Here’s a Sample of the “Working With Attachment And Addiction” Guided Meditation Script:
Namaste and welcome. In Buddhist cosmology, there's a term that I think's really powerful and it's called the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. And it's a psychic realm and it's a description really of us and certain states and it's the beings in it are depicted with these narrow narrow necks and these huge bellies which really are reflecting this endless desire for satisfaction and this incapacity to ever really be satisfied, the grasping and addiction that we get caught up in. So, it's really that space of living in that chronic sense of, something's missing, I need something more to be OK.
And I was reminded of this term because last weekend on Saturday night I spent about 15 or 20 minutes walking through a Sands Casino in Pennsylvania and you might wonder what was I doing at a casino? I was at a wedding and a lot of the guests were in that hotel. So, Jonathan and I decided we'd just have a sociological experience of our culture. So, we wandered through and the most notable thing to me, and it was packed Saturday night, was that nobody was happy. There was this sense of, there was either this intense focus and being pumped up and this wanting you could feel or this kind of deflation or angry or in some way defeated.
There was very little eye contact possible. I mean even couples were there, they weren't there together, really. You know, one of them was on the machines. It was the Land of Hungry Ghosts and it sounds extreme but when we're honest we realize that for many of us, we live with a kind of gnawing dissatisfaction, a kind of a disappointment that our lives aren't turning out the way we wanted. There's a sense of never arriving like we're trying to get somewhere or not and we're not there.
So, this hungry ghost can have a whole range of degree. But along with that is that we have then patterns, again chronic patterns, on how we are trying to meet our needs. And we use all these different substitute gratifications whether it's sugar or approval seeking or our possessions and as we know, when we're doing that, it's temporary fixes. You know, we feel we're on a roller coaster. We feel better for a little bit but then the need is back there again. So, we have a lot of this hungry ghost energy that runs through many of us.
Some of you might remember one of my favorite little essays on this kind of thing is, I called, Inner Peace. If you want to achieve inner peace you need to finish all the things you started. So, I looked around seeing all the things I had started and hadn't finished. So, today I finished one bottle of gin, a bottle of red wine, a pint of Ben and Jerry's, my Prozac, and a large box of chocolates.
