Happy Jonimas!

Happy Jonimas! My fellow Joni Mitchell devotee and friend SS reminded me that yesterday was her birthday, and we always like to celebrate one of our favorite artists. In honor of this special day I listened to two of her albums on my MP3 player-- For The Roses and her live album, Miles of Aisles -- while cross-stitching during Mabel's gymnastics class.

This was a good thing to do, because yesterday afternoon I got horribly irritable, and I could feel the urge to binge creeping in like cold air seeping into the cracks of a house. Music does have a calming affect on me, as well as doing needlework, and it helped me to avoid eating yet allow me to focus on what was bothering me.

I will say that one song in particular really hit home: Lessons in Survival. But that's a whole therapy session in itself there...

What I did manage to sort out were the feelings that were affecting me that evening. First of all, my back was hurting me off and on all day and was really starting to ache by late afternoon. That by itself is a logical cause of my irritability. But the real problem was feeling overwhelmed: I've dug in deeply to this Room of Doom project and making real progress. My book shelves are looking great and I managed to organize my large collection of greeting cards (I suppose that sounds odd, but my late grandmother was an avid card sender and always had a stockpile for every occasion. And guess who inherited it? Yeah, me.) But now I'm getting to the hard part; sorting through my husband's and my own miscellaneous papers and other office doodads and figuring out what to do with them all: file them, store them or throw them away. I feel a lot of uncertainty about Hubby's stuff (I have a difficult time getting him to file, organize or throw away anything, and if I go ahead and do it for him, I worry I'll do something wrong), and the piles are so big that I don't even know where to begin.

I found myself facing a similar situation last night with the counted cross stitch project I've been working on since August. I am finally getting close to completing this larger-sized, somewhat intricate picture, yet last night I had that same feeling of being overwhelmed and not knowing where to start. I finally made myself minimize my focus and just pick one color of thread and deal with that and not think about the rest. By changing my perspective, concentrating on a small amount of stitches instead of letting myself get overwhelmed by all the ones that need to be done, it was much easier to deal with and lessened my trepidations.

As I was getting into the groove and enjoying myself again, I realized I need to do the same thing with the Room of Doom, as well as the rest of my life. I see that this has to do with my perfectionism: I fret so much about doing something right that I either get irritable and fret about doing it wrong or wind up not doing it at all. I've seen this kind of procrastination a lot in my family and can recognize it in myself. Instead of getting overwhelmed, frustrated and apprehensive about the big things or what's going to happen in the future, I need to redirect myself and focus on the Now -- i.e., conscious living.

While I was still a little irritable when I got home last night, at least I knew why, and I didn't turn to food to make myself feel better. I used my shiatsu massager to loosen up my back, laid down on my heating pad and went to bed early. This morning my back is still a little tender, but better, and I'm prepared to tackle that stack of papers this afternoon a little bit at a time.

Fitness and Spirituality

I didn't mention yesterday that I finally rolled the stability ball out of my closet yesterday morning and did every exercise on the handy chart that comes with it. The move illustrated in this photo is the one that I'm feeling today in my triceps; otherwise I'm feeling okay, which means the weekly yoga must be helping to keep me in semi-decent shape.

I'm doing my best to revive my exercise routines. I let the strength training slide back in May, and by the end of the summer my regular walking had fallen by the wayside, too. I attribute the lack of walking to the Lexapro and the fatigue and lack of energy it caused.

Now that my energy and motivation are returning, I'm anxious -- in a good way! -- to get myself moving and physically active again. But it does mean recreating the habits that I let fall to the wayside. Part of that problem is getting disciplined to get up early enough in the morning, because from past experience I know it's the only time of day I can guarantee I won't be disrupted by phone calls, appointments, errands or the multitude of responsibilities I have. Unfortunately I still have some challenges: my home gym is still in the room in the garage at my old place (my cousin is renting the house), and even though it's a short distance away, it's still enough to give me an excuse not to go. My gym's future home, the basement in our new place, is still in flux; Hubby got waylaid in finishing that project by our dogs and their destruction of our kitchen floor. He swears to me that this will be done by Christmas, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for the best.

Another front I'm addressing is working on my spirituality. Yes, I do want to get back to church on a more regular basis, but that's only part of it. I've been wanting to delve into meditation for some time because I think it would really help me with stress as well as staying grounded and in touch with my body. The yoga is definitely part of that, but the truth is that other than my class once a week, I haven't been doing anything at home, and I know I really need to incorporate more of it into my daily life.

For some time I've been thinking about getting some jewelry that would be a symbol and reminder for me in regards to living consciously. As I began getting more and more into yoga I've discovered lots of "yoga" jewelry out there, but nothing really struck me and that I could imagine wearing on a regular basis. I wound up visiting Spirals of Light and was drawn to their chakra jewelry.

Now I'm no expert on chakras, but I do like the aspect of the connection of mind and body that it illustrates. The jewelry website encouraged you to think about colors you are drawn to, and the first thing that came to mind is purple. It's always been my favorite color, and I'm not sure it's a coincidence that I have been told by a person who can see auras that mine is a light purple color. When I looked at the bracelets I was of course attracted to the purple amethyst one, and I was quite pleased to see the following description:

Spirituality and Intuition

Amethyst, Clear Quartz
These stones help you to know your relationship with the Divine Spirit.
They are in alignment with the 6th chakra (Third Eye Chakra).
They assist in intuitive awareness, understanding and knowing, as well as insight and peace of mind.

Definitely sounded like what I was looking for, so I ordered it.

I then looked at the necklaces, and again I was drawn to the purple amethyst and quartz. I also liked the description for this piece:

“OM” with Amethyst & Quartz

This bright and shinny sterling silver “OM” pendant is surrounded with purple Amethyst and accented with clear Quartz. At 17” it is a perfect length to wear everyday.“OM” is the symbol of the universal force. It is the universal Cosmic Sound. Amethyst is a stone of spirituality and wisdom Quartz is an energy amplifier.

Again, this seemed to be what I was looking for. So I ordered this too, and yesterday they came in the mail. I'm not saying that I believe these pieces of bead and silver will instantly give me inner peace, wisdom, increased spirituality and energy. But wearing this jewelry makes me feel good. When I look at them they remind me what I'm striving for in my life and what a positive thing this is for my well being.

I've got my yoga class in an hour, so I better wrap up here. Namaste!

The Fruit of My Action

I was feeling so cruddy last night and I went to bed early to read a little before Hubby came up and did his imitation of a cat -- he snuggles up to me, arms around me, and basically stares at me two inches away from my face as I read until I look at him, to which he replies, "Am I bothering you?"

I opened up "Practicing the Power of Now" to page 44, and here's what I found:

"DO NOT BE CONCERNED WITH THE FRUIT OF YOUR ACTION [his bold and caps] -- just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord. This is a powerful spiritual practice.

"When the compulsive striving away from the Now ceases, the joy of Being flows into everything you do. The moment your attention turns to the Now, you feel a presence, a stillness, a peace. You no longer depend on the future for fulfillment and satisfaction -- you don't look to it for salvation. Therefore, you are not attached to the results. Neither failure nor success has the power to change your inner state of Being [my italics]. You have found the life underneath your life situation.

"In the absence of psychological time, your sense of self is derived from Being, not from your personal past. Therefore, the psychological need to become anything other than who you are already is no longer there. In the world, on the level of your life situation, you may indeed become wealthy, knowledgeable, successful, free of this or that, but in the deeper dimension of Being you are complete and whole now [again my italics]."

While I'm no expert at being a conscious person, reading this passage did make me feel better because it reminded me that these little bumps in the road, these successes and failures, do not change my inner Being.

When Hubby did come upstairs I addressed last night's ice cream incident, and somehow in the process of telling him how it made me feel he said something to the effect of "now we're even." While I knew he was joking (although it's often said there's a lot of truth in joking), I threw the notion out there that it was a passive-aggressive way to get back at me for something he's upset about.

Last week my friend SS invited me to join him and our other friends J&M on a trip to London in January. SS and I are ginormous Anglophiles, addicted to British entertainment, and he's been there several times and knows his way around. His partner B won't be able to go because he's just starting out as the sommelier of a great Tapas restaurant in D.C., so I would basically be SS's travel companion and make the trio a quartet.

SS, J & M have been three of my closest friends for many years. They have been like siblings to me and have been there for the best and the worst of times. Since SS moved to D.C. and I got married, I haven't spent nearly as much time with them as I used to, and I miss that. So this would be a fantastic opportunity to do that as well as go to a city I've always wanted to explore.

When I brought up this invitation to Hubby he was not happy. He admitted this was irrational and a double standard -- I've never complained once over his Alaska trips and actually encourage him to spend more time with his friends -- but it wasn't changing how he felt. Hubby and his family feel that couples should do almost everything together and do very little apart. They are in to constant togetherness to the point of suffocation, at least to me. Both my sister-in-law and I deal with the situation of wanting to spend time with old or new friends and dealing with husbands who try to make us feel guilty about it.

After his displeased reaction last week, I let it drop for a while, telling him I was still thinking about it and nothing was set in stone. During that time I've talked to a few people about it, trying to get reaction and feedback, and every single person has said I should go.

Yesterday afternoon I brought home some books out of storage and found my book of walking tours of London (obviously I've always dreamed of this). Hubby saw it and asked if I had thought more about the trip, and I told him I was leaning toward yes. I could tell he wasn't happy.

About half an hour later I gave him a kiss on his neck and he responded, "Don't try to butter me up!" At first I thought he was busting me for saying something similar to him (when he first got home he went on this rant about me being the most perfect, beautiful, sexy woman in the world, and I asked him if he was buttering me up for something). But then I realized he thought I was trying to make up to him for saying I wanted to go to London.

I don't respond well to guilt trips, which is what this clearly was. Which made it even funnier when later that evening he got so insulted that I accused him of being passive aggressive and said he never does that. Actually, his reply was something to the effect that I may be used to passive aggressive behavior, but he and his family don't do that kind of thing. Which made me laugh right in his face because anyone who knows him and his family know they are well versed in this behavior. But my initial laugh quickly turned to anger and I told him I was not going to get into a p*ssing match with him about whose family is better, and he retreated on that subject.

While he denies the ice cream was a roundabout punishment for me telling him I'd like to take a trip with my friends and not him, he did admit that he screwed up. At first he thought getting the ice cream would make me happy, but when he walked through the door he realized that the happiness would last maybe two minutes and then I'd feel bad the rest of the night. But by then it was too late.

I guess I should see this as progress. At least he's beginning to figure it out. Maybe next time he'll realize this before he buys the ice cream and will prevent another incident like this.

I'm glad I confronted him about this. I don't know what the fruit of my actions will be, but at least I made the effort and stood up for myself.

Running With Scissors

During my "down time," as I'm now calling it, I read Augusten Burrough's "Running with Scissors." I haven't seen the movie, which is nice, because I always get influenced by them about what the characters look like, etc. I like going into it with no preconceptions.

Anyway, if you haven't read or seen "Running with Scissors," it's about this teenage boy's very disturbing yet hilarious life with two highly dysfunctional families, his own and the family of the so-called psychiatrist who was "treating" his mother. There was a lot of talk of insanity, hospitalizations, and general wackiness.

Shortly after reading this book I had a disturbing dream that I was committed to a psychiatric ward of a hospital. I remember sitting in a bed (I can't remember if I was restrained or not), and while I was pretty much aware of other patients around me and a television set on somewhere in the background, nothing particularly bad was happening. I just remember feeling kind of freaked out that I had wound up in this place. I don't know who committed me, either -- whether it was myself, my family, the authorities, etc. I also don't know if there was a specific event that took me there (suicide attempt or other crazy behavior). I was given an injection of a sedative; I can still remember how realistic it felt as I began to get drowsy and fall into unconsciousness.

I later woke up in my Mom's house (in the dream) and felt all groggy and out of it. My mom looked at me and laughed, saying, "Boy, I don't know where you were partying last night, but you must have had a wild time."

I remember being so upset by this, that she didn't understand I wasn't hungover from a party; I was waking up from a scary, sad event.

There's a lot of symbolism in this dream that becomes more and more apparent as the days go on. At first it just bothered me; the concept of being "crazy" and locked up for it. But now, I can see that it's a representation of my life. While there was no one specific reason why I started to melt down this summer, I did. And when it became too much I went into action and went to the doctor for help.

As for the sedative? Let's just say that food became my knock-out drug the last couple weeks, sending me into a deadened, unconscious state. Now that I'm waking up from that haze, there are two ways of looking at it. I was on a wild "joy ride" of eating whatever I wanted, as much as possible. But one person's exciting ride is another person's trip of terror. It was a dark, sad place that was disordered, irrational and dysfunctional.

In an odd coincidence (if there is such a thing), last week my copies of "The Power of Now" and "Practicing The Power of Now" arrived in the mail after some delay. This morning I picked up the "Practicing" book and opened it to a random page. It just happened to be from the chapter entitled "Dissolving the Pain Body," and here is the paragraph my eyes settled on:

"This is not to deny that you may encounter intense inner resistance to disidentifying from your pain. This will be the case particularly if you have lived closely identified with your emotional pain-body for most of your life and the whole or a large part of your sense of self is invested in it. What this means is that you have made an unhappy self out of your pain-body and believe that this mind-made fiction is who you are. In that case, unconscious fear of losing your identity will create strong resistance to any disidentifcation. In other words, you would rather be in pain -- be the pain-body -- than take a leap into the unknown and risk losing the familiar unhappy self."

Pretty wild, huh? That's pretty much my recent behavior in a nutshell -- pardon the pun!

The good news is, "To suddenly see that you are or have been attached to your pain can be quite a shocking realization. The moment you realize this, you have broken the attachment."

Yes, I'm waking up and realizing I fell once again into my Pain Body. I know this is a good thing because it means I'm not actually in it anymore. But it still bothers me that I wound up there again. I do feel like a mental patient in those moments, out of control and sad that I don't seem to have a solid grip on anything. And even more frustrating, I don't feel like anyone around me in my day-to-day life can understand it at all.

I keep thinking about this one section of "Running With Scissors" and how much I relate to it:

"Natalie leaned in and put her elbows on the table. 'Don't you ever just feel like we're chasing something? Something bigger. I don't know, it's like something that only you and I can see. Like we're running, running, running?'

"'Yeah,' I said. 'We're running alright. Running with scissors.'"

The Logical Solution

Yesterday I wrote about feeling a lack of motivation, but today I realize that's not really an absolute truth -- in fact, I think it's from negative thoughts plus some perfectionism that have been accepted as truth, albeit irrational.

For example, since my seminar last Thursday I have been much more motivated at work. I have been getting myself better organized, filing papers on a daily basis, as well as writing a goal/to do list at the end of the day so I know exactly what needs to be done the next morning. I do a little bit each day and I find myself feeling more productive and pleased with myself.

While I felt like I was a lazy bum yesterday, I know that wasn't true, either. I helped Hubby move the furniture back into the foyer, dusted and put things back in place; I set the table for dinner and washed the dishes; I did a load of laundry; and I did a lot of counted cross stitch. I probably did more that I'm not even remembering like general tidying up and mommy stuff. Granted, the house wasn't cleaned from top to bottom, but who says I have to be an indentured servant in my house every day to feel like a good wife/mother?

At my seminar the instructor told us that the average person has 20,000 thoughts per day (who knows how this number was derived) and that the grand majority of those thoughts are negative ones. It's no wonder there's so much pessimism, depression and anger in the world. Some people try to always look for the positives, but it can be pretty difficult trying to stay upbeat all the time. We all know someone in our lives who drives us crazy always looking for the silver lining in our black clouds.

That's where conscious living becomes the logical solution. Instead of fighting the negatives or forcing the positives, doesn't it seem easier to just accept what is without judgment or criticism? The more I approach life this way, the better I feel. Not ecstatic, but not down in the dumps, either. It makes the bad things more bearable and makes the good things less crucial for happiness. Either way, we're less affected by the external world and can find peace in our internal Being.

The Ride of Negativity

Yesterday Hubby and I took Mabel and her friend to Idelwild Park. It's one of the oldest amusement parks in the country, apparently, at 130 years old. We had beautiful weather for the first half of our stay, then dealt with a little rain and some thunder and lightening at the end of the day. The girls still managed to get in a lot of fun with rides, water slides and games.

I will confess to you my goal for this trip was to get my favorite treat, a funnel cake with ice cream and strawberries on top. Usually when I get this I clean my plate, but this year I didn't finish it -- I got to my satisfaction point and felt quite okay with throwing the rest away. A sign of progress, I think.


On the way home we stopped at a little diner for supper, and I was really torn about what to get. I wound up ordering a Reuben sandwich with a side of onion rings and ate it all. This morning I paid the consequences for that salty corned beef and sauerkraut -- water retention.

It's amazing how a little bloat can trigger a flood of negative thinking. I started thinking that I'm not eating "healthy" and will start gaining more weight. Add that to the fact that I haven't gone on my morning walks the last two mornings, and the negative diet mentality thoughts only escalated.

But I notice that I catch myself being negative a lot quicker than I used to; I am more conscious of this behavior and can quickly realize it does me no good. So I find myself able to shake myself out of this attitude before it can evolve into depression, self-loathing or disordered eating. And fortunately, this conveniently ties in to some of the notes I took on "The Power of Now" before I took it back to the library.

"All inner resistance is experienced as negativity, in one form or another. All negativity is resistance. In this context, the two words are almost synonymous. Negativity ranges from irritation or impatience to fierce anger, from a depressed mood or sullen resentment to suicidal despair. Sometimes the resistance triggers the emotional pain-body, in which case even a minor situation may produce intense negativity, such as anger, depression, or deep grief."


And in my case, anxiety attacks or binges. Eckhart Tolle also delves into why it's so hard for many of us to let go of this resistance, which leads to negativity and the subsequent dysfunctional behavior:

"Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry, or hard-done-by person. You will then ignore, deny or sabotage the positive in your life. This is a common phenomenon. It is also insane."

You could say negative emotions can deliver a message -- a signal from our body that something's wrong, that something needs to change. In the past this negativity would have been a signal to me that I needed to get "back on track" and be stricter with my diet and exercise. But I've learned that there's so much more behind it besides the "eat less, move more" solution, and Tolle agrees:

"Yes, recurring negative emotions do sometimes contain a message, as do illnesses. But any changes that you make, whether they have to do with your work, your relationships or your surroundings, are ultimately only cosmetic unless they arise out of a change in your level of consciousness. And as far as that is concerned, it can only mean one thing: becoming more present. When you have reached a certain degree of presence, you don't need negativity anymore to tell you what is needed in your life situation. But as long as negativity is there, use it. Use it as a kind of signal that reminds you to be more present.

He even gives some advice on how to stop negativity:

"Whenever you notice that some form of negativity has arisen within you, look on it not as a failure, but as a helpful signal that is telling you: 'Wake up. Get out of your mind. Be present.'

"...whenever you feel negativity arising within you, whether caused by an external factor, a thought, or even nothing in particular that you are aware of, look on it as a voice saying 'Attention. Here and Now. Wake up.' Even the slightest irritation is significant and needs to be acknowledged and looked at; otherwise, there will be a cumulative build-up of unobserved reactions. As I said before, you may be able to just drop it once you realize that you don't want to have this energy field inside you and that it serves no purpose. But then make sure that you drop it completely. If you cannot drop it, just accept that it is there and take your attention into the feeling, as I pointed out earlier.

"As an alternative to dropping a negative reaction, you can make it disappear by imagining yourself becoming transparent to the external cause of the reaction... Feel yourself becoming transparent, as it were, without the solidity of a material to pass right through you. It is no longer hitting a solid 'wall' inside you... practice with little things first. The car alarm, the dog barking, the children screaming, the traffic jam. Instead of having a wall of resistance inside you that gets constantly and painfully hit by things that "shouldn't be happening," let everything pass through you.

"Somebody says something to you that is rude or designed to hurt. Instead of going into unconscious reaction and negativity, such as attack, defense, or withdrawal, you let it pass right through you. Offer no resistance. It is as if there is nobody there to get hurt anymore. That is forgiveness. In this way, you become invulnerable. You can still tell that person that his or her behavior is unacceptable, if that is what you choose to do. But that person no longer has the power to control your inner state. You are then in your power -- not in someone else's, nor are you run by your mind. Whether it is a car alarm, a rude person, a flood, an earthquake, or the loss of all your possessions, the resistance mechanism is the same."

This is great to remember when someone you know says something hurtful or rude, but even more important when the perpetrator is yourself.

So, instead of falling into diet mentality, these negative thoughts remind me to be more conscious, to stay the course with Intuitive Eating. I keep myself from falling back into the restrict/binge cycle, which just leads to more negative thinking, and on and on it goes, like an amusement park ride.

Cycles, Judgment and Joy

I have to return "The Power of Now" to the library today. So I'm trying to get some last-minute tidbits of wisdom from it before I take it back. (I have a copy ordered, but it's going to be a while until I get it because it's being shipped with something I pre-ordered that won't be available until September.)

Wouldn't you know, I found something that directly related to my previous post about my lack of energy and need to be productive:

"Your physical energy is also subject to cycles. It cannot always be at a peak. There will be times of low as well as high energy. There will be periods when you are highly active and creative, but there may also be times when everything seems stagnant, when it seems that you are not getting anywhere, not achieving anything. A cycle can last for anything from a few hours to a few years. There are large cycles and small cycles within these large ones. Many illnesses are created through fighting against the cycles of low energy, which are vital for regeneration. The compulsion to do, and the tendency to derive your sense of self-worth and identity from external factors such as achievement, is an inevitable illusion as long as you are identified with the mind. This makes it hard or impossible for you to accept the low cycles and allow them to be. Thus, the intelligence of the organism may take over as a self-protective measure and create an illness in order to force you to stop, so that the necessary regeneration can take place."

While some of this fatigue is probably a side effect of the medication, I do think it's my body telling me it's time to rest, to recuperate and regenerate from ... everything. I shouldn't fight it, let it be, and let the cycle run its course.

The weekend was interesting as far as food went. Saturday night we went out for dinner and I ordered eggplant Parmesan, which came with a side of spaghetti, a salad and bread. I ate all of my salad and one piece of bread, then my entree came. It was very good and I was really enjoying it, but halfway through I just knew I was done. I hit that satisfaction point where I felt good: not hungry anymore, but not stuffed, either. I knew I could pack the rest of it up and eat it later. I'm still at the stage that finding that moment is a shocking realization to me. I'm hopeful that it will eventually become an everyday occurrence.

Sunday morning went well, too. I had the same thing for breakfast that I ate Saturday, but I found myself very content with half the amount I had the day before. The problem came in the afternoon. I got an attack of the "snackies" and had more than my share of sweet and salty snacks. My feelings of fullness went dead on me and I had to consciously stop eating because my body wasn't sending a strong enough signal, or else my brain wasn't getting the signal. It wasn't until an hour later or so that it caught up with me, but by then my family wanted supper so I cooked our meal. I could have easily skipped that meal, but I went ahead and ate anyway. Then our neighbors invited us over and they had this incredible homemade cake with mandarin oranges in the cake and fresh blueberries in the layers and on top. I ate a piece, then my SIL, who was also there, and I picked at a piece that had fallen apart on the serving dish.

Last night I really felt like I had overeaten and wasn't thrilled about it. The good news is, instead of falling into binge mentality and thinking, "Well, since I've already blown it today, I might as well go all the way," I didn't eat anything else. I could have easily broken into my stash of candy bars (that I bought a week ago and haven't touched) and sucked them all down in a combination of self-pity and self-hatred. But there was no need to empty my cupboards, and there was no point in punishing myself.

This all comes down to that "good" and "bad" mentality, that all-or-nothing thinking when it comes to eating and especially dieting. Eckhart Tolle once again discusses this in "The Power of Now:"

"As long as a condition is judged as 'good' by your mind, whether it be a relationship, a possession, a social role, a place, or your physical body, the mind attaches itself to it and identifies with it. It makes you happy, makes you feel good about yourself, and it may become part of who you are or think you are. But nothing lasts in this dimension where moth and rust consume. Either it ends or it changes, or it may undergo a polarity shift: The same condition that was good yesterday or last year has suddenly or gradually turned into bad. The same condition that made you happy, then makes you unhappy. The prosperity of today becomes the empty consumerism of tomorrow. The happy wedding and honeymoon becomes the unhappy divorce or the unhappy coexistence. Or a condition disappears, so its absence makes you unhappy. When a condition or situation that the mind has attached itself to and identified with changes or disappears, the mind cannot accept it. It will cling to the disappearing condition and resist the change. It is almost as if a limb were being torn off your body. "

The problem with judging things as good or giving you happiness is that it inevitably leads to its opposite, the bad and unhappy. "What comes up must come down," the old saying goes. When we merely accept things as they are, to accept what simply is, there's no opposite, no downside. We don't experience happiness or unhappiness, but peace.

"Through allowing the 'isness' of all things," Tolle says, "a deeper dimension underneath the play of opposites reveals itself to you as an abiding presence, an unchanging deep stillness, an uncaused joy beyond good and bad. This is the joy of Being, the peace of God."

So, in looking back at my weekend, what good does it do to judge my eating as "good" Saturday and "bad" Sunday? If I just view both events as inevitable cycles, it eliminates the emotional ups and downs that I feel about my "performance." There will be days that I will be in tune with my body's hunger and fullness signals, and there will be days that I won't. It doesn't make me a good or bad person. It just is, and I am simply Being.

This means I need to surrender and accept the good with the bad. Because the minute I begin to seek happiness from one behavior, I am also taking in the inseparable unhappiness that accompanies it. This doesn't mean I should give up or shouldn't still strive to learn healthier behaviors. Tolle writes about this, too:

"This is not being negative. It is simply recognizing the nature of things, so that you don't pursue an illusion for the rest of your life. Nor is it saying that you should no longer appreciate pleasant or beautiful things or conditions. But to seek something through them that they cannot give -- an identity, a sense of permanency and fulfilment -- is a recipe for frustration and suffering... The more you seek happiness in this way, the more it will elude you. Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize the truth. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you joy. Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of Being. It is an essential part of the inner state of peace, the state that has been called the peace of God. It is your natural state, not something that you need to work hard for struggle to attain."

I can still strive to be an intuitive eater, but doing that will not solve all the problems in my life. It will not give me joy. Only living consciously, accepting what is and not resisting the natural cycles of life, will give me peace from judgment and unhappiness. Now the trick is to actually do it!

Apathy or Spiritual Enlightenment?

I'm having trouble coming up with some big pressing issue to write about here today. I normally have some little drama, some problem that I expound upon or allude to here and try to break it down until I can make sense of it or find a way to work on it.

Nothing's really striking me as pressing today. I still have some irritations (another dog diarrhea incident this morning, but fortunately it was contained on linoleum), some family issues that are fluttering around like some pesty flies, but nothing has me fired up.

The IE continues to go well. At supper time I was feeling a little nauseated again (I'm slowly moving my medication time from morning to evening to try to counteract these side effects), so I ate a very light supper. Before, in diet mode, because it was meal time I 'd stuff myself with as many vegetables as I could because it was "guilt-free" food and a permissible time to eat. Later I made Mabel a little ice cream cone and decided to make one for myself, too. It tasted great, and although it was much smaller than anything I'd get at an ice cream stand, it was just as satisfying. It all felt incredibly normal.

My first reaction is that it has to be the medicine. I told my SIL this morning on our walk about something that came up yesterday. I said if it had happened the week before I'd be seething, but today I'm just shrugging my shoulders and thinking, "Oh well, there's no point worrying about it now; I'll address it when it actually happens."

I keep thinking about Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now" and his idea of people incorrectly identifying themselves with their problems. I caught myself almost feeling disappointed that my anxiety and urges to binge are vanishing so quickly with this medicine, because there was a part of my mind that was identifying with these problems and wanted to cling to them for a while longer, whether it be for sympathy or to be treated with kid gloves by my family for a while.

He writes about it very well here:

"To suddenly see that you are or have been attached to your pain can be a quite shocking realization. The moment you realize this, you have broken the attachment. The pain-body is an energy field, almost like an entity, that has become temporarily lodged in your inner space. It is life energy that has become trapped, energy that is no longer flowing. Of course, the pain-body is there because of certain things that happened in the past. It is the living past in you, and if you identify with it, you identify with the past. A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self. The truth is that the only power there is, is contained within this moment: It is the power of your presence. Once you know that, you also realize that you are responsible for your inner space now -- nobody else is -- and that the past cannot prevail against the power of the Now."

This is pretty shocking for me. It's like my brain is going, "Uh oh. If I can't identify myself with Generalized Anxiety Disorder or Binge Eating Disorder, I have to be my true self. And what is that?"

On my walk yesterday I was by myself and listening to my Sirius satellite radio. I was flipping through the channels and came across Janis Joplin singing "Me and Bobby McGee." In this song (written by Kris Kristofferson) she sings "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose," and that's how I'm feeling right now. I'm being freed from the compulsive thoughts that lead me to anxiety and bingeing, and I'm feeling at loose ends.

When I have these aggravating moments now and I don't (over) react, I actually worry that I'm being lulled into a drugged apathy, a zombified state. But read this excerpt from "The Power of Now:"

"Do you resent what you are doing? It may be your job, or may have agreed to do something and are doing it, but part of you resents and resists it. Are you carrying unspoken resentment toward a person close to you? Do you realize that the energy you thus emanate is so harmful in its effects that you are in fact contaminating yourself as well as those around you?...

"Maybe you are being taken advantage of, maybe the activity you are engaged in is tedious, maybe someone close to you is dishonest, irritating, or unconscious, but all this is irrelevant. Whether your thoughts and emotions about this situation are justified or not makes no difference. The fact is that you are resisting what is. You are making the present moment into an enemy. You are creating unhappiness...

"Either stop doing what you are doing, speak to the person concerned and express fully what you feel, or drop the negativity that your mind has created around the situation and that serves no purpose whatsoever except to strengthen a false sense of self."

He then explains in simple terms how to drop the negativity:

"How do you drop a piece of hot coal that you are holding in your hand? How do you drop some heavy and useless baggage that you are carrying? By recognizing that you don't want to suffer the pain or carry the burden anymore and then letting go of it."

Later in the book Tolle elaborates on people creating drama in their lives and what happens when you let go of it:

"When you feel sorry for yourself, that's drama. When you feel guilty or anxious, that's drama. When you let the past or future obscure the present, you are creating time, psychological time -- the stuff out of which drama is made. Whenever you are not honoring the present moment by allowing it to be, you are creating drama.

"Most people are in love with their particular life drama. Their story is their identity. The ego runs their life. They have their whole sense of self invested in it. Even their -- usually unsuccessful -- search for an answer, a solution, or for healing becomes part of it. What they fear and resist most is the end of their drama. As long as they are their mind, what they fear and resist most is their own awakening.

"When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life. Nobody can even have an argument with you, no matter how hard he or she tries. You cannot have an argument with a fully conscious person. An argument implies identification with your mind and a mental position, as well as resistance and reaction to the other person's position. The result is that the polar opposites become mutually energized. These are the mechanics of unconsciousness. You can still make your point clearly and firmly, but there will be no reactive force behind it, no defense or attack. So it won't turn into drama. When you are fully conscious, you cease to be in conflict. 'No one who is at one with himself can even conceive of conflict,' states A Course in Miracles. This refers not only to conflict with other people but more fundamentally to conflict within you, which ceases when there is no longer any clash between the demands and expectations of your mind and what is."

It wasn't too long ago that I was wishing to achieve a state like this. Now that I'm beginning to get it, I'm questioning it. Am I in a drugged stupor, or is the medicine a tool that's helping me to stop resisting what is and stop creating unnecessary unhappiness for myself? Am I apathetic or enlightened?

I need to quit doubting or second-guessing this gift I'm receiving, whether it's drug-induced or not. I'm becoming more conscious, I'm becoming less resistant to what is and creating less drama in my life. These are all good things. Whether I'm ready for it or not, my life drama is coming to an end. I need to learn to accept it and be at peace with it.

A Stitch in Time

According to Urban Dictionary, "a stitch in time saves nine" means "that it is better to deal with problems immediately rather than later as things will worsen and take longer to amend."

Hmm, tackle a problem now instead of letting things build and grow worse... doesn't seem to apply to me at all...

Enough sarcasm. On Sunday I started a counted cross stitch project that has been sitting around collecting dust for years. It's part of a set of three pictures of garden vegetables that will match my kitchen nicely. The other two pictures (of tomatoes and peppers) have been completed and sitting in a shirt box for ... holy crap, 9 or 10 years! Once I get this final project, the artichoke, done, I plan on getting all three framed and will hang in my kitchen.

I can't believe it's been 10 years since I seriously cranked out any needlework. Actually, it was 15 years ago this summer that I learned how to do it.

On July 14, 1992, my dad, my sister and I were in Alaska on a rare (in fact, only) father-daughter trip to salmon fish the Kvichak River. Dad got a call from home and came to us later to inform us that his dad, my Grandpa Harold, collapsed at his favorite diner that morning and was life flighted to Pittsburgh with a ruptured aorta. Despite their attempts to save him, the damage was too severe and he passed away.

A few days ago my mother and I were talking about this 15th anniversary and how this event was really a major turning point in our family, or should I say the eventual dissolution of our extended family. Grandpa Harold was a quiet man who sometimes came off as gruff, but he was truly the keystone of our family, the stable, solid presence who kept everyone civil and smoothed over ruffled feathers. Without him, the petty bickering, old resentments and festering issues that he managed to keep in check went out of control.

For me personally it was also a watershed moment. The day of his funeral was the day I finally realized that my father would never be able to be there for me emotionally in any capacity. I don't know what I cried over more: the loss of my grandfather or the death of my dreams of having a close, loving, supportive relationship with my father.

I don't hold any bitterness or anger about my father's actions during that time. He was under a massive amount of stress and trauma, and for a person who always avoided confrontation and unpleasantness when he could, this was unbearable. His method of coping was running away from us, which isn't that unusual, and turning to his coping device, alcohol. How many of us run away from our problems or escape into some kind of substance? I've certainly had my drug of choice all these years.

I've written a little about my dad before, but if you're new, this moment of realization actually helped me. Once I let go of those old expectations of what I wanted from my father, I learned to accept what he could give me. Since that time our relationship has actually improved because I know his limits and don't set myself up for disappointment like I used to.

Anyway, back to the needlework. I was home from college that summer, and after the funeral I moved in to my grandmother's house and lived with her until the fall semester began. My Grandma Kate and I had a lot in common -- to this day people tell me I look like her and have her caring nature. She was such a well-loved person in our little town and to this day I catch myself wanting to emulate her.

Grandma was famous for her prolific needlework. In the spring she would have us grandchildren go through her catalogs and pick out projects we liked, and that Christmas we would get it as a gift. My house is filled with beautiful needlepoint pillows, framed pictures and a foot stool, among other things. She was also part of our church's needlepoint group and contributed a large part to the altar paraments and the Christmas Nativity set. She also contributed to a plastic canvas reproduction of our Main Street district from the turn of the century.

Up until the last year of her life Grandma was dedicated to her needlepoint. After supper she would sit on her sofa and stitch away through the 6 o'clock news, Wheel of Fortune and all the prime time shows, then finally finish up for the night with the 11 o'clock news. I have stacks of photographs of all the pictures she took of each project before she gave them away; it's amazing how much she produced.

That summer, the summer she lost her husband of more than 50 years, she taught me how to do needlepoint. I remember sitting on her back porch working on plastic canvas bookends (you put bricks inside them before stitching them shut) and a tissue box cover that looked like a goldfish bowl. Before long I graduated from plastic to fabric backed projects which were much more intricate and detailed.

Then one afternoon Grandma took me to her friend's house. Mary was a counted cross stitcher, and she gave me a little starter project of a little owl. After that I still did some needlepoint, but after that I veered more and more toward counted cross stitch projects. Part of it was because I knew Grandma would be making me a needlepoint project each year, so it freed me up to do something else.

I remember being so proud when I gave Grandma a framed counted cross stitch picture of a cardinal on a snowy lamp post as a Christmas present. Grandma loved cardinals and often wore a sweater with the red bird embroidered on it. It felt wonderful to be able to give her something made by my hand, after all the years of giving to us.

But the gift she gave me continued throughout the years. I loved doing needlework. I would get so absorbed by a project I'd stay up half the night stitching away. When I lived with my ex-boyfriend some of our best Sunday afternoons were spent on the couch watching football games while I worked on some cross stitch.

As I've mentioned before, I quit doing needlework when Mabel came into my life. It was hard to concentrate on a project when I had a toddler who needed constant supervision, and I couldn't afford to stay up half the night when I needed all the sleep I could get.

Even now, as I'm beginning this new project, I feel like I should be doing something else around the house: cleaning, organizing, etc. I've allowed my life to get so hectic and stressful with things that need to be done, not necessarily what I want to do.

But, as my daughter is fond of saying lately, "How's that working for ya?" Obviously, not very well.

So I'm paying attention to the old idiom "a stitch in time saves nine." I'm resurrecting what was once a very pleasurable, stress relieving, and non-food recreation for me, and I'm enjoying it greatly. I'm not waiting when I have more time, or when my home office is finally organized. I'm doing it Now.

Better yet, Mabel is interested in it, and I've started her on a latch hook project. But she's already got her sights on needlepoint and counted cross stitch, too. If my grandmother is able to, she must be smiling as she looks down at me and my daughter as we work on our projects together. It's a tradition being handed down to another generation, and it's me putting conscious living into action.

Detour from the Road to Bingeville

It's a rainy afternoon here. Mabel spent the night at a friend's house and is still there until I pick her up in an hour. Hubby's outside with his dad working on our new porch. My mom was here for a few minutes to visit and has just left. I have the house to myself and can do anything I want.

So why do I want to eat?

I'm not hungry -- for lunch I had half a sandwich that was left over from last night's supper, then half a brownie (probably a 2"x2" square) and just a few minutes ago I had a candy bar. The candy bar was bordering on excessive, but I was still hungry, so I let myself have it.

So now I'm pleasantly full, yet in my mind the urge to sneak off and stuff myself is lurking there like a shady character under a lamp post. Ominous but not quite an immediate threat.

And here I am, the Watcher, looking down from my window at this scene, and I can't help but wonder why. This is a reoccurring theme for me -- I get some time by myself, and the urge to binge arises. It's not that I'm lonely -- good Lord I've been so inundated with people lately that I'm been eager for an afternoon like this. I'm not stressed out or angry today -- work was calm and quiet with my Pastor still on vacation. It is that time of the month, but I feel fine.

Someone, and I can't remember who now, figured this situation out on their own blog, and I knew she had gotten me pegged, too. This comes down to the old food for comfort syndrome. I get some time to myself, I want to "treat" myself, and the first response is food.

This isn't anything out of the ordinary. We comfort and treat ourselves with food all the time. As a kid, after a victorious baseball or soccer game the team goes out for ice cream. As an adult, you get a promotion and celebrate with a fancy dinner. As a kid, you scrape your knee and your mom gives you a cookie. As an adult, we have a rough day at work and treat ourselves by stopping at the grocery store on the way home and picking up our favorite comfort food. When someone dies, the family gets trays of food from friends and neighbors.

But when that comforting gets excessive, when it becomes a compulsion instead of a treat, it's time to learn different ways of taking care of ourselves. My first thought was to come here and write about it, to make myself blatantly conscious of what was going on and to separate myself from the old thoughts and behaviors that lead me down the road to Bingeville.

Now the trick is to find something else to do that will be satisfying enough to not make me feel deprived because I'm not giving in to these thoughts.

But you know what? Just writing about it here, lifting myself out of that mind set before the momentum kicked in, has made the urge less intense, less important. I'm not identifying with it, so it has lost its power over me. It's still there under the lamp post, but it's slowly withdrawing out of the halo of light and back into the darkness.

I think the best thing I can do for myself right now is to take 15 or 20 minutes to meditate. Then I'll go pick up Mabel from her friend's house and get on with the rest of my day.

Thank goodness I was willing and able to take this detour from the Road to Bingeville. It's a different path than the one I'm used to, but the scenery's a whole lot nicer.

Salvation is Here and Now

It's Monday, back to the work week, so I ought to get back to work on processing "The Power of Now." I read this section last week during my trip to the woods, and it really spoke to me, especially now after this past weekend and the subject of taking up hobbies:



"Most people pursue physical pleasures or various forms of psychological gratification because they believe that those things will make them happy or free them from a feeling of fear or lack. Happiness may be perceived as a heightened sense of aliveness attained through physical pleasure, or a more secure and more complete sense of self attained through some form of psychological gratification. This is the search for salvation from a state of unsatisfactoriness or insufficiency. Invariably, any satisfaction that they obtain is short-lived, so the condition of satisfaction of fulfillment is usually projected once again onto an imaginary point away from the here and now. 'When I obtain this or am free of that -- then I will be okay.' This is the unconscious mind-set that creates the illusion of salvation in the future.



"True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is so be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it is to "know God" -- not as something outside you but as your own innermost essence. True salvation is to know yourself as an inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life from which all that exists derives its being.



"True salvation is a state of freedom -- from fear, from suffering, from a perceived state of lack and insufficiency and therefore from all wanting, needing, grasping and clinging. It is freedom from compulsive thinking, from negativity, and above all from past and future as a psychological need. Your mind is telling you that you cannot get there from here. Something needs to happen, or you need to become this or that before you can be free and fulfilled. It is saying, in fact, that you need time -- that you need to find out, sort out, do, achieve, acquire, become, or understand something before you can be free of complete. You see time as the means to salvation, whereas in truth it is the greatest obstacle to salvation. You think that you can't get there from where and who you are at this moment because you are not yet complete or good enough, but the truth is that here and now is the only point from where you can get there. You 'get' there by realizing that you are there already. You find God the moment you realize that you don't need to seek God. So there is no only way to salvation: Any condition can be used, but no particular condition is needed. However, there is only one point of access: the Now. There can be no salvation away from this moment. You are lonely and without a partner? Enter the Now from there. You are in a relationship? Enter the Now from there."

This is such an important thing for me to remember. I can take up all the hobbies in the world, but not one of them is going to give me happiness. Doing them may bring out the happiness that is already within me, but they won't provide it. Finishing my novel will not give me inner peace; completing a cross-stitch project will not make me a better person.

On the other side of the coin, I need to quit saying "When I finally get the house organized I'll get back to needlework again, " or "I'll get back to writing once Mabel heads off to college." This is just like saying "I won't dance in public until I'm a size 8" or "I can't wear a sleeveless shirt until I work out and make my upper arms firmer." All we have is Now. If I want to do something, this moment is the only one I have.

Can I tell you how wonderful it was to ride my bicycle yesterday? What an exercise in staying conscious and present: you have to stay constantly in the moment, watching for traffic and potholes, staying balanced, leaning into the turns, judging which gear to be in as I'm pedalling uphill. And it enables me to be in my body and appreciate what it can do; I feel the burn in my legs, my lungs taking in more air as I increase my pedalling.

Best of all, my daughter is in seventh heaven that she can go bike riding with me. We took two bike trips yesterday, the second at her request. With me at her side she could go down streets and into neighborhoods she's not been allowed to go down before.

"We should do this every day!" she exclaimed as we rode down one tree-lined street, and that moment still makes me so very happy. See? The bike riding itself wasn't making the happiness; it was being in the present, sharing a moment with my daughter that didn't involve the distractions of a blaring TV set, computer game or CD player. It was enjoying the Now.

On the surface this post doesn't have much to do with food or eating issues. But then, that's the whole point of this journey: I'm finding my happiness in the Now, not using food and eating to gratify me, console me over past hurts or numb myself so I don't worry about the future. When I allow myself to be in the Now I am free from compulsive eating and negative thinking. That freedom is salvation, and that salvation is here and now.

Pretty Mental Saturday (Alternate Title: Food Is Not the Answer)

As the title above suggests, I had a rough PMS day yesterday.

I'm not sure why it happens exactly, but once in a while I have a lethal combination of hormones and pressing issues that come together like vinegar and baking soda. I really felt as if I was on the breaking point and would explode into a thousand tiny pieces.

Every irritation seemed amplified. Every little annoyance in my life was collecting into an ever growing snowball and heading for the peaceful little village in the valley of my being.

It finally got so bad I ran away from home. Yes, I bolted and didn't tell anyone where I was going. I had to get away from the husband, the kid, the dogs, the in-laws, my mother, all the noise and questions and demands.

When I told my husband where I went later that evening, he told me it was "morbid." I drove a few miles out of town to a little village and parked at the country cemetery there. I walked around for about 20 minutes or so, looking at the gravestones, marveling at how old some of them were (for American standards). I was impressed at how many Revolutionary War Veterans were buried there, and I looked at the tombstones written in German and wished I could read them. Some of the people I knew, I found my great-uncle's stone, and I thought it was a little sad that some of the stones were so old and worn that all of the writing on them was gone and you had no idea whose remains rested there.

I'm not turning Goth, I swear. But I couldn't think of another place to go that was more peaceful and quiet. This cemetery is on top of a hill that overlooks the surrounding countryside, and the view is really a sight to behold. My dad's family farm borders this cemetery; in fact, he donated a piece of the land to the cemetery association, and I've been looking into getting a lot of my own so I can be planted there too someday.

After walking around there for a while, listening to the corn stalks rustling in the breeze, realizing how life can be both temporary and eternal at the same time, I was able to catch my breath for the first time all day. My freight train of a brain finally slowed down, and I felt like I was finally sane enough to go home again.

Unfortunately this tranquility didn't last too long; on the car ride home Hubby was calling to see where in the hell I'd run off to, and once I did get home I dealt with the starving child, the bored dogs, the family all calling to coordinate yet another trip to see fireworks. Before long I was knee deep in anxiety and misery again.

I am going to confess here that I did something I almost never do: I poured myself a drink. Yes, I mean alcohol. Now I know some of you may be thinking-- "Red flag! She's transferring her food compulsions to alcohol!" -- but I'm just a little too self-aware for that. I grew up with two parents who turned to alcohol to cope with life, and I know it doesn't work. But at that point I didn't have any Valium in the house, and I figured one drink wasn't going to send me over the deep end.

In fact, it helped a lot in the fact that it dampened the anxiety just enough that I could handle it in more beneficial ways. I pulled out one of my Wayne Dyer books (which has very similar information to Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now," now having read both authors), then spent some time in some relaxation techniques and even managed to meditate a little.

Believe me, this downing a shot of booze is not going to become a regular event. But desperate times called for desperate measures, and in this case I was able to come to the realization that nothing was so bad in my life that I needed all this anxiety; no one feeling I was experiencing could not be tolerated and survived. I wasn't thrilled about having to go out with the extended family yet again (the second time that day!), but since there was nothing I could do about it I had to just accept it and find some sense of peace within myself.

I will say that by the time we went for fireworks I was pretty much shut down. I couldn't really gather up the energy to participate in any engaging conversation, so I just sat back and laid low. My good friend and SIL picked up on this and asked me what was wrong, but we both knew we couldn't get into any details with everyone around. So I figure she'll be grilling me on our morning walk Monday morning.

Here's the thing about this Pretty Mental Saturday: even though I felt awful most of the day, there was never one moment that bingeing seemed like a viable solution. Not once. And maybe that was part of what made the day so harrowing! My old stand-by was gone and I had to find alternate methods of coping! In the very few instances that I did think about food, I remember this one phrase coming to me again and again: "Food is not the answer."

However, I did have to deal with one more incident before the night was through. After the fireworks Mabel was starving, as 8 year-olds are want to do, and the only thing she wanted was McD's and one of their Crappy Meals. Hubby relented to her whining and drove there, and the drive-thru lane was packed with other fireworks attendees, so he pulled in and went inside to order. Before he went in he asked everyone in the car if they wanted anything. In-laws said no, and I said no.

So what does Hubby do? He comes back with a Crappy Meal for Mabel, an order of fries for his mother, and two (2!!!) baked fruit pies for me! MIL is all atwitter and happy with her surprise present of fries fresh out of the fryer, all hot and greasy and salty. I looked at the pies in horror.

"What's this?"
"Pies," Hubby replied, "I know they're your favorite."

How I didn't throw the damn things out the window in a fury is still a mystery to me. How long have I been battling, first with losing weight, and now with the binge eating? How many times have I told him that doing this to me is like bringing a bottle of vodka to an alcoholic? Yes, I've told him I'm doing Intuitive Eating now and I'm trying to legalize all foods, but I've also told him that in addition I'm learning to not use food to cope with problems and numb myself from my emotions.

I know I've told him these things, but apparently he hasn't really heard me. I know he didn't do it to be mean, I know he was worried about me all day and was beside himself trying to figure out what to do to make me feel better. In his mind, in his family's tradition, food is always the answer to the bad day, to the crushed ego, to help you forget about the boo-boo. He was only doing what comes naturally.

But, here it comes again, FOOD IS NOT THE ANSWER! (Sorry to yell.) It would have been one thing if I had asked for the pies, if I had been craving them and actually wanted them. But I didn't! I had actually had a fleeting thought of getting a small vanilla cone, but after an internal scan (what, am I on Star Trek now?) I knew I wasn't hungry for it. I told him no, I wasn't hungry, and I really meant it. So why can't that be respected?

Those pies are still sitting on the kitchen counter, by the way. I haven't been able to bring myself to throw them away, because in the back of my mind I figure I might be hungry for them later. Something tells me they're like the rest of McD's food -- they taste great when they're piping hot, but once they cool down it's just nasty -- especially those nuggets!

But yes, I survived my Pretty Mental Saturday, and without a binge. I think I may need a medal for surviving this battle.

Time And Relative Dimensions In Space

I didn't post yesterday. I went online a couple times, but I just couldn't find anything to write about yesterday, and didn't feel like sitting down with my notes from "The Power of Now" and copying/analyzing them here.

It wasn't due to laziness -- I did my morning walk, and I got a lot of housework and laundry done, too. I did get caught up in a "Doctor Who" marathon running on the Sci Fi Channel, but I managed to fold laundry and get things done during the show and the commercials. Last night was the American premiere of the newest season, so I had my evening plans set.

I adore "Doctor Who," at least the last three series with the newest Doctors, Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant. Americans may know Eccleston as Claude the Invisible Man on the NBC show "Heroes," and Tennant as bad guy Bartie Crouch Jr. in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." My friend SS got me and Mabel into the show, and now we can hardly imagine life without it.

The Doctor is a Time Lord who can travel through space and time in his spaceship the TARDIS, which stands for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. It looks like an innocent British police call box (like a phone booth for us Americans) but it contains a very large space craft that has incredible power. As I'm thinking about it today, I can see a correlation to the TARDIS and Doctor Who to the work I'm doing with conscious living. In some ways I'm striving to be a little like the Doctor -- he's living in his own time, his own Now, and the past and future cannot hold him down. The TARDIS can also be a representation of ourselves and our identities. On the outside we may look ordinary, even dumpy, but our true selves, contained within our exterior coverings, is so vast, beautiful and powerful.

I think I didn't post yesterday because I was finally taking some of what I've been learning and applying it. I was living consciously, working on the immediate tasks in front of me and not worrying about yesterday or tomorrow. I didn't want to analyze, didn't want to fret about things. I was simply in the moment, Being.

And my eating reflected that. Once in a while I'd get these pangs that I should eat something. But unless I could immediately pinpoint exactly what I wanted to eat, I pushed it away, because it wasn't real hunger to me. It was my old behaviors wanting to engage (it's my day off from work, let's "treat" myself by eating lots of crap), and I wasn't having it. Once I could determine exactly what I was hungry for, I ate it, hence my lunch of a PB&J with a glass of milk for lunch.

It wasn't a perfect day -- I ate to the upper end of my full feeling at supper -- but I know now I had gone too long without eating, making myself extra hungry. I am happy that I recognized the exact moment that if I ate another bite, I would move from full to stuffed and be a miserable person indeed. And I'm equally thrilled that I was able to stop at that moment, while everyone else was still eating, and didn't feel driven to keep picking at things I wasn't hungry for anymore. And besides, I'm not aiming for perfect, am I?

What I am aiming for is traveling through my life like I'm in the TARDIS -- I'm not held down by the past or waiting for something to happen in the future. If I want to do something, I've got to do it now, because the Now is the only place where I exist, just like Doctor Who. Pretty cool!

Hollow of Tranquility

This is were we spent the afternoon July 3rd. It's some property my dad owns down in the real middle of nowhere -- it makes my little rural hometown seem like the big city. Years ago it was the site of a gristmill, which was dismantled and given to some historical society about 15 years ago. My dad bought the property after a friend of his went through a divorce and was liquidating some assets. It's a fantastic piece of property, and right now my sister has an Airstream trailer parked as a summer home for her and her daughters.


Our house was being treated for bugs (long story) and we needed to get us humans and dogs out of the house for a bit while the poisons settled in and killed the pesties. For those of you concerned about it, the bug guy told us the main ingredient in their insecticide is the same thing we put on our dogs to get rid of fleas and ticks, so I don't think we're going to wake up six months from now with a third eyeball.


At first I didn't really want to go; I had a headache and found myself dealing with some burbling anxiety. But I definitely didn't want to stay at the house, and I had nowhere else I wanted to go, so I took some ibuprofen, grabbed my book, some bug spray, drinks, snacks and towels for us, and we all climbed in the SUV and headed down over the mountain (yes, that's what we say when we go there -- and it is a big mountain we have to drive down to get there, White Horse Mountain).


I remember on the ride down my headache was still pestering me, as well as this anxiety, and I told myself "You're just going to have to sit with these emotions. If you have to cry, go walk off in the woods and do it. But you're not going to binge." Especially since I didn't bring enough food (or anything that would trigger me) for anything of the sort to happen!


But once I got there, all that anxiety vanished. It was so pretty there, the sound of the creek was so relaxing, and it was great to watch our doggies enjoy their first real experience in running water. At first they were hesitant about getting in, but boy, once they did, you could hardly get them out! This is Pearl, taking a short break and looking over the stone wall at Daddy and brother Bruno as they continue to venture in the stream. Sister Mabel was also having fun: Daddy held a foot-long water snake for her to touch; she was catching (and releasing) all sizes of crayfish and trying to catch minnows; and later when some other kids showed up she found a salamander and played with him until his tail fell off. Daddy assured us this happens often and his tail will grow back.


The water in the creek is pretty low right now, and as you could see in the first photo there are a lot of big rocks exposed in the creek bed. After walking around a bit I pointed at one rock and said, "That rock has been carved out especially for my butt, so I'm sittin' there!" It was perfect; it even had a smaller rock in front of it that made the ideal foot rest. It was just far enough away from the action that I wasn't getting soaked by the puppies' water wrestling matches, but close enough that I could talk to my fellow humans easily.


When everyone moved downstream a bit I was able to really relish the moment, the "Now," so to speak, and it was so easy in the middle of all that nature. Everything was so green and alive, the water was so clear (where the dogs hadn't muddied it up) and you could see all the little fish swimming around. There was no past, no future, just the rustling of the leaves and the endless flow of water. Timeless. It was impossible to be anything but conscious in that moment.


When the rock finally started to get a little too hard for my rear end, I moved up to dry land and nestled into the Adirondack chair that overlooked the stream (that's where I was when I took the picture of Pearl). Again, still close enough that I could be involved if I wanted to. Eventually my sister, my nieces, some friends and their dogs showed up and they all headed down the stream to the deeper swimming hole to splash and frolic. But I wanted to read more of "The Power of Now," and I managed to get into some more really intriguing sections. Never fear, I took notes and will be sharing them with you soon.


Don't worry, for those of you who are worried about me being antisocial; after a while I went down and joined everyone at the swimming hole. But I definitely relished the time I could get on my own, and I told Hubby on the ride home this definitely has to happen more often. Not only for the puppies, who had so much fun and really need that kind of workout to keep them in shape, but for us humans, too.


In my journeys through losing weight and tackling my food and emotional issues, "they" are always telling us to find non-food ways to relieve stress and to distract ourselves from food. This has always been hard for me, but that day I felt like I had finally found one that really worked. It takes a 15-minute car ride, but it was definitely worth it. I think you'll find me down here in my Hollow of Tranquility a lot more this summer.
(This photo was taken June 24 by Mabel at our family reunion. I really liked this picture of me because it wasn't staged, and I look really natural and relaxed. Now if I can figure out how to make it my new profile photo...)

For What It's Worth

Going back over yesterday's post, I feel a bit of a whiner -- poor me, Daddy forgot my birthday -- while all this death, disease, destruction and deception goes on in our world. But let's face it, this is a personal blog, not a newspaper column; I'm allowed to be selfish and self-absorbed here, since I usually don't allow myself to do it anywhere else.

No compulsive overeating yesterday, thank goodness. Making myself aware of what was going on really did let the air out of what could have been a really destructive turn in my progress.

I didn't want to believe it, but the IE writers are right -- this is hard work. One of my Internet IE friends worded it well when she described it as a kind of bell curve, where it starts out fairly easy when you're all full of optimism and zeal. Then the incline starts getting steeper as the real issues behind the eating start rearing their heads and the more challenging work begins. In addition, it's common to have a little weight gain at the beginning (me included) and I can see where this would be the easiest time to give up and go back to dieting, the old familiar solution to our problems.

This is the beginning of my third month. While I'm not happy about the pounds I gained from vacation, it's much less than I probably would have gained in a two-month-long eating free-for-all after falling off the diet bandwagon yet again. And I'm repeating myself here, but I've read everywhere that it's typical to gain a few pounds in the beginning of this process.

I think what's so hard about IE in comparison to dieting is that they operate in opposite directions. When you start a diet, most of them are geared to make you lose a big chunk of weight right away to get you motivated. In IE, the big results don't happen until much farther down the road -- a year, maybe even two or three! That's a long time for this generation of instant-gratification, I- want-it-all-now people that I belong to (Yes, I am Veruca Salt, at left.) I'm impatient and greedy and want to quickly invade and conquer. It's how I shop, it's how I drive, it's how I surf TV channels and clean my house. Give me the main gist of what you need to tell me, then move along so I can get to the next thing on my list. It's a hectic way to live, and I see almost everyone around me doing the same thing.

Then there's IE. It's like a crossing guard walking into the middle of the street making us STOP. IE forces us to slow down, turn off the noises and distractions around us and actually listen. We have to listen to our bodies to tell us when they're truly hungry and when they're satisfied. We have to stop and figure out the real motives behind our compulsive and emotional eating. We have to sit there with our feelings, learn that we can survive feeling them and don't need food to distract or numb them away. We are forced to step back from the jam-packed lives we've created for ourselves and become conscious beings. The pop culture junkie that I am, it makes me think of the Buffalo Springfield song "For What It's Worth" -- "It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound. Everybody look what's going down."

This doesn't feel like the best ringing endorsement for following Intuitive Eating. Some of you out there may be thinking, "Geez, who would want to do all this work and not see results for months, maybe even years?"

But that's if the only results you care about are the numbers on the scale. Earlier in this post I said IE and dieting work in opposite directions. There's another way that works, at least for me. It took about three years, but after all that dieting it really started to make me irrational and disordered. Doesn't it make sense that it might take a long time to reverse that damage and make me sane when it comes to food and my body? That seems worth it to me.

Invasion of the Pain-Body

What a night. I tossed and turned for a while, woke up at 3 a.m. and agonized over the out-of-control eating that happened yesterday, seeing all my hard work, my years of losing weight, slipping through my fingers. I couldn't even figure out why it happened, and I felt so helpless and unable to control this eating disorder. I started strategizing how I would call the doctor's office this morning and ask if I could try Meridia, because clearly my grasp of this IE is not working and I'm failing, failing, failing. I've been reading about Meridia as a medical treatment for Binge Eating Disorder, and I was convinced this was my only option to save myself.

I'm not sure what time it was when it finally hit me -- I think it was in the 4 a.m. hour. But I suddenly remembered the one part of "The Power of Now" that I hadn't written about here yet, and it clicked immediately. I had experienced a takeover of the Pain-Body.


Eckhart Tolle, the author, says that emotional pain leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with pain from the past and becomes lodged in your mind and body. It is a negative energy field that can be dormant or active. Anything can trigger it.

This Pain-Body wants to survive, and it only can if you unconsciously identify with it. It gets its "food" through you and feeds on any experience that creates further pain in any form. Pain cannot feed on joy.

Once the Pain-Body has taken over, you want more pain. You are not conscious of this and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But your thinking and behaviors are designed to keep the pain going. Its survival depends on your unconscious identification with it, as well as your unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in you.

Here's what happened to me, as far as I can tell. My Pain-Body was activated by spending the evening with my father. While nothing specifically terrible happened, it didn't have to; I started eating before I even got there just anticipating and preparing for my visit.

I don't write a lot about my father here, because to be honest we have a very distant relationship. I would consider us on good terms -- our conversations are pleasant and there aren't any major issues between us -- but it's very much a relationship of absenteeism. To fully illustrate this, here's a little anecdote that pretty much sums it up: several years ago a woman I worked with asked if she could interview me and my mother about my adoption of Mabel, because this co-worker was working on a book about adoption. She came to visit us, interviewing me first and then my mother. This co-worker came back to me for some wrap up questions, and she asked, "So, how long has it been since your father passed away?" I sputtered and said that he hadn't, and she apologized, saying, "I just thought, since you and your mom didn't bring him up at all, that..." Yeah, you get it.

There came a point for me 15 years ago that I had to emotionally withdraw and lower my expectations for our relationship, because to expect anything more was to create more disappointment and heartache for myself. I came to the conclusion that my dad was giving me all he had to give, and I had to learn to accept that. And to be honest, our relationship actually improved because of it. But it's normal for us to see or talk to each other maybe six times/days a year, and that's a high estimate.

Some of the old problems between us stems from the fact that I believe he associates me with my mother (they've been separated since 1996; the divorce was final in 2001), while my younger sister was considered on his side. Growing up I can remember being viewed as the spy, the stool pigeon who would tell my mother what he was up to and ruin his fun, while Sister was considered his "buddy." And yes, I was often my mother's ally in the war zone; I was her confidante, and sometimes that mother-daughter definition blurred as she relied on me for support. Meanwhile, Sister was Dad's party buddy and was his staunch defender on any number of issues. Since the divorce this division of the family has increased, especially when my sister left her husband and moved herself and her daughters into my dad's house, where she takes care of everything while he's traveling half the year. I live a mile away from my mom's house and see or talk to her nearly every day. So the camps are clearly defined.

I've tried to put these and other bad memories behind me (some of which I've discussed here before), but obviously these things still haunt me. I'm sure Tolle would consider this my Pain-Body. And what triggered my compulsive overeating yesterday? The yearly let-down that my dad once again forgot my birthday.

This has become almost a running joke in the dramedy of my life. My birthday is always the week of Father's Day, sometimes falling on the same day. I always make an effort to recognize Father's Day -- I give him a card, sometimes a gift, get together for a meal at his house -- but the only way he remembers my birthday is if I remind him repeatedly and basically bash him over the head with it. He even has a friend who has the same birthday as me and gives him hell for forgetting it, but it doesn't seem to sink in.

Now believe me, I don't expect balloons, streamers or big presents. I don't even have to get a card. But it would be nice for him to at least throw a "Happy Birthday" my way. And on the years when I do get some recognition because I've reminded and badgered him into remembering, it feels forced and unsatisfying.

So here's my theory of what happened: I started overeating earlier in the day in preparation of being forgotten about once again -- the fear of facing the pain that lives in me. When it did in fact happen, I continued to eat to comfort myself. My Pain-Body was activated by an expected trigger (dad forgetting my birthday), which then came true, and even though the eating was supposed to be a soother, it was really just feeding more pain (my eating disorder) feeding into the Pain-Body to make it even stronger. As if that wasn't enough, my middle of the night self-bashing and the snowballing irrational thinking gave the Pain-Body even more to feast on.

But then something wonderful happened. I did exactly what Eckhart Tolle tells us to do to regain control -- become aware of what is happening. He says:

The moment you observe it and take your attention into it, the identification is broken. A higher dimension of consciousness has come in -- presence. It cannot use you any more by pretending to be you, it can no longer replenish itself through you.

When I let the Pain-Body take over, I became unconscious, which according to Tolle means to be identified with some mental or emotional pattern. It implies a complete absence of the watcher -- my conscious Being. He suggests doing the following to do this:

Focus attention on the feeling inside you. Know that it is the Pain-Body. Accept that it is there. Don't think about it -- don't let that feeling turn into thinking. Don't judge or analyze. Don't make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who observes," the silent watcher. This is the Power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what happens.

Well, I will say that I feel better this morning having recognized all of this. It is gratifying to figure out why I do what I do and what causes it. While the perfectionist in me would have preferred that I discover this before I took thirds of potato salad or that third piece of pie, at least I figured it out before it stretched out into Day Two, Three or Thirty. But at least I now know this and will be prepared for the next time. Because if there's one thing I've learned, there's always a next time.