Devouring for Survival

I’m sitting at the silent table in the communal dining room, looking down at my lunch, my head cradled in my hands.  It is a medium-sized green-rimmed bowl filled with a healthy portion of greens, chicken, veggies, and a garnish of whatever cheesy casserole was served for the main course.  It promises to be nutritious and delicious.  And I hate it.  I know that if I take a bite, I will want to shovel in another before I even have time to chew.  A tear lands on the table below my chin and I push the bowl away.  I hear the contractor who’s spent the last few weeks flirting with me talking to another woman at the table behind me.  I’m missing out – on food, on attention, on all the relationships happening in the room behind me.  I’m becoming invisible, at risk of being forgotten, and it’s my own damn fault because I can’t just eat like a normal person, love like a normal person, join everyone in being happy.  Under the thoughts, all I feel is nebulous anxiety and sadness – deep and ancient like the sludge on the river bottom.  I want the food to be gone, and myself to be anywhere but here.

Stephen Levine, a Buddhist teacher, says that hell is wanting to be somewhere different than where you are.  I am officially living in hell.  I came to Ananda Laurelwood believing I was healed, embarking on a voyage abroad with no need of spiritual consolation beyond what I already carried with me in my root and found in the trees and sky around me.  I felt grounded and clear, at least in my next step, and full of faith that what I needed would come to me when the time was right.  Now I doubt everything.  Events and ideas don’t link together in the comfortingly linear and exciting way they used to.  The Ananda focus on spiritual joy feels oppressive to me – as if my darkness and ambivalence and anger and grief have no home here; as if I need to renounce myself to belong.  People are even increasingly telling me that my name doesn’t sound right.

When I set out on this journey I wanted to dissolve.  But now that I am losing my familiar sense of self in service to my community and in surrender to my guru’s guidance, I feel threatened by the very thing that finally has real potential to nourish me.  I forget that before I came here I was so consumed by planning my trip that I was unable to settle into even a 10-minute meditation.  I had shut out the idea of romance entirely, knowing it brought too many triggers for me to manage along with the challenges of my journey.  And I had spent nearly six months living alone, hording boxes of fruit and binge eating whatever my recovery diet allowed, believing that the extra weight would ground me and the demands of my trip would restore me to balance.  This place is not compromising my sanity, it is merely allowing me to settle enough to see the deeper layers of what I have always carried with me.

Several days ago, Gina loaned me the book she had been telling me about for weeks: “Women Food and God” by Geneen Roth.  Its simple message is that the way we eat is inseparable from our core beliefs about being alive.  As long as I eat unconsciously, I can continue believing my problem is with understanding proper nutrition, maintaining my ideal weight, finding the right exercise routine, identifying my food allergies, staying on top of hormonal changes, ensuring consistent sleep patterns, or integrating whatever new theory I read about on Facebook or hear about from a friend.  In this way, my life has a purpose – getting healthy – and I feel empowered and energized when I’m taking action to solve the puzzle of how to achieve it.  When I do, I’ll finally be someone worthy of being loved by an amazing partner and I will have access to all the energy and confidence I need to bring my gifts into the world.  For a time, I feel uplifted and successful being in control of what I eat, how much, and when.  And then something happens.  The cleanse I’m on ends.  I pull a muscle so I can’t work out anymore.  Desserts start appearing everywhere I go.  I celebrate with a bag of chips.  I rebel with a stolen bit of someone else’s cake.  I take all the fries I want because I deserve them.  What I have been denied is right in front of me, right now, mine for the taking, and no one can stop me.  And suddenly nothing else in life matters.

What does the way I eat say about what I believe about life?  Despite all the values I embrace and all the good things I aspire toward, the way I eat says that my need is greater than anyone else’s, so I’m entitled to a larger portion, even if it isn’t mine, and anyone who questions me is the enemy.  My greed makes me unlovable, but it is also the only way I will survive, because nothing will come to me unless I fight for it.  I do not believe in generosity.  I want to experience everything, and because I believe nothing will last, I must take as much as I can.  The way I eat says that I believe my innate sensuality is dangerous – that if I go with my impulses, they will destroy me.  I must be disciplined.  I cannot trust myself.  I have to put myself in harm’s way in order to find nourishment, because my emptiness is bottomless and intolerable.

I learned from my mother to be anxious about my weight at a young age; to discipline myself with bland and wholesome food, and then gorge in celebration.  I learned from kids at school that if I was willing to manipulate them or humiliate myself, I could win delicacies from their lunch boxes.  I savored the sense of rebellious victory in scavenging candy from the ground, in sneaking gulps of egg nog, in stealing cookies.  I discovered that there was something sexy in eating with wild abandon, and I found that when all my other strategies to secure love failed, I could use my body, as long as it maintained its appeal.

As daunting as it is, I understand now the necessity of facing all of my addictions together in order to truly embody lasting sobriety.  Compulsive, consuming, and self-perpetuating thoughts about food, about men, and about how to orchestrate a perfect life are all fantasies I entertain to protect myself from the reality around me.  As Geneen Roth puts it: “I shut myself down or walk out the door whenever pain threatens to destroy me, which is any situation that involves another person or whose outcome I can’t control.”

The problem is that my fantasies keep me fixated on a future that never comes.  The future I actually face is identical to the life I am living today, trapped in a feedback loop of increasingly agitated excitement and anxiety – first over the idea of potential bliss and then over grasping as it fades away to the familiar sense of hopeless emptiness.  Somewhere I must break the cycle.  Something in me tells me to just feel into the pain of isolation, the grief over my self-destructive behavior, the helpless vulnerability of stillness.  I need to honor it all with gentle curiosity, gratitude, and forgiveness long enough for it to transform willingly in the light of my deepening awareness and understanding.  And perhaps then I will touch into an enduring source of bliss beyond.

At some point in every meal I eat with courageous consciousness, after the tears have fallen over how heart-breaking my beliefs are, over how long I have lived with them, over how helpless and insufficient I feel, a sense of peace comes.  Sometimes it’s after realizing how much I am willing to sacrifice to love myself – all the tasty tidbits, promising men, comforts and opportunities I have let pass by to be here.  Sometimes it’s after I take a bite and feel the flavor and texture explode in intense waves of unanticipated pleasure.  Sometimes it’s just a spontaneous sense of opening to the moment, as if I am suddenly lighter and the space around me has expanded.

I can see the dining room reflected in the gold-rimmed mirror in front of me as if I have been living my whole life through a reflection, projecting my reality onto it so that I won’t be hurt by looking at it directly.  I realize that as vital as this strategy may have been when I was younger, this disconnect has gradually become the source of my isolation and mistrust, and I am beginning to access a hidden strength within me large enough to hold any agitation I might encounter by facing life as it is.  For a moment, I can see the men who share my life clearly in all their brilliance and short-comings.  The risks I am taking feel manageable.  And I am willing to let go of the pleasures of today that are not meant to be mine so that I can serve a higher good.  It is as though the central knot of all my self-constricting delusions is suspended between my mouth and the rim of that bowl.

I put down my fork and rest my hands in my lap between bites, gently coaxing the urge to devour to settle into a sense of faith that everything I need is right here, right now.  I do not know how long it will be before I can eat a full meal in silence without crying, until I am able to stop when I’m full and avoid what makes me feel sick, until I can inhabit a life that doesn’t revolve around whether I’m doing enough to deserve love, and until I feel nothing but compassion for the times I fall short of being my best self.  But through this practice I see myself edging open a door to enduring comfort and nourishment that will enable me to feel agitated, whether by excitement or anxiety, and not need to leave my body in order to survive it.  And perhaps one day I will feel satiated enough to truly be of service through loving purely and without expectation.

I wipe my eyes with a napkin and look across the table at Gina.  Her solemn face and red eyes mirror mine in the most heart-warming and affirming way.  Whenever she joins me at the silent table, her courageous presence with her own pain emboldens me to welcome more of my own.  And I find that I am stronger and far more whole than I believed.  I slide my hand across the plastic tablecloth to find hers.  A few tears fall as I mouth those most terrifying and liberating words: “I love you.”

Nancy

“Losing weight on any program in which you tell yourself that left to your own devices you would devour the universe is like building a sky scraper on sand…  It’s the belief in war (on oneself) that we focus on, because once that belief is gone, the weight will follow.”  – Geneen Roth