Several years ago I undertook a major cleanse that involved radically restricting my diet. Imagine if you will 8 months of no sugar, no wheat or gluten, no dairy, no red meat and no fruit except lemons and cranberries.
Most people generally ask at this point “What’s left?” A surprisingly long list actually, but that’s another blog post.
What I didn’t know back when I started the cleanse was that I was about to get a very in-depth look at temptation.
And I mean, we got intimate! I lived with it for days and weeks on end and just when I thought (in my safe little apartment) that I had vanquished it, I would have to go to the grocery store and go another round with it.
I was reminded recently of the major breakthrough I had during that time and an insight that led to one of my most successful tactics for facing down temptation.
What I discovered is this:
Remembering something I loved, gave me the fuel to stare down temptation and win.
There are a bunch of reasons for this:
1) Heart power is always the strongest motivational force within us.
(The heart has the strongest electromagnetic field in the body and perhaps that has something to do with it too.)
2) Remembering what I loved in a moment of temptation provided an immediate distraction from my obsessive focus on the tempting object.
3) Remembering love created a major “state change” or emotional shift from craving and agitation to warmth and fondness.
And that was the turning point. I realized that:
…the loving state and the craving state cannot co-exist!
So of course, I immediately started trying to find a love antidote for each tempting thing. And that was when I made another major discovery.
The beloved person, place or thing did NOT have to relate in any way to the thing I was being tempted by. They could be totally unrelated and it STILL worked.
So for example, you could be in the middle of a long put off de-cluttering of your bedroom closet and feeling incredibly tempted to stop and watch TV instead.
And you could call up the feeling of how much you love your dog in that moment (let’s say you REALLY love your dog…) and suddenly find yourself feeling pretty good and having enough energy to finish the closet after all.
So the loved item and the tempting item don’t need to relate to each other at all. It’s the state of feeling the love inside that does the trick.
Once I figured this out I began my trips to the grocery store with a beloved person in mind. I would then walk the aisles repeating inside my head like a mantra:
I love you more than these brownies, more than these cookies, more than this cheese….
Now, I happened to use some “love comparison” language there – but there’s no comparing needed.
In our earlier example, you could just stand in front of the closet breathing in the warm feeling of love for your pet, perhaps remembering fond times or the look that cracks you up – with no comparisons needed at all.
I found that the stronger the craving or temptation, the deeper I would need to get into the feeling of love in order to counteract it.
Try this when your own temptations strike and let me know how it goes.
What have your moments of temptation taught you?
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OK, that’s just a fascinating idea! Was it Mae West or Oscar Wilde who said, “I can resist anything except temptation”? Whichever… like many others, I’ve lived a long time in that space. In dog training, it’s standard practice to correct a behaviour problem by training an incompatible behaviour (e.g., Rover can’t jump all over Auntie Mabel if he’s been trained to a default greeting behaviour of sitting quietly and waiting to be petted) – so it makes sense to me that one could banish a negative thought or those whispers of temptation by focussing on an incompatible thought or feeling. Thanks much for this tip – I’ll certainly give it a try!