Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight by Peter Walsh

Winston. But if you want to get a better sense of how to separate your emotions from your purchasing behaviors, she’s definitely your expert.
    Winston, whom you met earlier, is also the director of mindfulness education at the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at UCLA. In the late ’90s, you could have found her in a forest in Burma, where she lived for a year as a Buddhist nun. More recently, you might have seen her wandering the aisles of a major home goods store in Los Angeles, where she was teaching students about “greed management.”
    The students could walk around, pick up items, read the boxes, and take in all the joyful colors of the store. What they
couldn’t
do was buy anything. Instead, she wanted them to simply take note of the desire they felt for items and how the mind reacts when it doesn’t get what it wants.
    The urge to possess an appealing object starts off strong. “It’s coming into you—it’s grabbing you by the throat. We think that in order to get rid of that ‘I have to have it’ feeling, we have to buy that object,” she says. Too often, people don’t ever get the chance to see what happens if they notice the feeling without acting on it. They usually buy the item to make the uncomfortable feeling go away.
    But as her students learned, an interesting thing happens if they pay attention to the urge. It may grow worse for a while. Then it fades. Winston calls this
urge surfing.
“The concept is used in mindfulness-based treatment with people with addictions—Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention—but it’s also relevant for people without addictions,” she says. “When the urge comes, you feel it, you bring your self-awareness to the experience of having this urge, and you notice it like a wave. It has a crest and it passes through us.”
    When she says to “bring your self-awareness,” she’s merely advising you to be mindful. You need to be aware of what’s happening in your mind and the effect it’s having. You’re not kicking yourself for wanting another pair of dress shoes. You’re not building a logical argument against the purchase (“I can’t afford a new lawn mower!”). You’re not guilting yourself. You’re simply observing the desire without judgment and watching what it does, like a bird you notice on a tree limb. Eventually, that bird will fly away on its own; you don’t have to exhaust yourself chasing it away.
    â€œBecause it’s hard to tolerate the uncomfortable feeling, whatever it is, we go straight to the behavior that numbs it out or the behavior that we think is going to satisfy the need. In a way, we’re so often on automatic pilot,” she explains. “When we’re at the bakery, we see a cookie, we reach in our pocket, we pay, and that cookie’s gone and suddenly we wake up from that trance, right?”
    But that “autopilot” action doesn’t really make our wants go away. “We find out it never really works,” she says. “We’re always hungry for the next thing, the next object. Bringing mindfulness into your daily life can intercept this automatic pilot and can really be helpful when you’re dealing with cravings, whether it’s for food or ‘stuff.’” The following are important observations that apply to your weight, your mood, and your home.
    You are seldom going to be completely at ease. Frequently, you’ll be tired, frustrated, worried, sad, bored, or unfocused to some degree. You will almost always have some type of itch that a snack or a purchase could relieve for a moment.
    The things you buy will never provide you lasting contentment. That’s because a new sensation of discomfort will come along soon enough.
    You will never have
everything
you want. There will always be something new that you would like to have. Even if you look around and feel satisfied