My Caffeine Addiction, Oh Boy

Welcome back to AND THE SUN, a newsletter where we try to pick the strangest assortment of content we possibly can that still somehow fits together about creative, artistic, and inventive approaches to meditation.

Before we start this week, a reminder:

• This coming Saturday, September 28th from 2-4pm, Eastern, I’m co-hosting a meditation workshop with Evan Leed about attachment and authenticity. The code ANDTHESUN gets you 50% off. Would love if you joined!

• Here’s the link. ← ← ←

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Guided Meditation

This week’s post is about caffeine. Specifically, my caffeine addiction, and what caffeine does to my mind-body.

So naturally, this week’s Guided Meditation is about coffee (and tea). It’s split into two parts: the first part is meant to be listened to before your morning beverage. The second part, after. (If you don’t drink caffeine, the first part will work just fine on its own.)

Today’s post is about my experience of coffee, and the psychodrama of craving coffee. The post is, therefore, frenetic – partially be design, and partially by consequence of the post’s contents. Enjoy. ☕️

Writing Day 1

Set the scene

I write to you today from the grand corridors of SoHo, nestled into the classic setting of a SoHo cafe, where decades ago the air might have been full of the chimes of America’s generational creatives.

Now, I find myself here at the delightful Stone Street Café, looking apprehensively at my double espresso served in a cup meant for a cappuccino. Luckily I’m not apprehensive due to its taste; it’s pretty good today. (For exceptional coffee, I have another Manhattan coffee recommendation, should you, too, hear the song of the sirens.)

I’ve been trying to quit coffee. In terms of the mental dynamics, it seems like a legitimate addiction. Crave it before, have my 30 minutes of delight, transition into the uncomfortable phase that lasts another, oh, eight hours? Then go to bed excited to wake up and do it again.

Caffeine has been in my life for years, but it’s been an especially salient vice the last couple of years, manifested as my morning coffee, because it interacts with my inner work and meditation process. With coffee, my attention ricochets around, and my body fills with big emotion sensations that move like waves in a stormy ocean. These emotions become fodder for practice.

Window into the experience

I often muse about the mechanics of my coffee-caffeinated experiences. When I’ve had coffee, it feels like I reflexively tense around emotion sensations, like the sideways bend that invariably occurs when someone touches that soft spot between your waist and your ribs. And that tension then makes the emotion sensation get stuck, which then causes turbulence – like oil swishing around a gas tanker with nowhere to go.

Halfway through the espresso in the cappuccino cup right now. There’s head pressure and light buzzing in my sinuses. I’ve hit the phase where I feel inspired to reach out to people. I texted a friend I’ve been meaning to reconnect with, asking how he’s spent his time recently, suggesting we find something fun to do together. I want to find our shared joys, again, which is how our friendship began.

I simply cannot corral my attention. It’s moving from one thing to the next, like lunging from platform to platform in a glitchy old computer game. I challenge myself to stay in the flow, to keep open.

The upper part of my chest, connecting up into my neck, is tight. It’s a tense and release, tense and release type of thing. In my solar plexus, where the butterflies of inspiration live, they’ve woken up and begun fluttering.

By the way, here’s one of my favorite videos on the internet, slow-mo espresso extraction. 🥵

45 minutes on – until now I’ve been trying to talk to Ivan about AND THE SUN strategy, and he’ll be able to attest that it’s been all over the place for a bit – things are mellowing a little bit. The slight, tight, bright haze around my head and into the visual field is there. My focus is more settled. It feels like the tight-excite feeling in my chest is settling down into the depths of my belly.

Ivan’s talking, I’m typing while looking at him, I don’t think he knows this (correction upon editing, he did know this), my shoulders are pulled up towards my ears, chest pulled down in a freeze. 

Relaxation

I did a weekend meditation workshop recently with a great meditation teacher who hammered in that the way into stillness is to relax. Relaxation is defined as ease, rather than tiredness or zoning out. 

When you really consider it, relaxation can become radical: described from the subjective perspective, to be relaxed is to be able to both radically take in and radically let go. It feels radical because there are deep structuring beliefs which might make taking in and letting go hard: beliefs about what’s bad for you (so you’re not open to taking it in) and beliefs about what’s good (so you don’t want to let it go). So to say, fuck it, I’m going to relax: that’s radical for me. It almost feels regal, sitting there with the “compassionately not giving a fuck” attitude. 

Caffeine makes it hard to relax, so I’ve been considering cutting out coffee in service of moving my practice forward into more stillness. This isn’t just for practice’s sake; practice is about continuing my own journey of development, growing into the best version of myself in the world (my relationships, my creations).

Stirring the pot (of coffee)

Yet when consider the idea of breaking my coffee habit… it gets unexpectedly wild inside. I’m sad about losing, for now, the joys of the fluctuations. It feels like leaving a relationship that wasn’t right. When we tell ourselves the stories of the relationship, we focus on the joys. In reality, it was more complicated. And was the relationship even that bad in the first place? It’s not so bad. In the scheme of things, it’s just fine.

Writing Day 2

Getting some help

It’s been surprisingly hard to end this piece of writing. In fact, it was so hard that I talked to two therapist-friends who know me well, and who are also both writers. It’s been hard because I wanted to conclude the piece by reflecting on how the role of coffee in my life. But when I do that reflection, I suddenly find my thoughts and feelings bouncing around with chaotic gusto, and it’s disorienting.

In fact, it reminds me of times in the past when an anxious attachment bond is breaking – disorientation is a hallmark. There are moments of being enmeshed with the desire for coffee (the attachment) and the fear of leaving it behind (the broken attachment bond), and there are moments of ease when it’s all fine and not a big deal in the slightest. And these two types of moments, the enmeshed and the clear, can switch off with lightning speed.

Clarifying

So, one therapist-friend challenged me to clarify to myself which of my psychological and behavioral patterns I’m pointing to when I say, “my caffeine addiction”. Relatedly, this friend also suggested delineating coffee from caffeine as two different, but related, psychological and chemical entities.

It was helpful to delineate the aspects of my experience like that. Fuzzy stories, like “I’m addicted to caffeine”, can make inner experience more confusing because the conceptual understanding – the goal of which is to make it easier to work with reality – does not actually describe the reality.

Here’s what I came up with:

• If I decide tonight I won’t have coffee tomorrow, empirically there’s a very strong chance I will have coffee tomorrow.

• The internal experience / thought patterns about coffee super-duper resemble ending an anxious attached relationship.

• I feel a sense of craving about coffee. If I consider having tea instead, I feel sad about not having coffee.

Reflecting

With the added clarity from the support of my two therapist-friends, and a night of sleep, I’ll leave you with several reflections:

• What do I expect will happen if I cut coffee out? What (mis)perception of the future am I avoiding? When I consider cutting out coffee – even substituting with tea – I feel this deep sadness. The feeling of love is mixed in there, somehow. Is this like sugar, where we try to satiate our desire for love by eating sweet foods?

• There’s the ritual of coffee, separate from the ritual of caffeine, separate from the chemical action of caffeine. There can be a craving dynamic with each of these. What happens if I drink decaf espresso and green tea at the same time? That’s today’s experiment (see video below).

• There’s something attachment-y in my impulse to cut out coffee. It belies the belief that I can’t change my relationship to coffee. This mirrors an attachment pattern I’ve been working through in my interpersonal relationships, in which historically I haven’t felt the sense that it’s possible to change the nature of a relationship dynamic. Slowly, through intentional inner work, I’m developing the visceral sense that I can change things in relationships. It’s liberating, empowering, and connecting.

Cinematographic exploration of decaf espresso and green tea. High concept, poor execution.

Lastly, a meta-reflection: I’ve learned from working on this post that there might be a difference between how it feels to write in newsletter mode and how it feels to write in personal mode. In newsletter mode, I’m writing for an audience and I feel a little more removed from my emotional situation of the moment. In personal mode, though, the whole art is expression: staying right there with it, as though I were talking about an emotionally hard thing to someone close to me. Unexpectedly, this became a personal piece about me working through my coffee addiction rather than an illustrative piece of examining the experience of coffee. It feels like an experiment in tone for AND THE SUN. Does this belong here, or on my personal blog? I’d love your curatorial input.

Next week, we’re rolling something new that we’re really excited to try. We’ll be interviewing and collaborating with an artist whose work is inspired by meditation. Stay tuned.

👩‍🎨