The word insatiable basically means “impossible to satisfy.” Mammon.
If we were to set aside the idea of food relative to appetite, are you able to name anything else in your life where there exists an insatiable appetite for?
How about rushing? Most of us have an insatiable appetite for rushing – running around stressed and anxious because we have “so much to do.” How is that an insatiable appetite you ask? Because we do it over and over and over again, which means it never really satisfies anything but the need for more of the same thing – like a hungry ghost.
How about the wish to be right? Most of us have an insatiable wish to be right – always countering another’s opinion with our own, always insisting on having the last word in a conversation or posting on social media “evidence” of our rightness. So obviously when we continue to do the same thing over and over again, feeding that appetite can’t be the answer because if it were, the appetite for it would be fulfilled upon taking that action.
How about the insatiable appetite for judging others or ourselves? Holy cow. Isn’t that a huge appetite? Thanksgiving Dinner has nothing on the appetite for judgment!
How about the insatiable appetite for appearing “perfect” to everyone? What a terrible burden that is…but yet, there is a tremendous appetite for it, clearly. When a mistake is made, there is a constant need to justify or excuse it. When anything in our life is “called out” by another as being anything but perfect, we get angry and resent the person that called it out. Can you see the insatiable appetite in all of that?
What’s interesting when we do inner work is that we find that the mind points to all these so-called different” appetites (so to speak), but they all truly stem from one source. In other words, rushing, judging, the need to be right, the need to be perfect, all stem from one big appetite source – an unconscious nature.
The problem is that we don’t understand how we are “tapping into” (living from) that source all the time without knowing it. Wouldn’t it be good to know how that is taking place? “I want to rush, be anxious and stressed all the time” said no one ever.
How are we tapping into that source without knowing it?
We turn to thought as our guide in the moment when that was never intended to be our “go to.” We were created to be living instruments through which a higher consciousness is able to express its life (communicate) through us. When there is identification with thought as our guide, we are “tapped into” that unconscious thought nature that has a never-ending insatiable appetite for more of itself.
How do we “tap into” the higher consciousness, a consciousness that can truly satiate our spiritual appetite that lies hidden behind all of the things in this world that we errantly reach for currently to satisfy a certain longing in us?
We tap into it by pausing, waiting, in each and every moment the very best we are able to and allowing that insatiable appetite for self to pass (for “our will” to pass), in whatever form it takes in that moment. When we agree to remain “empty” that way, the higher consciousness will then fill us with its guidance and its life.
For those of you who like scripture, the passage “there’s no room at the inn” means exactly what I just described. When we are filled with ourselves in the moment (turning to thought as our guide), there is no room for the higher consciousness to pour its life through us.
Take a moment in your week this week to notice when your mind is replaying something. There is an insatiable appetite hidden in that replay. Is it an appetite for resentment? For anger? For self-pity? For self-glorification?
Take notice of it. Don’t try to push it away or judge it – just see it. Every time you agree to see it, the pull to identify with it lessens….and that’s a good thing.
You can then teach what you learn to the children in your life, so that they may learn to live a profitable life instead of a uselessly painful one.
Photo by Alexandre St-Louis on Unsplash
