Hi Anita, I appreciate you working to understand me—I’m afraid I don’t make it easy.
That said, I think you understand more than you think… if we return to your first response to Kevin:
“What worked for me was the felt-experience of what it is that I was so very hungry for. I was hungry not for food, but for feeling like a child, a carefree child playing with other kids.” perhaps no further map is needed

Peter

I’m going to reshare something I seem to keep playing with as a felt experience..

The Matt’s Yes
In yoga, I don’t always give much thought to the mat, yet I wonder if it might stand in for the source from which all movement arises and to which all movement returns.

After every posture, whether graceful or awkward, we come back to it. Back to stillness. Back to silence.

The mat does not judge the pose we just left. It does not measure progress or keep score. It receives warriors and beginners, balance and falling, effort and exhaustion with the same quiet generosity. If it asks anything of us, it is only this: return.

Perhaps this is the cosmic game of peek-a-boo.

We step into a pose and, for a moment, forget. We become the striving body, the comparing mind, the story of success or failure. Then the pose releases, the breath softens, and we remember. We return .

This Yes we return to is not a yes of approval or resignation. It is not saying that everything is good or that nothing should change.
It is a deeper yes… the yes of seeing.

The yes that notices trembling legs and steady balance with equal clarity.
The yes that meets sorrow without calling it a mistake, and joy without trying to hold it forever.

Again and again we leave. Again and again we come back.
Returning to stillness. Returning to silence. Returning to Yes.

Perhaps that Yes is simply awareness itself, patiently waiting beneath every posture, beneath every story, beneath every effort to become something else.

Like the mat beneath our feet, it has been there all along.

Hi Anita,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and being so open. I’ll be candid—sometimes I feel like I say too much as well, even knowing that I don’t have much to say anymore. That’s usually the cue for me to take a little time away from the digital world.

Yet still, there are times when I take out the Lego blocks just to see what shape emerges. When I was playing with Kevin’s question, looking at how all these different colored blocks – Zen, psychology, gut science – all use different languages and maps to travel the same ground, it actually left me feeling both excited noticing the links and a little sad.

Despite centuries of analyzing the problem, we continue to struggle with it. It occurred to me that the very struggle and desire to know might not be as helpful as we think, constantly distorting the communication channel between the gut and the head.

Sometimes I feel like I spend all this time creating maps so that I might eventually find some secret beach with soft sand, a shady cove, and crystal-clear water just asking to be swum in. Then I imagine finally arriving… and being too afraid to actually swim, for fear of losing the map if I put it down or getting it wet.

I think that’s what we do. Seekers afraid of putting down the map and going for a swim…. I do so enjoy my “Lago blocks” though… 🙂

You must go on a pilgrimage to the chocolate mountain!

Peter

That really might be the ultimate cosmic punchline.

We spend lifetimes building elaborate intellectual scaffoldings, mapping out systems of morality, deciphering psychological depths, and climbing spiritual ladders, only to find out the whole game was just to pause, look at the mess without flinching, and whisper, “Oh, look at that.”

Is this why the Buddha smiles? It’s hilarious to think that the profound, transformative secret at the heart of all these ancient traditions isn’t some heroic feat of self-mastery or a complex technique we have to execute perfectly. It’s just radical, unvarnished honesty. The moment you truly notice what’s happening without immediately trying to fight it, fix it, or dress it up in a story, the spell sort of breaks on its own.

The friction disappears because we’ve stopped supplying the friction. The system self-corrects the second you stop trying to override it.

I wonder if we complicate it just because “sit there and notice it” sounds too simple to be worth the price of admission?

Hi Kevin – Your question lands close to home for me and I suspect a lot of people can relate.

I’ve been exploring something similar through a strange mix of Zen, Jung, current research on gut-brain communication, and even some of the older symbolic systems. What fascinates me is that they all seem to be pointing toward the same mountain from different sides, though I’m still very much learning.

The Muddy Waters

A student came to his Zen master, exhausted and frustrated.

“My mind is constantly agitated,” the student complained. “Intrusive thoughts, restless desires, and old habits keep popping up all day long. When I try to push them away, they only scream louder. When I ignore them, they just linger in the background. How do I stop the water from being muddy?”

The master smiled, handed the student a bowl of river water thick with silt, and said, “Set the bowl down on the table and do not touch it. Do not stir it, do not skim the dirt off the top, and do not fight the mud. Just leave it be.”

The student sat by the table for hours, watching the bowl. Because no one was stirring the water, the sediment slowly settled to the bottom. The water at the top became clear.

“You see,” said the master, “the mind naturally settles on its own. But every time you argue with a thought, you pick up the bowl and shake it again.”

That story speaks to your second question for me.

When I tell myself, “If I’m not hungry, I shouldn’t eat,” it can work in the moment. But I’ve noticed that I’m still engaging the thought. I’m still treating it as important enough to debate. After a while that becomes exhausting.

Your newer approach interests me because it feels closer to setting the bowl down. Though I’ve also noticed a subtle difference between ignoring a thought and simply allowing it to be there. Ignoring can sometimes be another form of resistance. Allowing feels more like, “Yes, that thought is here,” without needing to obey it or get rid of it.

Jung gave me another lens for understanding this. He believed that many of the forces that move us originate below conscious awareness and arrive in consciousness disguised as emotions, desires, impulses, dreams, and cravings. The mistake, perhaps, is assuming the message should always be taken literally.

Reading Anita’s response, I was struck by how her hunger wasn’t really about food. The longing first appeared in a form the mind could recognize: “I want something.” But by staying with the feeling rather than immediately satisfying it, she discovered what was actually asking for attention was a need for play, freedom, connection, and the carefree joy of childhood.

What fascinates me is that Jung, contemplative traditions, and modern research (GLP-1) seem to point toward a similar process. Something speaks before the “thinking mind” understands.

In the chakra system, this might be described symbolically as energy moving from the belly toward the heart and then into awareness. The belly knows before the mind knows. The heart helps translate the raw impulse into something humanly meaningful. Jung might have described the same movement as unconscious material rising into consciousness. Neuroscience might describe signals travelling from the body through the gut-brain axis before being interpreted by the “thinking” (remembering) brain.

Different maps, perhaps, but pointing toward a similar territory.

So when the thought “I want food” appears, I wonder whether the invitation is not to obey it, resist it, or ignore it, but to become curious about what is trying to speak through it.

And perhaps, as the Zen story suggests, clarity only comes after we’ve stopped shaking the bowl long enough to see what is actually there.

That was very perceptive, Anita.

Yes, the words enduring and tolerating do carry a certain weight for me. Yet the way you describe them makes perfect sense. In your case, they are not an escape from experience but a bridge into it. They help you stay with what is actually being felt rather than turning away from it.

I especially liked your image of the rocks. Oddly, the words themselves have become a bit like that for me, little rocks. When I notice myself using words with a certain weight, they have become invitations to pause and notice what is happening.

I don’t know what it is like to live with Tourette’s, so I wouldn’t presume to compare experiences. I do know something about living with tinnitus, which at times had me wondering if I might go crazy. Over time, though, it taught me that when I resisted it, labeled it, or wished it away, the discomfort only grew. When I simply noticed it, something softened, even though the sound itself remained.

Some have suggested that perhaps I should be grateful for the lesson. There may be truth in that… but I don’t feel that, it feels more authentic simply to acknowledge what it has taught me and leave it at that.

So it seems we find our own bridges. For you, today, it may be enduring and tolerating. For me, it may be noticing. The important thing is that neither of us is turning away.

Peter

I like that, lighter Meditator – Thanks Anita
I still have my moments of anxiety and such, but yes also moments of lightness… In that lightness we don’t need to be certain of any of it, only watch it all unfold.

When I read your posts of late, answering others, there is a quietness to them, grounded, I was wondering if you were more a peace with yourself?