Читать книгу From Bagels to Buddha - Judi Hollis - Страница 8

Preface

“Howd-ja-doit?”

“Howd-ja-looz-althatwait?”

“Howd-ja-keepitoff?”

That’s always what I’m asked.

Most people just want to know, “Whadjeet?”

They think it’s only about the food.

When I opened the nation’s first eating disorders unit in 1975 in Los Angeles, every new patient was contemplating an inpatient admission because he or she couldn’t stop eating compulsively. Naturally, the greatest interest was focused on that most treasured love object: the food plan.

Of course, to lose weight and keep it off, you have to know a lot about food. Most of my patients were already amateur nutritionists. Like me, they had read it all and done it all. None of us was fat for lack of trying to lose weight. I had fought my obesity since childhood, and had gained and lost thousands of pounds. At age eight, I was taken to a specialist. We prayed for a thyroid problem that could be beaten with white pills. My mother held my hand as the doctor put me in stirrups and checked for pregnancy. It was the start of a lifetime of failed answers from Western medicine. I never returned for a GYN exam until I was twenty-two and truly pregnant.

Hoping for some magic fix kept me fat. There were no chemical or hormonal imbalances.

No such luck.

I just loved to eat.

I once asked my mother about a picture of me at age five standing on the dusty, coal-covered porch on Scranton’s South Side. “Why’d you let me gorge myself with a corncob in each hand?”

Mom answered, “You just loved to eat. You were always hungry. I’d give you dinner and you’d say, ‘Mommy, I want more.’”

I know today that I was ravenously hungry for a spiritual connection not to be found in food.

My “more” mantra has now become almost four decades of giving up more for the satisfaction of enough. I’m now enough. Life is enough. Today I get enough to eat.

At age twelve I started dieting for my senior prom, which ultimately I went to fat, asked as a mercy date because I was the prom chairperson. Being fat, however, didn’t totally wreck my dating career since I had “such a pretty face” and was wild enough to date ne’er-do-wells and “lesser companions”—men I wouldn’t take out in public. During my early career as a drug addiction counselor, I even dated a few patients. These guys were hip, slick, and cool and knew how to make a fat girl feel sexy. During my first round of Weight Watchers, I had a crush on a drug counselor. I told him I wouldn’t go out with him until I “hit goal weight.” He went back to drugs before I got there. There was always something.

I eventually became a nine-time loser at Weight Watchers; I lost each time, and I was later hired as a consultant. When I tried acupuncture, the needles fell out of my ears. Protein drinks and restrictive diets worked until I ended those forays and binged. The truth is that most of us are expert “dieters” for as long as we stay on the diets.

All diets work. Take your pick. Mark Twain said, “It’s easy to stop smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times.” But how do we stay stopped? What does one do when firm resolve lessens and eating excess food seems the best alternative?

We eat. And, as overeaters, we eat a lot. And we usually regain more weight than we lost.

For permanent weight loss, I had to first learn that there is more to life than four ounces of protein, a cup of vegetables, and ten laps around the pool. And there is more to beating the weight game than intellect. I certainly was smart enough to stay thin. But to stay at a healthy weight, knowing stuff is only part of the equation. The permanent weight-loss goal lies somewhere beyond reason. In fact, I have found that the smarter we are, the more trouble we have surrendering to spirit. I had to surrender to my spiritual instincts. Transcendence cannot be cooked up from a recipe. The spiritual path is personal and precarious. We must first hit our own wall, lean into it, stay awake, accept help, get honest, own our dark side, live at risk, forgive softly, laugh gratefully, give generously, and trust the body’s still voice to tell us how. Then we’ll each find personal wisdom in our own Buddha nature.

A client once told me, “I get up in the morning and my head mugs me.” Being in your own head is like being caught behind enemy lines.

So many are now going under the knife, people are beginning to understand how hard it is to lose weight and keep it off. Most know that the statistics indicate a 98 percent failure rate for all dieters, with only 2 percent achieving lifelong, permanent weight loss. I’ve been in that 2 percent for more than three decades now, and I’d like to expand that slim margin by inviting you in.

We’ve all read about our national overeating epidemic. Americans have a super-sized appetite for fast foods, but that’s not our only problem. Our national girth has more to do with our spiritual connections—how we live, how we think, how we fight, how we love, how we die. We compete and strive to win. We overwork, overplay, overthink, and then eat mindlessly and ravenously. Genetics might load the gun, but environment pulls the trigger.

The journey is not a battle, but a surrender—a surrender to a more spiritual way of living. However, the spiritual life is not for sissies. Some may think that wearing Birkenstocks or lighting incense gets them in, but one can’t just look the part or go through the motions. I thought I could hang out with the “metaphysical maniacs” for six months, become my own personal guru, and then revert to self-abuse. Instead, I learned that staying thin happens not through competition, fighting, or winning, but by gently leaning in and letting go.

You might initially feel you are too smart for this “airy-fairy” stuff. I knew that my personal god of intellect had helped me to survive. After I had survived many life crises through cunning and guile, my tombstone might have read, “Nobody got the best of her.” I didn’t see that in some areas my brain was wired for self-abuse.

I first had to truly, truly, truly admit defeat and ask for help. Early on, I surrendered enough to ask a spiritual mentor for guidance. Initially attracted to her neat, polished, clean looks and her singsong, almost too-syrupy voice, I let her know during our first phone call, “I’m a therapist. I know a lot about addiction. I think I continue to gain weight because I am praaaabaaaaabbbblleee afraid to get thin.”

She answered quietly, “Why don’t you get thin, and then we’ll talk about it.”

Damn! Cut the wind right out of my sails. No bull. No psychobabble.

I continued, “I like everything about your weight-loss plan except the spiritual part.”

She replied, “There is no spiritual part. My plan is a total, 100 percent, take-no-prisoners spiritual program. It is spiritual and nothing else.”

Eventually, as you’ll read here, I got it. Hopefully, you will too.

In the Passover service celebrating Moses’s flight from Egypt, fathers all over the world recite a passage from the Haggadah: “This is what the Lord G-d did for me as he led me out of the land of Egypt.” Even though this commemorates events from many centuries ago, we view any transit out of slavery as if it happens for us all right here and now. Freedom for any one of us can create healing for all of us. So instead of examples from my patients’ struggles, as I had offered in previous books, I will share with you what happened for me personally. My vignettes, written over a twenty-year period, represent my continuing personal surrender process.

In my journey you will see a gentler, inward approach, one that you, too, can embrace as you travel on your own journey to surrender. You will find a personal way to give up the glommed–on, overstuffed, bloated feeling of too many bagels (metaphorically speaking), and to replace it with a free-floating, risky uncertainty. Oddly enough, as you open up and embrace that uncertainty, you won’t feel as smart, but you will know and see a lot more. This is what many who follow Eastern philosophy refer to as your “Buddha nature.”

Surrendering to that Buddha nature does not necessitate becoming religious. You can surrender to spiritual weight loss without believing in any deity. You can start walking the spiritual path even if your heels are digging grooves into the flooring. You can balance surrender with action, teasing out which actions are yours to take on and when it is right for you to let go. You act some. You wait some. It can be like listening to the pledge break announcer on public television: “We’ve got a matching donor! For every dollar you put up, our donor will provide a matching pledge.” You can echo the fishermen who advise, “Pray toward heaven, but row toward shore,” or the Muslim trader who warns, “Trust Allah, but tie your camel.”

I will not advocate for any specific organized religion; instead, I invite you to find your own spiritual connections. Spirituality and religion are two completely different concepts. I believe, and I’ve heard it expressed this way, that religion is for people who fear hell, while spirituality is for those who’ve been there. I also believe that those who face and acknowledge the fears and admit to the horrors they’ve lived through and the struggles they’ve overcome are certainly strong enough to surrender to the spiritual path. When you acknowledge feeling fear but stop fighting it, you will enter a new and stronger phase of growth. You feel the fear, but do it anyway.

None of us is ready until we’re ready. I had to weigh 222 pounds before I asked for help. I’d been a pioneer in addiction counseling since 1967 when I first worked for New York’s Mayor Lindsay in the Addiction Services Agency. I went on to graduate school, consulted with the US Navy’s alcoholism programs, and continued to develop early-addiction treatment programs throughout Southern California. I counseled thousands of others while I continued to gorge and binge.

Eventually, I surrendered over and over and over again. As I achieved en-lighten-ment, emotionally and spiritually, I lightened up the outsides, physically and behaviorally.

To maintain my seventy-pound weight loss for more than three decades, I had to learn a lot about surrender. Spiritual mentors taught me new ways to act so I could feel better about myself. As a result of “doing the right thing,” I stopped punishing myself with excess food. As an overeater, I had confused nurturance with punishment.

While finding the spiritual path, I often didn’t get my own way. I had to throw away my rule book. Each new time I gave up my self-will was just as difficult as the first time. Of course, the most difficult early surrender was following direction on a food plan. Once overeating was curtailed, all the other surrenders were that much more difficult. There was no convenient crutch of excess food to help me weather the changes. Many times I was instructed to do things totally against my instincts. For example, as a practitioner in addiction treatment who had been advised by spiritual mentors, I knew it was the right thing to refuse to bail my husband out of jail. Even though my head knew it was the right course, my whole body shook as I put down the phone receiver after I told him, “I just can’t come.” Then, before my first-ever television appearance, I quaked in fear in my size-24 flowered muumuu, and said I couldn’t do it. A spiritual mentor advised, “Suit up and show up and do what’s put in front you.” And then, after being attacked on a high-profile afternoon talk show, insisting I would not go back, I listened as my mentor directed, “It’s not your show, and it’s not about you. You have a responsibility to deliver a message.” When a jealous psychiatrist stole my first treatment program and plagiarized my early notes for Fat Is a Family Affair, I was again counseled not to sue, but to let it go. My own survival was more important. Each surrender I embraced brought more weight loss.

Most of my early surrenders were in situations involving attacks from the outside. Each time, I gave up my conniving, manipulative, controlling responses to stand with quiet integrity, allowing the universe to yield its results. I ultimately found that in seeking a spiritual solution, it didn’t serve me well to pick apart the actions of others. What benefited me the most was when I examined my own behavior and admitted my own shortcomings.

It was only after many years of practice that I was ready for the biggest surrender of all: the surrender to self. No longer was the external world menacing, but I faced a struggle from within—accepting myself as a fallible human being.

I invite you to travel with me as I journey from a Buddhist monastery in California to basement detox centers in New York, to Oprah’s favorite spa resort in Arizona, to Peruvian mountaintops, to a Native American sweat lodge outside Santa Fe, to a Russian bathhouse on New York’s Lower East Side, to yoga and massage centers in India, to the highlands of Burma (now called Myanmar), and ultimately back home to the Big Apple.

You won’t have to travel to strange lands to have your own, equally exotic, personal journey. Excesses of bagels, or whatever your food of choice may be, clog up your psyche, offering a false sense of security, a false-bottomed foundation, which keeps you feeling glued but in the end leaves you screwed. I invite you on a journey to give up that heavy, overstuffed feeling for the powerful emptiness of your own free-floating, Buddha nature. Some of these ideas were set down by Eastern holy men thousands of years ago. Some were instituted by two drunks in Akron, Ohio, more than half a century ago. Offered here is a synthesis to provide an operating mode to overcome modern, chronic food obsessions.