27/10/2024
Many people taking GLP-1 medications find that they’ve suddenly released their desires for food, alcohol, to***co, shopping, and more—how Buddhists have been contemplating this exact transition for centuries. But if renunciation of desire is the key to enlightenment, Shayla Love writes, “why does the medication version of Nirvana seem relatively lackluster?” https://theatln.tc/KkKGQIa3
Scientists are still determining how people respond psychologically to GLP-1 drugs. While many express elation at the effects of weight loss, others report feeling uninterested in activities they once enjoyed. If you’re suddenly stripped of strong feelings of wanting, “you have to reestablish what your behavioral drivers should be,” one neuroscientist told Love.
This mirrored what Love heard from Sister True Vow, a Buddhist nun at a New York monastery. Buddhism recommends contemplating your cravings over a period of years to loosen your grip on them; but GLP-1 drugs “do it in a chemical way, without the psychology of us coming along with it,” Sister True Vow said. The jarring feeling of abruptly losing your cravings “can also be an opportunity to uncover the roots of our desire in order to eventually let them go in a more deliberate way, Sister True Vow said. This doesn’t mean people have to forgo enjoyment of the present moment—in fact, Buddhism encourages such pleasures.”
The Buddha’s first sermon also described the Middle Way, in which enlightenment is approached not by breaking completely free from desire, but by gaining awareness of how and why you want things. After many months on the drugs, some GLP-1 users appear to be finding their own Middle Way. “I have had to learn more about what desire is, how it works,” one user told Love.
Modern American life is accused of overloading our dopamine system, such that some influencers and psychologists have endorsed “dopamine fasting.” “Desire, in other words, is a monster to be tamed,” Love continues. “Yet people’s emotional responses to GLP-1 drugs reveal that our relationship with wanting is more complex. If an overattachment to every craving can bring suffering, a total renunciation of them can be unsatisfying too.”
Read more here: https://theatln.tc/KkKGQIa3
🎨: Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.
