#133 Freedom from the addiction to ‘feel-good’

A few months ago, I was sitting on the beach with warm sand under my feet near a stall that sold nariyal paani, coconut water. Enjoying the cool breeze caressed by the waves and watching the setting sun, my eyes landed on some children who may have been 6 or 7 years old. They were negotiating with their mother to buy colored glasses. The hawker was encouraging them to try different colored glasses – Lal wala peheno. Wear the red colored ones. He turned to the other child and said ‘Tum blue wala peheno’, You wear the blue colored glasses. Ab batao kaun sa accha dikhta hai. Each of them proclaimed that theirs was the best view. Mere wala sabse accha hai. My view is the best view. As the children exchanged some banter, the mother anticipating a fight which eventually only she would have to resolve, grudgingly paid off the hawker. Happy now. The children happily laughed as they looked around with their new colored glasses. One red and the other blue and started to exclaim. Mamma has tuned blue. Mamma looks red. Even her hair is red.  The waters have become blood. The sand looks blue. My hand has become blue and so on. While it was a game for the children, there is a wide range in the lenses that we use to look at the world. Some may be conscious and some unconscious.

Some of us look at situations with the lens – what can I learn from this?

Some others look at situations or people with the lens – what is the related task to this situation. Here the person looks at life as a long to-do list.

Most of us look at situations with the lens of – Does this make me feel good? Not only do we look at situations in this way, we are addicted to feeling good. Anyone who has heard me for some episodes will know that I use words deliberately and carefully. Addiction? Isn’t that a strong word. It is. An addiction whether it is to alcohol, drugs or coffee or to feeling good is characterized by a few features.

You seek to indulge in and are always preoccupied with it.

You put the behaviour ahead of all other areas of life including responsibilities and so on.

Increasingly you need more of the behaviour to sustain you.

You are willing to indulge in risky behaviour for the sake of your fix.  

You are in denial about your addiction.

You have lost interest in other things and you seek it all the time

We see signs of preoccupation or rather addiction to feeling good all around us.

Feeling good is what seems pleasurable to our senses – soft music, for some hard metal, fragrance in the air, pleasant temperature, light, friendly conversation, comfortable chair, delicious food and so on. All of us enjoy this and that’s great.

Feeling good and enjoying life and its many moments which include pleasure -Kama are fine. We are talking about the addiction to feel good.

I must feel good all the time – is an addiction.

The movie ‘The Beach’ starring Leonardo Di caprio captures this addiction to pleasure and feeling good very well. There is a secret paradise like island off Thailand where people live in a community. Once one comes to the community you can never leave as the secret will no longer be a secret and the community will be infiltrated. It so happens that one of the members is accidentally bitten by a shark on his leg and needs urgent medical treatment. The head of the community refuses the possibility of the injured man leaving the island to return to the mainland for medical treatment. He is left isolated. When his cries of pain become unbearable they actually considered killing him. Why? Because his cries were ruining the party and their spirits. That man was one of the community but he was treated like a pariah by everyone because he was denting their feel good factor. They turned away from him because his suffering makes them feel bad. And when one is addicted to feeling good, one will turn away from anything that interferes with it. I am not suggesting that we have to wallow in misery and swim in a sea of suffering. But old age, disease and death are very much a part of the process that we call living.

Addiction to feeling good makes us blind to realities of life.

 Our addiction to feeling good impacts our life to such an extent that all areas of life get infiltrated particularly our spiritual pursuit. Let me give you some examples:

Example 1 – I did n’t feel good about the meditation today. If this is how it is going to make me feel, maybe I should stop meditating.  

Example 2 –  I did not get the warm, fuzzy feeling when we met our friends – only they were speaking and I did not get a chance to speak at all. Maybe we will postpone our next meeting.

Example 3 – The constant repetition that we are asked to do in class of a chant is so boring. I don’t feel like doing it. 

Example 4 –   This office colleague gives me a negative vibe and I surround myself with only positive people and energy. I will make an excuse to not meet this person although we have to work on a project.

Example 5 –I feel lazy and sluggish and low energy and don’t feel like going for a walk or working out.  

Example 6 – The Vedanta teacher is really challenging my pet ideas. I don’t like it at all. Maybe I should drop out

You get the drift, right? So many decisions based on the criteria of feeling good and most of it dependent on external factors.

If we are seeking a more enduring sense of feeling good then it can only come from doing good.

Doing good is Dharma.

It is the goodness that feels natural – the goodness of Dharma.

Doing good even when you don’t feel good starts to feel very good.

Trying to stick on to a dead end job during this economic slowdown which provides for the family does not feel good but you are doing good.

The act of generosity for the lesser fortunate seems to stretch your purse strings but you are doing good which leads to feeling good.  

Spending time with your parents and grandparents listening to their stories of childhood for the two hundredth time is doing good because they feel heard and validated.

Finding common ground with a colleague that you cannot stand while working on a joint project is doing good although it may not feel good.

Confronting a family member about some wrongs that were done at the cost of disturbing the false sense of harmony may not feel good but it is doing good.

The effort you make to drag yourself out of bed and go for a walk feels like a monumental effort but feels great later.

Working long hours to create an innovative product for the customer feels exhausting but you are doing good

Ending the extramarital affair and cutting all ties with your ex because it hurts the partner feels terribly painful and not good at all but given your commitment to the partnership you are doing good

When you do the right thing, an act of dharma that moves things forward as you embody universal values, you cannot help but feel good.

The truth is we feel good when we do good.

Maybe we were seeking all these feel-good experiences because we were not in touch with the goodness that is our nature.

We are then able to see that much like weeds which grow quickly and spread, the addiction to feeling good steals precious soil space in our spiritual garden of Dharma that we were trying to cultivate.

The weeds of the addiction of feel-good cast a shadow over the tender plants and trees of good actions blocking the sunlight of reason. The weed’s roots sucked up nutrients from the soil, the goodness that is our very nature.

The soil or the ground bed of our life is dotted with the seeds of our actions of wanting to do good. We have a natural striving towards Dharma because of our inherent goodness.

Our inherent goodness shows up in the following ways: Speaking the truth, Not harming another. We don’t struggle against the tendency to tell the truth. Even a thief will demand to be told the truth. Ask anyone who has been convicted for a crime. They wanted to do the right thing but they were overpowered by some emotion which clouded their reason. We don’t harm another because we can empathise with what harm feel like.     

Other ways in which our inherent goodness shows up, are – appreciation of someone, an act of generosity, working hard to come up with an innovative approach, accommodation and no discriminating against LGBTQ community, collaborating for a collective solution, persevering despite the challenges, compassion and gentleness for yourself and others and so on. This inherent goodness does not flinch from the reality of adharma that bites.

Our inherent goodness is really the intelligence that is Bhagavan, the dhata, the one who sustains the eternal framework of Dharma.

The one who whispers all the time about doing good, not for his sake but for our sake.

Doing good frees us from our addiction to feeling good. We may be recovering addicts but it is a brilliant start.

The momentum and force of the good that we do blesses us with so much punya that we have the leisure and relaxation to see the goodness in others.

It is the strength and force of goodness that is greater than oneself and flows eternally in the human heart, your heart.

We feel good. We do good. We are good. We are free.