Illness

I am ill. This is as disorienting to the mind as it is disconcerting to the ego. I am ill. Only weaklings become ill. I must have done something wrong if I am ill. I am angry because I am not supposed to become ill. I take all these supplements, eat right, exercise, and still I become ill. I am ill. I am pissed.

As a child and young man, the Buddha was sheltered and kept from seeing any of what is bad in life. When he first left his father's house, the first surprise he encountered was an ill person. He had never seen one and (so the story goes) never been ill himself. This was the first pillar of his awakening, the realization that illness was possible. Illness began the opening of his awareness. Much later, after he achieved enlightenment, he noted that it is the nature of all beings to become ill, to age, and to die. Since he taught the unconditional acceptance of All That Is, one can assume that he meant for us to accept these truths, too. Great.

All right, I admit to overstating the case to make a point. Yes, I am annoyed that I am sick, but what is really causing me to suffer is the overlay of commentary on my illness. I am imperfect. My co-workers will be irritated or, worse yet, think I am faking it. I must have done something wrong to bring this on myself. And, simplest yet most deadly of all, I must struggle against this, to make it not so or make it go away. I must hate it. This is so very dangerous because it is a reflection of all the suffering in the world, which is brought about, in one way or another, because we cannot accept that life simply is as it is. (Even the suffering that is wholly due to the behavior of others can be attributed to this cause, as these selfish others are operating on false assumptions of entitlement to more than their fair share of resources or power, wellness or life). It is in our very nature to become ill. Period.

As for being believed, I do my very best to live a life of integrity, to be, as the Buddha advocated, entirely blameless. Of course, I cannot hit this high a mark, but I can strive to be this person through my actions. Being a man of integrity, when I say I am ill, I am believed. This is vitally important; I speak the truth almost always. If I find myself in a position where I cannot speak the truth, I choose not to speak. Except if there is a gun to my head, I can always choose not to speak. Another person's anger because I will not speak does not obligate me to speak. One of the results of my honesty is that I need not fear that others may think badly of me when I cannot work due to illness. But I need to be reminded of this because of those decades of doubt engendered by the teachings of parents and the skepticism of authority figures when I was ill. I also have some decades of acting irresponsibly to account for. But I am not that man now; I am this one. The Buddha once said, "The past should not be followed after and the future not desired; what is past is dead and gone and the future is yet to come." I am the man I am today and not the man I was yesterday; nor can I project who I will be in the future.

So I am ill. I will take pleasure in it where I can. I have needed some extra time to catch up on a few things, so I will do that. I will just sit and read some, a luxury I have been missing. Illness has also been an excuse to go hog wild with my food consumption, so I will monitor that closely and see where it leads, while still giving my body what it needs to recover. Above all, I will remember:

OK. I will.

A brief one

The briefest of posts today. I am well but extremely busy, what with one thing and another. One of these is a quick trip to California to visit my family, an event that is always associated with food at every step. I will be blogging every day from there about how that is going. Should be interesting!

Things we believe

My weight today is 204 pounds.
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After yesterday's post, I got to thinking about things we believe. The woman sitting in front of me at  baseball game yesterday obviously believed something ("Thou shalt not talk during a baseball game") that, at least to my way of thinking, was clearly erroneous.

It seems to me that, like the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland, we often "believe six impossible things before breakfast." To take just one example: it is more or less pervasive among humans to believe that being cold or, worse yet, getting wet when it is cold can make you sick. Yet this is quite clearly humbug. Only viruses and bacteria make us sick and, no, contrary to another piece of popular "wisdom", being cold does not decrease your body's immune response to any significant degree. The reason we get sick more often in the winter is simply because we are indoors more and there is less fresh air ventilation and for both reasons we are more likely to be exposed to germs. Simple as that.

The only reason I raise this (admittedly contentious) example is to make the point that perhaps we all need to more often question our strongly held beliefs. As I started to think about it, a long list of Things We Believe That Are In Fact False occurred to me:
--There's always someone waiting to take advantage of me and unless I am constantly vigilant, they will succeed.
--Venting anger is necessary or it will fester, grow, and explode. (On the contrary, research has made it clear that acting on your anger causes it to increase, not decrease).
--Knowing about every bad thing going on in the world is essential, perhaps because if I do they are less likely to happen. I am not fulfilling my solemn obligation as a citizen of the world if I don't pay attention to every war, tragedy, and disaster.
--Being angry or annoyed at people and events that are unaware of my irritation will somehow change the annoying behavior or situation. Glaring is particularly effective.
--Worrying about something will keep it from happening.
--There are rules everyone should follow, and I know what they are.
--Meditation is about relaxation and if I try it and can't relax or my thoughts won't stop, I'm a meditation failure.
--I am lazy if I'm not constantly doing something.
--Only people with paid work are full members of society.
--Knocking on wood has a practical function.
--Making up rules for myself and chastising myself for not following them is an effective method of behavior change (and see the subset, Resolutions, New Year's type).
--When you continue to disagree with me, it must be because I have not explained myself well enough. Becoming louder, more long-winded, and/or profane will probably help.
--Someday, if I work hard enough, I will get to the end of my to-do list.
--Multitaskers get more done more efficiently. (I know a lot of people buy into this mythology, too. You might want to take a look here).
--Everyone is perfect but me.
--Everyone is stupid but me.
--Everyone is contented but me.
--Everyone feels the way they appear to feel.
--I am a better driver than you are.
--Illness can be avoided, aging is a tragedy, and death is not inevitable.

And on and on. I suspect any of us could come up with a much longer list. What these seem to have in common is a couple of things; magical thinking (if only I wish hard enough or do just the right dance or something, what I want to come true will) and judgement, either of others or ourselves. What a waste of energy! There is a world of phenomena happening every second, and we can either grasp the whirlwind or use our precious human lives wishing it were otherwise. This is our only choice, really. Step back and take a look at what you believe and ask this simple question: "What evidence do I have that this is true?" If you have spent your whole life thinking you are stupid or angry or worthless or less-than, ask yourself this question.

No one, absolutely no one is more worthy of your love than you are. 

At the baseball game

I spent a lovely afternoon today watching my Seattle Mariners get slaughtered by the Chicago White Sox. It's always fun just to spend some time out at the ballpark and chat with my Baseball Buddy Tamara. (A brief side note: like all people, I tend to make up rules and then become peeved when others don't follow them, even though they don't know what they are and have no idea these rules even exist. The tables were turned on me when a woman in the row in front of us was obviously annoyed that we were chatting all through the game. We were clearly violating one of her rules. But not chatting would have violated one of mine, so I just sent her buckets of lovingkindness and kept on talking).

I have been trying to experiment with disassociating certain events from food and eating; today I decided not to eat from after breakfast until I got home from the game. Eating has always been such an integral part of the experience of going to baseball games (and not just for me, of course), that I thought it would be an interesting experience to try not having anything. Not that there is anything wrong with eating at a baseball game, of course. It was more like a thought experiment to see what would happen.

This was a pretty spontaneous decision, so I didn't think about the fact that this meant going without any food from about 9 AM to nearly 5 PM; that was a bit of a shock to the system. Toward the end of the game I felt just a touch lightheaded (though that may have been faintness due to the lousy play of my team). Of course, I could have gotten any number of different things to eat from the concession stands, but I really enjoy playing with my hungers and seeing where the state of my body meets my state of mind and how each influences the other. By vowing not to eat until I got home, I had the opportunity to see that, contrary to the propaganda my mind likes to put out, I do not suffer any serious consequences from a little bit of deprivation, a short period of being a touch hypoglycemic. I did get to feeling a bit sad at one point. I had to remind myself that this was entirely a function of my body chemistry and had no basis in my psychological reality (though the 13 White Sox hits can't have helped any).

The other advantage to this approach is that I have all sorts of calories to play with this evening, not having used them up earlier in the day (as I did yesterday, by the way, to my chagrin and disappointment). I fully intend to use 80 of those calories on a pineapple juice bar; I love these things, and they don't often have them in stock at my store; I always buy several boxes when I see them. Yum. So tasty, and with big chunks of actual pineapple in them. Love it.

I intend to continue with these sorts of experiments and in particular want to look into fasting, perhaps choosing a day a month to completely abstain from food. This would not be in an effort to lose weight (I believe fasting is a terrible way to do this and can be self-abusive if carried to an extreme) but to clarify my relationship to my body and to food. Because my discipline is awareness, anything that puts me in touch with these relationships is worth doing. As I look into it further, I will continue to post on the concept of fasting and how I will approach it. Should be interesting.

Presence and empowerment

I listened to a very good dharma talk by Tara Brach a while back and thought it covered a lot of what I have been trying to say so am transcribing parts of it here. If you want to listen to the whole talk, I got it from Dharma Seed and you can find it here.

This is a rough transcription and not polished prose. The solid text is from the talk, my comments are italicized. Parentheses are paraphrases of what she said.

"When we have this narrowed attention, it’s actually a way of trying to control our experience. Most moments, we’re trying to make sure something bad doesn’t happen and become more comfortable. Presence and control don’t go together. Most of the time we feel some stress, the feeling that something is going wrong or something is missing. When we’re controlling, our mind is generating stories about what we need to do and what can go wrong and how others are looking at us.  When we try to fix ourselves, it actually deepens the belief that something’s wrong with me. The more we judge and try to fix ourselves—that’s controlling--the more we actually, deep down, believe, 'something is wrong with me.'”

 

I would add that this is one of many things that we as humans absolutely know to be true that are in fact false. For the most part, we are not threatened and need not be on high alert. We can relax, but find that hard to believe. We can accept and love ourselves unconditionally, but think this is vanity or in some other way ill-advised. This doesn't make any logical sense; how could it be wrong for me to love myself? But we still most often believe it.

"Controlling leads to more separation, more suffering. (It comes from the self perceiving itself as a separate entity in need. The alternative is an) empowering presence, which is a quality of presence that naturally leads to activity, but it’s more enlightened activity, it’s activity that’s coming from the depth of who we are, not from that tight place of feeling separate. The more we control, the more we’re cut off from the very resources that actually make our life meaningful. The more we chase after something, the more we grasp after the person or the item or whatever it is; the object, the food, the less there’s actually presence that can enjoy. The controlling gets in the way. How do we move from the habit of controlling, where we get tight, we get narrow, we strive, we defend, how do you move from that to this empowering presence, where you are willing to stop and tap into who you really are?"

This reminds me of a topic that deserves its own post, that of “poverty mentality”, the persistent idea of not having enough that endures far past its usefulness (it thinks it is keeping us safe) and disrupts our ability to be happy and whole.

"When we are empowered, we are tapping into the universe’s wisdom, the universe’s love, the universe’s strength and power. Meditation is a training in this tapping in, in this presence. And the reason it’s challenging (is because) all of our habits make us want to control, not come into presence. We notice this is happening…and we bring a quality of kindness as we meet it…. This is how we access the presence that empowers. The pathway home will always involve in some way these two wings of awareness and kindness. This doesn’t mean any kind of passivity. The alternative is not to lie down and be a doormat.

"What we start discovering is that, when we remember the truth, we are invited back to presence, and it empowers our heart, because that’s when we can draw on the love that’s here. The loving is not available when we’re in controlling mode. It’s there; we’re just not awake to it. The meditation deconditions the habit of controlling. It allows us to then act and live from that part of us which is most loving and most wise. When we offer that presence to another, it helps them remember, it helps them to move from their defensiveness, from their controlling, it helps them to come back into the depth of who they are. We create spaces (of safety and comfort) when we are present for our own heart to wake up and our own wisdom to wake up, and when we hold that presence for others, when we are not trying to make someone be different. I think of this as the definition of love: when we are with someone, that presence absolutely accepts that being as they are in that moment, it actually invites out that being."

Busy day!

Just a quick note today; it has been a very busy one. I went out doing errands, then spent a few hours with my friends Spencer and Lily, who are about 10 and 7, I think. Very fun. Tonight I am going to a work party, where I will be very restrained and conscious in my eating. All good stuff. Life is precious. I am grateful.

Guest House

OK, one more poem, then back to prose, I promise. But I couldn't pass this one up while we are on the subject of how we react to what comes to us in life:

Guest House
This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of all its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
--Rumi 

What a wonderful sentiment this is, and what a change from how most of us live our lives. We think of ourselves as wrong or bad for having those malicious thoughts or wishing ill to others, but these are not who we are. At heart we are kind and generous and it is only when we despair of ever being anything worthwhile because we continue to think badly of ourselves that we fall into the trap of negativity. What an irony that all we need do is welcome these "unexpected visitors. Welcome and entertain them all!" And you will note that these are not our thoughts or feelings, these are visitors, who come from God knows where and go out the same way they came, if we let them. That's the problem. If we lay claim to the ugliness and silliness, the sadness and the pain, then they do indeed become the people we are, though only temporarily. As soon as we are able to recognize that we are something much finer than a person who could have such ugly thoughts or moods, we must logically conclude that they cannot be who we truly are, and therefore must be mere transients passing through.

The Buddha was very clear: we are already free and it only requires us seeing that for it to be true. But this seeing is not easy to acquire, only because it is buried under literally generations of conditioning to believe otherwise. What motivated our ancestors and ourselves to bury this light so deeply? It can be nothing but fear, and fear has never yet led to the light. Yes, we will feel fear, but like the other visitors, we can let it pass on through, no matter what shambles it may leave behind, because we know that we have treated it with the respect and dignity all our guests deserve. What a joy to realize that I am merely landlord to a rowdy bunch of ne'er-do-wells and not a person undeserving of all that is good. This is the core truth of who we are.

Shiftless

My last post put me in mind of another one of my favorite poems, this one by Raymond Carver:

Shiftless
The people who were better than us were comfortable.
They lived in painted houses with flush toilets.
Drove cars whose year and make were recognizable.
The ones worse off were sorry and didn't work.
Their strange cars sat on blocks in dusty yards.
The years go by and everything and everyone
gets replaced. But this much is still true--
I never liked work. My goal was always
to be shiftless. I saw the merit in that.
I liked the idea of sitting in a chair
in front of your house for hours, doing nothing
but wearing a hat and drinking cola.
What's wrong with that?
Drawing on a cigarette from time to time.
Spitting. Making things out of wood with a knife.
Where's the harm there? Now and then calling
the dogs to hunt rabbits. Try it sometime.
Once in a while hailing a fat, blond kid like me
and saying, "Don't I know you?"
Not, "What are you going to be when you grow up?"

I love this poem because it so clearly expresses what I was trying to say in the previous post: we seem to operate on the assumption that doing something has an inherent value and is somehow invariably superior to doing nothing. But look at all the harm that comes from the impulse to DO. We push ourselves, force ourselves, become unhappy, use precious resources, and often end up with nothing more profound or worthy than the specious claim to have DONE something. I think we need to far more often ask the simple question, "So what?" or, even simpler, "Why?" Have you asked yourself that lately, about anything that you do because you feel duty-bound to do it? Why? Or, says who? Or, you and what army?

Of course, I am not arguing for indolence, as other posts in this blog make clear. But I do think that such questioning may tease out the places in our lives where the voices of grandparents, parents, teachers, siblings, aunts, and uncles are tell us we must do this or should do that without any clear justification for these demands.

I insist on this clarification because it can set us free. It is also a way we can open our hearts to a new sense of ourselves in the world, can lead us toward the realization that we are suffering from our sense of obligation, torturing ourselves with shame for what we have not done. No one is more deserving of love than you are. The Buddha said so. So let's start acting like it, what do you say?

The sage

My weight today is 209 pounds.
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One of my favorite poems (and thanks to the superb dharma teacher Heather Martin for introducing it to me) is this from Hafiz:

The small man
Builds cages for everyone
He knows,

While the sage
Who has to duck his head
When the moon is low,

Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the beautiful, rowdy prisoners.

How often are we the small man, building cages for our fears, for those we dislike, for every situation we encounter that makes us in the least uncomfortable? We even build cages for our dreams and hopes. In the process we build cages for ourselves, narrow little boxes of what we believe is possible or right. One of my favorite examples is the idea many of us have that we must always be doing something. If we don't we are being lazy or shiftless. Somehow we have come to the belief that we are not inherently worthy of sucking breath on this earth, and to justify our existence we must be busy, as if we are saying to some unseen authority figure, "See? See? I do, too, deserve to be here!" News flash: there is no such authority figure and you don't have to be doing all the time. To come to rest is one of the most profound and beautiful things we can do. To do nothing may be the most productive thing we ever do.

Whereas the sage...the sage has made for himself a world so large, a consciousness so expansive that he must "duck his head when the moon is low". The vastness of his being is that large, yet he is physically no larger or smaller than any of us. We must understand that we are all sages, that if we were to realize how very vital we are, all of us would have to duck our heads when the moon is low. What the sage does with his time is not stay busy, not build cages, not worry about worthiness or the next item on his to-do list. He drops keys. Faster than the small man can build them, the sage is dropping keys to open those cages. I like to imagine that the sage has a gentle smile on his face as he drops these keys. It is not his intent to frustrate the small man, but he cannot stand to see the prisoners remain locked up.

And what of these "beautiful, rowdy prisoners"? This is our own true nature yearning to be free of all the shackles we have placed on it. These are our griefs, our joys, our misbehavior, our love, our dancing spirit, our reckless abandon, our compassion, and our pleasure. These are lusts and disappointments and angers and fears. When we are acting as the small man, we think we can keep these rowdy prisoners caged, but we can't, and the small man is constantly frustrated by their repeated escapes. He thinks of them as recidivist, while the sage knows they have never been anything but free.

Make no mistake: you are both the small man and the sage. This poem is not to be read to mean that you are a small man aspiring to be a sage or (we should be so lucky) a sage who used to be a small man. We are all both, because our fear causes us to build the cages, but our wisdom demands that we drop keys. But we can aspire to spending more time as the sage than as the small man, and using our wisdom to know when we are in the cage-building business so we can call a halt to the construction. We can laugh, smile at our futility and sit down to a nice cup of tea instead. Being a sage is not hard work; it is the manifestation of the relaxed and open mind. It is peace itself. It is nirvana.

Transition

Because all things arise and pass away and as this is a fundamental aspect of their natures, it is inevitable that I will face many transitions. If I am paying attention, there are even many transitions in every day, a leaving behind what I was feeling or being or doing a moment ago to feel, be, or do something different in this. I suffer when I am in transition, but I know this is of my own making. Pema Chodron says that not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. Because change is in the nature of things, when I attempt to cling to how they have been, it is inevitable that I will suffer.

So, I am returning to work after a very busy week off, going to Jamie's graduation, spending time in Portland, going out to Whidbey. And tomorrow Kathy is leaving for a month to go care for her ailing mother in Milwaukee. We have been married a long time, and our only child has long since left to make his own life, so I will be on my own. I readily confess that I do not do all that well when Kathy is gone; she has become too much a part of my identity and my daily life for me to be able to perform that role with aplomb. However....

However, need I say it? This gives me the opportunity to reflect on the nature of what makes up a life and the transient nature of all things. Now, don't get me wrong, it's not as if I am turning a sow's ear into a silk purse here; I am not "rising above" the experience to make it a spiritual quest or some such rot. No, I am simply recognizing the painful nature of change and seeing that in the midst of that pain I can gain some spiritual understanding. Or, put more simply, since it will hurt anyway, I might as well get some good out of it, hadn't I?

I am at the stage of my life when parents are aging and dying; this is precisely where I should be at age 55, isn't it? My sister and my younger brother no longer have any in-laws, my older brother and myself are both down to one, and they are both ill. My siblings and I still have our parents, but they are clearly aging, too. When I speak to my mother-in-law, one of the things she acknowledges is that almost all of her peers have died.

I think it's a hard job being a human.

The weekend portmanteau post

As promised, my post from the weekend:

Thursday, August 18, 2011. As I mentioned in the last post, I am keeping an ongoing log of what I want to say these three days we are on Whidbey Island. I am staying here with friends and family to have some time away. It is beautiful here, looking out over the cove with mountain ranges beyond the mainland across the way.
These particular friends of ours are a couple with whom we try to make such a trip every year. We are also here with our son and his fiancée.

These are usually events at which there is a huge amount of eating going on, with snacking in between. This morning I used the fact that I got up early and breakfast was not slated until 9:30 to contemplate my hungers and the need I felt to eat before the meal was actually served. By taking a mini-vow (to coin a phrase) not to eat anything other than water and my beloved decaf coffee until breakfast was on the table, I was able to watch these various hungers arise and pass away without having to do anything about them. 

I have written elsewhere about the feelings of entitlement that lead me to overeating, and the inviolable right I feel to eat whatever I want whenever I want when on vacation is a huge one for me. This particular trip with these friends has a long history to it, and overeating has often been part of that history for me. Bring on the candy and the chips! Bring on the cake and the pie! Bring on the ice cream! Hey, I’m on vacation! But this is a perversity of the idea of relaxation, really. It doesn’t truly make me any more free or relaxed to stuff myself. This is just another form of conditioning I have used over the years to make me feel that I am not truly constrained by rules of anyone’s making while I am taking this break. The bottom line problem here is that when I feel this way, I am thinking of my changed relationship to food as a set of rules rather than a philosophy of eating that transcends all times and situations. It is my belief that setting up such a rule book only invites rebellion, as if I am two people, one of whom sets a bunch of rules and the other a rebel who chooses to break them from time to time. This dividing out of my self is not psychologically or spiritually healthy. It’s also not the truth, which must be the core of any sustainable system of belief.

Which is to say: my goal is to not set up rules on this vacation, but also not to overeat, and to use the urge to gorge as an opportunity to look once again at my relationship to food and what that urge might mean in this context and in my life. It should be interesting.

Friday, August 19, 2011. A grey, bleak, beautiful day on the coast.
The inlet is socked in with fog, but the sun is trying to make a breakthrough. I am inexplicably sad today, probably for many reasons. I do have a tendency to leave a place before I’m gone and have to guard against not being able to enjoy our last full day here. I love the people I am with and would not like it if this became anything other than a joyful time. One of the lessons of the Buddha I sometimes feel least able to incorporate into my everyday life is the idea that all things arise and pass away, the name for which is usually translated as impermanence. It is worth recalling that when he said all things arise and pass away he meant all things, not just those we wish to have arise and pass away. All those we love will age, sicken, and die, as will we. This was one of the core discoveries that led the Buddha on his path, and is one of the things that can guide me on it as well. My mother-in-law is ill, as is my brother’s mother-in-law, coincidentally enough. We all struggle financially, emotionally, and physically. This is the nature of being a human in this world. It is inescapable.

When I am feeling the way I am now: sad, anxious, tired, lonely (that’s an odd one in this context, isn’t it?) I know that the surest way out of this is down into the middle of it. To push it away from me is to increase my suffering and it is not all that uncommon for it to increase the suffering of others as well. So, my vows for this day: I will strive above all to ensure that I do not increase the suffering of those with me. I will invite the rowdy prisoners of my grief, my pain, and my sadness into the house of my heart and set them free there. They cannot do any harm to me that I do not let them do. They only have the power I give them.

Saturday, August 20, 2011. To a remarkable degree, my aspirations of yesterday were effective. Kathy has taught me the invaluable lesson that when I go into any situation with the attitude that I am here to be of service, it makes my life and the lives of others immeasurably easier and more pleasant. I know this sounds a bit odd, this “being of service”, as if we are serving every whim of others and placing ourselves second, but that’s not how it is meant. Rather, it is an attitude shift, a recognition that seeking to have my needs met by others is futile at best (and extraordinarily selfish at worst); instead, I can think how I can make the lives of others better, how I can practice the brahma viharas in every context. 

We had a beautiful day on the beach and even built a driftwood teepee together.

It was a magical, nearly perfect day, even if I did come in last by thousands and thousands of points playing Farkle. Ah, well, even there I was being of service, allowing my fellow players to get all the good rolls. I hope they appreciate it. Today we came home and rested from our vacation, a much needed transition. Transitions are hard for me. I hope to write about that tomorrow.

On Whidbey Island

As expected, we have no internet access on the island (I'm writing this brief post on my phone). I will be keeping a running log on my laptop and will publish the whole thing when I get back. Oh, and it's lovely here!

Exercise

After posting yesterday, I realized that I left exercise off the credo I wrote there. Exercise is vital to this whole thing, not only because it promotes good physical health, but because it promotes psychological health and a sense of well-being that cannot be achieved any other way.

Hopefully you have a form of exercise you love. Like dieting, for many people exercise has become a duty rather than a pleasure to be anticipated. Though I know it qualifies as fun for many people, when I see all those grim-faced people all in a row on ellipticals at a gym, it makes me shudder. I love to walk, the feeling of motion, of my body doing what it's supposed to do. I usually listen to something as I go, a book chapter or a dharma talk, that also feeds my mind, although I also quite enjoy walks without that, or even as a formal walking meditation (I'll write a bit more about that another time).

I am not a big proponent of needing to do a particular kind of exercise, though I think it has to be aerobic to do much good for either your body or mind. What's most important is that we find something we love so we will stick with it over the long term. Just like my philosophy of eating, this is not a short term fix with short term goals, but a way of life to which I am committing myself. It is much more important to make it an essential component of our lives than to fulfill the dictates of some program or regimen.

Though there are few statues or paintings depicting this, the Buddha walked a great deal. He was an itinerant teacher, going from town to town and depending on the largess of those he taught to make his way. He had no permanent home. Only in the rainy season did he set up an encampment to rest and wait out the rains. So if we need inspiration, we can think of the Buddha himself walking hundreds and perhaps thousands of miles in his lifetime to carry the message of freedom and the end of suffering to those who would them transmit it through the generations to us.

A summary

As promised, here is a summary of the philosophy I am propounding in this blog and by which I am currently living my life. This will also be helpful to me, no doubt, as a reminder of just what I am doing and why.

The Buddha was a real human being who found enlightenment over 2500 years ago and spent the rest of his life teaching the path to freedom he discovered. He was not a fat guy. Because he taught the middle way between indulgence and asceticism, it is highly doubtful he would have been self-indulgent enough to overeat to that extent.

The Buddha taught only two truths: there is suffering and the end of suffering is possible. All the other teachings and corollaries and commentaries are an attempt to teach these truths and the path to their fulfillment.

Each of us already have enlightenment in us, but it has been obscured by generations and centuries of fear, instinct, and training. These have created layers upon layers of rock-hard assumptions, beliefs, and actions that stand between us and the precious jewel of enlightenment. Nonetheless, it is there in each of us all the time, waiting to be discovered.

When we are not working toward our own enlightenment and that of others, we are suffering. This is true by definition, since enlightenment is the end of suffering.

Overeating and being overweight are forms of suffering. Not only do they cause us to suffer directly, they are also futile attempts to find the end of suffering through external means. This will never and can never work to find the true end of suffering and as long as we are practicing futile means, we will be neglecting skillful means.

Deprivation and dieting are also forms of suffering. This blog is not about dieting or control or guilt or shame. In fact, the first step in the process of any change is complete and loving acceptance of ourselves as we are in this moment in time. This moment in time is all we have until the next moment comes, and no moment should be wasted in self-hatred of self-loathing. This, too, cannot and never will lead to the end of suffering.

The key to a healthy relationship to food is mindfulness. There are many ways of becoming more mindful about how we eat. Jan Chozen Bays' book Mindful Eating is a useful if imperfect guide to this. Particularly useful is her description of the seven hungers.

Meditation is one of the keys to eating mindfully. It need be no more complicated then finding the time to watch the breath arise and pass away. The more one meditates, the more benefit derived, but each person much find what works best for them. Typically, meditation is a minimum of 15 minutes a day. On retreat, one meditates up to 18 hours a day. Finding a happy medium between these two should be the goal. 45 minutes at least once a day is fairly typical.

My primary method to develop mindfulness about eating is calorie restriction. The formula I use is ideal weight (in pounds) times 10 equals daily calorie intake. I do not consider this deprivation because my attitude toward it is to use this discipline to increase my awareness of my relationship to food. I also am not depriving myself because this amount of calories is sufficient for my well-being and I assume that consumption in excess of this is an attempt to find the end of suffering through the medium of food, which will never be effective.

When on vacation or out to eat, I do not count calories, but still try to eat mindfully at all times. I abandon the calorie counting primarily because it's just too much of a hassle and because I don't want my practice to become a pain for others. Because I do not consider the calorie restriction to be a burden, I don't splurge when I am not observing it. Rather, the way I eat on vacations and such is simply a different way of paying attention to my relationship to food. Yes, I feel the urge to gorge myself when on vacation, but why is this? Is this just habit? Does it really make me feel better? Is it on the path to the end of suffering or a form of suffering? On the other hand, as past posts have made clear, I don't practice deprivation, either.

Eating itself can be a method of contemplation and meditation that leads to the freedom of the end of suffering. Life cannot be separated into the good and the bad, the useful and the not-so-useful. Everything is grist for the mill of mindful investigation.

Despite what we may have been taught, it is not a waste to leave food on our plates or throw it away. It makes no sense to think that eating an excessive amount of food is somehow less wasteful than to toss it out. Ideally, we would always have the perfect amount in front of us (or perhaps just slightly less than that) and never waste a thing, but this is not always possible. Let it go. The starving children of Darfur were not going to eat the rest of your burrito anyway.

There are many teachings that point to the path the Buddha taught, and some of the most useful ones are the Four Noble Truths, the Five Precepts, and the Brahma Viharas. These are not obscure or difficult to understand. The Four Noble truths simply state that there is suffering and an end of suffering and describe the path to it. The Five Precepts suggest that it is most skillful to avoid killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, harmful speech, and intoxication (and I would include overeating in this last). The brahma viharas describe four ways we can be more attuned to the path to enlightenment: lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

No one is more deserving of love, kindness, compassion, and joy than you are. Celebrate life. Food is part of the celebration, but so is feeling physically whole. There is a balance that is possible. I wish nothing less for all of us that we should find this truth for ourselves, and to find it now.

The brahma viharas

But first...another gastronomical event. We went to a lovely little French bakery in northwest Portland (23rd and Thurman, for those of you in the area) called:

Where we shared this nice pastry. A little cookie filled with custard and those little puff pastries on the top with some sort of glaze on them. Scrumptious. It is nice to be able to share something like this rather than feeling deprived because I can't have one of my own. I know it is heart hunger calling out to me when I feel this sense of deprivation. Who knows where this impulse arises from? I was never really deprived as a child, at least not of food.
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I want to promise something to those of you who are reading this and are not familiar with all of the Buddhist terminology I am tossing about. I am going to talk a bit about the brahma viharas (really not at all mysterious, though the name sounds like it) and then in the Tuesday post I will go back and summarize things and relate all of this to the overall subject of food and weight and such. I am aware that some of this may be a bit obscure, but I swear to you it all makes sense in context. It concerns me that I may have waded in too deeply and perhaps not taken all of you with me. I will do my best to make the context clear on Tuesday.
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Since I wrote about mudita or sympathetic joy yesterday, and mentioned that it was one of the four brahma viharas, I thought it would be worthwhile to go into the other three, though not in any great detail. The link in the previous sentence can provide more insight into these essential concepts.

First of all, the term brahma vihara itself. The words are usually translated as "divine abode", but we should remember that in the time and place the Buddha was teaching, everyone would have understood precisely what he meant when he said this. He was determined to make the dharma accessible to everyone, and part of that was to use terms lay people could understand. So a more up-to-date translation of brahma vihara might well be "ideal place" or "most comfortable home". This is a place all us would want to live our lives, which is precisely what the Buddha intended.

I covered sympathetic joy in yesterday's post. The other brahma viharas are lovingkindness, compassion, and equanimity.

Lovingkindness, translated by some as simply "friendliness" is taking the attitude of wishing all people to be happy and free of suffering. There is no idea in Buddhism that if we have this attitude we can free others of suffering or keep bad things from happening to them; this would be magical thinking, and the Buddha did not advocate any such hocus pocus. Rather, the point of such loving aspirations for others is to set our minds in the direction of love rather than suspicion, bitterness, or anger.


Compassion is perhaps best defined by its root meaning, which is "to feel with". When another is suffering, we can enter into their mind state to the best of our ability and wish for them that this suffering may cease. It is all too easy to see the suffering of others and feel pity, which is essentially a thinly-veiled comparison of their plight to our own lives and the underlying pleasure that we are not suffering as they are; compassion is an antidote to this feeling.


Equanimity ties these all together and serves as an assurance that they will not get out of control either in the direction of excessive involvement in others' sufferings or self-serving reflection on them. It is also very important to recognize that we must extend lovingkindness, compassion and sympathetic joy to ourselves. Without this reaching out to what is needful inside us, practicing the brahma viharas is nothing but martyrdom.

As with all the teachings of the Buddha, these are not commandments or even "shoulds", but what are known as "skillful means". When we practice the opposites of the brahma viharas, which is to say greed, selfishness, anger, envy, pride, hatred, resentment, cruelty, and their "near enemies" attachment, pity, comparison, and indifference, we create suffering for ourselves and others. When we practice this path of the brahma viharas, we put ourselves in the way of joy and genuine, lasting happiness. Of course, we cannot control the waves or the wind life sends our way, but we can set the sails.

Dove Vivi

Yum! I hope I have made clear that while this is a blog about losing weight, it is also about the absolute joy of food and eating. That is part of the problem with dieting, it seems to me, that food becomes the "enemy" and we give up far more than we gain. As I have said in a prior post, I would rather die a diabetic death than put myself into an adversarial relationship to food or anything else. This was a big part of the Buddha's message, that one must find the joy in life; this joy is not even particularly well-hidden, but is part and parcel of our everyday lives, if we were but to look for it. An ancient sage named Atisha one said, "Always maintain only a joyful mind". As with so much of what are known as the lojong teachings, this is more an aspiration to be contemplated than something it is possible to live all the time, but the point here is that it is indeed possible to live in joy all the time, and that this is the state of the end of suffering. It is not my intention to add to the suffering of my life by making myself an adversary of wonderful food.

I ate with family last night at Dove Vivi, a wonderful pizza place in northeast Portland. This is the sign outside the little storefront operation, and one of their pizzas,
the sweet corn and carmelized onion. All of their pizzas are on cornmeal crust. It was some kinda wonderful. I also had a slice of the pesto and spinach pizza. Also quite a treat. I passed up on the third slice my mouth hunger was telling me I really wanted, but my stomach was quite certain was superfluous at best.

I feel so fortunate that I have family and friends I can spend time with and share these sorts of things with. Jamie's family is wonderful and, as her mother said, we have all gotten very lucky. I couldn't agree more. But I have the sense that all of us have also worked very hard to bring this sort of "luck" about. One of the things that Kathy brought to mind for me yesterday is the concept of sympathetic joy. In Pali (the language in which the teachings of the Buddha were written), this is known as mudita. This is one of the brahma viharas, a way in which we can incline our minds. Like any other thing in which we train ourselves, from riding a bicycle to another language, it is a matter of taking the time and effort to do this, but the benefits are enormous.

Sympathetic joy is the training of the mind to live in joyfulness in situations where disappointment or (in particular) envy might cause us to take a negative view of an event or person. As an example, yesterday the graduation ceremony went much more quickly than we anticipated and felt a bit chaotic all the way at the back of the seating area, so we missed the actual moment Jamie went across the stage to receive her diploma. What might we have felt? Disappointment, if that moment is what we came for. Irritation, that those around us were so loud that we couldn't hear or that the sound system was not powerful enough to allow us to hear. Anger, that we couldn't sit any closer and get a good view of her. General annoyance that there were just too damn many people in such a small space, that they couldn't shut down the farmer's market next door for just this one day to cut down on crowds and noise. And on and on and on, right? It seems like there is never a lack of locations for the placing of blame.

But because we were there merely to bear witness, to simply be present at the event and not have any specific expectations for how that event should unfold, and above all because we can practice mudita, we could see that all around us were families and friends who were celebrating this huge step that one of their own was taking, and we could bask in our sympathetic joy for them. The gift is this: all of this joy, the joy of all these thousand or so people is now our joy, too! We get a share of every moment of pleasure they are feeling.

The many faces of joy. What a pleasure. This is all by way of getting back to how very fortunate I feel to be among people who love one another, and my recognition that it is part of the work that each of us has done to this point that we can feel that love without reservation. Perhaps because of the deeply-felt sense of threat that seems to be hard-wired into us, as I spoke about in earlier posts, this does not come as naturally to us as we would like, and I give thanks to all of those around me who have worked to be the people they are, so I can bask in their love. It is an honor to be among them.

Portland

Just a brief entry before going out to dinner. A lovely day today, watching Jamie graduate, spending time with her family and friends. Have not felt compelled to go overboard with eating and that's a nice change. Seems like this mindfulness stuff might actually be working. Going out for pizza, though, so that should be a new challenge! More tomorrow.

Eating while traveling

Kathy and I are now in Portland to visit our son and his fiancee. She is graduating from college tomorrow. We like to stay in this hostel when we are in town; it's like our home away from home.

Traveling is a difficult situation for those of us trying to be conscious of our food intake. There are entirely different demands and "rules". I have a friend who took her own food wherever she went so as to be able to keep up with her portions and control them. This worked very well for her, but for me this would be a bit extreme.

But what I have been writing about up until now is the fact that the calorie restriction I have imposed on myself is merely a tool to make me more conscious about my eating, not a hard and fast limit. On the way down in the (rented) car, I used this time to be aware of my craving for something to eat and how related it was to both boredom and habit. There isn't much to do when one is driving, and not that much more when riding. It has been a habit of mine to eat quite a bit of snack food during these drives. But today I resisted this temptation. We had each gotten a sandwich from a place near us we really like, and about half way to Portland Kathy took over driving and I ate mine; this was the first time I had eaten since we started. I ate half my sandwich (something of a victory in and of itself), some fruit, and a few rice chips, then stopped. My stomach hunger had been assuaged, my cellular hunger was fulfilled, and what I really had left was this feeling that I should eat some more simply because that is what one does on a car trip. I didn't.

So much of my behavior around food seems to be tied up in just such habits as these. I have grooved patterns into my eating life and whenever I run across a trigger, the habit seems to run all by itself. I mentioned that I have been under some stress lately and have not been sleeping well, and this is another huge groove I have worn into my eating behavior, to comfort myself with food. And I did some of that, as I reported, but I also spent some time writing about it here and thinking about it some, contemplating, meditating on it, and it helped. The stress and anxiety are painful, I have to say, but as with so much else, when I simply let it arise, it becomes quite evident that it will not kill me and will not harm me, and it will pass away, as all such things do. And the habits of a lifetime can be revised, not by my willing them to be, but by the mere recognition that they are ephemeral phenomena that only have the power I invest in them, and no more.

Now we are going out to dinner with Jamie's family. Another challenge. We shall see.

Hunger, part III

A brief note to Lulu: your comment wound up in spam, for some reason. I told the system it wasn't and it should now be posted. Hopefully the system will recognize you from now on.
A brief note to Paul: I loved "Not As Exciting As A Car Wash, Perhaps". I laughed out loud at that.

So...I had a nice scoop of Full Tilt ice cream on the way home today, orange Dreamcicle flavor. Just what the doctor ordered. Some days are just like that. A whole lot of heart hunger, though my mother-in-law came through the surgery just fine. Quite a bit of mind hunger(one of the sample sentences for mind hunger Bays uses in her book is even, "I deserve an ice cream cone"!). Ah, and nose hunger; when I walk into the shop, mmm, they bake their own waffle cones. Then eye hunger: pink! orange! yellow! chocolate brown! Mouth hunger, just imagining what it will taste like. Probably a bit of stomach hunger, since I had just gotten off of work and was a bit hungry, though I don't kid myself that nourishment was really what I was after, at least not physical nourishment, so very little cellular hunger, if any.

Those are the types of hunger that Bays talks about and that I find to be quite accurate, in my experience. I wish I could say that I had the ice cream so I could write this post about it and let you know exactly how all these hungers work ("I make this sacrifice so you don't have to"), but of course that isn't true. I just wanted an ice cream cone and got one. Loved it, too. I have no intention of ruining a perfectly good ice cream cone with guilt or shame. Heavens, no!

A little note on the next week: I have promised myself to write here everyday, but while I am on my trip I have no idea what my internet connection or even cell phone service will be like. I may end up writing something in word processing and then transferring it when I get back. But I will, one way or another, write a post every day. If I end up using my cell phone, I have noticed that the formatting is a little weird, so if it looks strange, that's why; I'll fix it up when I get back home. Thanks for reading!

This is the day...

This is the day that my mother-in-law goes in for surgery to remove a mass and determine if it is cancerous and if there are metastases.

This is the day before we leave on a week-and-a-half vacation which is actually two separate trips. While they are both wonderful, neither is entirely relaxation.

This is the day before we rent a car for these trips, which for some odd reason still makes me a little anxious. I guess I like the security of having my own car and knowing for certain that she is there and ready to go. Of course, my car is there and not ready to go, so that doesn't help.

This is the day after the night that I didn't sleep very well, probably because of all of these things.

I guess I'm just saying that this is a stressful day, and recognizing that stress is one of my major triggers for overeating. Surely a scone will make me feel much, much better? Telling on myself helps to keep me from going down that road.

Another comment on comments

OK, so to follow up on yesterday's post about comments: you still have to choose something in the pull-down menu, but two of the choices are now "name" and "anonymous". Of course, the latter you can just choose and that's how it will appear. If you choose "name", you have to fill in the box, but you can put whatever you want there (now, Paul, don't get carried away).

To Lulu: the odd thing is, your comment appeared in my email as having been made on the blog, but it never appeared on the blog itself. Strange. If you wouldn't mind continuing to try, I would appreciate it, so we can figure out what's going wrong. Does anyone find the "fill in the squiggly letter" thing obnoxious? I would rather not remove all of my protections against spam if I don't have to, but if it's in the way, I can.

Hope this helps.

Hunger, part two

Yesterday I started a discussion of hunger, using Jan Chozen Bays' Mindful Eating as a template. Let me quickly say something about this book before I comment further. Now, first I have to say that this is purely my bias, and I don't want to alienate anyone, but I also don't want anyone to be scared off by the seeming rigidity of the book. So...folks who take up Zen tend to be a bit...doctrinaire. They really seem to like to make up rules and disciplines to follow. It is my observation that this proclivity predates their involvement in Zen. Similarly, I became a nurse because I was already compulsive; nursing didn't make me this way. In any case, just think of this paragraph as a warning label or something. I would love for people to read this book, but I think doing all the exercises and following all the disciplines might just make you (and me) crazy, unless you have a predisposition to this sort of thing, in which case, go for it!

My duty done in that regard, let me continue to comment on Bays' analysis of hunger. I think we can all relate to the idea that not all hunger is created equal, so to speak. The ravenous hunger I feel when I am depressed is entirely different from the ravenous hunger after a vigorous walk. I think she is right on the money when she describes these different hungers. When she described eye hunger, my mind immediately went to the window of a patisserie in Paris. They make their confections so attractive to the eye that I just want to eat them all, and right now. Here's a picture of the one I thought of:

Yum. Another interesting example for me is chocolate. I actually don't particularly like chocolate (I know, that makes me odd man out), but I love the way it looks. Though I would rather eat a carrot, nothing looks half so wonderful as a really good brownie. This is clearly eye hunger. (Nose hunger enters into it; I enjoy smelling chocolate, too!) For some people, coffee is this way; they like the way it looks and the way it smells, but can't stand the taste. (Not me; anyone who knows me well knows that a very strong cup of decaf is pretty much never far from my hand).

Nose hunger is a big one, too. One of the more interesting phenomena I have experienced is when some unrelated smell or experience can invoke in me a distinct olfactory memory of something like strawberry-rhubarb pie (yum!) or a hamburger. I just read an article about some restaurants in the New York area and the man behind their creation was very specific about the smells he wanted these places to emit so as to attract customers. He was clearly aware of how nose hunger works. Nothing is quite so attractive to me as the smell of a good cinnamon roll (hot, gooey, lots of cinnamon, with raisins, no frosting, thank you very much).

But nothing strikes me as being half so perceptive as her description of heart hunger. When I am sad, or when I come to reflect on how hard life seems sometimes, or on my aging and that death will come to me and to those I love, my impulse is to turn to something to fill the hole that feels as if it is gaping in the center of my being. I could eat an entire pan of my mother's macaroni and cheese, or her wonderful apple crisp (which no one other than my big brother--including me--seems able to replicate successfully) when I am feeling sad or forlorn or done badly by. I used to go to alcohol, but that wasn't a very successful strategy (to put it more than a bit mildly), and I have given up pretty much every other intoxicant (see Wise Action in the Fourth Noble Truth post), so what I am left with is food.

When I quit drinking, an image came unbidden into my head, a giant archway with neon and flashing lights that spelled out "End Of Fun", and I thought it was through that archway I was walking. OK, OK, I thought, I have to quit this habit because it is killing me and destroying my relationships and all that, but I am pretty certain I will no longer have ANY FUN ANY MORE EVER. (Of course, this conveniently ignored that it hadn't been fun to drink for a long, long time). When I contemplate not eating whatever I feel like whenever I feel like it, I get this same feeling. I mean, I have given up tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, caffeine, and meat, and now I am supposed to give up Full Tilt ice cream?

Well, no, to begin with. My way of going about this doesn't really deprive me of anything. I will post at another time on the tricky problem of negotiating discipline as a practice, but deprivation is not part of the plan. The point here really goes to the heart of the Buddha's teachings, which is this: when we reach for anything in an attempt to make our bad feelings go away or to create good feelings out of things, we are in the midst of suffering. It may not seem like it, because our minds are convinced that we have just solved the problem with whatever substance or distraction we have taken on but, just like my delusions around alcohol, the fact is that, though I may enjoy it while I am in the midst of gorging myself on Full Tilt, it doesn't really create anything lasting except a larger waist. What does lead to an end of suffering is recognizing the feelings for what they are and incorporating the concept that all things arise and pass away. When our bad feelings stay, it is because we have clung to them, have invested them with more meaning then they actually have.

At one point today, I was very sad.  I really couldn't explain it. It didn't seem to be related to anything in my immediate experience or environment. Fortunately (I'm not always this wise), I did not cling to it, try to figure it out, or do anything about it. I just allowed it to arise and pass away. Of course, I am not saying that if there is an action to be taken we should avoid taking that action. But we all know that most of what goes on in our minds is merely a passing show and doesn't relate to anything real. Thus, we can let it pass without clinging, and it evaporates like dew in the sun.

I will continue this discussion of hunger tomorrow.

Comments

A couple of people said that they have had difficulty posting comments to my blog. I think the issue was that you had to sign into some program or another (like Google ID) in order to comment. However, I have now disabled this, and anyone should be able to comment. Please let me know if you still have problems. And please comment! I would love to hear what you have to say. Unfortunately, if I start to get a lot of spam, I might have to turn the settings back on, but I will try not to. Thanks for reading!

Hunger

Hunger is not well-understood. It seems to me that it is even less known than thirst is. When I am thirsty, it almost always means that I need more fluid, though I may have a dry throat from allergies or nerves, but usually it is clear that what I need is something to drink.

But with hunger my subjective feeling that I want something to eat is very complex and it is very difficult to analyze exactly what this means. I can look in the mirror and know with some confidence that I would not suffer much from a few days without food, but at the same time I feel a bit lightheaded if I don't eat a little something between meals, especially on work days. But even when my body is not asking for nourishment, I can feel a hunger so deep that I would rather go through just about anything than not feed it, or so it seems.

In Mindful Eating, Jan Chozen Bays identifies seven distinct hungers; eye hunger, nose hunger, mouth hunger, stomach hunger, cellular hunger, mind hunger, and heart hunger. She also says that thirst can sometimes masquerade as hunger. This makes a great deal of sense to me. I know that I often eat for reasons other than bodily needs, and most often because I am tired, sad, or stressed. But I had never really considered how many different ways there are to be hungry. I would like to spend a bit more time on this topic and will take it up again tomorrow.

(This discussion on hunger is continued in a second and a third post.)

The weight and the wedding

My weight today is 208 pounds.

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I went to a wedding last night. Weddings are tricky. I get so swept up in the celebratory atmosphere, and the event is so highly charged with emotion, that it is difficult not to just go with the flow of things and eat the place down. Fortunately, I don't drink, I'm a vegetarian, and I don't particularly care for cake, so there's three things off my plate (quite literally) right there. I did put some water in my champagne glass so I wouldn't look entirely out of place during the toasts. There was some pretty intense drinking going on there, too, but that's neither here nor there to me (though I was a bit concerned about the so-called designated drivers on their third glasses of wine, plus the champagne; but that's just another thing I get to let go of!)

My eating was pretty restrained, but I didn't feel at all deprived. They did have some pretty nice side dishes that I could make a meal on, and I drank mostly water. Kathy found some sparkling lemonade for us, and that was very nice. All in all, I had a very good time. The couple were strangers to me (the bride is Kathy's co-worker) and that always feels a little strange, as if I am an interloper, but it's always a good thing to help people celebrate something joyful.

Polly's last bath

A silly little video of me and Polly going in for a final car wash....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX2CL3E7fhE

Control

The specter of death has come into my life in a very real way with my loved one's illness and I recognize that my fear is causing me to try to control everything in my life, including food. For someone like me--basically afraid and constitutionally compulsive--this is tricky territory. When I try to over-control, it is an effort to avoid the feelings of helplessness and despair that death inevitably brings up; it is the mind believing that if I do everything on my to-do list then nothing bad will happen and death will go away. On the other hand, if I allow the mind to "diagnose" me as trying too hard to control and therefore recommend that I let loose, I may turn around and indulge in compulsive behaviors to avoid the feelings in that way.

Of course, this is not truly the conundrum it seems to be. When I ask my heart what the right course is, I tend to hear the truth (if I can listen to it over the noise the mind puts in the way). As one of Kathy's friends said when her own mother was dying, I must "take a deep breath and make room for the feelings." They are unavoidable in any case, and if I don't allow them in as they arise, they may overwhelm me when the dreaded event finally comes. This is no petty concern; more than one suicide, more than one divorce, more than one shattered life has come out of just such pent-up feelings.

I must quickly make a distinction here and hopefully dislodge a misguided impulse. When I speak of allowing the feelings in, I do not mean that one must act on them, and most certainly not that one must act out. The old myth that if one doesn't express the feelings that arise by beating on a pillow or screaming or eating a hot fudge sundae are simply nonsense. None of those are feeling the feelings; they are all ways of avoiding the feelings. Allowing them in means simply to feel them. Talk about them, write about them, heck, put them in your blog; but in the end, you and I must feel them, allowing them to arise and pass away. In the process, we will come to realize that the feelings, though they feel threatening, will not kill us, in fact will not harm us.

Grief, pain, loss, hurt, shame, embarrassment, fear; these all give us the opportunity to open our hearts further. The mind has a very limited capacity for the negative and if we live there, we will certainly be overwhelmed. But the heart has a miraculous capacity to open infinitely and make room for unlimited sorrows. What is most gratifying is the realization that this opening of the heart, though forced by the injurious, stays on in us (if we allow it) and makes us more compassionate, more caring, more loving, more understanding, and, ultimately, more free.

So what?

So what does all of this talk about noble paths and truths and such have to do with losing weight, I suspect you would like to know. The fact is that those of us who eat to excess have little idea why. Pema Chodron talks about "a misunderstanding so old that we can no longer see it." This misunderstanding is the idea that we are not safe and that we must do something, anything, to make ourselves safe. This idea of safety becomes the drive to assure permanence, the idea that those things that make us feel safe will never leave us, and those that make us unsafe will never find us. Sure, we can acknowledge that these are unrealistic goals, but we still constantly strive to accomplish them. Because if we allow the unsafe to take hold, we and all those we love will die.

In ancient times, to eat when food was available made good sense because it might not always be available. It was also an adaptive mechanism to hoard food for you and your tribe; it was a brutal fact that not everyone survived hard winters in prehistoric days and to share and share alike would be suicide for all. None of this makes any sense at all, though, in our Western world. Yet most of us still believe myths we have been taught and some that are hardwired into us about food, such as: we must eat everything we cook or order in a restaurant, as a country we must hoard food so we don't go without, and, most pernicious of all for those of us who overdo it, that food itself will make us safe, at least for the moment.

What the Buddha taught was a radical reversal of this misunderstanding. He may have been the first prince of a major Indian tribe ever to turn his back on the wars, raids, land grabs, and infighting of his country and say that none of this mattered. None of it mattered because it's all a passing show and believing that the show is a permanent reality only reinforces these ideas that keep us locked into patterns of seeking and rejecting. We still believe that there is something or someone or some Being or some action that can make us safe; if not forever, then in this moment. But the fact is that we are already safe. We are already home.  When we live as if the next moment will be the right one, the one in which we will have it all together and the wolves will no longer be at the door, is to entirely miss the fact that this moment is the only moment we have. Similarly, our habit of living in the past derives, as I said in an earlier post, from the strategy of recalling past failures in order to avoid them in the future. This can be useful, but only if the lesson is learned and the experiences are then tossed away. Instead, we obsess on these supposed failures and entirely miss the present moment.

The Zen master Suzuki Roshi once said, "You are all perfect just the way you are...and you could all use a little work." This is funny because it sounds contradictory, but in fact it is not. In this moment, you are the only person you can be; if you could have been someone else in this moment, you would have been. But all of the generations and millennia of influences, the causes and conditions of our human existence have come to bear in this one moment to create the person you are now. And this person is ephemeral. In the time it took you to read that last, short sentence, you have changed into another being. Granted, the being before the sentence and the one after are very, very similar, but they are not the same. And both are perfect. And both could use a little work.

The work is the work of liberation. If we were to come to a full realization of the fact of impermanence (another core Buddhist concept), the basic truth that absolutely nothing remains unchanged in our world, we would be a long way toward freedom. If when we have the urge to eat in order to feel OK, we took a moment (the holy pause) to recognize that we are already OK and that the food can do nothing to enhance that okayness, we could become free of the compulsion to overeat. I believe this with all my heart.

Make no mistake, though; the mistaken idea of the existence of a permanent safe place is so deeply etched in our consciousness that one cannot merely make a decision to have it be gone and it will be gone. Fortunately, we have tools that can help us. Meditation is foremost among them because, among other benefits, through meditation we have the opportunity to see a most important truth about our minds: thoughts are simply ephemeral, passing shows that have no substance. They arise and pass away. We have identified with our thoughts as our true selves for so long that it comes as a rude but welcome awakening to realize that they have no solidity. In fact we have very little control over them whatsoever.

Let's apply a little logic to this. If thoughts arise and pass away without any input from us, and if we have little control over them, and if we quite often don't even agree with them, how can they be who we are? If they are who we are, then who is the "I" that is recognizing that they are not "I"? Because they are not our core identity, we don't necessarily need to believe what they say, so when they say that eating that piece of cake will make me feel safe and protected, I can simply recognize that this statement has no more validity then a claim that the sun is purple with yellow polka dots. Both of those thoughts can be allowed to arise and pass away without my having to do anything about them. I need not eat the cake. I need not look at the sun.

Pema Chodron has also said, "As a species, we should never underestimate our low tolerance for discomfort." When we feel any discomfort, we become afraid. When we are afraid, we kick into the fight or flight mode and feel we must do something or die. That something can be violence, running away, eating, drinking, gambling, shopping, sex, reading, television, drugs, movies, meditation (yes, even that), fast cars, gardening, writing, taking a bath, anything to avoid feeling that feeling or make it go away. Of course, most of these are not negative actions in and of themselves. But we need always ask ourselves what our motives are when we move away from discomfort and toward something else. Can we pause and just feel the feeling of unsafeness for a moment, rather than trying to make it go away? This may not seem like much, but this is the very nature of the beginning of liberation.

The Fourth Noble Truth

The Fourth Noble Truth describes how one can achieve the end of suffering. A quick review of the Noble Truths up to this point: 1. There is suffering; 2. Suffering arises not from external causes but from our response to them. 3. An end to suffering is possible.

The Fourth Noble Truth states that there is a path to take that will lead to the end of suffering, and that path is the Noble Eightfold Path (remember I warned you about all these numbered lists?). Before I describe this path, though, it is essential to point out a couple of things. First of all, the Buddha was saying that the complete end of suffering (which is to say Nirvana or enlightenment) is entirely possible in this very lifetime. Second, the path can easily sound like a set of commandments, but it is nothing of the sort. Once again, the Buddha was simply sharing observations from his own experience; since he had gotten there, he knew the path up the mountain, and he was sharing its landmarks. So, the path:

Wise Understanding, Wise Intention, Wise Speech, Wise Action, Wise Livelihood, Wise Effort, Wise Concentration, and Wise Mindfulness. Not everyone interprets wisdom as part of the description of these parts of the path, but this seems to me an essential aspect of them. One can expand almost endlessly on what each of these mean, but let me just briefly cover each of them, and perhaps in future posts I can expand on them a bit.

Wise Understanding (sometimes known as Wise View): in order to proceed on this path with any hope of fruition, one must understand why and what the end point might in fact be. To do this, one must have enough knowledge to make good judgments. But it is important to know that intellectual understanding alone will not lead to freedom. You will encounter many people with a great deal of knowledge and no wisdom; this is not understanding.

Wise Intention: If you choose to follow this path, you must be clear why you are doing so. If this is a self-improvement project, or if you have a particular end in mind (say, to be more patient or less angry), that is the ego/mind attempting to take control. The only thing certain is uncertainty and if one has a particular goal in mind and that expectation is frustrated, one will be tempted to think the path is not an effective one. What we are after here is freedom, not a (by definition) temporary condition.

Wise Speech is speech that does no harm. Harsh speech, lying, and gossip are typically thought of as harmful speech, but there are much more subtle forms of doing harm. One teacher took a vow to do absolutely no harm with his speech, no matter how small the harm, and to do so for a month; he quickly found he had very little to say. Idle speech is also generally thought to be unwise speech.

Wise Action: Now, don't shoot the messenger. You can't say I didn't warn you about all these lists. Wise Action is generally thought to encompass the Five Precepts, which are: To refrain from killing, taking that which is not freely given, sexual harm, harmful speech, and intoxicants.

Wise Livelihood is a way of making your living in the world that does not do harm, at least to the best of your ability. If you have a choice between being a gunrunner and being a doctor, hopefully the wise livelihood is obvious.

Wise Effort is vitally important. Quite often we can get caught up in an idea of the Ideal Meditator or the Ideal Buddhist, and strive and strive to fulfill that ideal. Sad to say, this is just the mind trying to take control over this process. On the other hand, if we do nothing, or only meditate when we are in the mood, or only practice Wise Action when we feel like it, then we are making essentially no effort at all.

Wise Concentration refers most specifically to meditation, or at least a specific aspect of it. Back when I was writing about meditation, I said that one part of it was to develop our minds to focus like the beam of a flashlight in order to make it possible for us to see the workings of our mind. This is wise concentration in its most basic form.

Wise Mindfulness simply means seeing things as they truly are, not as we wish them to be. When we are truly mindful, we are aware of the minutest perception we have, and how these perceptions are creations of our senses and our reactions to them.

As I said at the start, volumes could be (and have been!) written about the Noble Eightfold Path, but this should give you a general idea. Tomorrow I will try to tie this all together so it makes some sense to this quest we are on together.