Knowing how to master one's body and vices and the Fat Hungry Ghost

This situation is all about learning about your body and what it needs and wants. For instance, I had a problem with severe headaches. I found out that cutting my hair as short as possible without being mistaken for a skin head helps and another thing that significantly helps is wearing a beanie. Furthermore, you must exercise too and eat right, countering out the vices and tail spin the meds put you on to be lazy and eat unhealthy foods. I found natural body weight exercises along with free weights had the best effect on muscle mass instead of machines, which never even made me break a sweat.

On another note, you have to control your vice to drink, which seems to be common for people who hear voices. My philosophy on this is they prey upon us when we’re weak, so you have to stay strong. Stay strong physically and the mind naturally follows. I have also suffered from sexual dysfunction. Based on my two or three best attempts at quitting smoking that went beyond a week, I regained full sexual function, so that is the next vice on the list for me to conquer.

One way you could look at this is from the buddhist perspective. In buddhism there is something like a hell where you become a fat hungry ghost in the afterlife if in this life you were highly material and hedonistic and could not control your vices. The fat hungry ghost has a fat gut and a narrow neck. It has a constant desire to eat a certain kind of food that burns when it goes down its skinny neck, and it cannot transition beyond this form until it learns to control its cravings. This is sort of analogous for some of us in our situations. Ultimately we will feel much better if we learn to control our hedonistic cravings and vices like sloth and master our bodies.

I have in the past thought of the body as a temple, but lately I’ve been tearing it down.

If you enjoy something, do it.

If you need something, it owns you.

Things can’t make you happy, if your not free.

Having something is not the same as being something.

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