I am tired and stressed. I want to eat AT all these stressors. I want to eat at the asshole security guard at work today. I want to eat at all the unreasonable patients I had to deal with. I want to eat at our idiotic work computer systems. I want to eat at the fact that we will now be without a car. Wouldn't ice cream make all of this better? What's a few thousand calories between friends?
I used to like to drink at people, situations, and things, too. Didn't work then, either. I'm sure that the ice cream would, indeed make me feel pleasure and indulgence and like I'd earned this damn thing. But, just like the drink, the eventual outcome would be less than desirable.
Don't get me wrong. The last thing I intend to indulge in is wrapping myself in either guilt or self-pity. I don't see how I can maintain positive self-esteem if I am constantly be saying how bad I am or how shabby it is that I can't do anything I feel like doing. That's not my way of doing things anymore. I deserve all good things in life. I deserve to feel good about myself. But I also deserve to live out my life without diabetes or hypertension or exhaustion, and that's what I get from overeating. Guilt, shame, and remorse may feel like they should be motivating, but they aren't, not ever. They also are not kind, and I have no intention of being unkind to myself.
Part of the problem for me is that the consequences of drinking were so readily apparent, whereas the consequences of overindulging in food don't show up for a while. I have even been able to deceive myself from time to time that there are no consequences if I happened to hit a low point in my weight on the day I weighed myself after a weekend binge. "I see no problem here. Carry on." And carry on I did.
So I won't overeat today, I will write about wanting to instead. A huge part of the philosophy of the Dharma is that simply acknowledging something, without judgment, without trying to either push it away or cling to it, weakens the power of that thing. The Wizard of Oz was just a little man behind a curtain, and my big, bad need to find a solution to every bad feeling is just a chimera, too. I feel frustrated, exhausted, and stressed. There is nothing wrong or bad about that. There is nothing that needs to be fixed. I can breathe in and know that I am feeling these things. I can breathe out and know that I am feeling these things. They only have the power over me that I give them.
I used to like to drink at people, situations, and things, too. Didn't work then, either. I'm sure that the ice cream would, indeed make me feel pleasure and indulgence and like I'd earned this damn thing. But, just like the drink, the eventual outcome would be less than desirable.
Don't get me wrong. The last thing I intend to indulge in is wrapping myself in either guilt or self-pity. I don't see how I can maintain positive self-esteem if I am constantly be saying how bad I am or how shabby it is that I can't do anything I feel like doing. That's not my way of doing things anymore. I deserve all good things in life. I deserve to feel good about myself. But I also deserve to live out my life without diabetes or hypertension or exhaustion, and that's what I get from overeating. Guilt, shame, and remorse may feel like they should be motivating, but they aren't, not ever. They also are not kind, and I have no intention of being unkind to myself.
Part of the problem for me is that the consequences of drinking were so readily apparent, whereas the consequences of overindulging in food don't show up for a while. I have even been able to deceive myself from time to time that there are no consequences if I happened to hit a low point in my weight on the day I weighed myself after a weekend binge. "I see no problem here. Carry on." And carry on I did.
So I won't overeat today, I will write about wanting to instead. A huge part of the philosophy of the Dharma is that simply acknowledging something, without judgment, without trying to either push it away or cling to it, weakens the power of that thing. The Wizard of Oz was just a little man behind a curtain, and my big, bad need to find a solution to every bad feeling is just a chimera, too. I feel frustrated, exhausted, and stressed. There is nothing wrong or bad about that. There is nothing that needs to be fixed. I can breathe in and know that I am feeling these things. I can breathe out and know that I am feeling these things. They only have the power over me that I give them.
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