From Bagels to Buddha. Judi Hollis
feeling fear at all costs. Striving for and competing against are now our mantras. On national television shows, we pit obese sufferers against each other. Thin viewers laugh at the contestants while the obese cry and feel further hopelessness. We tragically compete at weight loss. America’s national epidemic is evidenced in the bulbous softness of our bodies, while we fear letting too much softness and kindness into our hearts. Fear, if unacknowledged, has to go somewhere. For many of us, it’s piled onto our plates and eventually lands on our hips, thighs, and stomachs or waits in ambush inside our arteries.
Could it be that our national obesity crisis is based on this cultural denial? Denial stands for Don’t Even Notice I Am Lying. Rarely do we sit down to just say out loud, “I’m afraid.” Acknowledging the fear doesn’t mean succumbing to it. It just means you embrace who you are and what is going on in your life. The word fear is sometimes read as an acronym: False Evidence Appearing Real. A raunchier way to describe fear is F_ck Everything And Run. As you begin your personal journey as witnessed in this book, fear will come to mean Face Everything About Resistance.
A Tibetan monk, who was an honored guest at a Manhattan literati party, was approached by a full-of-herself popular novelist. She asked, “So what is Buddhism, anyway?”
He smiled. “Do you want the short version or the long one?”
She replied, “The short version. It’s a party, after all.”
“Well, the short version is ‘Pay attention.’”
Baffled by not enough information, she prodded, “Well, the long version, then.”
He responded, “The long version is ‘Pay attention. Pay attention. Pay attention.’”
When you practice paying attention, you will find that there is a lot more going on than you ever noticed before. When excess eating is curtailed, your senses will be heightened, and you will feel your emotions in a much deeper and more vibrant way. You will enter the spiritual dimension with a sense of awe.
Coincidences may begin to occur as you start to realize that your actions will often produce instantaneous and direct consequences. You will notice your own part in creating problems in your life, and you may find yourself watching your new, gentler behaviors with amusement. As you do things in a whole new way, your love affair with food and excess will change. Sometimes your attraction to food will be a mere shrug, as if to say, “No big deal.”
I find it a great cosmic joke that most of us are impatient and intolerant individuals who have been given a body that won’t lose weight on our timetable. Instead, it produces unexpected cravings, nonscheduled undulations, gaseous emissions, and clamorous noises beyond our will. Over time, I found that I would have to learn to trust that body as my conduit to spirit. I was advised early on, since I wasn’t a believer and rebelled against any mention of God, to try the Quakers’ concept: “God is the still, small voice within.” This body of mine that seems to have a mind of its own will be my goddess, my transmitter, my dilemma, my teacher, and my karma.
Karma is what my addict patients would refer to as “What goes around comes around” and what my Bible-thumping friends would quote as “You reap what you sow.” My Jewish relatives would advise that you reap your rewards here on earth in this lifetime. My existentialist professors would caution that there are always consequences, and that “not to decide is to decide.” For those of us who love to eat, karma is best explained as “There is no free lunch.”
It seems that many of us avoid surrender and avoid accepting how gifted and special we really are. Perhaps you might be afraid to truly live the big life intended for you. Perhaps you might be hiding under a rock, refusing to let your little light shine. As sentient beings, we are chosen to express a deep spiritual longing, what Carl Jung called a “cosmic homesickness.” Buddhists explain that we seek “the Eternal.” We know there is more going on than our minds can dream up. For all the Freudian, or scientific, or mechanistic thinking posited during the twentieth century, today we are suffering large-scale addiction and out-of-control obesity—our modern plague.
Many may think becoming spiritual will make them look good. They hope to achieve an angelic pose, positioning themselves above the fray. Actually, becoming spiritual may make you look worse for a while. You will truly open up an avenue to your own dark side, and you may want to hide. St. John of the Cross called such periods the “Dark Night of the Soul.” Forgiving yourself may become the ultimate spiritual awakening, causing transcendence into what some twelve-steppers call “the fourth dimension.”
This transcendence occurs slowly as you take an honest look at yourself. It takes time and effort and initially seems like excessive self-obsession. One addict patient told me, “My head is permanently tuned to Radio K-F-_-C-K, all me, all the time.” Taking that honest look means acknowledging all your assets, as well as your liabilities, rendering you a little more humble. You might uncover motives and behaviors you find embarrassing. That embarrassment helps you become teachable. You’ll learn to love your neuroses, and your quirks and foibles, as signposts indicating your next spiritual breakthrough. Until you can learn to laugh at yourself, you haven’t really surrendered to the spiritual path. Eventually, self-obsession will lead to an honest appraisal of your motives and values and you’ll begin thinking more of others. You might even find them interesting.
At some point, you might even feel blessed and thankful to have a food obsession. You’ll see that your compulsive eating is a signal that something is wrong. It is a searchlight signaling for rescue boats. When pounds pile on, you get a clear indication that you’ve steered off course. What an accurate barometer. Our defects or neuroses are the signals that we are living out of sync with our true inner natures. They are our coping mechanisms to fend off fear and help us survive. Some folks never examine their true motives and needs, and instead relapse back into excesses and old behaviors. Instead of changing old responses, they retreat into familiar patterns of resentment, guilt, arrogance, and control. In the end, they binge. I wonder if they are the 98 percent of us who regain lost weight.
A spiritual life involves risk. To lose the fat risk, you must live at risk. This journey must be carried on with a forward momentum. You can ill afford to hang back and stay asleep. There is no escape into unconsciousness. Your soul knows. It will not allow dawdlers on the path. Staying locked in fear and inertia leads back to excessive eating. You must reach for your fate instead of a plate.
Sometimes people seek to avoid risk by running into analyzing. Looking back at when I opened the nation’s first eating disorders unit, I regret that I contributed to this problem. On stage and screen I was quite vociferous about the disease concept and the similarities between overeating and other addictions. I encouraged looking at the obsessive eating problem as a medical malady. I’d seen how that approach had benefited alcoholics, addicts, and their families. It helped them stop punishing themselves. I encouraged attendance at twelve-step meetings and offered an addiction model as a course of treatment.
However, some practitioners have taken this approach too far, stopping at diagnosis and not surrendering to the spiritual path of not knowing, of having fewer succinct answers. They strongly emphasize ideas about “food addiction” and are fearful of any sugar or white flour and insist on a concept of abstinence. They haven’t accepted that those who struggle with food obsession are given a problem that needs daily and continual renegotiation, and often the sufferers have to proceed blindly with no clear-cut answers. These practitioners fail to mention that many foods break down in the system to sugar anyway, and there are issues of timing and exercise involved with how the body processes these substances. They also fail to allow for any moderation or flexibility, not adapting food consumption to real-life situations. They are afraid of what Buddhists propose as the “middle path.”
Many people can survive the big traumas of life by battening down the hatches, gliding into their ninja stance, and getting ready for the onslaught. They’ve grown accustomed to stress and don’t feel that they deserve any peace. It’s the good life that presents a variety of challenges. Most don’t even know what peace looks like, or have a clue about how to be happy and content. What happens to that human fighter energy? How does one show up quietly to live an ordinary day as an average Jane?
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