Do you remember being a kid at Christmas time? Remember all the presents under the tree, waiting to be unwrapped? Remember the expectation that built and built, maybe for a month or more? Remember opening all those presents on Christmas day? Now, do you remember the feeling once it was done? How would you describe it? Hollow? Unfulfilled? Disappointed? It didn’t matter what you got, did it? That sense of needing something more was present.

Extrinsic expectation will do that to you every single time.

With mindfulness, we notice what is happening within us now. Extrinsic expectation is the hope that something outside of us will make us happy later. It never does. Sure, we get some kind of gratification for consumption; it addresses the fundamental sense of lack that motivates it.

But just because it addresses it, doesn’t mean it resolves it. In fact, it has the opposite effect: because it doesn’t resolve the sense of lack, it makes us want to consume even more, in the hope that sheer volume will be the answer—which, of course, it isn’t. We have a word for this phenomenon: addiction.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re addicted to drugs or money; gambling or shopping; sex or power: all you are attempting to do is to fulfill a deep sense of lack within.

Understand this: you lack nothing. You have always had everything you need. Check in right now: is there ground beneath you? are you dying of thirst? can you breathe? You may—even in this moment—think that you need something more. You may have a large debt to pay off and no job to achieve that goal; you may have nobody else in your life; you may be in trouble with the law and fear spending the rest of your life in prison. But—in this moment; right here, right now—in this moment you have absolutely everything you need. And I promise you this: if you check in at any other moment of your life, you will find the same thing. The future may look bleak, but the present is always complete.

So it is with expectation: the imagined reality of a future you. I will be happy when _____ happens, or when I have ______. No you won’t. The sense of lack you expect will be fulfilled does not go away because something extrinsic enters your life. How is that even possible? Your sense of lack is inside you; that extrinsic expectation will always exist outside you. The two can never meet. No, that sense of lack remains while you attempt to fulfill it with things or events or people or places. All you’re ever going to find with that approach is temporary gratification. Is that good enough for you?

It’s not, is it?

There is only one way known to fulfill that sense of lack, and that is to realize that you lack nothing. Never have, never will. And you will only realize that when you take a moment away from all that planning and preparation, away from all those regrets and past slights, and spend that moment instead right here, right now, with everything you need.

By Published On: January 4, 2016Categories: Mindful Musings

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