Craving and Courage.

It's been over forty years, but I can still taste the flaky minced chicken puff pastry from my school cafeteria in Dubai. The buttery layers, the perfectly seasoned meat, the cold Pepsi washing it all down. It was a lunch I started dreaming of even before breakfast, though with no pocket money, I had no way to buy it.

So I started stealing coins my dad left on the table. At first, it was just one or two a week, tiny risks easily taken. By the last class before lunch, craving would take over completely. My mind would zero in on memories of taste, anticipation pulsing through me, flooding body and mind. The more I indulged, the more the pattern set in and the bolder I became. Craving led to thought, to planning, to action, reinforcing itself with every cycle.

Inevitably, my luck ran out. My dad figured out who'd been taking the money, and I got his punishment.

But whatever lesson he hoped I'd learn never landed. Instead, craving grew insidiously, becoming a constant background hum that powered both my mind and body, shaping habits I didn't question for years.

Most of us never observe these patterns. We chase what we want, whether it's smoking, drinking, TV, junk food. And along with these seen physical habits, we construct unseen, mental habits too: of anger, of clinging to beliefs and views, of manipulating people and situations to avoid discomfort or grab a little comfort. Craving, the relentless, pervasive force, is continuously pushing us away from pain and toward ease - so subtle, we barely notice it's there.

Eventually, the cost of my physical habits became too heavy to ignore. I had to ask myself: Why do I keep smoking and drinking when it no longer feels good? Why can't I just stop? The answers lay within, always at the root, the same force: craving. The need to feel safe, happy, untouched by pain.

After years spent wrestling with and transforming my lifestyle habits and addictions, I have to face what turns out to be the deeper truth: the mental patterns that run far below the surface, that are harder to see, harder to admit, harder to change.

I start relationships believing I need someone to fill a lack in me. I end them believing someone else is the source of my pain. I shut down when others share their hurt, especially if my actions are involved. I isolate when I'm uncomfortable, pushing people away instead of sharing my experience. When my expectations aren't met, I decide they don't really love me, that I was right all along to protect myself.

These are habits as ingrained as any addiction, showing up in every relationship that matters, leaving behind the same wreckage.

Now, with more of my life behind me than ahead, I find myself once again at a familiar crossroads, another instance of shutting down and shutting someone out. Only this time, I'm out of energy to run. I can see clearly there's nowhere left to escape, nothing that will shield me from hurt, heartbreak, or loss.

Last year, in another heartbreak's aftermath, with trust broken and old strategies and stories failing, my heart refused to close no matter how hard I tried to force it shut. The only choice left was to face myself. To stop running and turn within.

So I began daily journaling, committing words to paper even when I didn't want to see what they revealed. I sat in therapy twice a month, letting someone else witness what I'd been hiding. I walked alone in nature, signaling to myself that I was ready to see what had to be seen, whatever the cost.

What showed up was hard to bear: selfishness, manipulation, greed, all the parts of myself I'd worked so hard to keep tightly locked away out of shame. As I opened up to them, waves of anxiety, regret, shame, guilt, and grief came breaking against the inner fortress I'd built for safety, threatening to breach the walls entirely.

And when this sudden, uninvited heaviness still clamps down on my chest, making it hard to breathe, old instincts want desperately to reach for relief: a fantasy where I am rescued, a book I can lose myself in, a screen that pulls me into fictional stories and out of my life, anything to distract from this suffocating weight.

But now I know too well the familiar feeling of numbness shutting down the heart, that brute strength of thickening my skin and hiding in darkness. This mental habit shuts out the pain, yes, but it also shuts out love, connection, and the truth of seeing things as they truly are.

Now I know if I run again, I'll never stop running. So, one breath at a time, I practice staying. Staying with the trembling heart. I practice opening, turning towards what hurts, even when it feels unbearable, even when every instinct screams to close, to protect, to flee.

And another force, palpable and sinister, is rising to the surface. It disguises itself as strength and independence, humming beneath every pattern of protection. It’s an emotion I can trace back to early childhood.

Fear.

Fear in every cell: fear of loneliness, of being unloved, of fading away into nothing, of what comes next when I have no control. Breathing into that fear, gently and with as much compassion as I can muster, I try to hold it all, as if I am both mother and child, opening to suffering and letting love in at the same time.

Maybe the whole practice is right here: in this breath, the next, and the next after that. No firm ground beneath my feet, nothing solid to grasp onto, just placing one foot after another into the heart of what it means to be human, to be vulnerable, to stay open when everything in me wants to close.

Again and again, I see it clearly: at the root of every thought and feeling, every action and reaction, lives craving. The urge to acquire what I think will make me happy, to discard what I think causes pain, to control the uncontrollable flow of experience.

In a culture that worships desire, labels its relentless pursuit as freedom, and tells us to follow our bliss and trust our gut, I am learning to be cautious and wary of my wants. When I commit to seeing craving clearly, even briefly, I build the strength to resist, or at least pause giving into the urge to want more of this and less of that, to fix what doesn't need fixing, to run from what needs to be felt.

And the more I release my grip on this endless craving, the more I find space opening up inside me, and with that space comes something I didn't expect: not just relief, but a kind of tenderness and love that cannot be acquired.

It is a genuine care for the person sitting across from me who is also struggling, also trying to find their way through. It is a friendship rooted in the solidarity that we're all in this together, all reaching for the same impossible safety.

Maybe that's what courage and love are, not some heroic charge into war or desire fading into duty and obligation, but this quiet turning toward pain, my own and others, instead of moving away. Not closing off to protect myself but opening up despite the risks. Staying present with the trembling heart, one breath at a time, even when I don't know what comes next.

And here's what I'm discovering in those moments when I actually manage to stay: this love isn't the love I've been chasing my whole life. It's not a love that needs something in return, nor the love that is exciting or pulsating with desire, and not the love that keeps score or sets conditions. It's not the love that fills the lack or proves I'm worthy or guarantees I won't be alone. It's simpler than that. More spontaneous and ordinary. The kind of love that can hold suffering without needing to fix it, that can witness pain without turning away, that can meet another trembling heart with recognition instead of rescue.

The chicken puff pastry is long gone, dissolved into memory and childhood. But the craving that drove me to steal for it? It's still here, woven through my life in subtler forms, in every relationship where I've wanted too much or given too little, in every fear that's made me run, in every moment I've wished things were different than they are.

Only now I'm learning to see it. To feel the craving rise, to notice the old urge to reach for relief, to stay with the fear underneath it all. And in that staying, in that willingness to be with what is rather than what I wish it could be, something shifts.

Not every time. Not perfectly. But enough.

Enough to sit with my own mistakes and remorse, with my daughter's anger, with my partner’s stress. Enough to feel my own loneliness without believing it means I'm unlovable. Enough to love without the desperate edge of needing to be loved back.

These days, my practice is simply this: one breath after another, one moment of staying instead of running, one small act of courage at a time. And trusting that in the staying, in the not-running, the love I've been seeking all along is not separate from me. It is always present, always accessible. It is what I am when I am fully present, right here and right now, breath by breath.

This kind of inner work is what I explore in my Chain of Habits workshops, where habit change is approached through understanding, not control. If you want to explore this deeper, feel free to join the waiting list here.