…you spend your days fighting your desire to eat. Some days you give in to your desire, and scream at yourself for your lack of willpower. Other days you resist the desire and feel virtuous and worthy of praise. On any given day, however, much of your mental life and energy is absorbed by thoughts about your eating, your weight, and your plans to control both. You’ve probably thought about these topics continually for many years. It amy appear to others that you are leading a humdrum, average life, but they don’t see beyond the surface of your daily activities. Despite appearances, you know that you are constantly preoccupied by painful thoughts about your body and eating…

And, not by coincidence, it turns out that the key piece of advice in the book comes down to the same thing as Hiakajo’s definition of Zen — “When hungry, eat; when tired, sleep.”

While the book doesn’t mention sleep, but the main thrust of it is aimed at converting a person to “demand feeding”, that is, “when hungry, eat.” One thing that’s been helpful is the differentiation the book makes between “mouth hunger” and “stomach hunger”. The “mouth hunger” is the hunger of the hungry ghost, never satisfiable, always wanting more. The “stomach hunger” is the true physiological hunger of your own physical need for food.

The main thrust of the book’s advice, it seems to me, is basically to be mindful of your own desires and needs, to train yourself to understand what’s going on in your body and mind by watching yourself as you experience the different types of hunger. It also concentrates on compassion; on not beating yourself up when you overeat, but instead forgiving yourself and understanding yourself.

This feels like exactly what I need. It feels like what I’ve been thinking, on one level or another, for years, but thought out and experimented with by experts, and formulated into a few hundred pages of really good, practical advice on overeating.

It may, in short, be the best chance I’ve ever had of understanding my overeating and making a real change in my patterns of behaviour.

So. Yes, understandably, I think, I’ve been using a lot of my energy to concentrate on following the book’s advice. Not on reading, which I’ve been doing fairly slowly and sporadically, but on actually doing. Listening to myself, forgiving myself, trying to understand the difference between mouth and stomach hunger. Trying to eat from stomach hunger more often, but at the same time being forgiving and understanding when I eat from mouth hunger instead.

But. I’ve been feeling, still, like I’m failing in the meditation side of things. For months earlier this year, I meditated daily in the hope of building a habit that would be hard to break. And here I am, having quickly broken the habit. On the other hand, maybe I would be sitting here writing this this morning if part of that habit formation hadn’t triggered some anxiety and guilt when I stopped the habit.

So, is today the day to start again? Twenty minutes a day, is all I’m up to. It’s not much to add into a routine. Maybe I can kill off a TV show and a few RSS feeds and some fiddling with iPhone games, and meditate instead. 7 * 20 minutes = 140. Two hours and twenty minutes a week, in total. It’s not much, in a week.

I’ll set an alarm for this evening, and meditate for fifteen or twenty minutes, and see how it feels.

Thinking it over, the most important thing that springs to my mind is, of course, the one I’m not so good at: practising. You can listen all you like, you can understand what you’re told, you can have a firm grasp of the principles… but unless you finally get off your arse (or on your arse, in the case of meditation) and do something with the knowledge you’ve acquired, then you’re just wasting everyone’s time.

This is one of my failings. I tend to think of it as a problem of integrity. Integrity, to me, means acting in the way you understand to be right. It’s all very well knowing that I should meditate regularly, that I shouldn’t eat when I’m not hungry, that working a dull job is probably not helping my sanity. I have lots of knowledge, some of it hard-won through personal experience, some of it passed on by smart teachers and smart friends.

And I don’t do enough about it. I don’t put my knowledge into practice. The gap between the things that I know and the things that I do — my lack of integrity — is my main problem.

So, that’s what I think is most important for me, as a student: narrowing that gap. It’s even possible that I should stop studying, as such, until I’ve started doing. Otherwise I might take all that hard-won knowledge with me to the grave, having never actually done anything with it.

What does being a good student mean to you?

Not only did it fail, but it failed quite spectacularly, with me overeating like a particularly hungry ghost, and even giving up meditation for a couple of weeks.

And this is where I would probably, in the past, have given up. And sunk back into despair.

But not this time. I have, instead, bought a couple of particularly good-looking books on overeating. I’ve also bought and have been listening to (I bought the audio version) Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen, to get some inspiration.

(Don’t fear, gentle reader, I know Zen is not about reading books. To paraphrase the eminent Merlin Mann, reading a book about Zen is like buying a chair about jogging. But I’m hoping to find some pointers in the right direction, at least.)

And I plan on picking myself up after this failure, and getting back on with things. Because I think that this failure may be part of the process. I’m definitely feeling different things as a result even of failing to let go of my desires. And I’ve been more emotional recently, which I think is a good sign of change.

So, I’m going to read these books, and try to get to the bottom of my desires, and specifically my problems with overeating and other addictions. Partly I’m going to try it through thought, and partly I’m going to meditate. Because simple daily meditation did seem to be taking me in a good direction in my life, and I don’t want to lose that.

The first thing I’ve found to use as inspiration are these words from Zen master Hiakajo, quoted by Alan Watts:

“When hungry, eat, when tired, sleep”

That’s a definition of Zen. And it’s two areas I’ve been having such a problem with all my life — for decades, at least — that it really hit home when I heard it. It sounds so simple. And yet it feels so, so difficult to do, for me. Even the sleeping, but especially the eating.

But I’m going to bear those words in mine. And starting tomorrow (I’m too tired today, and it’s gone 10pm, so I’m going to head for bed right now) I’m back on the meditation, and I’m going to focus on simple eating and sleeping, and getting them right. Because I think those two key areas could specifically help me lead a more mindful life than anything else I can think of.

See you tomorrow.

The main thing I’m failing at is eating. Or rather, I’m succeeding at eating rather too well. Though I’ve been trying to make myself analyse the addictive desire I feel for food, at most I’ve managed a few minutes here and there, and then eaten. And it’s not been good food this week, either. It’s all carbs and fat. I can’t remember the last time I ate an actual vegetable.

All of which makes me sad. I want, intellectually, to analyse the clinging that’s going on, to try to figure out why I want to eat so much when I’m really not in the least bit hungry. But the will just doesn’t seem to be there. It’s like I’m two different people, and the one who wants to eat crisps is the one that always wins.

Sigh.

Well, let’s try again tomorrow, and see what happens. Failure isn’t a terrible thing, but I feel like I’m struggling to learn from this failure, which means I’m not making any decent progress.

On the way home from work on Friday, I did a walking meditation, about as long as my normal seated meditation. And that really grounded me, and felt very good in places as I was doing it. I may try to do that again when I’m short on time, though I’ll be sticking with the sitting meditation where I can.

Then, on the way to and from London, I did a driving meditation. I’ve disliked driving long distances — any kind of long-distance travel, in fact — for a while now. It always seems to take far too long, and I get frustrated, and bored, and annoyed by the whole process. This weekend, I tried to stay in the present moment as much as possible as I was driving. I didn’t look at the clock. I kept bringing myself back to where I was, rather than where I wanted to be.

And it worked beautifully. Okay, I was lucky with the traffic, and neither the journey there nor the journey back would have been awful anyway, but I really did travel and arrive in a much, much better frame of mind than normal. I was awake, alert, and the journeys seemed to have taken much less time than I was expecting. It didn’t feel like two-and-a-half hours. I also didn’t feel the need to stop off at the motorway services and give myself a break halfway. I was fine without it.

So, that’s the good. Now, the bad: I gave into desire every step of the way. My friend Kavey, who had invited me down for a birthday celebration, is a food blogger. And it’s Chocolate Week, apparently. So, I was giving into desire left right and centre, all weekend, from the takeaway on Friday night, through the Chocolate Unwrapped event on Saturday morning, all the way through to afternoon tea at the (completely awesome) Bob Bob Ricard in Soho, with champagne pretty much on tap and more cakes than I could shake a stick at.

Jesus. I really, really overdid it. And that’s one thing I learned: I really don’t know how not to overdo it in circumstances like that. Where food keeps on arriving, where I’m in company who love good food and eat plenty of it. I just can’t stop. I mean, let’s face it, when I’m home alone, it’s hard enough, but out in a great restaurant with a group of food bloggers is really not conducive to delaying gratification or stopping eating when you’re full.

So, that was bad, I think. A wasted opportunity. Or maybe an opportunity that came too early in my practice. Next time I’ll maybe have to plan in advance, talk things through with my friends. Tell them that I don’t seem to be much like other people, in that I don’t process food as quickly, and therefore need to eat less. And then attempt to have very small amounts of food while other people are eating lots. (And staying thin, many of them. People who love food, who eat and cook and blog and live food are just as variable in their body shapes as everyone else…)

That’s not going to be easy. But if I want to practice properly, and have a healthy relationship with food, then not taking in more than I need is probably key. I’ll try to work on that this week, and we’ll see how I feel. More than halfway through the “Month of Desire” now, and I don’t feel like I’m doing well. Maybe I need to switch tactics a bit, somehow. I’ll think about that, too.

I’ve had a couple of moments where I’ve felt on the brink of something, where I’ve felt I could turn a corner and start giving things up. But then I’ve just not managed it, not followed through. Just carried on doing what I normally, giving into desire, and letting reality fade further away.

I feel quite sad about that. But I will keep going. Maybe I just need to generate enough of these opportunities that I finally take one in the end…

The first half of my evening was good — having dinner, reading a book (William Gibson’s Zero History is excellent, by the way) quietly and with concentration.

But then I got distracted by other things, desires, the internet, whatever. The point is that it got to about twenty minutes to midnight and I hadn’t meditated.

Previously, in this situation, I’d try to retrieve a bad situation by meditating even that late. But it struck me last night that that was just a cursory way for me to pretend I’d not failed. I knew sitting in meditation for twenty minutes before midnight at the end of a long day would almost certainly just mean me sitting on a zafu falling asleep and not learning anything about myself. That’s always been the case when it’s happened before.

So, instead, I decided to admit my failure, make the best of it, and go to bed. Now, this morning, I’m dealing with that failure, rather than, perhaps, being a little dishonest with myself and blogging about a partial success, where I sat on a cushion regardless of how late it was.

And not to check Twitter. Or do anything else with my phone.

I probably found my hand in my pocket, touching my phone, between ten and fifteen times. A couple of times, I’d got it unlocked before I realised what I was doing. Once, I refreshed Twitter, but managed to come to my senses and drop the phone back in my pocket before I saw the results.

One key thing I noticed: I tended to reach for my phone when I was feeling the need for human contact. But it’s a substitute for the actual contact I needed. For example, I remembered that I’d not yet replied to an email from my Uncle Ray, and the first thing I did was reach for my phone. But I’d never actually write or send that email while I was walking down the street on the way to work. I was reaching for Twitter.

Other, similar moments prodded me in the direction of this conclusion — I’d think about someone I should get in touch with, or was feeling guilty about not replying to, and my instinct would be to reach for my phone.

Now, I use the Toodledo app on my phone for capturing stuff I’ve got to do, so there’s maybe a link between “oh, I need to…” and grabbing my phone. But I was able to watch my thoughts pretty well this morning, and I don’t honestly think that’s the reason — just a rationalisation.

Really, I think I’m substituting the shallow distractions of Twitter for the deeper connection I’d make by getting in touch with the people I should really be talking to.

This week I’m going to start reining in some desires, and see how it feels, as opposed to just watching myself give in to them.

I also think this might be the state I spend most of my life in, one of the main reasons I’m still pretty overweight, despite now being a regular jogger.

This is something I really need to focus on. I think for the rest of this week, I’ll try to pay attention to it, but keep eating as normal, but for next week I’ll see how it feels not to eat unless I can detect some physical hunger. That’s not as easy as it sounds — it’s tough, sometimes, to separate the mental and the physical — but I’ll give it a try, and see if I can then observe more of this addictive desire. Should be easier to see when it’s being denied…

Meditation last night: rubbish. I was too tired, and I started too late. Meditation this evening: also rubbish, I started fairly soon after I got home from work, and I was still too tired. I just came back early from the Flickr meet at the pub so I could get to bed earlier. Here’s hoping I sleep well…