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Today’s Karmic Workout – Expose Your Inner Wimp

Karmic Muscle Group: Awareness & Resolve
Today’s Exercise: Expose Your Inner Wimp

[Preparatory Note: everyone has something (and usually many things) that they should do, but cannot find the will power to make happen. For some of us, it is losing weight or quitting smoking. When we stop to take a look at how we really live our lives what we find is that we are creatures that feed off of low-hanging fruit. If we had to climb a tree to feed, we might very well starve to death. This is to say that in most things, we take the easiest way out and often find that we do not have the mental strength to overcome even the lamest emotional barriers.

In recent times, the efficiencies of global economy has made most everyone's life physically easier. We live in a world of time saving devices. In the United States, even our homeless people sometimes have cellphones. Our devices have made life easy for us, perhaps too easy, and, without really realizing it, we have developed an expectation of comfort and ease. Several generations ago, your great grandmother may very well have spent a day baking bread every week. This was not her response to having seen an interesting recipe on a cooking show, this was part of her ordinary routine to provide for the family. The thought of taking five minutes, let alone a whole day to prepare food in modern times raises our blood pressure. It gives us emotional stress because it cuts into our texting and internet surfing time. We live in a gotta-have-it-now culture and when we have to wait for something it makes us mad. This used to be called "being spoiled rotten", but is now referred to as "righteous indignation".

One of the side effects of the Comfort Culture is that we have become emotionally uncomfortable when we do not experience the level of ease and pleasant stimulation that we believe we are entitled to. We see this emotional discomfort everywhere in our lives. We can go out of our minds with rage when someone accidently cuts us off in traffic. This gives us an adrenaline rush over and above the energy drink we just spilled on ourselves and we get suddenly very uncomfortable. It is the surge of fear that makes us so upset, not the event itself. The truth of the Comfort Culture is that we will go out of our way to avoid uncomfortable emotions because we expect to feel good continuously. But we are not designed anesthetized living. We are designed to adapt to every situation and actually need this mental diversity to be effective. When we tell ourselves that we will not eat sweets and then see a doughnut in the office, we can actually get upset that we can't have one. Our inner wimp begins to whine like spoiled child and we begin to feel emotionally uncomfortable. Ultimately, after we have eaten our second doughnut had the inner wimp now has a stomach ache, we wonder why it was so hard to control the doughnut. The doughnut, however, had nothing to do with it. It was all about the wimp.

You will not quit smoking by doing this exercise. In fact, the purpose of this exercise is not to alter behavior, but simply to notice how our emotions and expose our sense of the entitlement to comfort that undermines our resolve. As we become increasingly affluent and self-indulgent, our ability to hold our ground on any decision that is unpopular with our emotional state becomes weaker. Living at the whim of random emotions is turning us into idiots. It is actually killing us.]

Make a short list of things that you do, but know that you should not do or things that you do not do that you know that you should do. You will only need one of these, so do not torture yourself with a full confession here, but you do need to select at least 3 to 5.
Find a quiet place to contemplate and turn off your cellphone.
Establish meditative breathing with long inhales and equally long exhales.
Review your list and pick the worst example of your lack of will power. It might be food. It might be that you don’t clean up your living space. Note that it might not be on your list. We tend to protect areas of particular weakness like cigarette smoking because we simply do not want to confront it. Pick your worst weakness even if you skipped it on your list in the beginning.
On a piece of paper write your weakness at the top and put two columns underneath it. In the left-hand column, make a list of the negative things that arise out of the behavior that you have listed. If there are health consequences, list them. If there is mental agony, list that. Take at least 3 minutes to fully consider the cost of the behavior.
In the right-hand column, list what you get out of the behavior. It most likely be something like “it tastes sooooo good” or “smoking calms me down and makes me peaceful” or “it makes me feel happy”. It also might be something that is expressed in the negative like “I avoid feeling stressed out” or “I avoid sadness”.
Take a full minute to clear you mind and think of nothing.
Read the two lists. Notice that the column on the left, the “costs” column, the items are largely rational and logical. Notice that the second list, the ”perceived benefits” on the right, is largely emotional. Notice that these emotions are actually arise for the purpose of avoiding something. In other words, the perceived benefit of the behavior is that you get to avoid a specific feeling.
Now make a third column. In this column, list as precisely as you can, the emotion that you are avoiding by seeking out the emotion in your perceived benefits list. Notice that you are not really seeking to avoid doing something or trying to have something, your are really trying to avoid feeling a certain way. This is the true source of your inner wimp.
Notice that what is happening here is that we are using the object of our lack of will power to try to convert one emotion into another. If you picked an object of craving for this exercise, notice that the object simply triggers the need to feel good by feeling satisfied. But what triggered the need to feel good or the need to avoid cleaning your room? Under the craving or the desire to avoid doing something is a point of stress and anxiety. The real conversation is all about your emotional state and has nothing to do with the doughnut you can’t resist. You could just suck you thumb.

Training Note:
We do not experience reality objectively in the least. When we know we should pay our bills, but don’t do it, it may very well be because we do not want the stress that arises when we consider our financial situation. In fact, it is not unusual for people to go out and shop when they want to avoid thinking about how broke they are. This is absolutely destructive behavior, but it is justified by a sense of entitlement to comfort and an avoidance of discomfort. When we fail to maintain our discipline, when our inner wimp gets the best of us, we usually begin to feel bad about ourselves. We start to know ourselves as weak and pathetic. Eventually, we will simply give in and assume the identity of weak and pathetic and give up any attempt at self-discipline. Other times we get angry at the object of our weakness. We hate the cigarette or the doughnut, but the fact of the matter is that those things are not causing the behavior. They are actually quite neutral.

What is killing us is our inability to cope with the negative emotions that are triggered when circumstances or objects in our environment spark the cognition that unlocks the emotion. You may not even be hungry when you walk by the doughnuts in the office, but simply seeing them sparks the idea that eating one would make you happy. You are going for the happiness, not the food. This is the basic mechanics of addictive behavior. The object that triggers our behavior launches thought that we have interpreted in such a way that it ignites a specific emotion. When some people see a spider they are propelled to their childhood and become irrationally afraid. When some people see jelly beans immediately follow the pre-programmed identity that they attached to it as a child on Easter was euphoric about an Easter basket. These emotions when liked to our fundamental identification of an object are like land mines. They blow up before we know what hit us.

Many people take drugs not necessarily to feel euphoric, but so as to not feel anxiety. It never occurs to them to confront the anxiety and change their relationship to it. They simply follow the bliss into addiction. Every human being does this at one level or another.

The secret is to expose the emotion driving the behavior and see how it is linked to the trigger. While this may sound like advanced psychotherapy it is actually a process called “mindfulness” that has been used by meditators for centuries. Studying how your mind actually works often alters behavior simply by being cognizant of the emotions that you are actually having even if they are not readily obvious. In most cases, what motivates us to unwanted behavior is not the happiness of eating the doughnut, but a latent anxiety that makes us think we need comfort. When we see the doughnut we do not notice the anxiety that comes up because our craving arises almost simultaneously and fills our mind with want in exchange for fear. This may be tricky to figure out. For some of us, when we were children, we developed anxiety when we saw our favorite foods or candy and were not allowed to have them. We developed the habit of feeling anxious around foods because we were afraid that our desire for them would be thwarted. This type of childish anxiety can inform adult behavior that has us want doughnuts even if we were not hungry. Fighting the craving does little to alter the behavior. Recognizing and coping with the stress or anxiety that triggers the craving can be a simple and effective way to defeat additive behavior.

This is a very common problem among drug users. Drugs make us feel better, but why are we feeling bad in the first place? As a person uses drugs more and more, their coping skills diminish. This actually causes a person to experience even more anxiety or other negative emotions because instead of using normal coping skills to alleviate stress, we are feeding a second emotion over the top of it. Drug use, over time, actually gives a person more anxiety, not less. Like an unused muscle, coping skills atrophy leaving the drug user even worse off than before. Freedom from drug use does not arise so much from the battle over the dependence on the drug or the euphoria as it does developing the skill to cope with the stress that provoked the desire for escape in the first place.

Even if you are not a drug user or chocoholic, do not think yourself immune from this type of thought process. The key to mental freedom is to watch you mind and notice how it acts and reacts to various cognitive events. When we notice that overeating is actually caused by a very specific stress and not the allure of taste, then we see a doughnut for what it is.

Karmic Benefits:

Coping Skills, Like Muscles, Only Grow When They Are Being Used: if you are not confronting your life, but hiding behind comfort to avoid it, you become mentally flabby and incapable of self-discipline. Eventually, no amount of comfort will make you happy. This explains while people who challenge themselves and face their lives tend to be much happier. They are stronger and more versatile. They have greater power and freedom because they face fear, stress and anxiety rather than seek to avoid these feelings.
No Amount Of Self-Indulgence Will Overcome An Unaddressed Anxiety: most destructive avoidance behavior like addictions and laziness are only made worse as we continue to avoid the underlying anxiety that provokes them. This starts a cascade of damage to our being. First, we begin to get angry with ourselves for being so weak-minded. This destroys our self-esteem and begins to erode our lives in other areas. Until we recognize the basic emotional impulse that is triggering the emotional undermining of our choices, we will always be looking in the wrong place.
Like Any Other Skill, Coping Is Best Developed Over Time And In The Long Run: sometimes we get frustrated with ourselves and try to alter our behavior “cold turkey”. This becomes a brutal battle between our emotions and our will. A few minutes of meditation a day focused on the actual root emotion that we are trying to manage can cause us to become aware of the true source of the behavior. Often the behavior will disappear on its own soon after we see the true cause.

It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.

Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.