From Bagels to Buddha. Judi Hollis
for us all right here and now. Freedom for any one of us can create healing for all of us. So instead of examples from my patients’ struggles, as I had offered in previous books, I will share with you what happened for me personally. My vignettes, written over a twenty-year period, represent my continuing personal surrender process.
In my journey you will see a gentler, inward approach, one that you, too, can embrace as you travel on your own journey to surrender. You will find a personal way to give up the glommed–on, overstuffed, bloated feeling of too many bagels (metaphorically speaking), and to replace it with a free-floating, risky uncertainty. Oddly enough, as you open up and embrace that uncertainty, you won’t feel as smart, but you will know and see a lot more. This is what many who follow Eastern philosophy refer to as your “Buddha nature.”
Surrendering to that Buddha nature does not necessitate becoming religious. You can surrender to spiritual weight loss without believing in any deity. You can start walking the spiritual path even if your heels are digging grooves into the flooring. You can balance surrender with action, teasing out which actions are yours to take on and when it is right for you to let go. You act some. You wait some. It can be like listening to the pledge break announcer on public television: “We’ve got a matching donor! For every dollar you put up, our donor will provide a matching pledge.” You can echo the fishermen who advise, “Pray toward heaven, but row toward shore,” or the Muslim trader who warns, “Trust Allah, but tie your camel.”
I will not advocate for any specific organized religion; instead, I invite you to find your own spiritual connections. Spirituality and religion are two completely different concepts. I believe, and I’ve heard it expressed this way, that religion is for people who fear hell, while spirituality is for those who’ve been there. I also believe that those who face and acknowledge the fears and admit to the horrors they’ve lived through and the struggles they’ve overcome are certainly strong enough to surrender to the spiritual path. When you acknowledge feeling fear but stop fighting it, you will enter a new and stronger phase of growth. You feel the fear, but do it anyway.
None of us is ready until we’re ready. I had to weigh 222 pounds before I asked for help. I’d been a pioneer in addiction counseling since 1967 when I first worked for New York’s Mayor Lindsay in the Addiction Services Agency. I went on to graduate school, consulted with the US Navy’s alcoholism programs, and continued to develop early-addiction treatment programs throughout Southern California. I counseled thousands of others while I continued to gorge and binge.
Eventually, I surrendered over and over and over again. As I achieved en-lighten-ment, emotionally and spiritually, I lightened up the outsides, physically and behaviorally.
To maintain my seventy-pound weight loss for more than three decades, I had to learn a lot about surrender. Spiritual mentors taught me new ways to act so I could feel better about myself. As a result of “doing the right thing,” I stopped punishing myself with excess food. As an overeater, I had confused nurturance with punishment.
While finding the spiritual path, I often didn’t get my own way. I had to throw away my rule book. Each new time I gave up my self-will was just as difficult as the first time. Of course, the most difficult early surrender was following direction on a food plan. Once overeating was curtailed, all the other surrenders were that much more difficult. There was no convenient crutch of excess food to help me weather the changes. Many times I was instructed to do things totally against my instincts. For example, as a practitioner in addiction treatment who had been advised by spiritual mentors, I knew it was the right thing to refuse to bail my husband out of jail. Even though my head knew it was the right course, my whole body shook as I put down the phone receiver after I told him, “I just can’t come.” Then, before my first-ever television appearance, I quaked in fear in my size-24 flowered muumuu, and said I couldn’t do it. A spiritual mentor advised, “Suit up and show up and do what’s put in front you.” And then, after being attacked on a high-profile afternoon talk show, insisting I would not go back, I listened as my mentor directed, “It’s not your show, and it’s not about you. You have a responsibility to deliver a message.” When a jealous psychiatrist stole my first treatment program and plagiarized my early notes for Fat Is a Family Affair, I was again counseled not to sue, but to let it go. My own survival was more important. Each surrender I embraced brought more weight loss.
Most of my early surrenders were in situations involving attacks from the outside. Each time, I gave up my conniving, manipulative, controlling responses to stand with quiet integrity, allowing the universe to yield its results. I ultimately found that in seeking a spiritual solution, it didn’t serve me well to pick apart the actions of others. What benefited me the most was when I examined my own behavior and admitted my own shortcomings.
It was only after many years of practice that I was ready for the biggest surrender of all: the surrender to self. No longer was the external world menacing, but I faced a struggle from within—accepting myself as a fallible human being.
I invite you to travel with me as I journey from a Buddhist monastery in California to basement detox centers in New York, to Oprah’s favorite spa resort in Arizona, to Peruvian mountaintops, to a Native American sweat lodge outside Santa Fe, to a Russian bathhouse on New York’s Lower East Side, to yoga and massage centers in India, to the highlands of Burma (now called Myanmar), and ultimately back home to the Big Apple.
You won’t have to travel to strange lands to have your own, equally exotic, personal journey. Excesses of bagels, or whatever your food of choice may be, clog up your psyche, offering a false sense of security, a false-bottomed foundation, which keeps you feeling glued but in the end leaves you screwed. I invite you on a journey to give up that heavy, overstuffed feeling for the powerful emptiness of your own free-floating, Buddha nature. Some of these ideas were set down by Eastern holy men thousands of years ago. Some were instituted by two drunks in Akron, Ohio, more than half a century ago. Offered here is a synthesis to provide an operating mode to overcome modern, chronic food obsessions.
Intro Obesity as a Spiritual Crisis
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), obesity affects over 33 percent of Americans—that’s one-third of adults. Medical costs associated with obesity are estimated at $147 billion, and obese adults are at a higher risk for coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, liver and gallbladder disease, and respiratory problems. In addition, obese adolescents are more likely to have prediabetes, a condition in which blood glucose levels indicate a high risk for development of diabetes. Americans are some of the fattest people on earth, gorging at elegant tables, all-you-can-eat buffets, and fast-food drive-thrus, or competing in hot dog–eating contests. We are slowly and complacently adapting to “more is not enough” as we seek excess food to cope with our lives, which speed along in overdrive. Our quest to fill that bottomless plate not only affects our health, but also takes a toll on the animals and plants with which we share our Mother Earth. Sadly, as a result, some of us vomit to escape the consequences, and some, like I did, simply overeat and accumulate excess weight.
Despite our extensive knowledge about calorie counts, food combining, pulse rates, and body fat indexes, we keep putting on more and more weight. Great and wonderful tomes have already been written that explain how cultural expectations of unnatural thinness have created this national epidemic. It may be that advertisers have contributed to the anorexia-bulimia-obesity triad, but there is more to it than the model culture, fitness crazes, heart disease, diabetes, or other food-related maladies. We are facing a spiritual crisis and are eating to quell the pain while avoiding our fears. Advertising ploys work because they address America’s abundance conundrum: we have so much, and we still long for more, and yet we fear living with the consequences that come from wanting and getting more.
Fat is fear? Do you even know you are afraid? President Franklin Roosevelt addressed a fearful nation with “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Once the nation acknowledged that feeling, it could then face those fears and show up with courage, resolve, and pride.
Some of us thought the women’s movement of the 1970s would change things, but instead