Have you ever noticed a sense of incompleteness in your life? That there was something missing? I know I certainly have from time to time. What is our number one craving?
You have most likely felt it too since adolescence, or at least since early childhood. It’s a feeling that something is wrong; that something is missing; or that we’re missing out on something.
It’s a feeling of disconnection or loneliness from others – a sense that we don’t quite fit in.
It’s a feeling of moving through the world in isolation, unfulfilled, without a true sense of intimacy with others, without a deep sense of purpose and meaning in what we’re doing.
We all crave a feeling of connection and intimacy with others. We may seek connection and intimacy from online social networks, but it’s lacking there.
This craving for real connection and intimacy drives us to use dating apps to find the perfect someone, but the dating doesn’t necessarily bring intimacy.
This craving drives us to look at pictures of what other people are doing, read about their adventures, and then feel like we’re not doing anything as meaningful.
There’s a tendency to wake up and immediately begin distracting ourselves – to seek something interesting, exciting, any kind of ‘reward’ or dopamine hit.
We look for the convenient over the challenging, and the quick and easy over struggle and meaning.
We try to fill this craving with consumerism. We buy things in an instant which gives us a feeling of immediate, albeit temporary satisfaction – not a lasting satisfaction, not real fulfilment, but a boost of excitement. It doesn’t satisfy the craving for very long. Any pleasure dissipates after minutes as we open the package that’s been delivered the very next day.
We try to fill our craving for connection and intimacy with food, with TV, with shopping, with online entertainment … but none of it brings lasting satisfaction beyond momentary pleasure.
This is all driven by our sense of ‘incompleteness,’ our deeper craving for wholeness. A craving we never let ourselves really FEEL – the one we never want to face with our eyes or heart wide open. It’s always there, unacknowledged, unseen and unrelenting.
The tragedy is this: if we could just stop for a short while, and simply allow ourselves to fully FEEL the discomfort of that disconnection, without resistance… we could find our wholeness.
It’s the wholeness of being completely okay – no matter where we are, no matter what we’re doing. It’s a wholeness of being absolutely in awe with our experience, and of not needing anything more. Without resistance. Without judgement. Without rejection. Without comparison.
This sense of wholeness does not reside outside of us, in our phones or online, in books or in what everyone else is doing, on TV or in food, in shopping or in ‘stuff’. It’s all of that and much, much more. We don’t need to look to any of these things to reclaim that wonderful, loving, authentic sense of wholeness. It’s in you. It’s in me. Together. All-ways.
P.S. You CAN change the way you think.
And that’s exactly why Dr Jeffrey M. Schwartz and I created a highly effective self paced on-line program based on his best selling book: You Are Not Your Brain webinar series.
Your article is so true. That is a beautiful meditation Josie. You have such a soothing voice.
Thank you for your kind words Lisa. I’m glad you enjoyed it.