along Hochelaga, on my intention. To liberate myself and others. I felt that intention deep in my heart.Every time the mind wandered, I brought myself back to the why.
I can apply that to my environment. I can transcend this aversion loop and step out, forever. I made this prison. I can walk out of it.
