As I write this, Thanksgiving Day approaches. Here in the USA, this celebration is about stuffing. Yes, there is breadcrumb mixed with spices and giblets, a staple of the ritual feast. But there is also the act of stuffing the body full of food. My sister used to tell the story of how she and one of our cousins would roll on the floor after Thanksgiving dinner, holding their stomachs, so full of food it hurt. Most likely, no one ever critiqued the overindulgence that caused these youngsters pain. Eating to excess was expected.
Is it a coincidence that the signal American Holiday promotes gluttony?
In this country, and increasingly in the rest of the world, happiness is equated with fullness. A house filled with possessions. A career overflowing with status. A bank vault bulging with money. A garage packed with cars. A vacation loaded with adventure. A romance flooded with passion. Children bursting with ambition. The sirens of the media promote these values, and the unsuspecting masses somnambulate toward the dulcet promise of full-fill-ment.
Those of us who have come up empty-handed before these manufactured hungers should count ourselves lucky.
Once upon a time, I yearned for society’s treasures. The house, the career, the bank, the garage, the vacation, the romance, and the children called to me from the land of dreams, and I plotted to gather them all. Some I collected; others eluded my grasp. But I never examined the healthfulness of these desires. The goals of life remained unquestioned: you accumulated as much as you could and hopefully more than your neighbors. By doing so, you found happiness.
Only my harvest did not make me happy, for two reasons. First, because no matter how much bounty I hoarded, countless gems still beckoned in the distance. Worse, many of my dearest attainments fled when my surgical career ended prematurely a dozen years ago. When you lose the icons of success in this culture, you feel torn apart. It can look pretty tragic, but sometimes such losses simply make room for Grace.
Once the promise of stuffing has been crushed by the molars of fate, new paths to satisfaction can be explored. While lulled by the consumerist dream one marches through the shopping mall, credit card in hand, without noticing the disused trails leading away from the highway of the herd. But once the mall has been exposed as a dungeon, and the credit card as a shackle, these less traveled byways are recognized as the heart’s only hope.
What would it mean to quit eating while still hungry? To quit spending while still flush? To quit working while still achieving? Or, putting it bluntly, to stop copulating before climax? After all, in tantric rituals, sex is not pursued for orgasm. The couple deliberately forgoes culmination in order to master control over bodies, hormones, and desires. Strength and insight are born of restraint.
There is power in resisting urges and maturity in not stuffing.
We have become a culture that dulls the pain of adulthood by seeking satiety. We eat when unhappy or anxious, pour drinks when bored or stressed, light cigarettes when edgy or tired, and watch TV to escape. We fill our stomachs with food, our brains with intoxicants, our lungs with smoke, and our eyes with images, all in order to avoid discomfort.
But no matter how successfully we indulge our desires, in the end, we always feel worse. Trying to fill a hollow heart by feeding bodily orifices is a doomed strategy. We end up bloated with everything but what we truly need, which is love. Not the sort of love that comes with passionate romance, or even from an affectionate family. Our hearts require the love that smolders always in our own center, but which we cannot feel because we have smothered it with, yes, stuffing.
When we stop jamming up the orifices, and permit a bit of emptiness to expand within, the dim spark of this love finds the oxygen it needs to burn brightly. And blaze it does, until we feel giddy with fulfillment. We become lighthearted and buoyed by bliss. We wonder why we ever wanted the hot sex, crisp bills, shiny Porshe, exalted position, or any of the other trophies of conventional success. We understand that the only appetite that can ever be satisfied is our yearning for the love we already possess. We become filled by the radiance of our own divine light, our own direct connection to the cosmos and one another.
There are many ways to find our way back to this core of being. We can follow the path of devotion and believe in a transcendent God. We can follow the path of mindfulness and open to the ocean of consciousness. We can serve others until we forget our base hungers. We can accept life with all its flawed beauty until we rediscover our capacity to love every being and every particle of creation, including those that sicken and destroy.
This is the gift of emptiness. This is the gift of not cluttering the open space within, of leaving room for the flower of our own divinity to blossom. Once it does, we realize that inner spaciousness is a necessary prelude to genuine fullness. Once we understand this central truth, we no longer seek relief in stuffing.
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