I tell my retreat students that they need to remember two things: to eat what they want when they’re hungry and to feel what they feel when they’re not.
Women turn to food when they are not hungry because they are hungry for something they can’t name: a connection to what is beyond the concerns of daily life. Something deathless, something sacred. But replacing the hunger for divine connection with Double Stuf Oreos is like giving a glass of sand to a person dying of thirst. It creates more thirst, more panic.
I tell them that if compulsive eating is anything, it’s a way we leave ourselves when life gets hard. When we don’t want to notice what is going on. Compulsive eating is a way we distance ourselves from the way things are when they are not how we want them to be.
Every good enough mother teaches her child that no matter how bad it seems- no matter how many rejections or scraped knees or broken bones there are- it is going to be okay. Maybe not the way we wanted or hoped it would be, but still okay. A good parent returns a child to the place where she can trust that although she might be bitter or hateful for a moment, it’s not the end of the world. There is love here. There is light and quiet here. There is peace.
Imagine what you could do... if you stopped turning your energy against yourself and use it instead to question what you’ve been hypnotized into believing about the size of your body. And to speak up for matters to you and your children.
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
It’s not about food. It’s never about food. And it’s not even about feelings. It’s about what’s below them. What’s in between them. What’s beyond them”.
Take yourself in. Ask the questions no one ever asked you. Keep going until you know the answer and you know who’s asking. Until you realize- it’s not far away- that the essence of you, like the sky, was always here. You just happened to get distracted by the local weather for a few decades.
Ask yourself what you love. Without fear of consequences, without force or shame or guilt. What motivates you to be kind, to take care of your body, your spirit, others, the earth? Trust the longing, trust the love that can be translated into action without the threat of punishment. Trust that you will not destroy what matters most. Give yourself that much.
At its core, hatred is the desire to annihilate that which is causing us pain, in the misguided belief that if we could only incinerate what seems to be causing the pain, we would finally be at peace. All feuds, all wars, all acts of revenge are built on this principle, including our inner war with food and weight.
I do believe that there are frozen places in ourselves – undigested pockets of pain – that need to be recognized and welcomed, so that we can contact that which has never been hurt or wounded or hungry.
But staying with the emptiness – entering it, welcoming it, using it to get to know ourselves better, being able to distinguish the stories we tell ourselves about it from the actual feeling itself – that’s radical.
You miss the life that happens in the middle zone – between now and what you think your life should be like. And when you miss those moments because you’d rather be doing something else, you are missing your own life. Those moments are gone. You will never get them back.
Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds – our stories of loneliness, rejection, grief – that we don’t realize they are in the past. They can’t hurt us anymore.
Live as if they know that they are worth their own time. Live as if they deserve to take care of their bodies. Live as.
Stephen Levine, a Buddhist teacher, says that hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. Being one place and wanting to be somewhere else. Being constantly agitated – another word for nonaccepting – about the inevitable. Being in a relationship with someone and refusing to surrender to the love because you don’t want to give yourself to something you will eventually lose.
I kept becoming larger in her presence, kept returning to who I would have been without the pretense of who I thought I should be.
You can deal with the loneliness one night at a time. But what you can’t deal with is the idea of loneliness, the fear of it.
We are always whirling in the trance of deficiency in which we equate being alone with loneliness, restraint with deprivation, being silent with being empty. I get seduced by the promise of adding yet another ornament to the tree of myself and forget to pay attention to the heavenly invisibles.
There isn’t a someday. There never was. No one has ever been to the future that you keep putting your life on hold for. All we ever have is now. And if you continually put your life on hold for what your life will be like tomorrow, or the next year, or when you finally lose the weight, you won’t recognize that you already have what you want because you will have spent years training yourself to want, not have.
Your body is the piece of the universe you’ve been given, the place where love and joy and grief happen, where happiness unfolds. Do you really want to keep believing that it’s a horrible, ugly, lumpy thing? Do you really want to keep punching yourself like that?