Getting Unstuck

Up until a couple of months ago, I found myself completely incapable of eating intuitively. I was still caught up in that all or nothing, perfectionist, diet mentality. I had managed to completely renounce dieting, so this meant that I was overeating and/or binging every day for months. I didn’t know how to eat intuitively, and I was beginning to wonder if I would ever be able to.

Then something changed. I was flying to Orlando for business, and I wanted something to preoccupy me on the long flight. I downloaded a new audio CD I had purchased called “Getting Unstuck” by Pema Chodron onto my iPod. Halfway through the recording, I had the biggest light bulb moment I have had in my whole intuitive eating journey. I suddenly “got it.”

In “Getting Unstuck,” Pema Chodron teaches on a Tibetan Buddhist concept called shenpa. There is no clear definition for the word shenpa. It is basically that hooked feeling we get, that sticky feeling, that urge to scratch. For some of us it is the urge to drink or the urge to shop or the urge to gamble. For me it is the urge to eat. On this recording Chodron teaches how to stop the scratching. Here’s an edited down version of the excerpt that changed the course of intuitive eating for me.

“So there’s this practice that some of you have done with me, or do on your own, which is called one in the beginning and one in the end. And what this is is when you wake up in the morning, you make your aspiration for the day or aspirations… And one at the end is at the end of the day you look back over. This is the part that is so loaded for people like ourselves because looking back over you go into despair mode about what a failure you are.

So when Dzigar Kongtrul teaches about this, he always says, for me when I see that I connected with my aspiration even briefly once during the whole day, I feel a sense of rejoicing…And when I see that I blew it, lost it completely, I rejoice that I have capacity to see that…What is it after all that sees that we blew it? It’s your own wisdom. It’s your own insight. It’s your own prajna [wisdom]. Couldn’t we just have the aspiration to identify with the wisdom that sees that we said a mean word or that we drank when we said we wouldn’t drink or whatever it is? The wisdom that sees that? That we identify more and more with this prajna or this wisdom aspect of our being instead of always identifying with the failure that’s being seen. When I see that I didn’t live up to it, that I blew it, I rejoice that I have that ability to see.

So this is a very, very important point you see, and again hopefully I say this to get us into the spirit of delighting in seeing rather than despairing in seeing… Letting seeing build confidence rather than cause us to go into a depression and feel discouraged and hopeless. This is the point that he makes over and over again in his teachings. Being able to acknowledge the shenpa, being able to see the shenpa, that is the doorway to freedom…Then if we can do the next step of refraining from going down the road, which sometimes we’ll be able to do and sometimes we won’t be able to do depending on the strength of the shenpa. We should rejoice that sometimes we have that ability to interrupt the momentum of the shenpa. And we should rejoice that we even had the aspiration to acknowledge and to refrain. And we should expect relapses…You know, five steps forward, five steps back. Five steps forward, four and a half steps back. Yay!”

I suddenly knew why I couldn’t eat intuitively. I was always focusing on my failures. At the end of every day, I would look back at how many times I overate and how many times I ate when I wasn’t hungry. I was going about this whole intuitive eating thing all wrong. I needed to focus on my successes, not my failures. Every night when I went to bed instead of remembering all of the times I overate or binged, I would be much better off focusing on all of the times I ate intuitively and all of the times I was conscious of what I was doing.

So that’s what I did. Every time I thought about a time when I overate, I pushed that thought out of my head and thought of the last time or last few times that I chose not to eat when I wasn’t hungry. I no longer allowed myself to think about my “failures.”

All of a sudden I was able to eat intuitively. Not all of the time but sometimes. At first I ate intuitively once every couple of days. As time went on I was doing it more and more. Here I am a couple months later, and I’m eating intuitively most of the time. Amazing!

Take Action Challenge

I was blog surfing yesterday, and came across the Take Action Challenge on Christine Kane’s blog. I instantly realized that this is something that could really help me. I have been struggling with taking action in regards to conscious living. I have spent countless hours learning about it. I have read books on the topic and listened to even more audio books. I listen to audio books about living consciously every day on my commute to and from work. I have spent hours sitting in my meditation room reading or listening to mindfulness books. My favorite teachers are Pema Chodron, Eckhart Tolle, and Marianne Williamson. I have been listening to them for months, so I am very clear on what conscious living is all about.

I can’t seem to take the next step and put what I have learned into practice. My meditation room is really only a reading room. It’s nice to have a peaceful place to read, but that is not what I envisioned for that space. I envisioned a place where I could meditate and practice yoga, a place where I could move into conscious living.

While reading Christine Kane’s blog, I stumbled upon a reference she made to morning pages. Basically, the point of morning pages is to spend 20 or 30 minutes every morning writing everything that comes to your mind. This sounded like a good tool for me to live more consciously, so I wrote my first morning pages today. Much to my surprise, after 20 minutes of writing I discovered why I have been feeling so blocked when it comes to putting conscious living into practice. I am afraid of what direction my life will go if I allow myself to live consciously.

I have a great job. I make a lot of money. I get a lot of vacation time. I don’t have to work long hours. I have a lot of freedom at work. But I also have this nagging feeling that this isn’t where I’m supposed to be. I started working here immediately after I lost my father. I was in a period of profound grief, which probably isn’t the best time to choose a life-long career. This job was the obvious choice. It was the easy choice. But was it the best choice? I’m worried that it might not have been.

Also, my husband and I recently bought a very expensive house. (We live in Los Angeles where all homes are exorbitantly expensive.) We both love the house and hope to live in it for the rest of our lives. If I left my great paying job, that wouldn’t happen. We would have to move. Every time I have tried to express my dissatisfaction with my job, my husband freaks out. He doesn’t want to move. I really can't blame him. I would probably freak out if I were him, too.

On top of that, I don’t think I even want to live in Los Angeles. There is so much concrete here. Too many rushed, stressed out people. Too many cars. Too much traffic. Any time we go on vacation to a beautiful woodsy less populated area, I find myself wondering why I don’t live there. I want to be surrounded by trees. I want to live with nature, not endless concrete.

If I allow myself to live consciously, I will be forced to pay attention to what I truly want in life. I won’t be able to stuff it down and ignore it anymore. The truth is I don’t even know what I want. I haven’t even let myself go there. I have a copy of Finding Your Own North Star by Martha Beck. This book is supposed to help you figure out what to do with your life, what your true calling is. I have picked it up several times over the last year or so, but I can’t get past chapter three.

I have decided to do Christine Kane’s Take Action Challenge. I am committing to do at least one thing every day to become more conscious. In practical terms that means that I will either meditate or do yoga. It’s scary to think about the changes that living consciously may bring, but I want to live consciously because I know that is the only way to have a meaningful life.