by Geneen Roth
It’s uncomfortable to walk around in a body that is uncomfortable. It’s hard to let innate brilliance or power express itself when you are schlepping around twenty or fifty extra pounds. It’s not impossible, just more difficult. And since there is already so much inherent difficulty in being alive, what with people getting sick, raising kids, dying, and the earth on the verge of destruction, why not make life easier on yourself? Why not make the effort to discover what enhances your aliveness and vitality? Because when you do, you become less and less fascinated with those foods, activities, and people that don’t.
We intuitively understand that we want something we cannot see or touch, but we don’t know how to name or access it. And so we fall back into believing that being thinner will right everything that is wrong. The only problem is that it’s based on a lie.
In my mind there is only one true reason to lose weight: to keep the channel open. You think the pain is about the twenty pounds that’s separating you from fitting into your jeans, but that’s the crux of the lie, as all those people on their deathbeds will tell you. (Google people, regrets, deathbeds, and read about the five, twenty-seven, or thirty-five things they say; their regrets, without exception, are about allowing themselves to get distracted by some form of the lie.) The Indian sage Nisargadatta writes that all teachings, “whatever their source . . . , have only one aim: to save you from the calamity of a separate existence—of being a meaningless dot in a vast and beautiful picture.”
In some part of ourselves, we know this. We know that what we’re doing on this earth is manifesting spirit in the only physical vehicle we’ve been given—our body; by doing so we’re saving ourselves from the calamity of leaving the earth without showing up. Eventually, we become more dedicated to keeping the channel open than to eating meat loaf when we are not hungry. And although we keep faltering, keep slipping, keep being seduced by the lie, one day we will be more drawn to the truth than to the endless fascination with drama, pretty things, and thinner thighs.
The only best reason to do this—to keep the channel open—is that there, in that vast space, we find love itself, flagrant, unstinting, give-it-all-away love. Not just for our spouses or children or particular community, but for arms and legs and nights and fog, love for the mornings, floors, caterpillars, and trees. Love for the sounds your foot makes on the sidewalk, for traffic and honking horns, for the earth itself. Nothing is left out. Zen teachers call it discovering “your original face.” We do whatever it takes to keep the channel open because when we don’t, it hurts, and when we do, it doesn’t. Also, there is nothing better to do with a life.
PART TWO
Through the Mind
Living on the inside of my mind—or rather, believing the things my mind regales me with regularly— is like chewing nails.
CHAPTER EIGHT
* * *
Zen Mind, Puppy Mind
We adopted a puppy last week and it hasn’t been pretty around here. Well, really, it hasn’t been pretty in here. My mind, that is. Izzy the puppy, however, is pretty. She looks like a stuffed toy. Big brown eyes and a nose like a plump olive. Red fur that is soft and a bit curly. My friend Catherine says she looks like a person impersonating Lucille Ball. Cute little puppy running around with her black “Pawda” stuffed purse. From the outside, you’d think that our house was the picture of adorableness. Then you might take a look at my face and see that there’s trouble in paradise.
Izzy was a sort of rescue dog. “Sort of” because she wasn’t supposed to be a rescue; my husband and I aren’t that virtuous. I know, I know, it’s terrible, and if I had a tail, it would be between my legs. Good-hearted people, people who care about the earth, do not buy dogs. I, however, am not one of those people. Don’t get me wrong. I give money every year to Save a Sato, the Marin Humane Society, and Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. I believe that the people who save dogs and the people who adopt those dogs are angels.
I, it must now be apparent, am not an angel. Plus, almost everyone I know who has adopted rescue dogs—okay, three people (none of my other friends are silly enough to even get a dog, and I understand their feelings much more this week than last week)—told us that it’s taken two years for their dogs to stop submission-peeing and fear-biting. I don’t want to wait two years. I’m already sixty-five; I don’t want to spend the time I have left, not even two years of it, with a submissively peeing dog.
So, we decided to buy a puppy—a four-legged fluff of jubilation. We looked at a litter of nine, all of which were like those irresistible puppies you see on YouTube. All, that is, except for one that was cowering in the corner. She was shaking and frightened and couldn’t get away from the bully that kept attacking her. She wouldn’t walk over to us. She wouldn’t make eye contact with us. And in a moment of weakness, a moment of remembering what it felt like to be the chubby kid who never got picked for soccer but did get picked on by Peter Zimmerman, the class bully, my heart melted. And so, when Matt said, “If we don’t take her, I don’t think anyone else will,” I agreed.
Until last week I would have told you that I like animals more than people. “I am an animal person,” I say, when people start talking about babies and puppies. After it rains, I spend hours saving salamanders and frogs from getting run over. The hummingbirds in my backyard land on my fingers. And I, who abhor being wet or cold, have been known to jump into icy bodies of water to save drowning baby birds. I fancy myself like Clarissa Estés, in Women Who Run with the Wolves. I could be wild enough to run with (very nice) wolves, or at least capable of loping with a poodle. (Izzy, by the way, is a standard poodle.) But today I am not an animal person. Today I don’t like anything on four legs, especially the one that looks like Lucille Ball.
I blame my husband. He, Matt, is the one who wanted a dog. And not just any dog. He wanted a girl dog. A big nonshedding girl dog—and this is the important part—that was related (through a complicated series of blood lines) to Celeste, our dog that died a year ago. Me? I was enjoying not having a pet for the first time in eighteen years. Enjoying being able to walk out the door and not see those big eyes staring at me through the window, silently accusing me of abandonment. But Matt also has big doggy eyes, and when he looked at me ever so sweetly and said, “I really want a dog now,” I caved in.
I’m usually not a pushover, but—and I say this in the kindest possible way—Matt is very doglike. Every morning he greets me like he hasn’t seen me for ten years. “Hi sweetheart,” he says brightly. Big smile. Crinkly eyes, like the sun is just now rising and using his face as its stage. Sometimes I am glum, introverted, and rather dramatic—sort of like Isadora Duncan (was her nickname Izzy?), who was strangled to death by her own scarf. So as Matt walked around shaking off sparks of light while telling me how much he wanted a puppy, I thought, well, it doesn’t seem right to deprive him, and anyway, why not get a dog? I am, after all, an animal person.
But today I am convinced we made a huge mistake. Izzy walks around (when she’s willing to come out from under the bed) with her tail down, afraid of everything—doorways, stuffed toys, food, water, friends, Matt, me. Last week, a woman who started a sanctuary for abused and abandoned dogs came over to help bring Izzy out of her shell. After three hours she said, “Your dog is as bad as any feral dog I’ve met.” This from a person who rescues dogs thrown over bridges in Mexico City. This from the woman who drives around with ten feral dogs in her car, most of whom look like large rats.
For the longest time I clung to the conviction that scary thoughts are created by scary situations: . . . I couldn’t tell the difference between my stories of a situation and the situation itself.
If I was going to get a dog, I’d say to my husband—and apparently the “if” part of that sentence is now moot—I want a dog that’s happy. I want a dog that could remind me that day-to-day joy is possible. I tell him about my friend Nina’s nephew who spent a year searching for a puppy, adopted one, and within a week decided he wasn’t cut out to be a puppy f
ather. I tell him the story of the writer Joyce Maynard who adopted two girls from Ethiopia, soon realized it was a mistake, and gave them back (i.e., found them a home with two stable parents). If people can give back their children, I tell Matt, I can give back a puppy. Can we please just FedEx Izzy back to where she came from?
But, and I am now going to get to the point of this story, I began to see that living on the inside of my mind—or rather, believing the things my mind regales me with regularly—is like chewing nails. For instance, the night before I married Matt, I was convinced I was gay and was marrying a man because I lacked the courage to come out. Twelve hours before walking down the aisle, I was suddenly beset with memories of my wild attraction to Rose Koven in eighth grade and the downy pleasure of feeling each other’s breasts (which were a bit like large mosquito bites) on the orange pillows in my bedroom. After confiding this to my friend Sil, she reminded me that although I’d had many opportunities to be with women since eighth grade, I really did prefer the smell and feel of men, particularly the one I was marrying the next day.
For the longest time I clung to the conviction that scary thoughts are created by scary situations: losing someone you love; being fired; having your house burn down; being diagnosed with a terminal illness. I couldn’t tell the difference between my stories of a situation and the situation itself. When I believe my stories I am convinced I’m living the wrong life, and I’ve found that without the stories there is a simplicity and an elegance to life as it is unfolding in this very moment.
With Izzy—because the stakes are, er, somewhat lower than marrying a person of the wrong sex or being diagnosed with a terminal illness—I see that although having a dog whose nervous system reminds me of my own wouldn’t be my first choice, there is something about this dog that I feel as if I already know. Almost, but not exactly, as if I’d been waiting for her and there she was, but not in the dog costume I was expecting.
Therefore, with uncharacteristic maturity I have made a promise to stop myself whenever I notice I am listening to the stories my mind prattles on about. Since I could switch the Izzy story with many similar tales I’ve told myself that were not true, it has once again become quite clear to me that, as spiritual teacher Catherine Ingram says, the mind is mad. When I remind myself of that, I don’t take the thoughts that I need a different dog/life/husband personally.
The truth is that along with its multiple and exhilarating pleasures, there is something deeply uncomfortable about being human. About loving for the sake of it, even when you know that everything and everyone you love is going to get lost, get broken, or die—particularly four-legged beings that almost always die before you.
When I first met Matt he was grieving the loss of his previous partner, who’d been diagnosed with ovarian cancer six months after they met, and died five years later. Despite knowing her for only 182 days (I counted), he accompanied her through four and a half years of chemotherapy treatments, hair losses, excruciating pain, three remissions, and the dying process. But you’d just met, I thought. How could you willingly go through that kind of heartbreak and loss? Why didn’t you just leave? (Never mind that after knowing him for twenty minutes, I felt as if I could go swimming in the ocean of his heart, it was that big. Or that when I heard he stayed with his partner, I realized that he was a man who loved with fierceness and loyalty—and I liked that, even if I didn’t understand it.) When I finally asked him why he stayed, he said he understood that the pain of losing her would be so much less than the pain of never having loved her at all.
As the weeks have rolled along, the situation with Izzy has changed, as situations always do. She’s kissing us now, puts her wet-truffle nose in the crook of my neck every morning to be nuzzled. Despite my reluctance, I find myself laughing at her prance-prance-leap before she picks up a toy, and the crossing of her paws when she lies down, as if awaiting high tea and scones. The way she lives in the world, as any animal person knows, is a portal to what the Zen masters call Beginner’s Mind.
Everything is new to her, even the scent of the redwood tree she’s passed a few hundred times; despite her hypervigilant nervous system, she is a constant reminder that although I’ve seen the tree in our driveway, the succulents in our garden, the helicopter-flight of the hummingbirds a hundred thousand times, I haven’t seen them today.
And according to Zen masters and dogs, there is no other day. No one has ever touched or experienced the future because, when it arrives, it is still only today—which makes it a perfect day to revel in the spectacle of being aboveground, and throwing a pink elephant toy across the room dozens of first times.
Although I’ve seen the tree in our driveway, the succulents in our garden, the helicopter-flight of the hummingbirds a hundred thousand times, I haven’t seen them today.
Each of us plays host to at least two or three distinct identities that when triggered feel utterly familiar. They feel like who we actually are.
CHAPTER NINE
* * *
Be Kind to the Ghost Children
Izzy has an eating disorder. When I put her food bowl down, she looks at me as if it’s a couch, as if the fact that she is supposed to eat it hasn’t occurred to her. My cat, Blanche, also had a problem with food: he was so fat that when he sat on your head in the middle of the night, you felt as if your brain was being crushed. And there was Celeste, our dog before Izzy, who was allergic to dog food, and could only eat white rice, chicken breast, and egg yolks for the first three years of her life. No, it has not escaped my purview that one hundred percent of the animals that live with me manifest extreme food symptoms.
Matt and I take Izzy to a vet that my friend Annie tells me about. She says Rob-the-vet is a miracle worker. She also says that coincidentally all of her animals have had eating disorders, too (she puts coincidentally in capital letters), and tells me that Rob-the-vet worked with Koko-the-gorilla. At the mention of Koko, I swoon. Although I have tried to visit Koko in Palo Alto for years—she adopted a homeless kitten and was friends with Robin Williams—I have not been able to arrange a meeting.
Rob-the-vet has startling ice-blue eyes and palomino hair that drifts like crazy wings down his collar. On his walls are the requisite letters from kids written in big crayon rainbow colors: “Dear Dr. Rob, Thank you for saving Lucy. She wasn’t feeling so good, love, Miranda.” “Dear Dr. Rob, Even though Bongo has one eye, I love him better than my brother. Thank you for helping him, love, Mandy.” During our first session Rob tells us that Izzy, who is a year and a half, has no belly center. Actually he says, “She has no abdomen content.” She is in the throes of a shock pattern from being abused, attacked, and bullied for the first twelve weeks of her life—which, according to him, are the most formative.
Then Rob proceeds with his specialty: the “psychomotor treatment,” which consists of different kinds of massages—on her spine, in her joints, on her head—coupled with looking deep into Izzy’s eyes and holding her close to his belly. “Do you want to try it?” he asks us. I nod, then look at Matt to see if he’d like to go first, but since relaxing is not a challenge for him, he has taken this opportunity to nap.
Rob asks me to stand belly to belly with him and to breathe. Although it does feel somewhat comforting to lean against a big belly, what gets to me, what really makes an impression, is that he keeps emphasizing that Izzy will be fine, that she can learn to regulate herself, and that it is me who needs to relax.
“Are you a nice person?” he asks me.
I am about to launch into the many ways in which I am cranky and selfish when Rob says, “I don’t really need to know the circumstances in which you aren’t nice, just a general impression of whether you are kind to your animals.”
I nod and tell him that my teacher Jeanne says that in her next life she is coming back as my dog. Rob says, “Then she has enough of what she needs—food, water, space to run, kindness—and she will be fine. Relax,” he says. “She will discover her own relationship with food, but you ha
ve to hold the line. You can’t let her manipulate you with those big eyes and her history of abuse and abandonment.”
Now he’s talking.
I am a sucker for tales of abuse and abandonment, mine and others. Being abused served me in many ways (although I would not have chosen it), and it gave me a story to tell in my first few books. (Also, writing about people who hurt you is an excellent way to take revenge, but only people who aren’t nice would know that.) And it provided the longing to see what, if anything, lay beyond a life of drowning myself in fried chicken and coffee ice cream.
“Because,” Rob continues, “she has been living with you for a year and a half now—many times longer than the three months in which she was abused—and being frightened of food or people means she is living in the past, not the present. Unless you muster equal parts kindness and fierceness with her, the stance of having being abused—and what she is able to get from you because of it—will become a way of life.”
I am listening intently but can no longer figure out whether he is talking about Izzy or me. Because although abuse and how I used food to dull its pain became a portal for me, it also provided a solid identity of being The Wounded One Who Survived. Having spent years in therapy and written books about what happened, there is a teeny chance that I began wearing the wounds as adornments, as my calling card. “You think you had it tough? You think you had a difficult childhood? Read my book When Food Is Love and get back to me.”
