Halloween Special: The Phantom Sweet Tooth Returns!
A strange thing happens to you after you’ve been practicing the HRH Program for
any length of time. Your sweet tooth withers and dies.
Around this time of year, it feels especially odd, as sweets seem to flow into
the house like crisp autumn air through a drafty window.
And since Halloween seems like a season now, instead of just a day, I’m
especially glad that my sweet tooth is dead.
But in keeping with the Halloween theme, I’ve noticed that I’m still a little
haunted by the ghost of my former sweet tooth.
In a way, it seems a lot like the phantom limbs that are reported by people who
still feel their arms and legs after they’ve been amputated. The feeling that
these limbs are still on is very real to them. And if the phantom arm or leg
starts to itch, figuring out how to relieve that, for instance, can be a real
frustration.
Similarly, even though my sweet tooth has been amputated by the HRH Program, I
still feel it itching sometimes. I find the sensation of this phantom sweet
tooth to be pretty annoying, because when I eat something to satisfy it, it just
doesn’t taste very good.
In the past, when people have told me that their dessert was too rich, I just
didn’t get it. The richer, the better, I thought. Now I know what they mean, and
I just can’t force down the same quantity of sugar that I used to. Of course,
that’s a good thing, and I’m glad for it, even if I do miss the possibility of
really downing a really huge piece of double-dense chocolate cake.
But what exactly is this phantom sweet tooth? Why is it that I still want to eat
something that my body really doesn’t like?
The answer seems to be that my mind has yet to catch up with my body. I have
perpetual thought patterns that have yet to die along with the cravings that my
body had for the sugary treats.
And thoughts are powerful things. They have tremendous influence over our lives,
even when we think we’re not paying much attention to them.
I’ve been re-listening to an absolute must-read book by Eckhard Tolle called The
Power of Now. In it, he relates ways to get past having our minds run our lives.
But perhaps the most important part of the experience of reading or listening
(perhaps especially listening) to the book is that you become acutely aware of
the mental patterns that repeat on a constant basis—and how much these patterns
actually run your life.
While we may think that we are in control of our minds, Tolle points out, in
almost all cases, our minds are actually controlling us. They’ve taken us
over, and they remake and strengthen themselves minute by minute by repeating
and replaying certain ways of doing things.
In essence, we’ve become possessed by our own minds. If you don’t believe it,
just watch your mind in action for the next couple of hours or days. Catch
yourself thinking. And try to watch whether or not those thoughts are empowering
or negative. Then, just for an experiment, see if you can turn them off at will.
And try to see how long they stay off before. It’s a bit of a trick to watch
yourself think, but give it a shot.
Once I started re-listening to the book, I discovered that this phantom sweet
tooth was in fact my mind trying to repeat a lifelong habit, which now mainly
plays out after my kids go to bed. At that point, my mind knows that it’s time
for ice cream or another form of sugary or chocolaty dessert.
That’s what I’ve done most of my life, and that’s what my mind is most
comfortable with. So it’s insistent that I actually have some, even if my body
says it doesn’t want any.
Crazy, right? Well, yes, I find this absolutely bonkers. But there are tricks
for turning off old patterns of thought. And that’s what we’ll start to cover in
the next newsletter.
In the meantime, if you want to pick up The Power of Now, or any of Tolle’s
other books, just go to Tolle’s Books
understand where these phantom habits of mind come from a lot better than I can.