1. Dancing With Hunger – Resistance and Acceptance
By Greg Turner | June 4, 2019
Picture these two scenarios. You are waiting in a checkout line at the grocery store that is moving so, so slowly. It takes 5 minutes to get to the checkout person.
You strike up a conversation with the stranger who is in front of you. You find this person very, very attractive and it seems he likes you as well. As a result, the 5 minutes goes by in a flash and does not last nearly long enough.
Now, the second scenario is the same 5 minute long line at the grocery checkout. This time there is no attractive stranger. Instead, you notice how hot and noisy it is in the grocery store and the person in front of you reeks of cigarette smoke. As a result, the 5 minutes seems like an eternity to pass by before you get to the checkout person.
Both scenarios last 5 minutes, but your experiences of each one are vastly different. One goes by in an instant and the other drags on and on.
What is the difference that makes the difference?
There are a lot of answers to that question, but for now I want to focus on resistance and acceptance.
What you resist persists. This is a psychological law. If you resist experiencing some experience, you end up making it stick around and making it worse than it really is. What you won’t let be in your experience won’t let you be. In other words, resistance to an experience is the glue that makes it stick around.
In the second scenario, the resistance to the experience, trying to get away from it is what made it seem terrible and is what made it seem like an eternity to pass by.
Compare that to the experience of the first scenario. There was no resistance to it. Instead, there was acceptance of it.
Now, you may be asking what all this has to do with the experience of hunger?
The answer is quite a bit, actually. I can assure you, that if you are struggling with hunger (and assuming you have not been starving for weeks and weeks) your experience of hunger is in large part a result of your resistance to it. You are not starving to death. What you are experiencing is about 10% actual physical hunger and about 90% made up from everything you are doing in your mind, typically on a non conscious level, to resist and resist.
The way to dance with hunger is to start accepting it. This series of posts on dancing with hunger will explore a lot of different ways to stop resisting it and start accepting the hunger. You will learn how to let the hunger be so it will let you be.
For now, let me share one technique. Feel the hungry feelings. Not just your thoughts about them, but feel the feelings. Where do you feel the hunger? Now, in your inner mind, invite the hunger feelings to get worse. Say to your inner self, “let me feel you hunger much more strongly.” More often than not, when you open yourself up, in this way, to feeling what you are resisting, the hunger feelings will dissipate.
So that’s it for now. Watch for more posts about how to dance with hunger.
Topics: Hunger