Abascal Dharma

[A note: this is a continuation of last week's post and parts of it, in particular my references to the Abascal Diet Plan, might not make as much sense if you haven't read that one.]

For one who wishes to take up in earnest regular meditative practice, it will be very desirable that he should be moderate in eating.

--The Buddha

For eight years, I worked as a burn ICU nurse. I encountered hundreds of badly burned patients in that time. What struck me as most remarkable is that a certain proportion of them, say a tenth or so, told me their lives were better, had more meaning since they were burned.

A study some years ago looked at people who had won the lottery and attempted to determine if they were happier since having become millionaires. What the researchers discovered is that if the winner was happy before getting all that money, they continued to be happy; if they were miserable before, the money did nothing to change that.

I have worked with some paraplegics and quadriplegics and heard stories of many others (and you probably have, too), who said that their lives had more meaning and purpose after the accidents that paralyzed them than they did before and that they were, for the most part, happier than when fully able-bodied.

For 15 years I have worked as a nurse in an HIV clinic. There is a subculture of deep emotional and material support for those who are positive that many never felt before they contracted the disease. We surround them with help that they could not have gotten prior to having the disease and their community often gives them a level of understanding that was absent before.

It is a fact that nearly all persons who survive a suicide attempt report regretting the choice and having more pleasure in life and less of an impulse to further suicidal behavior afterward.

Of course, I am not saying that one ought to seek out being badly burned, poor, paralyzed, a suicide survivor, or HIV positive in order to find meaning in life. Rather, I raise these examples to point out a very basic reality at the core of what the Buddha taught: we do not know what is good for us. In fact, the Buddha in many places argued that precisely what we believe will bring us happiness is what is most likely to cause suffering. We are certain where happiness lies and we are often absolutely, completely, utterly wrong.

Since food is what this post is about, let's take an example from that realm: sugar. We think sugar makes us happy. It tastes nice, it touches a primitive pleasure circuit in our minds, it feel luxurious. But what we choose to ignore is that it also causes suffering of both an immediate and long-term nature. Almost immediately our insulin goes wild trying to accommodate the overload of sucrose and makes us feel worse. A craving for more sugar kicks in and this can in turn cause a cycle of binging that makes us feel terrible. Long-term, as we all know, it can cause many ills, including dental caries and weight gain out of proportion to the calories consumed as sugar. It is implicated in the development of Type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, stroke, and heart disease.

Yet, knowing all this, we continue to consume an enormous amount of it. I am not speaking out here against any and all consumption of sugar: I am a fan myself and intend to have it every now and then once I am off the strict part of this diet plan. But I am trying to make the point that we are more or less clueless when it comes to what will make us happy, and sugar is a pretty good illustration of that.

I called this post Abascal Dharma, not because Kathy Abascal had this in mind when she came up with the plan, but because it fits so neatly into the idea behind the Dharmic principle of Renunciation. The Buddha did not believe in self-punishment or deprivation. In fact, he was a proponent (and an example) of the Middle Way between self-indulgence and asceticism.  But he also recognized the basic fact I have been pointing to here, that our intuitive sense of what will make us happy, what will bring joy to ourselves and to others, is misguided. We could speculate endlessly about why this is, why our most basic impulses are so off course. The theory most tossed about (and which has the greatest appeal to me) is that these predispositions are hard-wired into our primitive brains as a mode of survival that no longer serves us well. For instance, our strong affinity for sugar might be a residual impulse from a time when sweetness in food made it highly desirable for survival because it supplied sorely needed calories. Much as the fight or flight instinct in us was useful when we were a young species but now causes untold suffering, our desire for sweetness often leads to a sourness our hunting and gathering forebears could never have imagined.

There are many teachings of the Buddha, but the one with which he began, and which constitutes the core of his philosophy is that of the Four Noble Truths, which, stated simply, is that there is suffering and there is an end of suffering. He went on to say that the source of all suffering is craving, which is the desire to have that which we do not, or to not have that which we would rather not. This is where Renunciation comes in. Renunciation is in a very real way an experiment. Something deep down in us believes that if we do without something, a certain food, tobacco, sex, a shopping trip, alcohol, that we will feel worse. It seems intuitively true: something that makes me feel good in the short term must be good for me overall. But we know this isn't always true. What the principle of Renunciation asks us to do is to be scientific about it, to do without something and see if our joy increases or decreases. The Buddha bet his spiritual life that we would discover, as he had, that it would increase.

Abascal Dharma is understanding that during this three week elimination phase of the diet, when I asked myself not to consume sugar, wheat, peanuts, dairy, or dried corn, as much as it at first felt a bit like deprivation, is actually the source of a sense of freedom. Though I have made many good food choices over the years, I feel as if I am coming (slowly, gradually) to a true wisdom about those choices and how they influence my life. And how they can lead to the end of suffering.

Abascal

Those of you with long memories may recall that the original intent of this blog was to explore my relationship to food and what it meant to be a person who embraces the Dharma and is also overweight. I hasten to add that this was not a personal judgment, but an exploration. The question was not (and is not) whether or not it was somehow wrong to be overweight and a practitioner of the Dharma, but what the connection is between the two.

I suppose the first question really must be whether or not is in unskillful to be heavy. Does that seem like an odd question? To put it in context, one might ask a similar question: is it unskillful to be angry? At first blush, one might say that it is clearly unskillful to be angry, since it disquiets us so badly and often does damage to ourselves and others and the relationships between us. But what underlies the anger? Why is it there? What does it feel like in our bodies? What is the real meaning of the anger? In other words, what precisely about anger makes it an unskillful emotion in this particular instance?

What I was trying to do, way back then, was explore similar questions in my relationship to food. So, rather than asking whether or not it is unskillful to be a fat guy (it clearly is not), what I was asking is, does the fact of being overweight speak to a larger reality? Am I dodging something that I would rather not face and using food to do it? That, of course, would be unskillful, because it is resistance that leads to suffering and this kind of suffering leads us away from the path to ultimate freedom.

It's a complicated thing. As I have written many times here, food is packed with emotion and memory and history and comfort. Food is the first comforter, straight out of the womb, and it doesn't really change much for the rest of our lives, as far as I can tell. Though we begin with breast milk, we soon branch out to creamed peas and French fries, a trajectory that has the potential to end in the booze aisle. We continue to seek comfort and if we can't find it where we are, we will go on seeking it until we do. And because most if not all of these things cannot provide the comfort we crave, we are setting ourselves up for failure and further suffering.

Which all comes back to the question of Renunciation. This is also tricky to talk about because it can feel very Catholic, as if we are giving things up in order to be good (an appropriate thought for this time of year). But that is not what the Buddha was talking about. When we renounce things in this context, we are letting them go so they don't stand in the way of our happiness. Or, put another way, the very things we think will give us comfort actually have precisely the opposite effect. By distracting us from squarely facing what stands in our way, they exacerbate our suffering, somewhat like pretending a rapidly spreading cancer is just a few aches and pain, which leads inevitably to yet greater suffering.

And so, the Abascal Plan. Kathy started doing this a few weeks ago and had such good results that I decided to give it a try. Here's the basic deal: first of all, all crap goes, which really just means sugar, chemicals and overly-processed foods. Then, for the first three weeks, the elimination phase, you also delete dairy, wheat, dried corn, and peanuts. After the three weeks you add these back one by one to determine if you have a problem with any of them. If you do, they should stay out of your diet forever. And throughout (which is to say, for the rest of your life) you eat proportionally, two thirds fruit and vegetables to one third protein and/or grain.

The basic idea behind the Abascal Plan is that inflammation causes many of the health issues we experience and that quieting this inflammation by eating the right foods for our bodies will help us have more energy, less pain, and will lead to natural weight loss. Though I remain skeptical, I am hopeful.

So, I have begun (I am on my sixth day of the elimination phase). This post has already gone on long enough, so I will close here. But next time I will go into more detail about how this relates to my relationship to the Dharma, because that connection is very cogent for me, and I hope to make it so for you.