DEPENDENT ORIGINATION

The mental phenomena such as craving can be understood to be causally conditioned. In Buddhist's teachings there is something called the ‘law of dependent origination’ which asserts that sensory contact conditions feeling, feeling conditions craving, and craving conditions grasping. Meditative practice and 'mindfulness...' help to cultivate a gap between feeling and craving. It is in this space that we find our freedom, the freedom to have a choice rather than merely to react compulsively. The word buddha means “one who is awake”. To be awake to our inner world, rather than operating on automatic pilot, is a powerful preventative measure against relapse.