"Feeding Your Demons™" is a method that I developed actually while teaching the traditional chöd practice,
when I realized that for myself and also for others,
we were relating to the demons more as Buddhist concepts,
than as things that were really alive for us in our lives, issues in our lives.
Feeding the Demons
It's a five-step process,
in which you give form to, personify, ask questions to and then feed a demon,
that is a personal demon, like a fear.
It could be a fear of the dark, a fear of dying,
it could be depression, it could also be a physical illness.
So with this method, you personify and then dialogue with,
and essentially then dissolve your body and feed this demon.
It's a way to make personal something that could be conceptual.
The next question that you asked is what is a "mara," or what is a demon?
There are different ways to classify demons,
and Tibetans have a lot to say about demons!
Machig [Labdrön] had four demons:
the outer demon, the inner demon,
the demon of elation, and the demon of ego clinging or arrogance.
Outer demons are anything that you perceive with your senses, that you react to.
So historically or traditionally, they would say it's like a bear or a mountain lion,
it's something outside that you have a reaction to of fear.
But these days it could be more like a person that you're afraid of, or a situation.
Let's say you have social anxiety and you have to do a public speech, that's an outer demon!
Then, inner demons are demons that arise within the mind.
They're not connected to a specific outer stimulation.
Let's say you have depression that's not connected to a death or something like that,
it's just within you, it's in your own mind.
So one of the ways in which these two are distinguished
is that external demons are called demons that block,
and the inner ones are demons that run on and on.
So the demons that block mean that when you see that mountain lion,
you freeze, you block, you grasp, you cling, and so your experience stops.
It's like you're in an airplane and there's turbulence,
all of a sudden your experience stops and you're in fear,
so that's a demon that blocks.
The inner demon, the demon that runs on and on,
is our minds and how they just don't stop.
They just keep going right on and on.
So that's two: demons that block and demons that run on and on,
or outer and inner demons.
And then demons of elation.
Another way to say that would be demons of aggrandizement,
and these are demons that can either be spiritually or materially aggrandizing.
So things like fame, for a teacher, that's a potential demon.
Or you have a special dream and then you think you're special,
that's a more subtle and inner form of the demon,
that is generally associated with our spiritual development,
and then clinging to that and sort of enhancing the ego through that.
Then the fourth demon is interesting,
because you'd think it would be the first demon because it's at the base,
and it's the demon of ego-fixation or ego-clinging,
or in Tibetan it means arrogance.
It's that very fundamental fixation that all the other demons develop from.
So what I realized after thinking about these demons for a while,
is that the reason this is fourth, not first,
is that it takes that long to get at the root.
And first we can see the outer demon.
Also if you're sort of immature psychologically,
you think the other person is the problem, the outside, right?
And then you get maybe a little more insight,
and you realize, "Oh no, it's in me."
And then you keep going deeper and finally you get to this root.
So those are Machig's four demons.