Are you losing it?

Desires are the most unrelenting enemies of man; he cannot appease them. Have only one desire: to know God. Satisfying the sensory desires cannot satisfy you, because you are not the senses. They are only your servants, not your Self.
 Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda

I had a friend in graduate school who was quite aware of his addictive tendencies, eating, drinking, studying, exercise. With extreme will-power and flawless execution, he had structured a life and study plan that allowed him to study and exercise intensely, coupled with high sugar, beer and porn consumption. He made it work all right, but it seemed like a fragile equilibrium and he often looked depressed. My time in graduate school was luckily much happier. I spent most of my leisure time reading spiritual texts, only to find than ten years later—burdened by an extremely stressful job—that my friend’s struggles would find me as well.

A caring parent will probably rather have a Michael Phelps or a work-aholic CEO as a child than an alcoholic or a drug addict, but to the individual involved the pain might be equally unbearable. The winner of 28 Olympic swimming medals admitted that he was depressed for large stretches of his career. His extremely structured training schedules and intense will-power got him to the top of the world but he felt miserable doing it. Are you at risk of losing it? Do the cravings and the fears get the better of you? Scary as this prospect sounds, isn’t it true that often our spiritual journey starts when we feel pressed against the wall with no prospect of escaping?

You may think that freedom is the state when we cease to have cravings and fears but true freedom comes earlier. Freedom is when we recognize the cravings and the fears for what they stand for, not what they appear to be. Freedom is when we can call the drive, the craving, the anxiety by its real name and act accordingly. Freedom is the ability to follow the energy of the moment and not be ruled by our cravings and fears. We spiritual folks are also occasionally depressed or anxious, but there is always a smile on our face because we know that we are past the point of losing it. Instead, we are losing the baggage of the past, the fears and the many means of escaping.