A meditation to help with cravings.
This guided meditation is called urge surfing.
It's a technique that can be used to avoid acting on any behavior that you want to reduce or stop.
Some examples of behaviors may be smoking,
Overeating,
Over drinking,
Over spending,
Maybe lashing out at someone or any impulse that you'd like to bring a little more balance to.
We use the acronym of SURF that stands for stop,
Understand,
Relax and freedom.
Psychologists use this as a meditation to help people with their addictions,
Including our technology addictions,
Overeating,
Over drinking,
Etc.
We use it to remind us of how to handle urges.
The idea is the faster we are noticing our urges,
The less likely we will be to helplessly react on them.
The more quickly they can pass and allowing us to reset,
To have a little more freedom from our impulses or cravings.
The more we practice,
The better we'll be able to handle those urges that don't serve us.
So let's get started.
We're going to use our imagination to see if we can connect to an urge and then we have something real to work with.
So sitting up nice and tall,
Straightening your spine,
Eyes softly closed,
Relaxing your shoulders,
The muscles in the face.
And take a slow breath in,
Nice slow breath in,
Filling the lungs and relaxing into your exhalation.
Now let's take another full breath in,
Filling the lungs.
Slow breath out,
Letting go.
Taking a moment to notice the variety of sensations in the body,
Which might include the breath,
Sensation of your seated posture,
Perhaps the temperature of the air in the room on your skin.
Just noticing.
Now we're going to draw upon our imagination and memory to see if you can connect to the memory of an urge that is familiar to you.
Maybe an urge to check your phone,
The urge to lash out,
To drink,
Overeat,
Even just the urge to stand up.
We just want to have something to work with.
So bringing to mind this urge that you're familiar with and seeing if you can recall or feel the intensity of it,
Noticing where it shows up as a sensation in the body.
Once you have an urge in mind,
Step one of surf is to stop.
That means when you first feel the stirrings of this urge sensation,
Then you try to use that as an early warning reminder to stop and pause.
So just pausing here with the sensation of an urge.
And take a slow deep breath here.
Step two is to understand.
And this simply means getting curious about where you feel the urge in your body.
What that urge sensation feels like and how it shows up in the body.
You might check in with the muscles in the face,
The jaw,
Shoulders,
The chest,
The belly.
Again just remembering that particular urge,
Bringing it to mind and just getting curious,
Understanding where it shows up in the body.
If you're having trouble coming up with an urge,
You can just imagine that you have the urge to stand up,
Imagining yourself about to stand up.
You don't stand up,
But just notice how that urge shows up as a sensation in the body.
We're just giving you something to work with here.
Do you feel it in your face,
Hands,
Chest?
Is it concentrated in one part of the body or does it spread out?
Does it have a sense of urgency or is it more relaxed,
Somewhere in between?
We're just exploring here.
Urges tend to have a bell curve.
There's the initial trigger and then typically a growing intensity and then a gradual decline.
This can be witnessed in the body in real time.
We're just trying to understand,
To be curious,
The details,
Where it shows up in the body.
When we have the urge to react,
To binge,
To lash out,
We get to know where this little drama plays out in the body.
Staying with sensation of the urge,
Where you feel it,
And getting familiar with the life cycle of the urge.
Now let's go on to R.
R is to rest and relax.
To ride the wave of sensation.
We try not to push away the sensation or react against it.
We just allow the feeling to be there and be known.
And as best as we can,
Rest into it.
Relax into any sensation you're currently noticing.
So just breathing here,
Notice the sensation.
We can think of this as relaxing backwards.
So you notice the urge and the sensation that wants to propel you up and forward into doing or saying.
But instead you do the opposite.
You breathe out and you gently relax back.
So take a moment to actually feel this scenario.
An urge comes up and instead of propelling forward into reaction,
You pause and breathe out.
And settle back through whatever urge that has come up.
The last step is F for freedom.
As we watch the urge and the sensation in the body,
And as we relax back instead of propelling forward,
We start to notice a particular freedom here.
Notice the feeling of the urge passing without acting upon it and taking satisfaction in this.
And that's it.
As the urge passes,
You're able to simply watch it.
This is what it feels like to be free or at least a little more free from our cravings and impulses.
Whatever's going on,
It's from this place that we want to respond rather than react with your full measure of intelligence and care.
And that's it.
Come back to your breath.
With regular practice of this meditation,
You'll notice how this shows up in real time.
You'll notice an urge.
You pause.
You breathe out and relax through it.
And the intensity subsides.
Over time you live more in that settled place.
And as Victor Frankl said,
Between stimulus and response,
There is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Happy surfing.
