The Vipassana meditation course is the practical application of the buddhist theory of happiness. Within Buddhism there’s no concept of an afterlife therefore its focus is on happiness in this life, and that’s what is relevant here.

‘When I was 5 years old my mother always told me that happiness is the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment and I told them they didn’t understand life’. John Lennon

Buddhism is concerned with happiness in the here and now and they figured out the structure of happiness, or at least how to generate happiness, a long time ago. Nowadays, our science understands that structure in much more detail than could be known in the past - no one was talking about bio chemicals a thousands years ago -but happiness, then is happiness now. In practice, we've got the more esoteric traditional model, or the modern scientific model, to choose from but, regardless of which we prefer, the fundamentals are the same. Here we'll explain happiness from both perspectives - present both models - so the universal fundamentals are clear. From there, how an emotional detox significantly improves our sense of well being/ level of happiness is readily understood.

'If I have an hour to solve a problem, I'll spend 55 minutes defining it and just 5 minutes solving it' Einstein

By defining we're returning to the underlying fundamentals which, if we clarify, tends to resolve the problem. Confusion begets confusion.

Emotional detoxes are so named as we're detoxing/deleting motivations that have accumulated within us over time and now compete against/suppress our emotional motivations. If we're not connected to our emotional motivations we're not motivated to nourish them and if we're not motivated to nourish them we don't. Not surprisingly, if they become mal nourished - they're not purring as they should be. We have to prioritise, have to choose which motivations we have within us as they determine our objectives, then decisions then actions and it's our actions that take us to this, or that, reality.

We have a garden within, that garden can grow a wide variety of plants, but we want relevant and fruitful ones, not just weeds and whatever plants/motivations just happened to blow in there. Everyone wants delightful, fruitful plants in their garden but some don't understand they firstly need to weed their garden, need to take out the undesirable -need to make space- before putting in the seeds they want. We need to empty our 'cup' of the existing stale, ugly flavours before we try to pour in the delightful flavours of our choice.

Our emotional well being is what largely determines our level of happiness and our emotions thrive on love and joy. While love and joy are very similar experiences -similar flavours/ bio chemicals - they’re not exactly the same and nor are their sources the same. Joy is like soft background music that is always there, but we can’t connect to it, can’t hear and experience it, if there’s also loud music. Often, it's only when the loud music is turned off that we even realise the other music was there all along. When we - if we - experience it we then get it, we understand that less is more and it’s this experience a VM course seeks to introduce us to.

Explained more scientifically; we have two seperate motivational systems; We have our dopamine system and our serotonin/ oxytocin system but we can only access our serotonin system in the absence of the louder dopamine system. For example, those on the other side of the monastery walls are not seeking interpersonal love - they’re in the wrong place for that - so they’re either all naive, and stupid, or they’re seeking something else. That we don’t get it, that we may not know what they’re experiencing doesn’t mean that experience doesn’t exist, it just means we’ve never experienced it ourselves.

“The inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. We live in two worlds.” Jung.

Our emotions do not live in the manmade cultural reality our brains construct. Our cultural realities exist like bubbles within the larger reality, they're not the reality, not all there is to connect to and experience. However, it can seem the reality our brains construct is the reality and therefore we can be limited to just that reality. This can lead to emotional discontentment as we're not feeding our emotions the raw diet they require. For example; Love is blind, it's got nothing to do with our brain. The love that can be explained is not the love. The taste our brains understand, and thus can explain, is not the taste.

The Tao that can be explained, is not the Tao. Tao Te Ching

While it's always been obvious our emotions live in their own, pre brain, meaningless world, it had been assumed that world was a branch on the same brain/nervous system tree as the meaningful world our brains construct. We now know they're not just different branches, but completely different trees, albeit intertwined thus looking like they're the same tree. As I'm writing this - Sept 26 - Stanford has just proven this complete separation which will, in time, change models we'd previously considered to be accurate. However, for our purposes, it makes no real difference as, either way, our emotional motivations clearly exist in a different world than our ego/social motivations do. Explained via the existing model; our emotions do not live in the cultural world of labels, categories and meanings constructed by our brain; they live in the raw, meaningless, world that exists before our brains reformat the raw data our senses are providing. Our emotions exist in the same world they always have existed in long long before our brains developed the capacity to generate much in the way of labels and meanings.

Clearly, in the distant past, when our brains went through a series of significant upgrades - language, sophisticated thinking, etc - our previous brains were not scooped out and the upgraded versions plopped into our skulls. The upgrades added to what was already there, they didn't replace what had been there for millions of years.

Intellectualisation creates a gap or lack of rapport between you and your life. You may think about things so much that you get into the state where you are eating the menu instead of the dinner. Alan Watts

Our emotions experience the raw data our senses provide while our ego then experiences the reality our brain reformats that data into - via cultural labels and meanings. Understanding we have two systems, that there's two wells we can drink from, is important as that's often what's required to then take the steps to access that other well. Our emotions consume the 'apples' raw whilst our brain 'cooks'/processes those apples into something else, and it's this something else, that our ego consumes and experiences. Our brain puts 'sauces' on top of the dish - labels and meanings - which we/our ego consumes, and experiences, along with the dish underneath. We're experiencing, or hopefully experiencing, both worlds simultaneously albeit via different motivations. It's easy for sauces to dominate, to be all we're really tasting which, in time, becomes all there 'is'. Mere sauces become all that matters and we become emotionally mal nourished given we're no longer bothering ourselves with the quality of the underlying emotionally relevant dish. Those on the other side of the monastery walls are not confused; they exiting one reality to better access the other one. They're turning away from one well in order to find the other, much more satisfying, one.

‘I sometimes wonder if all pleasures are not substitutes for joy'. C.S Lewis

Get too dominated by our ego/ cultural reality and we start cooking all the apples/ start consuming just sauces, which leads to emotional malnourishment. An emotional detox removes those sauces, removes the attraction to those sauces, reconnecting us to what's underneath and thus we're now orientated towards our emotional interests/motivations. We're now nourishing them, they start purring and if they're purring, we're purring. There's nothing negative about some sauces, the issue is when we can't discriminate between mere sauces - what satisfies our ego - and the organic something underneath - which satisfies us emotionally. The issue is not sauces per see; it's too many sauces, it's that they're on too thick. It's the cumulative disconnecting/disorientating effect of them that's the issue. Scrape them away and we get this because we experience the massive difference. We get that less is much more because less of one is more of the other and the other is what is important, at least as regards our level of happiness.

There's two wells we can drink from. There's the cultural realities and the infinite reality beyond the walls of those manmade bubbles. If we could hear our emotions we'd hear something like this.

I want to run, I want to hide
I wanna tear down the walls that hold me inside
I wanna reach out and touch the flame
Where the streets have no name

I wanna feel sunlight on my face
I see that dust cloud disappear without a trace
I wanna take shelter from the poison rain
Where the streets have no name. U2 'Streets have no name'

As there's two realities - two wells - there's effectively a spectrum given we can access both to one degree or another. Towards the cynical pole of that spectrum we have Donald Trump who is completely dominated by his ego, thus emotionally hollowed out. His ego tree has grown so large it's shaded out his emotional tree - no light/joy is getting into his emotional core. All he cares about is status, power and wealth as ego satisfaction is all he can now access thus all that matters to him. All there 'is'. If there's only one teat providing pleasant flavours/bio chemicals available to us, if we're chained to the one well, then that's all there is for us to feel good via so, naturally enough, we furiously milk that teat to obtain as much satisfaction/pleasant bio chemicals as we can from it. Thus, Trump proclaims himself the 'greatest', perhaps the 'bestest' ever, given ego satisfaction is the only type of satisfaction- the only well - he can now access. The issue here is ego satisfaction is insipid, with a low ceiling, compared to emotional satisfaction. It's something, it's some pleasant bio chemicals, but it's not much. It's just the consolation prize.

At the other end of the spectrum, in a forest, reclining under a tree, with that massive smile on his face, was where Buddha resided. He said; 'By doing nothing, I do everything'. Indeed, if we're already extremely happy what is there to do? Do what? By definition, if we're 10/10 happy, there are no dissatisfied motivations to try and satisfy. What are we going to scurry around the environment for if there's nothing out there we want? Of course he just blissfully reclines and watches the world go by. If we feel we lack nothing, we feel we have everything we want. If we feel we have everything we want we are, by definition, on a very high level of happiness.

At one end of the spectrum everything can be nothing whilst at the other nothing can be everything. Especially when we understand that joy needs space to flow into.

As mentioned on the front page; we're not out in the environment, doing as we do, for no reason. We've got objectives in mind, be they immediate objectives - lets get a coffee - or longer term objectives we're trying to advance/satisfy. Our objectives are downstream of our motivations - we're not seeking what we don't want; not seeking a coffee if we don't want coffee. Given our current batch of objectives, we make our decisions; we choose among the options we believe we have available to satisfy those objectives. Our decisions determine our actions - lets walk over to that cafe - and our actions take us to one reality or another. Our steps add up, taking us here or there, yet upstream of it all is our motivations. Sort out our motivations, sort the wheat from the chuff, and gravity does the rest.

We have our primary motivations, the set we're all born with that are typically referred to as instincts. They're hardwired within us, they're with us every step we take so if they're not purring, we're not purring. Then we have clusters of secondary motivations which have been installed by our culture along with the ones we're just randomly acquired over time. Secondary/ acquired motivations can be deleted and if some of them are no longer relevant, no longer serving us our actual interests, then why keep them in us? Just delete them and make space. We didn't choose most of them anyway.

Some people who are very dissatisfied with their lives nevertheless have no intention of changing their own behaviour. They want to keep on doing as they’ve always done, but just have it turn out differently’ Thomas Sowell

Detoxing our motivations is upstream transformational therapy as opposed to the much more common midstream incremental therapy which requires fighting against our motivational current. That intervening upstream is much more effective is understood, at least here and there, but it doesn't fit the structure of modern societies. People have jobs, are also juggling responsibilities and assorted other motivations, so the typical one hour a week type of therapy is all they can reasonably access. Similarly, therapy businesses are businesses adapted to the same structure. For most therapists the mainstream path is the reality -they don't know anything else themselves- and their job, as they see it, is to help their clients adapt better to that mainstream path.

Midstream therapy has a very poor success rate - not surprisingly - but it's often better then nothing. Of course, given the limitations of midstream therapy, and the expense involved, these days most seeking be to be happier quickly give up and select a pill instead.

This is not to disparage midstream therapy; many therapists help many people. It's to explain there's another option and that the other option cannot be offered on main street. It doesn't fit, and if detoxes were offered there what are they going to sell? Water? We don't really need anyone else to help us detox, all we need is to know how and then step out of our own motivational web for a short time. Our hardwired motivations will come with us and the rest of those old motivational threads can blow away with the wind. We experience the difference, reorientate to our actual interests -new objectives - and can then spin another web. But now we're building it, now it's relevant - it's catching what we actually want. It's limited, functional, it's letting plenty of light in and we're not ourselves tangled up in it. Happy days.

Actually, as I'm writing this ( August 26) the Huberman podcast discussed this very topic with psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia who explained, albeit with different terminology, the same thing:

‘What I try and do is I help people get to their fundamentals. Everyone is focused on changing behaviour, everyone is focused on increasing willpower to overcome a tendency, and it’s, like, why not just change the tendency? For their natural thoughts to change, for the way they see the world to change, for their behaviours to change on their own doesn’t require willpower. Will power is necessary when you’re fighting against tendencies but it’s not required when those tendencies are no longer there.’

Exactly. One needs willpower when it's motivations vs motivations, but we don't need it if we just delete the contradictory 'tendencies'. Possibly, this is obvious to Dr Kanojia due to his Indian heritage as, after-all, India is the birthplace of Buddhism and, incidentally, where I did my VM course more then 3 decades ago. Also incidentally, the Huberman podcast is an excellent source for remaining updated with the latest scientific discoveries and conclusions regarding health and happiness. Very popular, it typically ranks no 1 in the world in its genre and is often in the top 10 podcasts overall. Stanford neurologist Professor Huberman is the host. He's a pragmatic, evidence only, type of guy and recently pondering the 'meaning of life' he saw it as ' learning to enjoy the time we have and to prolong that time'. Exactly, what else? And if we believe it's something else where did those beliefs come from? It's hard to imagine we'd choose them ourselves as that would be self defeating. If we believe life is about hard work, so it will be but, like, why would we want that life? Isn't that the life of a slave? We have to survive, have to work if we don't already have plenty of $$, but there's a big difference between living to work and working to live.

Well, I think it's fine
Building jumbo planes
Or taking a ride on a cosmic train
Switch on summer from a slot machine
Yes, get what you want, if you want
'Cause you can get anything now

I know we've come a long way
Things are changing day to day
But tell me, where do the children play? Cat Stevens. 'Where do the children play'

Where do the children play? Increasingly, the answer is they don't play and if we don't get to play when we're young - do what we actually want to be doing - we can struggle to play/enjoy life when we're adults. Early, intensive and prolonged education continually overrides what we'd prefer to be doing - we've got to attend class - until that connection to our innate motivations/ ourselves is no longer active. How many classes on 'happiness' did you get offered in school? Exactly, that's not their job, that's the individuals job. The cultural beliefs and values -that template - we get installed in us via our education propel us down the society's mainstream path which, if it's fruitful enough - if it's in good shape - tends to work out just fine. After-all, we've got survival motivations - need a job etc - so we need to be competitive within the structure that exists. But what if our mainstream path isn't in good shape? What if it's now potholed, with the once low hanging fruit long ago been harvested, yet we're now programmed up to sprint down that substandard path? Awkward. All civilisations have a life cycle, nothing last forever, and we don't get to choose where within that life cycle we happen to be born. But it is what it is, and we make our way through the desert to an oasis, or we don't. Such is the game of life.

You got a job downtown, man it leaves your head cold
And everywhere you look, life ain't got no soul
That apartment you live in feels like it's just a place to hide
When you're walkin' down the streets, you won't meet no one eye to eye
Now the cops reported you as just another homicide
But I could tell that you were just frustrated. Springsteen Murder incorporated

If the quality of our life isn't as we'd like it would seem to make sense to recalibrate. To get the cuckoos out of our nest and start acting in our own actual interests.

'The cage is invisible because you were born inside it and they taught you to love the bars' Mark Twain

A 10 day vm course involves spending nearly all our non sleeping time sitting crosslegged and meditating with meditating here meaning focus on the feelings arising within us. We soon connect the dots, soon realise motivations motivate via feelings, via the various pleasant and unpleasant flavours. How else?

Using an extreme example; A drug addict has acquired a powerful negative motivation - they're infected - and this powerful motivation overpowers nearly all of their other motivations. All they care about is accessing the pleasure the drug provides and avoiding the pain they'll experience if they don't access that drug. A given motivations power equals the distance between what we believe we'll experience via satisfaction and what we'll experience if that motivation is dissatisfied. However, a motivation doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's competing for our energy against many other motivations, be they immediate, or longer term, objectives/motivations. We're typically juggling a lot of diverse, and often contradictory, motivations. Our ego, for example, seeks status whilst status is emotionally irrelevant. How does the drug addict escape that motivation/habit? By no longer feeding it. If the person goes 'cold turkey' for a week, or so, that motivation dies off leaving him, or her, free of it's dubious clutches and free to reorientate towards satisfying other, hopefully more positive, motivations. All non-innate motivations, large and small, obvious or obscure, can be deleted via the same means. When we're just sitting we obviously can't feed our clusters of motivations so they, one by one, die off returning us to our hardwired actual motivations.

Just as it's not much fun for the drug addict to detox from that motivation - dissatisfied motivations 'claw' - an emotional detox is also not much fun but, for some of us, it's well worthing doing at least once in our lives to get calibrated to ourselves, to experience that less is more and to taste the other well.

The thing with dopamine reward system -one well - is that dopamine is largely connected to anticipation/ expectations. Dopamine is calibrated to our expectations of reality, not to reality itself. It’s not the event/thing, it’s our expectation of the event/thing that matters when it comes to generating dopamine.

The relevant point about dopamine pleasure is we’re only accessing that pleasure/satisfaction when our expectations are met, or exceeded. Think of your favourite dish at a particular restaurant; you have an expectation, a high expectation regarding that meal you’ve ordered and should that meal drop below that expectation you’re actually dissatisfied, yet it’s still a very nice meal. It’s actually still better than 90% of the meals you eat yet you’re displeased. The pleasure that motivated you to be there does not materialise because of your expectations of the meal, not because of the meal itself. Hence how it’s actually a lot easier to become depressed/ unhappy if we’re wealthy, with ample options, than if we’re poor with few. This is why those that are very wealthy, and also happy, live quite disciplined, austere lives, at least as regards their day to day habits. They just have to or, in time, they self destruct. It’s why most people who win lotto are actually less happy after a few years than they were previously. We can easily drown in the midst of plenty.

The poor, on the other hand, obviously lack the means to keep ratcheting up their expectations and can therefore find satisfaction from what, for the pampered, would be experienced as painful. A 3 star hotel generates elation in some, but disgust in others. It’s not the hotel.

While, via a detox, we can often access the other well, we also tend to find our existing well has freshened up. We now appreciate much that we previously didn’t. What was a small, insignificant pleasure is now a big pleasure. Indeed, what was painful can now be pleasurable.

What matters is what’s happening inside us so it’s typically hugely beneficial to reset, to return to core, and recalibrate every now and again.

Between this page, and the front page, there's probably enough info for most people. I will colour this all in further, when I get round to it, but the basics are now explained. I write much more about emotional detoxes than physiological detoxes simply because information on body detoxes is readily available, and explained better than I can, but this isn't the case when it comes to emotional detoxes. The Eastern, more holistic approach to physiological health, is now accepted as valid in the West but this is not yet the case when it comes to emotional well being/happiness.

While the underlying fundamentals of emotional detoxing are all the same - we starve out useless motivations - the detoxes we offer differ from VM courses/detoxes for a number of reasons.

Firstly; VM courses tend to be too harsh for most of us modern types. While some discomfort is unavoidable we want to minimise pain as it's counterproductive longterm. The less resistance to detoxing we acquire the easier, and more likely, it is we will detox in the future if required. Secondly; it's not so much about doing nothing as it is about doing differently. We can 'walk and chew gum' at the same time. In other words; we can delete negative motivations whilst enjoying positive ones simultaneously thereby counterbalancing the pain from our disgruntled motivations. Thirdly; the one size fits all format of VM works for large groups but ideally a detox should be tailored to the individual and not just as regards the process, but also as regards outcomes. People are different, their situations are different, they have different amounts of time available, their ultimate sweet spots differ etc. Forth; if we're going to do an emotional detox it makes a lot of sense to also do a physiological detox especially as the process is largely the same anyway. In other words; even a 10 day emotional detox starts with at least a 3 day body detox which takes us someway down the emotional detoxing path.

Ultimately, Nui's job at real detox Lombok is to guide individuals to a new experience -to help them find the other well - to bounce them someway along the spectrum. But, everyones sweet spot on the spectrum is different and that's for them to discover and define. Some experience the 'avalanche' effect; one boulder/ motivation tumbles down and out leading to many more instantly tumbling out - an avalanche. This instantly bounces us a significant way along the spectrum and can be a somewhat surreal experience as the reality that was is now very different. It's the same - that tree is still there - but what aspects of the environment we're bringing to the fore, thus what we're pushing into the background, has changed. Because it's our motivations that are determining what we're prioritising. Someone walking down a street seeking cigarettes is scanning for shops that sell cigarettes -bringing that data to the fore - as that's what is relevant to them. When our motivations change, our objectives change, thus what is relevant changes. We're no longer scanning for, and bringing to the fore, what we were so the exact same location is now both perceived differently and experienced differently.

Our motivations not only determine the path we choose, but also what that path 'is'.

However, there's no specific objective, no 'right' place to get to. Those that are flexible put themselves in a useful spot - powered by relevant motivations - to better achieve a set of objectives and/or enjoy a context. However, they can then move themselves/reorientate when, or if, they want to by changing their motivations. They not this, nor that. Ask the humble who they are and they struggle to answer besides; "it depends on context" as the walls most have built around themselves are just not there. They're pouring their own cocktails and when we can do this why would we pour ourselves an ugly one? For the humble, thus flexible, this is obvious and it seems weird that others can't just change their recipe if the taste isn't satisfactory.

Seen a man standing over a dead dog
By the highway in a ditch
He's looking down kinda puzzled
Poking that dog with a stick

Got his car door flung open
He's standing out on Highway 31
Like if he stood there long enough
That dog'd get up and run

Struck me kinda funny
Seemed kinda weird, sir, to me
How at the end of every long hard day
People find some reasons to believe Springsteen reason to believe

What's important is experiencing that the spectrum exists as we then gain the flexibility to move along it ourselves. What's important is realising we don't want the thing, we want the feelings we believe we'll experience via that thing. The obvious question then becomes; what feelings do we prioritise - what do we actually want to be experiencing - and what other feelings/motivations are blocking our ability to access the ones we actually want? We simply can't untangle what's in our overcrowded 'basket of motivations' without emptying it and when we empty it we find most of what we had to untangle no longer exists.

'We carry with us the seeds of our own destruction - it's part of the human package - along with the seeds of the things that bring life and good things into the world but there is a very big tug-of-war all the time. It's hard to come down on, uh….we have a hand that builds and we have a hand that burns, so this is a song about someone who figures out how to come down on the side of the hand that builds. This song is called ´Leah´….”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXF6p_2CmNo&list=RDhXF6p_2CmNo&start_radio=1

Our Emotional Detoxes