Cravings, desires, fears, and longing are familiar feelings, experienced by most people, some of the time. In practicing mindfulness, we try to be aware of such thoughts and feelings that come up, and to simply be with them, without getting pulled into them.
 
Whether you practice mindfulness or not, though, we are all familiar with the ways in which these feelings, impulses, and states can take us completely out of the present moment, completely out of being centred, and cause us to feel unsettled, agitated and unwell.
 
One thing each of these feeling states has in common is a sense of lack. This sense of lack often goes beyond what we normally think of as a "feeling"; we experience it at a physiological level, as a "reality". It is not so much a top-down process, starting with a thought, "I am lacking this..."
 
It is a bottom-up experience that begins at a sub-conscious level, a felt sense of lacking something, that causes us to feel uncomfortable, uneasy, even agitated. This produces a thought about something that might help us feel better or, at least, distract us from the uncomfortable feelings.
 
Another way to put that, would be to say that the physiological, brain-body experience of lack can create more than a thought, more than a sensory feeling, more than a belief, that we are lacking something: it creates a state in which we are totally experiencing the lack – as if we are lacking something that is critical to our happiness, well-being, or, even, survival.
 
This experience is strongest with addictions – which is why they are addictions! But it can also be quite strong with feelings like regret, or longing, or desire, as well. Strong to a point that we can completely forget, we can completely separate from, the reality that we can be just fine without whatever it is we are desiring.
 
Experiencing this lack is an indication, and can only arise from, a deep sense that we are not whole. The feeling, the sense, the belief, that we are not innately whole, or that we are not safe, or that we are not enough, creates the feeling and belief that there is always something missing that we need to get, or do, or feel in order to be okay.
 
...And this being okay will be temporary. It will only last as long as we are distracted from the core feeling of not being okay.
 
Cravings for food, drugs, alcohol, sex all fall under this pattern. Desire for bigger, better, shinier things does as well. Holding onto regret or loss from the past, longing for something to be different in the present, or for something different to happen in the future, are all forms of feeling not okay in the present.
 
Watch this great, short video about the real problem of addictions, which demonstrates some of this.
 
Feeling not okay, not whole, not safe, are all vestiges of our early life experience. In other words, they are all "scars" from our past experience. You can also think of them as "wounds" or as "conditioned thoughts, feelings and beliefs".
 
If here-and-now, in this present moment, you are fundamentally safe and you've got what you need to get through day-to-day, and you know how to get what you absolutely need to get through day-to-day, then there is no real reason to feel a lack.
 
You may feel a desire for something better, for greater comfort, peace or well-being, but what I am saying is that there is no real need to feel a lack to the point of distraction. There is no reason to feel agitated or uneasy. There is no need to exist in the belief that the present is not okay, even to the point of affecting your mood or state of mind.
 
Desire in itself is not a bad thing. Desire can move us, motivate us, inspire us towards improvement, greater-well-being, greater safety, greater comfort, better relationships, new experiences, creativity, happiness: all sorts of good things.
 
The more that we are fully connected to ourselves, the more we have an internal sense of being ok as a person, and that we can be ok in our environment, that we can be safe and get our needs met. We can have the connections we need with others, and we can also set the boundaries we need.
 
But when some aspect of early life experience resulted in a sense of not being ok: not being able to get the connection you needed, or the love, or the attention, the caring, the sense of safety, or any number of variants of these, a deep, internal, subconscious feeling that either "I am not ok" - or that "my environment is not ok" -  sets in, and becomes part of your experience of yourself in the world.
 
Poverty, for example, can be a pernicious experience of feeling not ok and unsafe, that can have a deep, lifelong, traumatic effect of this type.
 
These types of experiences result in a sense of disconnection from ourselves, as we focus on how to get what we feel we are lacking, or how to avoid what causes us to feel unsettled or uncomfortable: how to be safe. And that focus becomes conditioned, and chronic, even when the conditions of our life have changed.
 
It does not have to be severe trauma for this to happen. You may not even be aware that you experienced this sense of not being ok. Very subtle, ongoing aspects of your early experience can cause this.
 
For example, an awareness that your parents are constantly or frequently worried about a lack of money, and experiencing that when they worry, they can't be as present to you or your needs, means (to a young child) that lack of money threatens your connection to them; since your survival and well-being depends on this connection, your brain might register that as a threat to your survival, even though you are not consciously thinking anything like that.
 
Rather than ask yourself whether you can pinpoint any types of experience that might explain the ways you don't feel ok in the present, it is better to look at it from the reverse angle: the ways that you don't feel ok, the patterns of thinking and feeling that are a problem for you and that you struggle with, are the evidence of the fact that it did happen, in some way.
 
To tie that back into the beginning of this blog, the cravings, desire, fears, and longing that take you completely out of the present moment, completely out of being centred, and cause you to feel unsettled, agitated and unwell, are the evidence that something happened, to cause you to be disconnected from yourself.
 
Not completely disconnected. But in some ways, to some degree, as evidenced by these feelings, that are in themselves an experience of feeling not ok in the present moment.
Mindfulness is definitely part of the solution, as it helps you to focus on allowing yourself to feel whatever you feel, and to be aware of both thoughts and feelings, without getting pulled into the narratives around those thoughts and feelings. (I.e. without getting pulled into acting to either satisfy, or escape, those thoughts and feelings.)
 
With practice, this can gradually help you to feel safer to feel what you feel.
 
It is possible, with mindfulness, with practice, to experience cravings, desire, fears or longing, while remaining mindful, aware and centred. Over time, this reduces the power of these feelings over you, and strengthens your ability to stay in the present moment.
 
But it is extremely challenging. It can turn into an experience of "doing battle".
 
And for many people, it is either too challenging to stick with, or not sufficient. In this case, it seems to me unnecessary to put oneself through the suffering of sitting with these distressing feelings, when it is possible to heal them.
 
Or the suffering of being able to sit with them, but to continue to struggle with them in day-to-day life.
 
Working on the spiritual level, to connect with a sense that you are, in fact, whole, is also helpful. But you need to feel that in your body; otherwise, it is only an idea, that you can buy into to some degree, some of the time.
 
The most effective solution is ultimately to heal the initial "wound" of separation, of disconnection, of the experience of lack. This is possible to do, usually in therapy, by connecting with the original cause(s) of these feelings of lack, and using healing techniques to resolve the experience.
 
One of the defining characteristics of trauma is that when trauma-related feelings are triggered, we are no longer in the present. We are re-experiencing the past in the present - even if it is only in the form of physiological sensations, and not in the form of conscious memories.
 
Mindfulness is useful in helping us to stay in the present and to distinguish between these feelings and the actual present moment.
 
Consciously tracing the feelings back to trauma in the past, helps us to properly know where these feelings come from, and to fully realize and understand that they are not about the present.
 
Therapy interventions of various types can then be used to then heal that trauma. When we activate the past, and bring it into the present, we have an opportunity to actually change the brain's way of registering the experience, in a process called "memory reconsolidation".
 
It is as though we pull out the incomplete file of the experience, deal with the "unfinished business", and re-file it under "closed".
 
In my experience, Energy Psychology methods, including my favorite, Logosynthesis , are very effective for accomplishing this, when used by trained trauma therapists. People are quite consistently able to take a memory (or memories) that causes them some level of distress to think about, and end up feeling very detached from it, usually saying things like, "It's in the past...it doesn't really bother me any more...I understand now why it happened."
 
They then experience a decrease in the feelings that this (or these) memories were triggering in the present. The sense of lack decreases, and they feel better, more whole, more able to handle their lives as they are. In other words, they feel more connected with themselves, and better able to be in the present moment.
 
Cravings, desires, fears, and longing are familiar feelings based in a sense of lack, which is in turn based in the experience of some form of suffering. These feelings are an indication of unresolved suffering, of unhealed wounds, that we keep re-experiencing in the present. They are a call to healing, so that we may grow and thrive in the present.