by Geneen Roth
Instead of avoiding fear we can do what is counterintuitive: welcome it and notice that the part that allows the fear is much bigger than the fear itself.
If you ask a group of people who want to lose weight whether they’d find being thinner threatening, you would hear a unanimous No. But you would be asking adults, and that which wants to stay hidden is young. The proof is not in what people say they want, but in what they do. Not in their wishes, but in their actions, which consistently lead to the spectacularly dismal results of maintaining weight loss. And while it is the adult who decides to limit her food or eat the Paleo diet or substitute good fats for trans fats, it is the ghost children—the ones that hid in the closet when our parents were fighting, or whose breasts our uncles fondled, or whose mother died when we were ten—who sabotage the results. If even just a part of us is constellated around a painful story from the past, if we haven’t named or allowed the feelings that accompany that story their due, then losing weight is like telling a small child that everything on which her survival depends has been ripped away. Not exactly a recipe for success.
The heart of any addiction—drugs, alcohol, sex, money, food—is the avoidance of pain coupled with the unwillingness to acknowledge that both the behavior and its consequences serve us even as they destroy our lives. They keep us distracted from the original pain by creating another, possibly life-threatening situation. When we have to focus our attention on not driving while drunk, or having an operation to limit the food we eat so that we can walk, we have little time or interest in naming and meeting feelings we’ve been exiling for thirty or forty years.
Losing weight may indeed bring up fear of being overwhelmed by the very feelings you’ve used food to exile. But so what? Fear isn’t a monster; it’s a feeling. And like any feeling, it passes. Fear can be felt, held, dissolved by naming it, feeling its location in our bodies. Instead of avoiding fear we can do what is counterintuitive: welcome it and notice that the part that allows the fear is much bigger than the fear itself.
If we deprive and shame ourselves with food (or any other area of our lives), we will be deprived, ashamed beings who might also be thin for five minutes.
Maintaining weight loss isn’t about what we eat, not really. It comes back to what we want from our brief time here on earth. It’s about making a commitment to act in ways that match that desire, including our relationships to people, the work we do, the food we eat—and not giving ourselves the wiggle room of thinking we can go on a diet to lose weight and then pay attention to what drives us to food. Alas, it doesn’t work like that. How we get there is who we will be when we arrive there. If we deprive and shame ourselves with food (or any other area of our lives), we will be deprived, ashamed beings who might also be thin for five minutes.
“Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows,” David Foster Wallace wrote. “Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me. . . . The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors.”
Choosing to keep struggling with food, whether it’s our way up or down the scale, is a choice to stay in the burning building of suffering while telling ourselves we can’t help it. The other choice is to jump from the burning building and discover, according to Chögyam Trungpa, that “you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.”
I thought of my body as a collection of limbs and organs that happened to be connected to the person I took myself to be. It was like owning a three-story house and living in the attic for sixty-four years.
CHAPTER FOUR
* * *
Heavenly Bodies
After breaking my back in an accident several years ago, it occurred to me that I hadn’t realized I had a back. Not really. Yes, I knew the word for back. I knew my back was behind my front. I knew what a vertebra was from photos in freshman biology. I knew that when I did Pilates twice a week, it sometimes hurt back there. But as a longtime runner, dancer, and mountain-hiker, I’d always treated my body like a machine I could push to its limits, like a piece of clay I could sculpt to my image of it. I thought of my body as a collection of limbs and organs that happened to be connected to the person I took myself to be. It was like owning a three-story house and living in the attic for sixty-four years.
In her book M Train, Patti Smith asks, “How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?” A version of the same question might be asked for backs that support us, legs that carry us, arms that pick up our children, and even for having bodies at all. In my own case, it took breaking my back to recognize the good fortune of having one.
Until the broken vertebrae (and the radical pain that ensued), I was both mystified and bored by what I’d heard other people call “living in the body.” It felt uninteresting and irrelevant. It also felt unnecessary since everything I wanted to do—move, work, touch, eat, sleep, talk—could and did happen without occupying the lower floors. As usual, it took a crisis to wake me up; this time, to the difference between having a body and living in it.
The vertebral mishap made it clear that I’d been treating my body with unconscious resentment. “Really?” I’d think. “I have to interrupt what I am doing and work out with weights three times weekly to keep my bones strong? I have to stand up every twenty minutes when I am writing because ‘sitting is the new smoking’? And I have to practice Kegel exercises called Closing the Garage Door and Snapping the Turtle Shut so that I don’t end up wearing Depends?”
It didn’t stop there. There was also the day-to-day maintenance of flossing, water-picking, deep skin cleansing, and food preparation, just to wake up the next morning and do it over again. To that full-time job, add the hours of reading about and ordering the array of sunscreens that don’t give you cancer, hair thickeners that don’t make you look as if you stuck your finger in an electric socket, and toe-separators for bunions.
When I bring up the subject of embodiment at my retreats, the response is equally unenthusiastic. “For God’s sake,” my students say, “now I have to pay attention to MY BODY? My children need to be picked up from school. I have a business to run, a paper to write. Can’t you just tell me what, when, and how much to eat? (So that I can do it for a few weeks and then rebel against being told what, when, and how much to eat?) No one ever told me that living in my body was part of the deal here. And I don’t have time to learn something new.” Yes, I say, I understand, after which I often quote James Joyce: “Mister Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” A wave of head-nodding ensues, after which someone murmurs, “But the real problem is that my mother made me go on a diet when I was ten,” and we are back in the attic again watching childhood reruns.
In the movie The Story of Stuff, the narrator says there is no such thing as “away” when we throw something away. It’s all connected: the plastic bag in your hand, the shirt you just bought, the poisoning of the oceans. “There is no away,” I kept saying to myself in those first post-fracture months, because although I did not believe that I was to blame for breaking my back, I did see that for many years I’d treated my body as a dumpster into which I could throw any food my mind wanted without consequences, as if the sheer physicality of this body and the intangibility of my mind (aka the real me) were unrelated.
When we actively notice and occupy the body we already have, we begin noticing . . . that blazing, animating life force that allows the rest to be visible.
I was kinder to my jade plant than to my body.
I treated my cell phone with more reverence than I treated my body.
And yet.
While living in our bodies rather than a short distance from them would help us be alert and awake in our daily lives, it is also true that, despite the wishes of Walt Disney, who lies frozen in a crypt waiting to be sprung back to life when we discover
the secret to immortality, bodies are not meant to last forever. Even if we spend ninety years treating these bodies magnificently, they will wear out and die. Or they will be hit by a truck, a stray bullet, or a renegade virus and die young. There is also the possibility that, like an increasing number of tourists, we will die by selfie while standing, say, on the top of Machu Picchu and falling to the bottom.
And there it is: the D word. “Life is like stepping onto a boat which is about to sail out to sea and sink,” writes Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki.
It’s impossible to talk about bodies without also talking about death because whether we work out frantically or vacate the floors below the attic, bodies die. But as temporary, fragile, and vulnerable as our bodies are, they are the most direct portals to the only forever there is.
In the last few weeks of my father’s life, days were measured in breaths, not minutes. Even the division of mornings sliding into afternoons rolling into evenings disappeared. Only this sip of water, these moistened lips, this exact moment mattered. Since I’d been four years old, I’d dreaded the death of my father, convinced that when he died I would die. But now I attended to only this breath, this sip of water.
Although I had an extraordinary and complicated relationship with my father, I was closer to him when he was dying than when he was healthy. And it wasn’t because he couldn’t talk back to me (well, maybe just a little), or comment on the Bach sonatas I played at his bedside. It was because death loomed so large that my mind could do nothing but give up its relentless drone and notice that nothing was missing, nothing was wrong. Every ragged breath was complete. Every time I dropped the cloth in the water, lifted it to his mouth, touched his lips—eons converged, melted, expanded. Universes were born, died, and were born again in the time it took to change his T-shirt. Every now was an eternity. (If I’d been a more skillful meditator, I would have probably discovered the same thing when sitting on a cushion, but I’m not, and I didn’t.)
After he took his last breath, I closed my father’s eyes, held his hand, and watched his face. During the next few hours, I kept looking for him in what remained—his familiar smell, baby-smooth hands, knobby nose—but he was gone. I don’t know where he went, but it was as if he’d dropped his body like one of his Gucci loafers. Since his arms and legs were there but he wasn’t, I had the thought that as the Indian sage Nisargadatta says, “we are not in our bodies—our bodies are in us.”
Besides sitting with a dying person, the best way I know to be in daily contact with what never dies is to be awake now. To use the senses as a portal to what lies beyond them. Because the body’s sensations are immediate, noticing them cuts through the babble of the mind that is always lurching from the past to the future, nattering on about details, hopes, and desires. On the horizontal level of day-to-day maintenance, digital devices, Kegel exercises, and toe-separators keep this so-called life going, but they are not life itself, just as clouds are not the sky.
St. Francis of Assisi said, “What we are looking for is what is looking.” When we only pay attention to the ever-changing parade of thoughts, we miss what is looking. But when we actively notice and occupy the body we already have, we begin noticing what Eckhart Tolle calls the inner body. That blazing, animating life force that allows the rest to be visible. The part of us that has never, not for a second, gone away, and that eventually drops this body like a tight shoe.
You didn’t float to your desk, you didn’t get beamed from your bedroom to your kitchen. . . . Did you see what you were looking at? . . . Or are you rummaging around in the attic of your mind?
Here’s my suggestion. Spend five minutes a day (everyone has five minutes), in segments of a minute apiece, noticing where you are. Just that much. You didn’t float to your desk, you didn’t get beamed from your bedroom to your kitchen. Your foot touches the floor, step-step-step on your way, you pass other objects, you hear a panoply of hums, noises, clatter. Did you see what you were looking at? Listen to what you were hearing? Are you here? Or are you rummaging around in the attic of your mind?
A breath, when you are noticing it, takes eons to fill your chest and leave it. When you become aware of the sound of the wind, the blare of a horn, the click of a computer key, you can’t help being aware of the life force that expresses itself through this fragile body. And while immortality is not an option (I’m talking to you, Walt), when you fully drop into what you see or feel in your body, time falls away because it has no relevance. You cannot help but open to what gives it radiance: eternity itself—4.6 billion years of stardust. And we have it because we are it.
Expecting a woman to stand up for what she knows while convincing her that she must first be thin is like binding a Chinese woman’s feet and asking her to run a marathon.
CHAPTER FIVE
* * *
If I Were Gloria Steinem
My friend Dave (quoting from multiple sources) once told me that “A friend is someone you call when you need to move. A good friend is someone you call when you need to move a body.” Isabel is the body-moving kind of friend. Recently, though, she has become a conspiracy theorist. She is convinced that there is a Cabal, a congregation of evil lizard-people called the Draco, whose intent is to control and ultimately destroy humanity. According to her, the attacks of September 11 were orchestrated by the Cabal; so were the Paris attacks, and ISIS itself. Also Vanity Fair, Vogue, most movie stars, politicians, and all billionaires are part of, or controlled by, the Cabal. (Isabel maintains that for selling your soul the Cabal grants you fame, success, and gushes of money, after which you are forever owned by them.) She says, “It’s like The Matrix, but in real life. We are puppets of the Cabal. We think we are free, but we’re being hypnotized and manipulated by the ones in power.”
“How do I know I’m not part of the Cabal?” I ask her. “Maybe they got to me in my sleep.”
“You’re not important enough,” she says.
But despite all the websites Isabel cites, the so-called evidence she reels off, I don’t believe in the Cabal or in objective evil. I do believe there are, and have always been, confused, misguided people who commit insane acts. Although it seems as if there is an insane world “out there,” it makes no sense to me that there is an out there that isn’t also in here; in different circumstances—with no money, no food, and the promise of a heavenly afterlife—I, too, would be capable of violence.
It already doesn’t take much for well-fed, velvet-clothed me to believe that those who cross me (the aggressive driver on the freeway, the basketball analyst Charles Barkley when he disses Steph Curry, anyone who disagrees with me) are my enemies and must be vanquished.
The day after my conversation with Isabel, I heard Gloria Steinem interviewed on NPR’s program Fresh Air about her book My Life on the Road, and it got me thinking about the Cabal again. Gloria said that one of the ways the patriarchy controls women is by controlling their reproductive rights, and therefore their bodies. She referred to a 1970s panel on abortion: “It was comprised of ten men and one nun. You can’t make these things up,” she said. Then she was asked about today’s most pressing women’s issues, and she mentioned domestic violence, female genital mutilation, rape, and sex trafficking. I kept waiting for her to mention women and weight, but she didn’t.
Because it’s almost always defined as a mundane matter of willpower or sloth, food gets ignored as a political issue. When Gloria was asked about her relationship with food, she mentioned her father, who weighed three hundred pounds and believed that anything could be cured by “a malted and a movie.” He was sort of right about that, she said laughingly, and added that she herself still had a weakness for sweets. That was the point at which I wanted to say, wait, Gloria, you’re missing something. I don’t know of a single woman (and I’ve been privileged to be allowed entry into the inner lives of hundreds of thousands of them) who hasn’t struggled with the size of her body. And when a woman’s energy is tied up in judging her body, it ties up her power as well.
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Might this be another way the patriarchy controls women’s bodies? By hypnotizing us into believing we must be thin in order to have value, or authority? If I wanted to silence half the population of the world—the one most likely to oppose war and guns—I can’t think of a better way to do it. Expecting a woman to stand up for what she knows while convincing her that she must first be thin is like binding a Chinese woman’s feet and asking her to run a marathon.
We don’t need a Cabal to enthrall or manipulate or silence us; we’ve done it ourselves (with limitless assistance of the patriarchy) by channeling most of our life’s energy into having thinner thighs. This doesn’t mean we should join the Fat Acceptance movement, or (only) blame men for trying to control our bodies. Even if this whole brouhaha with women, food, and weight is the patriarchy’s way to silence us by keeping us focused on impossible goals (fifty women in the world look like supermodels; 3.5 billion don’t, and never will), we’d still have to do the same thing: stop allowing it. When we realize we’ve had duct tape over our mouths for decades, there is only one thing to do: tear it off. Our power is not in blaming or shaming, but in waking up from the collective trance in which we’ve been living. We use the same arms we’ve been told are too fat, and we uncover the same mouths we’ve been told are too loud, and then we start telling the truth about what we already know but don’t want to know we know.
There are many ways of truth-telling, but the best way I know is to ask questions and be relentlessly honest in answering them. Is it true that when I lose weight I will have the body and therefore the life I want? Have I ever lost weight? How many times? Aside from having a thinner body, did losing weight fix my relationships with friends, family, or colleagues? If it is such a cure-all, why did I gain it back? (Answers like “Because I lost my job/my spouse/my best friend,” don’t count. Answers like “Yes, but next time it will be different” are excuses and probably lies.)
