Or, in fact, not-hungry ghost. I sat tonight’s med­i­ta­tion while my din­ner was cook­ing — the twenty-minute cook­ing time for chicken with rose­mary is a good match to my cur­rent med­i­ta­tion time! But as I was sit­ting, I had a very clear real­i­sa­tion: I wasn’t hungry.

And this seems to be true for all of my meals so far in this “month of desire”. And for snacks, and for my latte in the morn­ing, and my habit­ual after­noon vend­ing machine milk­shake. None of them seem to be any­thing to do with sat­is­fy­ing a phys­i­cal need. Well, maybe the drinks might have some­thing to do with thirst. But not much, that I’ve noticed.

Bud­dhist mythol­ogy has fig­ures called Hun­gry Ghosts. The Zen of Eat­ing describes them like this:

“There’s a pow­er­ful image to depict the futil­ity of pur­su­ing one object of desire after another: the Hun­gry Ghost. Hun­gry Ghosts are large, mythic beings with huge, dis­tended bel­lies and extremely nar­row throats. They try to eat, but their nar­row throats pre­vent them from get­ting the ful­fil­ment they crave. No mat­ter what they do and how hard they try, they feel empty and unsat­is­fied. The Hun­gry Ghosts is not just a fig­ure in Bud­dhist mythol­ogy. There’s a Hun­gry Ghost in each of us, too.”

This rang a strong bell with me when I read it. I often feel like this about eat­ing. It seems I’m try­ing to sat­isfy some­thing other than phys­i­cal need when I eat; it’s a crav­ing for ful­fil­ment, and it is never satisfied.

So, lots to think about here. I’ll try to focus in on this feel­ing when I’m want­ing to eat. Try to fig­ure out where it comes from, if it’s not from hunger, or any other phys­i­cal feel­ing of need…

Yes­ter­day I didn’t med­i­tate until far too late. Today I med­i­tated as soon as I got home from work. Both had the same result, sadly: a real fail­ure to stay awake. I’m not going to be too hard on myself for that, though, as yes­ter­day I just had a really bad day, headachey and ener­gy­less. I won­der if I may be going down with something..?

On the plus side, I’ve started think­ing more about my desire as I feel it, as was the plan for the month. That was mostly at work today, espe­cially after my Graze box arrived — my first one! A month when I’m meant to be analysing my desire seemed a good month to start hav­ing Graze boxes deliv­ered to work; cer­tainly it’s inter­est­ing to observe my reac­tions to know­ing there are tasty snacks in my drawer.

So far my obser­va­tions have told me things I already knew — for starters, that my desire for food has no con­nec­tion with hunger, as far as I can tell. When I want to eat it reminds me of quit­ting smok­ing — that desire to pull some­thing into my mouth, a feel­ing that there was a hole that needed fill­ing, that I just wanted to breathe more in than air.

I ate a cou­ple of the selec­tions of my Graze box today (you get four per box.) I’m going to try to keep the next two for the next two days. Next week, I’ll try to stretch the four lit­tle packs over four days. I think this is a good way of “play­ing” with my desire.

I’m still read­ing The Zen of Eat­ing. I’m not get­ting through it fast, but that’s mostly because it has a lot of good stuff to say, and I want to think about — and blog about — angry ghosts and dry drunks before I carry on. Maybe later this week, though it looks to be a busy one…