The Buddha Still Wasn't A Fat Guy

I promised last time I wrote that I would return to the subject of the Precepts and how they apply to my (at this point successful) effort to lose weight and get to a healthier place in my relationship to food. If you have not done so yet, you might want to go back and read that previous post, because this one will make a whole lot more sense if you do.

The last of the Precepts the Buddha taught was that of avoiding intoxicants. We don't usually think of foods as intoxicants, that is, as things that create a literal state of intoxication. A few words about definitions, then:

• In the Buddhist sense, intoxication might not even be the right word. I can't read Pali, so I have no idea how the original word or words might be translated. But I interpret an intoxicant to be anything that diverts you from the ability to pursue your ultimate fulfillment (whatever that may be). This can also be something that does not affect you physically at all, such as intoxicating scents or music. And many foods—even healthy ones—can be used to mask our emotional states, which is another form of intoxication.
  
• As mentioned in the last post, the root word for intoxicant also means poison. In the broadest sense, then, an intoxicant could be anything that treats your body badly or causes you to abuse or not fully support it.
• Intoxication is not necessarily an event. Intoxication can occur over a long period of time and, as such, you may not even be aware of its effects until it stops.
• However, intoxication is a state, at least in the way I am thinking of it. The Precept says that we avoid intoxicants, but I think it is more accurate to say that we avoid intoxication. Though monks and nuns entirely eschew alcohol and all drugs, this is not necessarily the standard by which modern, Western lay practitioners (and their teachers) would judge intoxication. In other words, that occasional glass of wine is not generally seen as an intoxicant under those circumstances.

But, what does this have to do with food? Well, here's the thing. About that third point above: I think we have become entirely inured to the effects of certain food choices and have taken for granted that the harm they do is incidental to the pleasure we get from them. But this is actually far from being the case. Everything we put into our bodies has an effect, some of it desirable, but with many of them not. Especially in this world of highly processed, sugary foods, we are ingesting unimaginable amounts of stuff and much of it is doing us harm, whether subtle or more serious we can't always know.

Now, here's where we get into really touchy territory, and I want to proceed carefully. While talking about these issues, I have found that most people are very protective of their right to eat whatever they choose. Please hear me loud and clear: it is not now nor has it ever been my intent to judge or change anyone else's behavior around food. God knows, I have had to free myself from a huge number of intoxicants over the years, including alcohol, drugs, and nicotine, and I never once benefited from someone telling me that I was a bad person or was doing a bad thing. So, please don't think that what I am about to say is a judgment on what you choose to eat. It's all just information I have gleaned from my experience with this.

One of the primary tools of the Abascal Way and of any plan that aims to help you make wise choices about what you eat is the elimination diet, wherein you eliminate all those foods that might cause you to have a harmful reaction. The problem with the day-to-day ingestion of these foods is that the inflammation and other ill effects are often happening at such a low level they are not immediately noticeable. Or, they have been happening for so long that we simply consider them to be a normal part of our lives (joint and back pain being a prime example for those of us over 40). An elimination diet takes these out of our consumption for long enough for these effects to go away. You then add them back in one at a time to see which might cause you to react negatively. In this way, for example, my wife and I both discovered that we don't do all that well with gluten. We love our bread, but gluten was causing problems we never realized.

Another example (and here I move with trepidation) is sugar. I know, I know, every single person to whom I have ever mentioned this food plan has gone along with me right up until I say, "Oh, and by the way, sugar is simply gone forever. No more sugar", at which point they want nothing more to do with me. But, as much as I never wanted to admit it to myself, after eliminating it and then trying a little bit again, I am entirely convinced that sugar is an intoxicant. Our bodies are not designed to process sugar in such a refined form, and our bodily reactions are both predictable and negative. It creates inflammation and kicks you into a biochemical state from which your body has difficulty recovering. It also creates a craving for more of the same, so if you are not meticulous (and more highly disciplined than I am) you will continue consuming it, which will exacerbate the ill effects and set up a cycle of ever-increasing harm.

These effects are no joke. Sugar is a major player in the epidemics of both obesity and diabetes around the world, and these two conditions also predispose one to heart disease and stroke, not to mention many other inflammatory-induced harmful states such as arthritis and other body pain. All that from a doughnut? Sadly, yes. At least, that's how I read the evidence that is accumulating around the consumption of sugar. Don't believe me? Eliminate sugar (by which I mean ALL sweeteners of any sort—yep, no stevia, either. Nope, no honey, sorry) for three weeks and then eat some again. To make this a fair trial, you should eat a substantial amount of it when you add it back or else the effects might be too subtle to notice and you will assume they are not present. Believe me, you will feel the pain.

And the damn stuff is everywhere, have you noticed? Have you tried to buy a salad dressing without sugar lately? Good luck. It's even in most commercially produced soups, though God knows why, and nearly all microwaveable foods.

But all is not lost! When I write again, let me tell you about the joys we have found in consuming foods that do not cause all of these reactions. Because, even though I have a long list of foods (and other substances) I am no longer consuming, I enjoy eating more than ever. It turns out we don't even know what we're missing when we turn to intoxicants to feed us both physically and emotionally.

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.

Sugar

I have mentioned in this blog before the concept of renunciation, which is the Buddhist cosmology has a special meaning. Unlike the temporary giving up exemplified in Lent for certain Christians, renunciation in the Dharma is neither an abasement nor a sacrifice. Rather, it is a way of bringing to the forefront the ways in which we attempt to escape from the present moment into the trap of diversion. This form of renunciation can be permanent, such as my renunciation of meat and alcohol, or may be temporary, as a way of bringing these ways of thinking into sharper relief. A good example of this is a renunciation once taken on by the teacher Sylvia Boorstein in which she gave up purchasing fresh cut flowers for a full year. She truly loved buying these flowers, but had recognized the attachment she had to this practice and wished to come to a deeper understanding of this urge.

Over the years I have done some of what I call special renunciations, too. I once gave up ice cream for a year. Other of my renunciations have been more personal and private, but most have revolved around food. Recently I realized how much sugar has become a part of my life and have been contemplating a year-long renunciation of it.

First of all, it is important to realize that there are no rules to such a renunciation beyond those which are self-imposed. The Buddha did not say anything about the details of such a practice. For instance, though I say I intend to renounce sugar for a year, I understand that this can only be done within certain parameters, because naturally-occurring sugars exist in all fruits, vegetables, grains, and other food. It would be silly and possibly fatal to do away entirely with carbohydrates in my diet. What I use as my guide in such situations is a return to the reason for my renunciation. I must ask the question: to what, exactly, am I addicted?

Because addiction is what I'm really talking about here. This term can be overused, I know, but a definition of I like is this: an addiction is anything used as a way of avoiding the truth of one's existence. When thought of this way, one can see that such things as television, the internet, sex, shopping, focusing on the problems of others, exercise, gossip can all be addictive. I have certainly used sugar this way. This blog began as a quest for the meaning behind the reality of my inability to keep my weight within a range that is normal for a man of my age and size, and sugar has been a huge part of that struggle. One certain sign that this is an addiction for me is that the consumption of any processed sugar inevitably leads to a craving for more.

On April 13, 2011, Gary Taubes wrote a provocative article in the New York Times Magazine identifying sugar as a toxic substance. He paraphrased the pediatrician and specialist on pediatric hormone disorders Robert Lustig as saying that our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them." He refers to sugar as literally poisonous. Both Lustig and Taubes define "sugar" in this context as any source of sucrose (brown or white sugar) and high-fructose corn syrup. They argue that the problem isn't merely that these substances are empty calories, but that the way our body processes them is entirely different from the way we process other sugars, and that the difference is inherently toxic.One of the ways in which this toxic reaction may happen is that the liver cannot easily process the fructose in these compounds at the rate at which they enter the blood stream. This inability in turn induces insulin resistance, which is a problem in both diabetes and obesity, both of which have seen a meteoric rise over the last two decades. Sugar may also be implicated in some cancers and heart disease. A pretty damning indictment.

My own addiction to sugar does not take the predictable form of sodas or pastries or such things. I am more likely to get my sugar fix from ice cream or candy, from cookies, candied ginger or cocoa, lattes and mochas. No better for me than those others, certainly, but a bit more subtle. Which is part of the problem.

Another issue is the degree of comfort I get from these foods. If I am suffering from insomnia, there is nothing that works better for me than to have a big cup of cocoa. Never mind that there is caffeine in chocolate and the sugar is more likely to rev me up than calm me. Mine is clearly a psychologic rather than a physiologic response. The same applies to ice cream. It is for me the ultimate comfort food, as can be deduced from the fact that I felt the need to do a year's renunciation of it.

When I first contemplated doing a year-long sugar renunciation I thought it would be fairly simple. Cut out the candy and the cookies entirely and voila! it's done. Not so fast, bucko. The more I looked, the more I realized how much added sugar there is in so much of what I enjoy. Which brings up another question: at what point is the risk of possible toxic effects worth the pleasure it gives me? Clearly, if one is consuming a six pack of soda a day, the risks are far too high. But a dish of ice cream once a week? What could be the harm there?

(Then I went to the doctor this week and had my blood drawn. Mostly things are fine, but my HDL cholesterol is low and the first thing I thought to myself was, "Do I have to be freaking perfect just to be healthy? *Sigh*)

The answer for me, and for many such contemplations when the Dharma is applied to them, is what I referred to earlier: to what spiritual use am I putting these foods? Am I trying to (ahem) sugar-coat my experiences as a way of not having to actually live them? For me, the answer is clearly, yes, quite often that is the case.

I'm afraid it will take me a while to figure out exactly how to proceed with this renunciation plan. I will share my process with you as I go. This won't be easy but, as has been observed by those wiser than I, very few things worth doing are.

Skin

Complacency in the resting state of the human mind.

We would rather not be bothered by the thousands of events of cruelty, suffering, bigotry, despair, violence and casual dismissal of our fellow humans. In part this is certainly protective; too much goes on, we cannot absorb it all without ourselves falling into despair, which is perhaps the most destructive of all emotions, as it freezes us, makes us incapable of movement in any direction.

The other day I got in the mail a whole sheaf of photographs of myself. Naked. Yep, that's right, a pile of pics of yours truly in the buff! You won't be seeing them on the internet. Because I derive from Northern European stock (or, with less grandiosity, because I am a pasty-faced white boy),
my dermatologist (it feels odd to think I have my very own dermatologist) asked that I have high-resolution, full-body photographs taken of my naked body. She wanted to have something against which she could compare any new moles or blemishes, to make sure they were new and not just the same old, same old eruptions of dermis. The photography session itself was not particularly traumatic; I have no hang-up about my naked body and no delusion that the sight of it will be titillating. It is the body of a man of late middle age with lots of moles and lots of hair, pretty much average in pretty much every way. So, posing for a photographer, while it felt oddly like a fashion shoot (including the white umbrella-reflectors and striking poses as directed by the picture-snapper) was not in itself disturbing. But when my copy of the photos came in the mail, I felt a visceral reaction I had not expected, combined of dread and curiosity. Until this morning I had avoided looking at them.

Not from my portfolio

The Buddha taught that we should consider our bodies carefully: "In this fathom-long body, equipped with sense organs and faculties, I declare to you is the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world and the path leading to the cessation thereof." The entire philosophy of suffering and the end of suffering can be found in the body. Many have insisted that the Buddha intended to denigrate the body, asking us to see it as foul and the source of our cravings and distractions from the path of purification which could lead to the end of suffering. I find no such sentiment in the teachings, or at least not wholly so. I have read and heard the teachings on revulsion toward the body, but have also absorbed the teachings of the glory of the body. This may sound inconsistent, but it is more truly the evocation of the body as the teacher of all things, both "the origin of the world" and "the cessation of the world". To cling to the idea that the body is only to be reviled is to miss the point. Reviling the body is an exercise, just as celebrating it is. To cling to either image is to invite suffering into our lives.

She clearly disapproves

I went to see an exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum yesterday called "Elles", a tribute to women artists from the Pompidou museum in Paris. I expected to see the usual canvases of Kahlo, Cassatt  O'Keefe, Morisot and their ilk; there was very little so predictable as this. What I had not expected at all was the video installations, one of which was a naked woman (the artist) holding a live chicken by the legs until the chicken became calm, then having the head of the chicken chopped off and the same woman holding the chicken as it died, spewing blood over her and the floor. Just one example. The reason I evoke this disturbing image and the exhibit is to emphasize how clearly the show was designed to show our overwhelming disaffection and objectification toward our bodies and, in particular, the bodies of women (and to recommend to all Seattleites that they go see it).

Looking at the photos of my skin, there were few surprises. I thought my posture was better than that. Yep, there's that little inner tube around my middle that has been the subject of my most fervent hopes for weight loss. My, I have begun to sag! (Come now, Reid, you are well beyond mere beginning). What it did cause, though, was a crack in the skin of my routine image of myself and the world. We all carry with a certain version of our bodies that is notoriously inaccurate. Some of the paintings I admire the most are self-portraits that are honest and straightforward; the artist must have had to study his own body closely and in great detail (sometimes disheartening detail, we must believe) to paint such a portrait.

Both of these, as well as some other events in my recent life (A book by David Foster Wallace, a talk by Amy Goodman) have done is shake up my complacency, a necessary disturbance of the surface normality of my day-to-day life, a wake-up call of what the world is, both inside and outside my head.

I work with wounds, disturbances of skin integrity and its healing. One of the enemies of wound healing is what is called "biofilm", a glaze of bacterial matter on the surface of the wound that is fairly benign but prevents the wound from moving forward on the trajectory toward intact skin. It seems to me that our complacency serves the same purpose, this benign glaze that covers our eyes as we watch our televisions and stare into our omnipresent technoboxes. The best of art, of commentary, of actions by the outrageous, puncture our safe surround and bring us face to face with the reality—often ugly, as often gorgeous, sometimes both in a swirling admixture—of our daily lives.

This is precisely what the Buddha advocated. He did not wish for me to recoil with revulsion or swoon with delight at the sight of my own skin or the contemplation of my guts or my death. He had no desire for me to find the naked chicken woman disgusting or titillating (though of course she was a bit of both). He would have me give up neither my delight in escape nor my deeper seeking. What the Buddha asked of me is that I look at them and see what they are, truly are, in this moment, in my perception, right now. Really, the Buddha didn't advocate much of anything beyond WAKING UP.

Complacency may have been the Buddha's only enemy.

Weight loss reflections

I started this blog with the intention of tracking my efforts to lose weight. A couple of posts back, when I was talking about what I eat and why, I said that I would revisit this topic, if only briefly. As those of you who have been following this blog for awhile are aware, I have shifted my focus more to the Dharma side of things and have de-emphasized the weight loss angle. Why?

Well, it's not because I no longer think that losing some of this excess weight would be wonderful. I am aware of the health consequences of carrying even a relatively small amount of extra poundage. But here's the thing: I am simply not willing to live my life under some sort of cloud, constantly concerned about every extra pound or calorie. Put another way, I would rather die a fat, diabetic, hypertensive mess than spend the precious hours of my life worrying about my weight. Whenever I hear myself, internally or aloud, speaking in martial terms (fighting weight, struggling with it, wrestling it), I recoil. I don't want to live my life in any more struggle than is called for. Just day-to-day living is hard enough.

On the other hand, I treasure discipline and commitment. And by saying I treasure them, I mean that I find great pleasure in them, a greater pleasure than I do in eating junk, for instance. Because of this, in a normal, average week I follow the strictures of my 1800 calorie regimen six days, giving myself Sundays off. When I do this, I steadily lose weight. But many of my weeks are not "normal". When I go on vacation or to visit my parents I find it very difficult to measure and parcel out everything I eat, especially since much of the time is taken up in social eating. Not that I am one of those who, when I feel released from obligation, go buy a box of Twinkies and eat the whole thing; I have never been that kind of binge eater. But a few chips here, a latte instead of drip coffee, a cookie or cinnamon roll or two and pretty soon I have put on an extra pound or five. And since I am now visiting my family once a month, when I factor in my vacations and other time off, my "abnormal" days begin to outnumber the "normal" ones. With the decreased metabolism of a 56-year-old, I have found that, even with moderate eating, if I am not ever-vigilant, I can gain up to 10 pounds in a week.

My friends Barbara and Jim say that when they decided to take off some extra weight they always took their own food wherever they went, even out to dinner with friends or on vacation, if they thought they would not be able to calculate accurately the "cost" of the food they would otherwise be eating. That would be very difficult for me, but I get the point. When I eat with my parents, for instance, we tend to eat at places that specialize in meat and potatoes types of meals. Nothing wrong with that, and they like pretty decent places, but for a vegetarian, lean meals are hard to come by in these restaurant. I'm not complaining, but it does make me wonder how to deal effectively with such times.

Kathy and I just came back from a mini-vacation to Doe Bay on Orcas Island in Washington state.

Doe Bay

It was beautiful and restful and damn near perfect, at least for us. We didn't do much, really, though we went on a couple of hikes in two different state parks on the island. I did not pork out while we were there. We had a couple of meals in the restaurant attached to the resort, but mostly cooked and ate moderately in our own little cabin. Still, I would not be at all surprised to find I gained between five and ten pounds over those five days.

Our sweet little cabin, Chakra

Don't get me wrong. This is not a "problem" for me. I refuse to let it be. But it is a curious conundrum and one with which my thoughts are often taken up. I wonder what kind of alternative strategy I could use for those times when I am out of town or relaxing that would not make these times less interesting or fun but would still allow me to remain on the path to good health? I guess I will find out.

What does that have to do with it?

Now, wait a minute, you may well be asking, what does all of this have to do with losing weight? Isn't that the premise upon which this whole enterprise is predicated?

Well...yes and no. If you were to ask if losing weight was my goal when I started this blog, my answer would have to be no, that really wasn't what I was trying to achieve. Why? Because it is this very kind of striving that is the creation of suffering as defined by the Buddha in the Four Noble Truths. But if you were to ask if losing weight was one of the outcomes I was hoping might come to pass from writing this blog, then I would have to answer yes, of course. Am I being inconsistent here?

I don't think so. And here's why: I consider the excess weight I carry around as a symptom of suffering. It is not suffering itself unless I make it so by opposing the idea of being overweight by telling myself I am a fat slob or a weakling because I am incapable of losing it. I have given up these forms of suffering. (It is possible, by the way, to make such a choice. It may not happen overnight—it didn't for me—but you can, believe me. There is no reason to create this kind of suffering for yourself. And you may also have noticed it doesn't help you lose weight, either).

No, the extra weight I carry around is a direct result of trying to bring an end to suffering through the expedient of extra calories. It doesn't work, it can't work, but that's why it's there. Which is why I have chosen to confront this challenge as a meditation (or series of meditations) on what the Buddha was trying to say. What I have found is that the more I incorporate these principles into my life, the less I suffer. The less I suffer, the less likely I am to overeat. It works the other way, too: when I feel the urge to eat to excess, I have the opportunity to confront that urge with the understanding that I am trying to bring an end to suffering through unskillful means. Both of these lead directly to liberation if I have the wisdom to use them skillfully. Here, for me, is the most important factor, though: I do not use the fact of losing or gaining weight as a measure of my self-worth or my success or failure. Everything we confront is an opportunity to become free and this is no exception.

That sounds all fine and well in principle, of course, but what does it mean in actual fact? How do I go about this? Well, as I have described before, I restrict calories. This serves the practical purpose of aiding my desire to lose weight but the more important function of allowing me to see clearly what it feels like to have a desire to eat when I do not need any food for sustenance. Why do I want it, then? What hunger am I feeding if I eat when I am not physically hungry? What do I feel I am lacking that I am trying to fill with food?

I want to be clear that I believe with all my heart that this is a path to total and complete liberation from the fetters of this world. It is far from the only path, but it certainly is one. Anything upon which we can meditate and come to a profound understanding of the nature of suffering and the end of suffering can lead to liberation. That is why I have taken this on. It is also why most of this blog is about the dharma and much less of it is about actually losing weight. I've lost some, I've regained some, I've lost it again (I keep an Excel file with my weights in it and over the past few months the graph looks like gently rolling hills). But in the process I have come to a deeper understanding of the dharma. Am I entirely free? Well, of course not, far from it. But the Buddha made clear that such a release is entirely possible in this very life and for each of us. It is not an esoteric or mysterious path, not the purview of mystic yogis or ascetic recluses. The grist of the mill of liberation is present in every moment of every day of every human life.

Eightfold Path: Wise Effort

It has been a couple of weeks since I have addressed any of the Eightfold Path. I think it is important to recap why I am writing about this path. As I said in the introduction to this whole thing, our tendency is to overcomplicate things; all things, really, or so it seems to me, but especially this simple path that the Buddha outlined. He taught suffering and the end of suffering and nothing else, and detailed in the Four Noble Truths that the path to the end of suffering goes through the Eightfold Path.

I have already spoken of Wise Speech, Wise Action (parts one and two) and Wise Livelihood. (By the way, sometimes these are spoken of in a different order, but I am following the order in which they are presented by Sayadaw U Pandita in his seminal book, In This Very Life).

Wise Effort, the next step on the path, is defined as the development of wholesome states and the avoidance of unwholesome states. That's not really very helpful, though, is it? We all want what is wholesome and don't want what is unwholesome, or at least we think so. It's almost as if we reach this description of Wise Effort and feel we can check this one off. Not so fast.

Someone once said that we dislike samsara but are addicted to its causes. (Samsara, for those who might not be familiar with this terminology, is all of those things that keep us from Nirvana, or complete peace). When we look for something outside our deepest selves to give us happiness, we are creating suffering and looking for lasting satisfaction where it cannot be found. We are constantly creating worlds of illusion that we believe will bring us happiness, and when those fairy kingdoms fall apart, we build another and another. This is unwise effort.

Why do we keep this up, though? It's quite simple: we still believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that these actions will bring us lasting happiness, or what I prefer to call joy, but they don't and can't. This is no trivial matter. All the suffering of the world has its root cause in this delusion of what is good and right. Wars are fought, drugs are taken, food is overeaten. What we must recall is that all people everywhere are seeking the end of suffering. Just because we are very, very bad at figuring out what will bring about the end of suffering does not mean we are not entirely sincere in seeking it. What strikes me as most odd, both in myself and in others, is that we cannot seem to learn from our experience. We eat the ice cream, which brings us transient happiness, but adds pounds to our bodies, stress to our hearts, and fuel to our diabetes. Yet the next time we feel the need for an emotional boost, we turn right back to the ice cream (or the wine or the tobacco or the crack or the television or the exercise or the shopping) as if we had never realized that it could not bring us what we truly desired. Much has been made of what kind of food we eat and how this appears to have made us the most obese nation ever, yet it seems to me quite likely that this has more to do with this misguided sense of what will bring us happiness.

But it's not so surprising, really. We are not inherently beings who think in the long term. We are built for survival, which is a moment to moment phenomenon. It requires the Wise Effort of continuing to question our assumptions to break down the barriers we place between us and Nirvana. Always, always, we must question if the choices we are making are truly leading to lasting happiness or as likely to melt away as an ice cream cone in the sun.

The next step on the path is here.

Shaking up the snowglobe

There is a metaphor I use for the inside of my head. I compare it to a snowglobe. My (delusional, illusionist) goal is to always have the snow sitting passively on the bottom of the globe, placidly coating the little bench, the plastic tree, the picturesque streetscape. But the mind is not prone to passivity and the snowglobe will be shaken from time to time, sometimes more violently than others.

Lately I have been in a bit of a swirl and the snow has been a-flying. I am a creature of habit (always a losing proposition in a world that doesn't much care what my tendencies are) and I have deviated from my habits the past few weeks. Mostly, though, it is this damn book, Trauma Stewardship, which I have mentioned here before but still have not quite finished, that is shaking up the snow in my globey little head. I call it "this damn book" with only the greatest affection, of course. In the grand scheme, in my larger mind, when my ego is put aside, I want my snow to be agitated. But it can be pretty disconcerting.

What Trauma Stewardship has done is cause me to challenge, oh, pretty much everything I value and the way I spend my energy and time. A very valuable service, the sort of deep cleaning. You would pay a pretty penny to have done to your house, but it feels a bit like (to quote Mel Ash) shaving the inside of my skull. I don't mind, really I don't, but it's a little uncomfortable.

As always, I refer back to the Buddha, who tells me that this is, in fact, what life is all about, this discomfort, this comfort with uncertainty, this insubstantiality. He would tell me, no doubt, that my feelings of security and certainty were mere phantasms with no basis in what is really going on. Just look, he would say: where do you find something that stays the same from day to day? If you find something, be assured that this solidity is a delusion, for every building, every mountain, every person, every day, every thought, every feeling, every relationship, every belief, every creed, every teaching is constantly in the process of decay and reformation. It is, he would remind me (again, again) that the nature of suffering is not this transience but my intransigence toward it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks a bunch, Bud. I am feeling bad (confused, tired, uncertain, insecure) right now. Spare me your platitudes. To which he would, no doubt, just chuckle wisely. Bastard.

But I know he is right. What I am experiencing, for umpteen-millionth time, is change. Just change. Merely change. The usual change. I admit it, though, I am 55 and kinda tired and would just as soon just sit still, thank you very much, with the snow in my globe all on the ground and not stirred up. Of course, of course, the Buddha would no doubt say, that is also an option. Watch a bunch of TV ("reality" shows are good for this). Read stupid books. Dumb down, numb out, plumb no depths. But beware! No real happiness, no lasting joy can be found in this way. Only by embracing the reality of constant change, of being open to the flow of the void, by not only accepting the shaking of my snowglobe but actively seeking it and letting it fall where it may, only then can I find anything like real joy. Sigh.

It's not that I'm not willing; I am, really I am. I just get tired sometimes. I feel as if I have climbed this mountain before and always found that it has no peak, no point at which I can say, "I have arrived at the top of the world. I am now certain of being on the right path." So be it. I will carry on. Truly, I have joy in my heart for the journey. I am not sad or depressed or discouraged. But it is scary, isn't it, to open your heart to being constantly challenged? Bring it on. I'm ready.

Eightfold path: Wise Action (Part II)

A reminder: this is the second part of Wise Action, which is the second of eight parts of the path the Buddha described as the way to freedom from suffering. I first wrote an introduction to the Eightfold Path, which you can find here, then a post on Wise Speech. My last post was the first part of Wise Action. In this discussion Wise Action is synonymous with the Five Precepts, which are to refrain from killing, stealing, sexual harm, harsh speech and intoxicants. In my first post on Wise Action I described the first two of these precepts. This post describes the other three.

The third precept is to refrain from sexual harm. As with the others, there is a very basic level of this precept, which is that adultery causes suffering. Whereas this is normally a true statement, the very term adultery does not necessarily have meaning for many relationships in the modern world. Even a suggestion that one ought not have any sexual relations outside of a committed relationship does not take into account the many varieties of sexual experience that might or might not cause harm, not to mention that sex has the power to do great harm even within a committed relationship.

Therefore the crux of this precept must be avoiding the creation of harm, of suffering in oneself or in another. Sexual energy is a powerful force and can be used to reinforce intimacy and to have great fun but can also cause great and often permanent harm if misused. As with the previous precept, we must also be cautious that none of our actions are manipulative, creating a situation of seeming consent where at a deeper level there is none. If we use pornography we must ask ourselves a similar question about our assumptions of consent on the part of those who participate in its creation. Is this also a form of sexual harm?

The aspiration form of the precept concerning sexuality is the vow to cultivate responsibility. If we behave responsibly toward all beings, it is unlikely that we will knowingly create sexual harm.

If you study the dharma (the teachings of the Buddha) for a while, it will become evident that many of the terms repeat in different forms and places. Thus it is that Wise Speech is the first part of the Eightfold Path and is also one of the precepts. Specifically, the precept asks us to refrain from harmful speech. I refer you to the post on Wise Speech for a lengthy discussion of this concept.

The aspiration form of this precept is the vow to cultivate loving speech and deep listening. I did not write much about listening as a form of skillful speech, but it is an important part of this. To listen deeply is to have no agenda but to listen, to be entirely open to what is being said without judgment and without any impulse to interrupt or begin formulating our response before the other person has stopped speaking. It is a very difficult practice and one to which we are not accustomed. Amazing what you can hear if you are actually listening! It can be quite different from what we thought was being said.

The fifth precept is to refrain from intoxicants. This one is tricky, too. Of course, it would be simple to say that we should avoid all alcohol or other drugs, but this is not necessarily true. For those who can safely do so, a glass of wine or other alcoholic beverage might lead to a greater ability to be present. Many wise people have sworn by hallucinogenics as an aid to realization. Caffeine can an intoxicant if used unwisely. Food can be addictive. Too much sugar can lead to unwholesome mind states.

On the other hand, we need not get into splitting hairs to understand the intent of this precept. We are being asked to refrain from anything that keeps us from a clear awareness. We also avoid use of any substance that has the potential to create harm or in any situation where harm might result (driving after drinking being the classic example). As with all of the precepts, if we align ourselves with the desire to avoid harm and move on a path toward enlightenment, we cannot go far wrong.

The aspiration form of this precept is a vow to ingest only that which preserves peace, well-being, and joy. It is worthwhile reminding ourselves that this means not only our own peace, well-being, and joy, but that of all beings. If our consumption of any substance creates harm for another or has the potential to do so, it should be avoided.

The next step on the path is here.

A poem seeks me out

So much depends
upon

A red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

It is rare for me that a poem comes to mind and will not be denied my attention. I must assume there is some meaning in the fact that the poem has sought me out.

This poem is by William Carlos Williams and is one of the most famous of the Imagist poem, the school of poetic thought which holds that the object itself is the subject of poetry and not an allegory or metaphor for another object (or feeling or event) altogether. Which is not to say there is not deep meaning to the poem, but that the objects themselves—wheelbarrow, chickens, rain—carry all the meaning there is to be found there.

There are those who claim to have deciphered the code of this poem, but I think they are suffering from a basic misunderstanding. There is no code. The images are evocative in and of themselves and the fact that the poem evokes so much for so many is the measure of its "success". Here is what it means to me:

The first four words make the whole poem work. We are not merely being given an image to look at (though that can be very effective, as in the best haiku), but told that so much depends on this object, which causes us to look more closely than we might otherwise.

The object in question is a red wheelbarrow. Notice that the word "wheelbarrow" is broken into its two constituent parts, which breaks up our assumptions about the object and causes us to look at it more closely. And a wheelbarrow truly is a rather remarkable thing, an inclined plane with a wheel. The fact of the inclined plane makes it possible for us to lift much heavier loads than we would otherwise be able to (think of a flat cart with the same load and having to lift it over an obstruction, for instance, and how much more possible the lifting is with a wheelbarrow). Then, the presence of an angled front panel combined with the incline plane makes it possible for us to dump those loads rather than have to transport them with a shovel or other tool from the cart to the ground. The fact that we have taken all this for granted does not make it any the less remarkable; Williams is asking us to notice this fact. He may not have had inclined planes and such in mind when he wrote the poem, but he had noticed the enormous utility of the tool and how much depends on it.

But what is such a trusty tool doing abandoned out in the rain rather than safely stored in a shed? It seems a rather sad oversight, but we have all done similar things through our carelessness or distraction, forgotten to put the tool away or to tell someone we love them or to notice our life passing until it is too late and the damage has been done: the wheelbarrow is rusted and worn, the relationship is dead, our lives are over. Not that we are to believe that this wheelbarrow is beyond repair—it is much more resilient than that. Nonetheless, for something upon which so much depends, it is rather cavalier treatment for us to leave it sitting in the rain.

But since we have left it sitting in the rain, let's notice how it looks with the rain streaked on it. It provides the barrow with a glaze that makes it more beautiful than it would have been otherwise. This is not a brand new, shiny wheelbarrow, after all, but a well-used, worn, trusty companion that benefits from the glaze the rain gives it.

Then, as if the beauty of the object were not sufficient unto itself, this shiny, red, beloved tool is set off against the stark whiteness of the chickens, its loveliness thereby accentuated to an even greater degree. This brings it that much more into the foreground of the image and of our thoughts.

This, then, is the gift Williams gave us, but what it means is entirely individual. For me, it brings to mind the idea, first of all, that poems are often quite adept at doing what dharma teachers try so hard to do: it asks me to pay attention and notice that the miraculous is happening in every moment, that objects have meaning to the degree that I pay attention. How many red wheelbarrows have I entirely ignored, or ran to put away before they were ruined, without truly seeing them? How many people have I entirely dismissed as beneath my notice without reflecting that they are or were someone's son or daughter, perhaps beloved, perhaps not, but miraculously borne in someone's womb and birthed from them to be loved, despised, scorned, and esteemed by many people throughout their personal history? How often have I reflected on what is mundane to me but is truly astonishing? (One example: every now and then I just have to stop and marvel at the amazing ingenuity which lead to water, gas, electricity and telephone signals showing up at my house regularly, without my having to do much of anything but pay the bills for them. Truly flabbergasting when I come to think of it). How does food get on my table? Why does anyone ever do something so inherently painful as love another? How can so much information get onto something as small as a microchip? How does that tiny sunflower seed know to grow such a gargantuan, majestic creature? What ever gave this species the idea to build buildings as high as 2700 feet in the air and how in the world is such a thing possible?

For these things are worthy of notice; above all this is what this poem says to me. So much depends on my paying attention to them. The Buddha would not be confused by this. He understood how much depends on giving our whole and undivided attention to everything that comes within our perception; a wheelbarrow, a fear, a meanness, a cockroach, a joy, a puppy, a viper. Nothing, absolutely nothing is more important than this. Why should this be? Because the Buddha taught the end of suffering and understood, perhaps more clearly than anyone before or since, that to project ourselves into a place or time other than this place and time is to create suffering. Period. Such a causal relationship cannot be subverted. Yes, of course we must think of the future in order to plan, must think of the past in order to avoid the errors we may have made there that exacerbate our current suffering, but these are the activities of a moment. Most of the time we spend in these times-that-are-not-this-time is entirely fruitless discursive thought that is our ego's attempt to take control over the uncontrollable. This is suffering. It is not possible to have such control, yet we quite nonetheless often expend all our energy trying to make it happen. How could this be other than suffering?

The past is, plain and simple, past. Lily Tomlin said that "forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past." The future is a complex welter of possibilities, the strings of which are too tangled with chance, the behavior of others, the actions of nations, the movement of planets and who knows what mysteries, that to think we can plan for all of its eventualities is like the mouse trying to run the cheese factory; he may eventually get the output he desires, but it was never his doing.

Look! What do you see?

Jacob's Children, Chapter Twelve

I am aware that I have been absent for nearly a month and have not carried on with my tale in that time. Much has happened that pertains to this story. Allow me to begin where I left off and bring you up to the present. I find I must go away for quite some time, perhaps forever, and I must finish telling you this story before I go or I will never forgive myself.

After the death of January, the work could not continue, of course. Ruth was in prison and Clara retreated yet further into that parallel world in which she believed much more than this one. My grandmother returned to her parents' house to, as she thought, live out her life as a spinster, for the one vow that had not yet been broken was that, to the best of their ability, these powers would die with the sisters. There was, though, a young man who worked for hire in the fields around town. I have seen paintings of him and one old photograph my grandmother keeps in a drawer of her desk. He was a beautiful boy and reportedly could sing like an angel. But my grandmother kept her vow not to marry and did all she could to discourage him from pursuing her, in which she was not entirely successful.

Though rarely coy, my grandmother is as silent as the grave about the circumstances of the conception of my father and will not even reveal the name of her paramour. Of course, modesty forbids her from being explicit, but one would like to know what the circumstances of such a seduction were, how they overcame her great resistance. I have proposed to her the idea that, while she had every intent to remain childless and unmarried, she need not therefore remain virgin. After all, a single sexual encounter would surely not yield a child, would it? She may have been naive enough, or sufficiently passionate, to have convinced herself of this. Her only response, though, is "perhaps, perhaps," with a musing and amused look on her face. I suspect she would say the same were I to propose that a flight of angels came to her bed, so we will never know. Very frustrating for the historian I consider myself to be.

Nonetheless, a conception there was, and my father, Jacob, was born nearly 85 years ago. That the boy who engendered the pregnancy offered to marry my mother is beyond doubt, but she turned him away time and again until, disheartened, he left for the city and never returned to see his child. Whether he be living or not, or where he may be is lost to us. Perhaps my mother thought that in naming my father Jacob she might bookend our lineage, for she had every intention to raise her child to succeed where she had failed and to ask him to choose a life of celibacy.

My father was a contemplative child, seemingly born with a deep wisdom, as one can sometimes see even from the day of a child's birth; he was not unique in this. Photos from that era show a boy with dark, deep-set eyes peering with uncommon gravity at the viewer. The effect is disconcerting, as if he could see into the core of one's being. He has never entirely lost this characteristic. As he grew, my grandmother made certain he received only instruction that would incline him to the life she intended for him. She was well aware that such attempts to mold the nature of a child often backfire and create exactly what was intended to be avoided, but Jacob was a tractable boy and took to the discipline of Buddhist thought in particular when it was taught to him. Though it is common in the Eastern world to make a monk of one who is still a child, it is rare in the West, but an exception was made for this remarkable child who showed such great promise. He was sent to Thailand to live in one of the forest monasteries there. He has said that it was only when he arrived there that he finally felt at home. Perhaps there is some truth to the idea of rebirth, who knows? Perhaps he truly had been there before in a previous life, as he claims.

In any case, that is how my father came, at the age of ten, to be an acolyte and finally a fully ordained monk of the Thai Forest order. He was renamed Ajahn Mehta and renounced the world entirely and with a full heart, or so it seemed. For a full fifty years he lived this life, in the fullness of time becoming the abbot of his monastery. He was, by all accounts, a sober, upright, firm, yet humorous and loving teacher, beloved by all those who lived, worked at, or visited this place of peace and calm.

At the age of sixty, while sitting in meditation, much as he had always done, my father became fully enlightened. No one was more astonished than he himself at this turn of events. Decades ago he had ceased seeking such a state, for he knew that in the seeking was the source of suffering. He had lost all desire for this, even the sneaking thought in the back of his mind, for he sought more than anything the clarity of being content in the present moment as it was. Yet it was clear to all those who came near him that he was utterly transformed. He had a glow about him, so they say, and suddenly seemed to know all there was to know.

But most astonishing of all was that, laughing and capering as he never had before, he declared that his new, deep understanding was leading him away from the monastery and into the life of a householder, a life he had never known. Such consternation this caused in the order! That one of their own should become enlightened, only to leave the confines where this had been made possible! It was a scandal! Could this actually be?

With great merriness, my father assured them that it was so and that he intended to leave as soon as his successor as abbot could be named. He did name him and, no surprise, his choice was a young, impulsive monk whose choosing caused no end of surprise and horror. Yet, it could not be gainsaid, and abbot he was and still is (and a fine one, as it turns out).

Most horrifying of all to the members of his order, he made it known that one aspect of his new-found way of knowing was to take a wife and beget children! He has told me since that it was the very awareness of the powers carried in our family line that made it clear to him that, far from being right that it should end with him, every attempt should be made to carry it on. It did not take long for a man of his accomplishments and shining demeanor to meet and marry a strong, merry woman, my mother, Theresa, nearly 35 years his junior who has, to this day, borne him ten children, of which I am the eldest.

Now it is my turn. I am Jacob, too. I have been called to go to a place far, far away from here and my father has blessed my going to do what I can. I have some ability to heal, it seems, and kindness still is my watchword. I have the tendency to gain weight that most of my antecedents share, but know that acts of kindness can keep this in check.

I know this is an inadequate story, for it is not my calling to be able to write such things. I thank you for your patience if you have come this far with me. We, my siblings and I, have great work to do. What my father seeks is that we spread the love contained in our hearts as far and wide as we can and I, for one, intend to honor this intent. It is his hope, and mine, that the world thereby be made a better place. This can come to pass, we hope, if all of us, those of us truly descended from him as well as all of you, should think of ourselves as Jacob's children.

The Body in Charge

An interesting realization which is still in the formative stages, so I probably won't be able to comment on it very articulately: it seems to me that the mind (ego) is more or less in charge of the reactions of the body. Now, I have gotten to the point where at the very least I question what the mind says because I know how extraordinarily loopy it can be, but I seem to have a tendency to believe what my body tells me. For instance, my shoulders are tense right this minute. The mind is using this (or so it seems to me) to communicate to me that I should be doing something else, that this tension in my shoulders is a Problem which must be Solved. If the mind had simply told me I should be doing something else, I could easily countered ("no, I thought it over and I shouldn't"), but if I buy into what my body is communicating without question, even though it comes from the same source, I can come to think I must take some action to ameliorate this discomfort. A fascinating insight! Yes, both the mind and my body can give me useful warnings, but quite often these are just vestiges of a bygone time when my progenitors were under much more frequent threat and their reactions were essential to their physical health. Whereas now my lack of reaction often is integral to my mental health. Interesting. I look forward to investigating this further.

A story to illustrate this: Joseph Goldstein tells of a time he was doing walking meditation and suddenly a feeling of doom came upon him. He began to question things, to the point where his spiritual path was up for review and he began to consider whether he perhaps was on the wrong path altogether. Then he burped. It all went away.

Listening to my body must be done with as much care, love, skepticism and humor as listening to the mind or to others who may try to convince me that something or other is the truth. In the final analysis, only I can judge what is true for me.

I will surely want to write more on this topic later.

Trudging

It sometimes feels, lately, like life is all about trudging, putting one foot in front of the other, not to get anywhere, but just because it's what I am supposed to do. I have obligations, I have made choices and now the only manly thing to do is carry them out. One foot in front of the other. Do it because They Said So or I Said So and don't ask any questions. Poor me.

Well.

That's not a very satisfying way to live a life, now, is it? But let's dig a little deeper. After all, what we are searching for is not contentment or happiness but the truth, isn't it? We should never lose sight of the fact that the word dharma, which is what we use to describe the Buddha's teachings, simply means truth in Pali. At first blush this seems a bit egotistical, for the Buddha or those who came after him to claim that they found The Truth. But what this really means is that the Buddha encouraged everyone to find his or her own truth. If his teachings are useful in this pursuit, wonderful. If not, they are to be rejected; the Buddha was very clear about this. So, what's the truth here? Am I really feeling such a darkness, such bleakness as all that? No, not really. But it feels so much more important to be having an existential crisis than to say, "I am tired" or "I am cranky" or "All this darkness is getting me down" or "I would rather not do that today, thank you very much". It makes me feel like Proust or something, that my every Madelaine has deep meaning. But, I mean, Marcel, it was just a cookie, for God's sake.

I was listening to a dharma talk by Heather Martin yesterday (in case you forgot, you can get all the dharma talks you want for free [donations encouraged] at dharmaseed.org) and had an interesting experience I think most of us have had. She said something I have heard before, that I have said many times, that I intellectually accept and believe I thoroughly understand, yet when she said it I finally got it at some level I never got it before. What she said, in essence, was that there is no avoiding that which makes us feel sadness, grief, pain, loss, anger, illness, disrepute, or shame. It is most certainly not the point of the dharma to place us in a position where we no longer feel these things. There are in life what the Buddha called "the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows". He was not prescribing the sorrows ("you must go through these trials") but merely describing them ("like it or not, it's like this"). Nor was he recommending the joys as a preferable state of being. In fact, he want even further and said something quite radical: even having a preference for one mind set over another is suffering.

Now, wait just a minute. I should not prefer feeling good to feeling bad? What's up with that? Could that really be what the Buddha said? Well, not exactly. What he was saying is that the event itself is just an event. When the event occurs—as it is occurring—we have a choice to resist it if it's "negative" or embrace it if it's "positive" (these are our habituated responses) or to accept it as it is. Only the last is the path to freedom. The problem with us deeply conditioned human beings is that this reaction happens in a millisecond, so it ends up feeling inevitable and out of our control. That is what practice is all about.

It has always amazed me how athletes can react in a way that seems almost instinctive. How does one respond in time to a 100 mph tennis serve or pitched baseball? How does one move in just the right way to evade a defender in basketball? The answer is that they have practiced these things over and over and over again until the movements are second nature; they have conditioned themselves to have these responses. Just so, we have conditioned ourselves with our immediate responses to each event. It requires years of practice to recondition ourselves to another response, that of complete and full acceptance first. Only then can thoughtful action take place.

The insight I had yesterday had everything to do with the fact that I practiced and continue to practice day in and day out to find acceptance of every moment as it is. This has largely been an intellectual practice and often feels more futile than useful since the same conditioned responses of clinging and rejecting are still the most common ones for me. But I believe with all my heart that it is only by preparing the ground that these little insights come to us and are recognized as such. Out of such small insights is a larger, more global insight constructed. What we need is something in which we can believe strongly enough so we continue practicing even when it doesn't feel particularly fruitful within our definition of what fruit it should bear. But experiencing these insights can encourage us to seek more where those came from. When we find that the dharma really has been telling us the truth in some particular, it causes us to be curious about whether or not the rest of it might be true as well. When even this fails us, we can reflect that people we respect have used these principles to become better, more joyful, deeply compassionate human beings and believe that it is possible for us, too. We can reflect that billions of people over thousands of years have taken on this practice.

Perhaps the most important realization is that the spiritual path does not lead to progressively more and more pleasure. Sorry, it just doesn't. It may well lead to more joy, which is an entirely different thing. If we are practicing for the particular reason of feeling better, we are doing several destructive things. First, we are setting ourselves up to fail; as I said above, there are ten thousand sorrows that are unavoidable. Second, we are setting conditions on the dharma, which will inevitably fail these conditions and may cause us to believe the dharma has no efficacy. (We made these conditions up, by the way; nowhere is there a list of promises of what will be gained by this practice). Third, by loading up this practice with expectations we are allowing our egos to take over a process that is not of the ego but of the broader consciousness. This can only lead to suffering. As the saying goes, "expectations are premeditated resentments". These expectations can be very subtle, as simple as the belief that sometime, someday, if I practice long and hard enough I will be at utter, complete, imperturbable peace. The tricky part of the dharma is that this kind of peace truly is possible, but can only be found by achieving a state in which one no longer desires it (or anything else). So much of this practice is that of abandoning what we have come to believe as true in favor of what is truer. Our capacity to cling to beliefs that have never done what we believe they will never ceases to amaze me. (An example: if I get enough material goods, I will finally feel secure, safe, and comfortable; that's a popular one. Here's another oldie but goodie: if I accomplish all of the things on this list, I will be able to finally rest and be content). What evidence do we have that any of our assumptions are true? Have they ever been?

One of the things about which I have been cranky the past few days is that I am once again trying to live by the principles for eating I have set out in this blog after being somewhat lax over the holidays. I would really rather continue eating snowman cookies and drinking egg nog, thank you very much. That certainly is one option and there is nothing standing between me and another headless snowman. But I know that, contrary to what my body and mind seem to be telling me, there is no freedom in the indulgence of excessive amounts of food. There is freedom, however, in coming face to face with this irritability and my feelings of unfairness ("me want cookie!"), to use this as grist for the mill of my spiritual practice. Nothing is required of me but that I stick to my vow of renunciation and watch to see what happens. I have the chance to be a spectator at one of the finest shows of all time; I would be a fool to miss it.

Resolutions

It is a new year and this always feels like a new beginning. I have no doubt that one of the most common resolutions made on January 1 is to finally lose that nagging 10, 20, 30, 40, 100 pounds that keep us from being the perfect, happy human beings we know we have the capacity to be. Nothing wrong with the impulse, of course. To set an intention is one of the holiest things we can do, to place our feet on the path to something that transcends the suffering we currently experience.

But we have been here before, haven't we? We have made these same resolutions over and over and yet we seem incapable of keeping them, of finding their fulfillment. (Not this year, though, this year I am stronger, surer, want it more completely). I suspect I have quoted before the old saying that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, each time expecting a different result. A corollary is: another definition of insanity is finding the same explanation for getting the same result each time. Because we know, don't we, that it is our weakness, our lack of will power, our self-hate, our mothers, our upbringing, our disappointments, our fears, our losses (take your pick of one or more) that cause us to persist in our self-destructive behaviors despite all of our determination to have it otherwise. Where does it all fall apart, this resolution of ours?

I would assert that, having begun from faulty premises, we cannot help but reach erroneous conclusions. Having determined to do something that cannot be done in the way we propose to do it, nor by the person we have decided will do it (us, ourselves), there is no possibility but that we will fail and in failing fall into the same pattern of self-recrimination followed by renewed effort to do the impossible followed by inevitable failure....

So, do we give up? Do we just remain fatties (or junkies or drunks or sexpots or compulsives)? Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall have type II diabetes? Hardly. But the so-called "problem" and the so-called "solution" are the same thing, really, or at least derive from the same source, which is a basic and complete misunderstanding of who and what we are. Don't get me wrong, I am not speaking from some spiritual hilltop as one who has incorporated these truths into my everyday life. But I am pretty sure that the truths are out there to be comprehended if we choose to go about addressing our lives through that lens rather than the self-defeating one we have been using ere now.

Resolutions fail at their inception because of the inherent emphasis on reinforcement of the ego as the active agent of change. When we reinforce the hegemony of this strong sense of self, when we give it the power to determine how we view the past, present and plans for the future, we are stepping directly into the very source of suffering. Odd, really, like escaping snakes by jumping into the snake pit. Isn't there a better way?

When it comes to food, we really can't hope to change our attitude toward what we eat with the same mind that led us to have our current attitude toward it. Sure, for a while we may fare forth with great confidence and the bold impulse of abnegation, thrusting aside every danish and pizza in our path. But that inevitable day will come when we are weak, tired, grieving, sad, depressed and that same mind we have been using to deny ourselves those foods will resort to the same patterns it has always known to assuage bad feelings, which is to eat those very same foods, in direct proportion to the level of negativity contained within the feeling states. Why would it not? When the monkeys are mad, throw them bananas. It may not solve the problem, but at least it will distract them long enough for us to escape.

What we can do is treat each morsel of food as a meditation. As has been repeatedly emphasized here, the awareness aspect of our beings is external to and encompassing of the mind. When we ask ourselves, with gentleness and love, what this feeling means and what this food means to it, when we investigate in this way, only then can we find a sustainable change of heart and mind that leads us, not to new, sleek bodies or the ability to resist sinful impulses, but to a new way of viewing the world, ourselves and everything around us. That the new bodies may come, that we may feel better in them is something to which we cannot cling, for it is that very clinging that is the nature of suffering to begin with. This, too, will arise and pass away. What will not arise and pass away, not ever, is our realization of what is true at depth in all we do and are.

So, by all means, make those resolutions. There is wise effort in that, in determining the path and lacing up our boots and beginning to walk.

New York Times articles

 The New York Times today has two articles on the difficulty of losing weight (makes sense, it being the first of January; time to make those resolutions!). The first is in the travel section and is about the Biggest Loser camp, the second is in the magazine and is called The Fat Trap. Each is interesting in its own way. The travel article is mostly about the physical set-up of a resort designed to take off pounds quickly with an enforced combination of diet and exercise.

The magazine article, though, is a fascinating piece about how those of us who are obese or overweight face a very difficult time overcoming our genetic tendency to being that way. Will power can only take us so far when it comes to facing the overwhelming power of our hormonal legacies. It describes a few people who have reduced their weight and kept it off for at least a year and the conclusion seems to be that one must be ever-vigilant to have any hope of success. They make it sound like a rather grim process. (Note, too, the before and after pictures of the one couple featured in this portion of the article: they look pretty happy in the photo when they are fat and fairly grim when thin. Hardly good promotion of the joyfulness of the process!)

I think that we must reframe the whole idea of being vigilant. Yes, this is a lifetime effort, just like being an alcoholic or, for that matter, diabetic or gluten-intolerant is a lifetime thing. But it's not a life sentence. It need not be such a downer or a downer at all. It need not even be a struggle. We have the power to take charge of our eating lives, but it's not will power, it's spiritual power that we need. I know this sounds rather woo-woo and precious, but it is borne out by the experience of countless people. What creates transformation is a transformative experience. But I think it's a mistake to think that such an experience is a sudden thing; for most of us it is an ongoing and growing belief that we can tap a power that has no source and no end, the power of our own unlimited potential to be awake.

This world of addiction, violence, despair, grasping and such things is a narrow, dark place in which we are constantly looking for something outside ourselves to fill the emptiness. Because it can't, we grasp for more to try even harder. The expansive, gigantic, free world exists in our hearts, not out there somewhere. It is available to us anytime and anywhere. We need no accessories to access it; we need not look good while doing it. We are all we need, all we are, right here and right now. It really is as simple as that.