Hello and welcome to Mindfulness Plus. I'm your host Thomas Mconkey. Thanks so much for downloading us.

We have a new website up, lower lights sLC.org. If you want to see what we're up to, go check us out. We've got

six-week mindfulness courses live in Salt Lake. And if you're out of state, out of country,

check out our online class. And I hope to see a lot of you at our seven-day silent retreat

in June in southern Utah.

That's not to be missed.

Today's topic is addiction.

What's interesting to me about this topic is that we tend to talk about addiction in our culture as though there are some people who have addiction

problems and most of us, the rest of us, don't struggle with that kind of thing. In point of

fact, when you start to practice mindfulness, when you start to look really closely at the dynamics of experience moment to moment,

what you discover is that at the heart of experience is a kind of addictive mechanism.

So whether you have an illegal drug habit or you have a texting habit or a potato chip habit

like I am plagued with personally, what you realize is that the object of addiction is less important than the actual underlying

structures of addiction. The Buddhist tradition is exceptionally articulate about this mechanism

that in modern Western culture we talk about in terms of addiction.

The way it basically works is that we are attracted to things that give us pleasure

and we have an aversion we're repelled by things that are unpleasant.

So when we investigate our experience directly, compelled by things that are unpleasant.

So when we investigate our experience directly, we notice a very basic and deep-seated

push-pull.

By push-pull, I mean we push things away from us that are uncomfortable, and we try to

pull pleasure and more comfortable things towards us.

...