This guided meditation helps your get curious about your cravings so you can break free from unhealthy habits.
It’s normal to want to overcome those habits that aren’t serving you. But what happens when you get curious about your cravings instead of just trying to willpower your way out of them?
We often imagine that our actions are the result of choice and awareness, which means that we can be extra critical of ourselves when we’re struggling with habits that aren’t serving us. But researchers in the science of habit and craving have found that much of our decision-making process is the result of unconscious neuro-chemical loops that reinforce themselves over time.
In this meditation, author and researcher Judson Brewer introduces a thoughtful way to bring genuine awareness and choice back into the equation when cravings arise.
This guided meditation was recorded live at the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School
- First, find a comfortable position. We can begin just by settling into a comfortable posture, whatever that posture is for us right now.
- Now, tune into body sensations. Check in with your body. What does your body feel in this moment — are you holding tension in any places? Perhaps checking in with the feet and other touch points: the knees, the hips, our hands, our shoulders. Even this breath, breathing itself. Just being really curious: What’s alive for us right now in our bodies.
- Name the cravings in your mind. For the next few minutes we’ll play with working with cravings. Once we’re settled and anchored in this body, just bring to mind something that really gets our juices flowing, whether it’s a food or something else we really like. We’re also bringing to mind those itches that we feel like we have to scratch. Many of us that are in “Inbox Zero,” which is this constant race to keep our inboxes and our e-mail accounts as small as possible. We can bring this to mind: What does it feel like? When I opened up my computer and I have 58 new e-mails in the last hour. So whether it’s something pleasant, or whether it’s something unpleasant that we feel like we have to deal with, just bringing that situation to mind. Really checking in to see what this urge to do something feels like in our body; this urge to hold onto the pleasant or the urge to make the unpleasant go away.
- Now, notice how the craving shows up in your body. As we identify where it is in the body, we can dial up the curiosity. What does it feel like? Perhaps even naming to ourselves the physical sensations that are most predominant. We can even explore how this feeling shifts and changes as we bring this curious awareness to it. We can even dial up the curiosity a little bit more. If we had to pick is it more on the right side or the left side of our body? Is it more in the front or the back of our body? And what happens simply by curiously exploring where it is? How long does this sensation last? Is one sensation replaced by another that becomes more predominant? And if we notice that the sensation is fading away that was brought up by imagining that food or the e-mail inbox.
- Notice what it feels like now just to rest in awareness in the body. Notice what it feels like to know that we can become aware of these sensations — That we don’t have to be slaves to our cravings, we can explore them with curiosity, moment to moment.
- Finally, explore any other urges or cravings that surface. For the next few minutes. Simply resting in awareness of our bodies. Being on the lookout for these urges: Urges to get lost in fantasies or those urges to beat ourselves up over something that might have happened earlier in the day or in the week. Just diving right in. Exploring. Holding each sensation with this kind, curious awareness.
This guided meditation provides additional information to a feature article titled “Constant Craving” which appeared in the April 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.
