Lin on Life

If

2010-05-01T08:40:00.000-04:00

If life were but a joyful high, where I just soared and touched the sky,

I'd never think of pie.

But life's down here where all's hard sell, and I'm just muddling through the hell,

and chocolate chips are swell.

When I'm not bored but busily attending to the needs I see,

I sip only plain tea.

As often though, my worldly cares are met with blank, unfeeling stares,

but not from the eclairs.

Abstinence makes life go better.

2010-04-26T19:05:00.000-04:00

When recovering from anything—drinking or smoking or overeating, abstinence comes first. Sometimes it is hard to know what constitutes abstinence. For alcoholics and drug addicts, abstinence is self-explanatory. Quit doing it. We can’t do that with eating. When it comes to food, abstinence is anything we say it is. It isn’t about diets. It isn’t even about weight. Abstinence is not compulsively overeating anything, and not eating certain trigger foods ever. Many of us use Medifast as our food plan, figuring out as we go what works for us, based on medical needs, allergies, and the like. Medifast provides enough information to make educated decisions regarding food.

But there is more to abstinence than not overeating. Other traits we come to know as character defects come into play with the obsessive compulsive personality, which I and a lot of others I know have. We need to abstain from denial Denial offers one terrific payback—avoid truth. The longer we can put off looking at the problem we can avoid acting on the solution which is often as difficult as the problem. If I can't see how much weight I have gained, then I don't have to do anything about it.

Therefore we need to abstain from procrastination, laziness and selfishness. Author M. Scott Peck said in The Road Less Traveled that laziness is the original sin. Edgar Cayce called selfishness the only sin. In the Edgar Cayce readings, Self is condemned as the cause of the world’s ills. But we can’t give up self until we have a self to give up. We develop a self by adopting an attitude of gratitude for every choice we ever made. An attitude of gratitude will change our actions. I guarantee it. You can’t be grateful for everything you ever did and keep on doing it. I don’t know why it works, but it does. Try it. Fell of the wagon? Gained 50 lbs back? Thank You, Lord. Can’t do that yet? Eventually it will just happen effortlessly. When we feel grateful, the Creator of the Universe moves into our corner to help us. There is a point on this path homeward where we miraculously become grateful for everything we have done and everything that was done to us because it has all combined to make us what we are today—precious, and well along the path to becoming free. That’s a promise.

Codependency & Compassion

2010-04-26T16:52:00.003-04:00

Can you lose 50 pounds 50 times? I hope so. A lot of us seem to be trying to do just that. We don't keep it off because we still have more that being too fat can teach us.

In the 70’s, when I was in my 30’s, I lost 100 pounds by using spiritual principles and learning to eat healthy foods. As 12 Step work eased its way into the national consciousness, and word got out that alcoholism was not the only addiction that could be addressed through the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, words such as obsessive, compulsive and codependent began to grab my attention. I did not know exactly what they meant, but I would soon learn. I also learned that I was a food addict and a compulsive overeater, but I would not address those issues for many years. After all, I had lost the weight and was living life as a size 10 platinum blond driving a red convertible. I just wasn’t happy.

When they named codependency I leapt for joy. I might have looked okay on the outside, but inside I was a neurotic mess. Then the late Janet Woititz wrote Adult Children of Alcoholics. She was the keynote speaker at the first ever conference on codependency ever held, and they held it in my city, where my newspaper sent me to cover it. Woititz describes codependents this way:

Codependents:
Guess at what “normal” is

Have difficulty following a project through from beginning to end

Lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth

Judge themselves without mercy

Have difficulty having fun

Take themselves seriously

Have difficulty with intimate relationships

Overreact to changes they can’t control

Feel they are different from other people

Constantly seek approval and affirmation

Are either super-responsible or super-irresponsible

Are extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that the loyalty is undeserved

Lock themselves into a course of action without giving serious consideration to alternative behaviors or possible consequences.

Most of those traits have been true of me at one time or another, except for the lying. I am a Sag. I am constitutionally incapable of not telling the truth, as I see it. But as I mused codependency I hit on another trait that, as far as I know, has never been touched on. It is what I call conditional compassion.

Codependents are capable of feeling compassion but not unconditionally. We feel conditional compassion. We love and accept others based on whether they please us. Do we like the way they dress? Speak? Part their hair? Our capacity to love others is diminished by how well we measure up to whatever standards have been set—for us or by us. If we fall short of our own standards, we have little compassion for ourselves; therefore we lack compassion for others when they don’t live up to our expectations. We can be very difficult to live with.

I consider learning to love to be my purpose for being born. I believe we are to love those who have hurt us, those who hurt themselves, and those whom we have hurt. I grew up assuming it was normal to withhold approval when a child is bad. If we were loved only when we did things the grownups’ way, we grow up thinking that withholding love from people who don’t do things our way is reasonable and logical. But the secret to learning to love, if there is one, is to love God first and foremost, and to become unconditionally compassionate. Period. It all leads to Father, forgive them...
Unconditional compassion.

Unprovisional empathy.

Unlimited boundless, endless, utter love.

It sounds like a tall order, but it has to be ultimately where healing from codependency leads, otherwise what has it all been for? We can say we are no longer codependent when our compassion is unconditional. So when we go into 12 step meetings and declare we are recovering codependents, we are declaring our unconditional resolve to love – no matter what.

How do we do that?

We love God, first, last and always. What does that look like? It looks like us, hanging on a metaphorical cross, saying Father forgive them… Call it the crucifixion allegory. Call it simile. Call it life. Many of us don’t have to look further than our own families to find those who would crown us with thorns and hammer nails through our hands and feet. If we can say Father forgive them… we’re free.

WHAT IS COMPASSION?

Many would ask, What does it mean, this sort of compassion? If it means to condone torture and abuse, forget it.

Compassion does not mean to condone. We almost don’t have one word for what it does mean. The closest words are “divine love.” Unconditional compassion is a piercing depth of knowing, the ability to see the whole picture and to comprehend fully what is going on with another person. Used this way unconditional compassion surpasses human ability and becomes love that is able to divine, to see within, to ascertain, to determine, to discern.

Genuine compassion comes out of having dealt with our own pain. When we can see how we have contributed to our own distress, we can feel empathy when we see another doing the same thing. We can also understand that their pain is just as necessary for their growth as ours was. We can feel sad that they have to suffer to learn, but we can detach, in love, knowing their pain is their path to their joy—just as ours was.

Codependent Crazies Can Keep Us Fat

2010-04-26T12:26:00.002-04:00

Some things never actually change. For example, me. I have the most wonderful new husband and new home. One would think I would be happy and food would no longer be an issue. I am happy. Yet food is still an issue. I still want to mask, hide and medicate some pretty uncomfortable insights about myself. I still want to eat.

I need to read this every time I get ticked off at him.

Always the controller, now my efforts to control him are both covert and subtle. I want to control what he does, thinks, feels, and how and when he should change.

I did not marry a wimp.

Controlling and caretaking him does not work. It makes me feel crazy. It makes me feel like he is driving me crazy, but it is really me who is driving myself crazy.

My controlling and caretaking create unmanageability in my life. I don’t see clearly what is going on while it is going on. I am in a fog. I want to eat.

I become so enmeshed in him and his issues, and I get so focused on him and out of touch with myself, that I lose control of the external affairs in my own life. Unmanageability creeps into my other relationships, my spirituality, health, recreational activities or lack of them, home life, community involvement, and finances. I want to eat.

My feelings, thoughts, and reactions to others become unmanageable. Depression, fear, anger, sadness, and chaotic thoughts overtake me. I become so consumed with thoughts of him and with wondering what he is feeling I lose touch with what I am feeling. I want to eat.

My mental energy, mind, and intellect is in an unmanageable state, clouded by denial, fear, and attempts to control him. I get caught in a torrent of obsessive thinking and get stuck in negative thought patterns detrimental to my health and well-being. I want to eat.

I get so focused on him that I neglect my creative gifts and talents. My financial affairs may become unmanageable. I may overspend or underspend, depriving myself of necessities. I want to eat.

I subject myself to his occasionally inappropriate, abusive, and out-of-control behaviors. I feel victimized by my inability to set boundaries, and I may victimize him by failing to set boundaries for myself. My behavior is at times as crazy as his, the very person I am trying to control. We are not perfect. We fit together in the broken places. But I may feel compelled to take care of him in a way that diminishes his ability to take care of himself. When I do this, taking responsibility for the consequences of his crazy behavior, I feel angry and used. As a caretaker, when I feel responsible for his feelings and needs, I neglect my own feelings and needs. And I want to eat.

When I don’t say no, don’t say what I mean, don’t stay in touch with what I want and need, it creates unmanageability. Sometimes I feel so controlled by his expectations and desires I feel like a puppet on a string with no life of my own. If I don’t stop this, the results will be serious, even deadly. I may get caught up in other compulsive behaviors or develop physical illnesses from stress and from not dealing with my emotions. I may go back to enduring life, just getting through, (going along to get along), waiting for my reward in heaven not knowing there is reward each day in being alive and living my own life. When I don’t know how to relax and detach, I go back to caretaking and controlling and obsessing about him. I don’t take care of myself in a loving manner. I want to eat.

Not being able to take care of myself gives him control over me. Not only do I try to control him, I allow him to control me. When I love him too much, when I desperately want him to need me, love me, accept me, approve of me, I forfeit my ability to take care of myself with him, out of fear that I may not get what I think I need. When I hope I can get things into place through willpower – and hold it in place through willpower, I hope I will finally be safe and get what I need. Then I won't want to eat.

These ideas are illusions.

I’m already safe. I already have what I need.

I am not defective.

I am only doing what I learned, protecting myself by trying to control others, or by allowing others to control me. But when we grow up to be caretaking, controlling adults, we lose touch with 1) loving and accepting ourselves, and 2) trusting the flow of life and goodness. I hate that I can’t control. I don’t like feeling uncomfortable or being in emotional pain. I get sick of having to detach and surrender. But I have to admit that when I try to have power where I have none, I get crazy. I can’t control others no matter how much I want to, no matter how much better I think I know what’s right for them. I need to detach from the fear and stop trying so hard. Accept myself, as is, no matter what. The solution will come, but not from trying so hard. The solution will come from detachment. I need to remember this whenever the codependent crazies set in, whenever I start caretaking him and ignoring my feelings, when I am obsessing about him and the future, or when I start neglecting myself, or feel stuck in a rut or when want to eat.

It is safe to detach and trust. I can accept myself, my current situation, my problems and all my unmanageability. I surrender to detachment, then watch as manageability sets in. I can be in this safe place, this comfortable place, and be here whenever I need to.

For in this place ONLY, I do not want to eat..

Synchronicity at Work

2010-04-14T17:39:00.002-04:00

When I started on Medifast in July 2009, I lost 13 lbs in 14 days. That was some kind of wonderful! Then the honeymoon ended, as it always does, and reality set in. I struggled through the next 33 pounds, then realized I could not do this alone. I did not have to. Medifast friends (MF'ers) spontaneously came out of the shadows and began to share their journeys. Soon we were a cohesive unit, slingshotting one another to victory. Our consciousness expands while our waistlines shrink. How can you beat that?

From Voices of Recovery, for April 14:
Starts out with a quote from The 12 Steps and 12 Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous, p. 106, in defining Step 12. “We gratefully follow in the footsteps of many others who have walked this way before us, and we’re gratified to be making foot prints of our own for others to follow.”

Then the reading continues: “I am grateful that all of you were here when I entered the doors of OA. I am grateful for the founders who left the first footprints for me to follow. I am grateful for the other compulsive overeaters who were willing and happy to share their experience, strength and hope. I am grateful I didn’t have to walk the path alone. Eventually, I found that I could leave footprints for others to follow. I, too, had experience, strength, and hope to share. I am always happy to share with others. We walk together on this path of recover. We follow the footprints in the sand of those who have walked before us, and we leave footprints for those yet to come.

Voices of Recovery can be ordered through http://www.oa.org/. This is must reading for anyone who uses food to medicate feelings.

This is an exciting, consciosness-expanding time in our history. People are banding together to help each other heal from whatever they need to heal from. I just need to be a part of it.

What it means to be powerless

2010-04-13T21:24:00.015-04:00

Powerlessness is a confusing concept.

The cornerstone of all 12 Step programs is powerlessness.

What does it mean to be powerless?

STEP ONE (OF THE 12 STEPS OF OVEREATERS ANONYMOUS): “We admitted we were powerless over food and our lives had become unmanageable.”

The word powerless often evokes much resistance.

I knew a woman who thought admitting powerlessness was a separation from God statement. “I believe in the opposite principles and tell people they are all powerful and life is all good… blah, blah, blah. She said the 12 Steps should be rewritten because there is no power greater than ourselves when we believe we are God. This woman speaks for many who, in my opinion, misunderstand powerlessness.

Admitting we are powerless is the beginning of becoming empowered. I won’t say “in my opinion” anymore because everything that follows is my opinion, based on experience.

POWERLESSNESS EQUALS VULNERABILITY

When I say I am powerless over food, I mean I am vulnerable to food. Certain foods, not all, but I know which ones.

When I say I am powerless over alcohol, I mean I am vulnerable to alcohol. I'm not, but I easily could be. I never met anything I liked that I couldn't overdo.

When I say I am powerless over people, I mean I am vulnerable to people – at least certain people. Certain people and their actions provoke undesirable reactions within me. For example, when my mother was alive I was vulnerable to her opinions, powerless over her opinions. Same for my dear sweet husband. I am totally vulnerable to his moods – hence, powerless over his moods. Our emotional enmeshment in one another’s “stuff” goes so far beyond co-dependent, you just don't want to know. But let’s not get off track here. Being powerless over food, we can never stop at food. Food is just a symptom. All this goes way beyond food. Recovery isn’t about food. It isn’t about powerlessness. It is about love, but God wants us to grow up along the way.

Before I understood that powerless over means vulnerable to, I thought if I could surrender completely enough and become powerless enough, (vulnerable enough) life would get easier and I’d lose weight. It doesn’t take a rocket science to see the flaw in this reasoning. A person cannot go through life powerless over / vulnerable to everything and everybody. Who would want to? But this is why working through the steps can take years. The road from innocence to wisdom does not run in a straight line.

The first few years of working the Steps, I tried to give my life to God. The harder I tried the more unmanageable life became. I became so angry I was screaming, “Tell me what I’m doing wrong!” The answer came: “I don’t want you to give your life to Me. I want you to live your life for Me. It’s your life. I made it possible. Now you are trying to give it back to Me, expecting Me to do all the work. You are looking for a softer, easier way.”

I felt like a baby bird that had been shoved out of the nest.

The transformation from being powerless to being empowered began instantaneously the moment I stopped expecting God to make it easy. But until I admitted I was powerless over / vulnerable to wanting things my own way, I remained a victim of that part of myself that wants its own way. That part of me kept me on my knees, in a consciousness of begging and beseeching… please, God, I want to do Your will, but please do it my way. Please make me normal. Please let me eat all my favorite stuff and not gain weight. And while we’re at it, may I please run the world?

In a thousand ways, HP told me to get up off my knees. My HP is JC. I felt as if music was writing lyrics I needed to hear. Songs I can’t identify were telling me to stand up, turn around, and face life head on. Almost nobody gets to eat anything they want. And no I couldn’t run the world. Not even my own.

At first I feared I was being told to turn my back on God. Then it became obvious that that’s impossible. God is spirit. How do we turn our back on spirit? It’s everywhere. It is the air, the water, the music… and as such, is therefore impossible to turn one’s back on. That’s why the psalmist said, “If I make my bed in hell, thou art there.” Understanding God is an evolutionary process. Like spiritual alchemists, the lead in our lives begins to turn into gold when we realize that once we are truly empowered with God’s power, our will IS God’s will.

I am powerless over God. I have to be vulnerable to God. There’s no choice about that – or at least nothing that works. But that does not mean God replaces Lin. It means God restores and empowers Lin so that she isn’t so vulnerable to outer forces, food and people. To be powerless over God means to be vulnerable to God and to nothing else. Before recovery, I was vulnerable to everything but God. Admitting we are powerless demonstrates our willingness to be vulnerable to nothing but God. But that does not mean life gets easy. Life gets do-able, most days, when we know who we are. That does not mean merely tolerable. It means we can feel the pain or the joy that is ours to feel when we stop letting other people, situations, circumstances, and food dictate who we think we are.

Nobody wants to admit being feeble, helpless, impotent or weak, especially when it isn’t true. I’m not helpless or weak, and most likely neither are you. I was not chemically dependent on illegal substances to get me through the night—only legal ones: nicotine and chemically altered food.

My resistance to admitting being powerless was as high as anybody’s. Powerlessness can also suggest being defenseless or unarmed. I didn’t like thinking of myself in those terms. But I was overlooking the obvious. I was defenseless against certain wrong foods. I am not powerless over celery. I am not vulnerable to celery, or defenseless against celery. But Breyer’s Butter Pecan is a different matter. If it’s in the freezer, I become vulnerable to it, powerless over it and defenseless against it. Maybe I don’t like admitting it, but ice cream can make my life unmanageable in a New York cheesecake minute. .

What is unmanageable?

“We admitted we were powerless over food and that our lives have become unmanageable.”

How so?

Being powerless over food, or vulnerable to food, as explained previously, leads to suffering, where chaos, crisis, depression, anxiety and worry are routine.

For starters, being overweight or totally out of shape makes me nuts whenever I have to meet someone new. Or God forbid, see someone who knew me when I was thinner, younger, all of the above. This is the story of my Unmanageable Life.

Of course, with Compulsive Obsessive Overeaters (COO's) or Compulsive OverEaters (COE's) it’s all about control. None of our people ever do anything right and we have to do everything ourselves. Of course, nobody will cooperate. Of course, if everybody would just leave us alone, we’d get thin in time. Of course, we’d already be thin if everybody around us would just shape up. Of course, it is everybody else who keeps things in an uproar, and if those people would just get their act together, everything would be all right, because everything we are doing is for their own good! It isn’t life that’s unmanageable! It’s all those people!

I used to think my life was not unmanageable. And in reality not all of it was – or is. Almost no one’s is. I was not a drug addict or alcoholic, but I finally had to stop apologizing for that when I realized I was doing cold sober what other people had to be drunk to do. I used to feel guilty for not being an alcoholic until I realized that these 12 Steps are about changing our behavior, and that I could have swapped horror stories with any wino on the street, and he would have come out looking like a saint. I didn’t have to drink. I was, as the song says, looking for love in all the wrong places.

Through it all, I was taking care of a family. In fact, I was powerless over caretaking. In my desire to be spiritual, I helped everybody—whether they wanted it or not. I was not all bad. No one is. We’ve all got it together somewhere. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. But I had no boundaries. No life. I kept telling my therapist I wanted to “give up self!” He kept telling me “First, you have to have a self to give up!”

So I ate.

Eventually, I became teachable, and got it that self-will couldn’t cut it anymore. Now, how could I escape this insanity?

What is insanity?

Restore me to sanity, please.

Ladies and Gentlemen, As I've done countless times before, I’d like to introduce you to my alter ego. Her name is Betty Blob. She's the one who lives in a cage in my head. One night on the way from the bedroom to the bathroom, she stopped off at the kitchen for a rendezvous’ with a gallon jar of macaroni salad and gained nine pounds. That’s insanity.

Step Two of Overeaters Anonymoussays, "We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity." Step two promises to deliver me from this kind of madness and to help me get honest about the “extremely irrational and self-destructive” manner in which I was eating: “Under the compulsion to overeat, many of us have done things no sane person would ever think of doing.” The 12 Steps and 12 Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous, p. 9.

I had been deeply immersed in 12 Step work years ago, but I freely admit that when I started on Medifast, at my doctor's suggestion, I had no thought of getting clean and sober, and to make abstinence a way of life again. It started out as just another diet. But through Medifast, the light dawned that this was a food plan I could live with and learn from. I have become a member of a caring community of COE’s. We call ourselves COE MF'ers. It was the willingness to act on faith that was the key to Step Two. This has been a healing process and a stabilizing of what had become my unbalanced life.

My world spun off its axis in March 2008, when my son died. Then, after a long illness in which I was the cornerstone of her care, my mother passed away. Suddenly I realized I had gained 50 lbs. As I've said somewhere, I don't think I even noticed until I had to wear a 3X tent to her funeral.

With the combination of Medifast as a food plan and OA as a life plan, I have lost that 50 lbs, and am happily plugging away at making sure Betty Blob stays in rehab.

POWERLESSNESS & COOPERATION

I believe that cooperation is the key to spirituality, and that the key to recovery is cooperation. But how do we cooperate when we are powerless over insanity?

When we admit we are powerless over what has gone before, we open a way to become an active channel for good. We become free to cooperate with God as we understand God, be s/he HP, JC, HS (Holy Spirit – just thought I’d throw that in there). The problem is, we do not understand how being powerless over ___________________(name your poison) relates to cooperation.

Long ago I heard a story on the radio that illustrated this principle better than anything I have ever heard. I’ve never forgotten it, and am very glad I wrote it down. It’s long, so hang in or check out, whichever suits your fancy. I’m glad to be reminded of this because I am not sure I have ever totally and utterly trusted God, and actually thrown my whole body and soul into Step Three: "We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood God."

You may have heard this story on the radio at the same time I did. An airplane captain described an in-flight emergency that threatened the lives of all aboard. A mid-flight explosion blew a three-foot hole in the fuselage. As he described the crew’s attempts to regain control of the airplane and the passengers’ reactions during the crisis, I realized he was telling a story about how powerlessness and cooperation work together.

The 237 passengers and crew were certainly powerless over that three-foot hole in the airplane. They didn’t cause it and they surely could not fix it. Their situation was the direct result of a long chain of events that preceded their takeoff—design flaws, mechanical errors, human mistakes, none of which anyone on board that plane had anything to do with. There was nothing they could do about the fact that the plane was irreparably damaged and very shortly would no longer fly. It seemed inevitable that they would crash. About the best the crew could hope for was to crash gently, somewhere that would harm the fewest people. In a sense, they were looking for a safe place to crash. (Sounds like some of us.)

While the crew diligently sought out the best course of action, the flight attendants rearranged the passengers. In the unlikely event that they would be able to open the emergency doors when they landed, they needed hefty men, strong enough to get the doors open, seated next to those doors. It was a Wednesday, a "Children Fly Free” day. There were 40 unattended children on board. The flight attendants asked for adults to voluntarily move next to a child. With the seating arrangements accomplished, the flight attendants re-briefed the passengers on the use of oxygen; also on how to open the windows, if the opportunity arose.

Those 237 people were totally powerless over the situation, and in those moments their lives had never seemed more unmanageable. The only thing they could make a decision about was how to respond to the situation. They apparently decided, en masse, to cooperate and leave things up to the captain and crew.

The crew set about using all the survival skills their training had given them. They radioed for help. The captain said he had been blessed with a type of leadership training that permitted him to lay aside his ego and sense of responsibility long enough to listen to what his crew and ground control could offer in the way of assistance.

Some of the passengers were injured when the explosion occurred, but instead of blaming themselves for buying a ticket for that particular flight, or decrying whatever circumstances had put them in that particular place at that unfortunate moment, each person in the group sat holding hands with the person seated next to them. Some of them talked together, some cried together, some prayed together. But no one, the captain said, screamed, “Why is this happening to me?” Not even the woman who was flying for the first time, after completing the “Fear of Flying” course. She seemed to realize this was the perfect test to determine how much she had learned.

The crew informed ground control of their position and injuries on board. Ground control radioed back that they were flying over a mid-Western town and that all the doctors were playing golf. The captain said he almost laughed; it was Wednesday and, after all, doctors play golf on Wednesdays. Ground control said, “No. There’s a medical convention in town, and one phone call will bring all those doctors to the burn unit.” The captain said he could not believe their good luck. They were about to crash in a town with a burn unit and a medical convention. He said he began to get a sense that something larger was assisting with this emergency.

They coordinated a landing site and summoned many ambulances. At the hospital, waiting, was what turned out to be one doctor per injured passenger. No one had to wait for treatment. The townspeople gathered to donate blood and to help with the children. Some families even took the less injured children into their homes until arrangements could be made for safe passage onward.

Everyone lived to tell the tale. Why? Was it the captain’s skill or a passenger’s prayer? Life can be like that airplane. Sometimes life blows up.

Captains of disabled aircraft must use all their skills, but also listen to the crew. Casualties of other people’s mistakes need to hold hands with a person alongside who understands. It is time to share, to cry, to pray, to see it as an opportunity to test what we have learned—or whether we have learned to choose how to respond. That’s the only place we have a choice. We always get to choose how to respond.

Sometimes we are captains of our own planes, especially when it comes to laying our egos aside long enough to listen to our crew. But sometimes, we are much like the passengers on that plane. We are in the earth plane and subject to blowups, blowouts, and forces beyond our pay grade. Here, the captain and crew represent higher power. We are totally powerless and utterly vulnerable. Do we trust? If we want to survive and recover, we need to talk, pray, hold hands and cooperate. That is our responsibility. That is how we help ourselves. We trust. We don’t try to take control. We cooperate.

So what does this have to do with Medifast? We face our demons then pay it forward. We broadcast our stories for the benefit of others. Everybody who has completed the journey and landed safely has been given a second chance at life. All of the beautiful weight loss successes on the Medifast board have stories to tell that will help the rest of us. Even those of us who thought we had landed safely, only to find ourselves in big time trouble yet again, can share what we’ve learned along the way. God will do the rest.

Note:
For a couple of years, I’ve been more like the plane. I was flying high, so to speak, with sufficient spiritual altitude so that on a clear day I could see forever, or so I thought; then circumstances beyond my control just about blew me out of the sky. I was a plane crash looking for a place to happen. As the plane, I was so damaged I was completely at the mercy of whomever was in charge. It was not me. As the plane, only the critical skills and cooperation between the captain, crew, ground control, and even the passengers (the committee in my head), could save me from certain total destruction. But save me they did. I guess time will tell whether I’ve really taken the third step. The 12&12, p. 27, says, “Once we compulsive overeaters truly take the third step, we cannot fail to recover. As we live out our decision day by day, our Higher Power guides us through the remaining nine steps.” And I need to tell my stories too. God will do the rest.

How to know if you are a glutton or an addict?

2008-10-23T11:45:00.003-04:00

Are you a glutton or a food addict?

How do you know?

Have you sold your birthright for a meal lately, as Esau of the Bible did?

Most of us were born with glorious potential, but also with that particular something that blocks us from reaching that potential. Ask yourself what is it that reveals the weaker, short-sighted aspect of your personality. Food is mine. Is it yours?

Does the idea of eating only one-half cup of ice cream make you mad? You might need to consider your piggish ways.

If the ADA’s notions about portions leave you starved and frustrated, your colleagues and siblings may soon be calling you garbage gut.

If the idea of eating just one is truly incomprehensible, you may be sealing your fate with your fork.

Are you often voracious? Insatiable? Ravenous?

But here’s the important question: Does it matter? Is your weight or BMI or how you look in your clothes interfering with your living up to that glorious potential you were born for? Do you care?

Desperately?

Well, here’s a well-kept secret. If you care now, you will still care in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. Caring about the consequences of gluttony and/or food addiction rarely goes away. Putting food first in our lives may not cost us the right to lead a country, but it certainly can cost us many happy times.

What are the consequences?

Fat. Sadness because you feel shame about not being able to control your eating.

Fat. Depression because over-eating has robbed you of having fun. Again.

Fat. Self-condemnation because something compels you to behave in self-destructive ways and it spills over into every area of your life. People assume you’re weak. Undisciplined. The emotional consequences of gluttony present themselves long before health concerns do.

If your hips are heavy, your heart probably is too. When the sin of gluttony or the disease of addiction lies at your door, it blocks the opening of many other doors. If belly bulge is stealing your joy now, you won’t feel any better about it next year or the year after that. It will go on stealing from you until pretty soon, it has stolen your whole life. How many parties does a girl have to miss before she gets it? How many fashion trends and fads does she have to pass up because her portly profile resembles a boiled egg?

But what can you do about it? It isn’t as though you haven’t tried already. You’ve been on all the diets. One or more worked but you didn’t stay on it. All that advice about determination and perseverance hasn’t done a bit of good. Why not? Because the gluttonous alter ego in us doesn’t care about fashion trends. She likes to eat. What she wants. When she wants. And as much as she wants. And God help the one who comes between her and her Cherry Cordial ice cream. Addiction is sneaky.

There is always a moment when we choose to care about the food more than anything else. Like Esau when he sold his birthright for a bowl of stew. He was hungry and he didn’t care that he was supposed to inherit a fortune.

Getting to the truth about gluttony and addiction
Why do we fail in attempt after attempt to permanently change our eating behavior, and likewise our appearance? We tell ourselves we failed yet again because of some logical sounding excuse, but the real reason we don’t stay on diets is gluttony. Period. End of sentence. Or is it? Is it gluttony or addiction?

Think about the last time you pigged out on something that made you feel crummy about doing it. Gluttony masquerades as fatigue, stress, even illness. So does addiction. Someone who is not a glutton or an addict will not use those excuses to stuff herself. Normal people might occasionally eat too much because their plate is too large, or the ambience too inviting, but never because of some inner compulsion. But I am not normal. Even though there is always a moment when I could choose differently, I occasionally don’t. I fall off the chow wagon yet again. And I do it often enough to keep my two body hovering two good sizes larger than I’d like. No amount of distorted logic can account for the regularity with which I sabotage my best intentions. Plainly, self-will runs riot. We are defined by our actions, not our thoughts or feelings.

What’s the difference between a glutton and a food addict?
A food addict might love the taste of food but hates the results of overeating. When a food addict overeats her whole life begins to spin out of control and the addiction takes over. She begins to act out in other ways. Control issues show up. A glutton loves food despite what it does. A glutton just accepts the results of overeating as part of life and does not care about getting it under control until health problems threaten. And she doesn't care enough about other people to try to control them.

Hi, my name is Lin and I'm an addict.

Random Notes

2008-10-14T19:12:00.006-04:00

THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS

1994 shall forever be remembered as the Year of the Wounded Healers.

Wounded Healers know:

1.about loving in the midst of apparent abandonment - abandonment by a parent — apparent (a parent) abandonment, and about how the inner parent abandons the child within;

2.how money isn't everything until there isn't enough, then it becomes everything, and how if you don't pay attention to money it will take over your life;

3.why letting go of the good stuff is just as important as letting go of the bad;

4.that the Ideal determines consciousness;

5.why a radio with all its many channels is a metaphor for the many voices within us;

6.how it is necessary that organized institutions must fall;

7.why it is necessary to stop trying to make ourselves feel better;

8.why it is good to get beyond form, labels and belief systems;

9.why there are so many ways of saying the same thing;

10.why there are so many people saying the same thing;

11.why "this too shall pass" is both comforting and terrifying;

12.to accept pain and joy in the same spirit;

13.the meaning of what on the planet needs doing that no one else is doing and that I care about;

14.why Buckminster Fuller and Descartes both spent a year in silence, discovering what they already knew without anymore input.

JUST FOR THE HEAVEN OF IT

1.Choose one person (surely you know of many) who is having a hard time financially and tithe to them for a time.

2.When someone is sick or injured, instead of saying, "If there's anything you need, let me know,'' look around you. Whatever you would need if you were in their shoes is what they need. Do what is at hand to do.

3.When someone is recuperating, instead of saying, "I'll be praying for you,'' go to their house and, if nothing else, water their plants.

4.When someone is terminal, do not say, "I took a course in pie-in-the-sky healing. Is it all right if I practice on you?'' Instead, say "I am here for you." Then be there, knowing they might outlive you.

5.When someone is sick or injured, do not try to explain it away with platitudes about how they must have needed to rest.

6.When someone is sick or injured, do not ask THEM to explain it away with nosy questions about whether or not they've examined why this has happened. You can bet they have and don't like the answers, and are not about to discuss them with you just so you can feel superior.

7.When someone is down on their luck, do not feel superior because you are healthy or walking around. Paybacks are hell.

Dealing with Fears - Part 3

2008-10-13T16:02:00.004-04:00

Dealing with fears

While seeking a way to deal with fears, I came into possession of Faces of Fear, written by Edgar Cayce’s son, Hugh Lynn Cayce, who ran the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) when he was alive. Faces of Fear combines Edgar’s readings with Hugh Lynn’s own 40 years of counseling young people and giving seminars on understanding and coping with fear. This book is relevant today as it was when it was written almost 29 years ago.

The “Conclusion” from Faces of Fear, Overcoming Life's Anxieties, Harper and Row, San Francisco, 1980 is reprinted here, with permission:

“Fear, indeed, has many faces. Fear patterns become so entangled in our lives that tracing causes or identifying the nature of our anxieties may become difficult. Do not become trapped by fixing your attention on possible causes. Begin to use the negative, sometimes even strangely fascinating, feelings of fear to change your life. You can transform anxiety and fear energies to constructive thought and action. My experience with self and others suggests that persistent work with the concepts explored in this book not only brings freedom from fear, but also releases new energies that lead to a richer, fuller life.

“This book has been written for you. If you were a desperately sick person, you would not have come this far. Fear is a universal pattern arising from our rebelliousness. Our thought form, the flesh body itself, blocks our perception of our real goal of existence. Yet through it, as we move in consciousness, we can come to know our Creator and a true relationship of love with our fellow human beings. We have shut ourselves off from God; we are guilt-ridden, unable to accept God’s constant love for us, so we find it difficult to love others or ourselves.

“Yet guilt is itself a sign that we are capable of growth. J.F. Bugental puts this succinctly in The Search for Authenticity: ‘Guilt is a part of the dignity of being a man. Were there no responsibility attaching to our choices, no guilt inhering in our identity, we would be inconsiderable, as unmeaningful as the chance scrawlings of a man infant.’

“The unconscious mind is a battlefield. Conflicts between aspects of ourselves create our fears. Our desires war with our tendencies to repress them; our real worlds struggle with our imaginary worlds; we are torn between our drive to be important and our sense of insignificance; we hope for acceptance but confront rejection; sometimes we want to live; sometimes to die.

“Fear symptoms arise from bodily stress, psychological childhood conditioning, and the stress of daily living. Fears may arise to haunt us from other lives. And we fear annihilation or punishment in death. Finally, we all, at some time in our lives, feel a sense of failure that grows out of the sameness of existence and a threat of meaninglessness.

“The Edgar Cayce readings speak to many of these fears and provide, for many people, ways to deal with them. For example, an important spiritual law can help renew our relationship with our Creator—the oneness of all force. We can begin to sense that we are parts of a whole and that we do have a part to play as children of God and co-creators with Him.

“Moreover, through prayer and meditation, we begin to awaken the real self, the soul. Our wills are aroused and we can control the mind, the builder. As we set Ideals, we can measure our thoughts, words, and actions. We can build fear-free constructive attitudes by ceasing to feel negative thought patterns; tuning up our flesh bodies through the mind; conscientiously trying to be positive and constructive in our thinking; checking our dreams to observe what we are building with the mind; using positive suggestions on self; spending time with inspirational reading; and developing a sense of humor. We can use small groups for protection, help with self-observation, and healing. And service to others needs to be incorporated into our daily action.

“No one idea, prescription, or action resolves anxiety or specific fears. Fear, as we have seen, is entangled in our flesh bodies, our minds and emotions and our spiritual lives. We need to change our patterns of life activity. Waking up helps us understand new dimensions of ourselves. Turning loose, letting go of our negative past and beginning now to rebuild new patterns of physical, mental, and spiritual activities can free us from anxieties and fears that hold us chained in a consciousness of inadequacy and even self-destruction. We can transform fear by remembering Christ’s admonition: ‘Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.’ (John 14:27)” (pp. 139-140)

We don’t need to be afraid to be held accountable for our victories as well as our defeats. An Ideal (standards) and meditation helps us to embrace both.

Fear of ______(fill in the blank) Part 2

2008-10-12T20:41:00.005-04:00

FACING FEARS

Deliberately choosing not to be thin is decidedly different from wanting to be thin but being afraid of the effort—or the results.

To many, both men and women, fat feels safer, but especially to women because men seem to feel fewer emotional complications relating to body image. Men, whether fat or thin, generally do not define themselves in terms of how much space their bodies occupy. From childhood, women receive contradictory input regarding their roles. On one hand a “real” woman is presented as a nurturing creature, angel wings outspread, sheltering all who enter her dominion, solver of problems, and she’s supposed to look sexy while she’s at it. Sexy, but not too sexy. The shoulds and oughts surrounding womanhood doom many accomplishments, including efforts to lose weight.

As a weight control columnist I received many letters from readers expressing their desires to be thinner, but undercurrents of fear and anxiety ran throughout these letters, often ill defined, but unmistakable, nonetheless. I recognized them because I had been there and done that.

Fears may overlap, but the recurring themes fall into six categories, and I’ve added a seventh:

Fear of…
…loss of familiar boundaries
…appearing self-centered
…competition and jealousy from and of others
…feeling powerless or too powerful
…imagined expectations of self and others
…sexuality
…perfection.

Fear of loss of familiar boundaries
A 45-year old woman we’ll call Jane wrote, “I need to lose about 60 pounds, and I really do well sometimes. But lately I’ve noticed that whenever I lose about 25 pounds, everything begins to close in on me…”

This closing-in-on-me feeling occurs in women who are using fat as a protective wall against the world. The need to keep others out, to be separated from others, clashes with the need to be closer to others, producing a conflict, a paradox. By losing weight we think others can get closer to our real body, which we think is hiding somewhere beneath the fat. When weight loss occurs, we may be left feeling vulnerable, fragile, and invade-able. These feelings can be terrifying.

Unless the entire body, fat and all, is first claimed as your own and acknowledged as a manifestation of past choices, any weight loss is likely to be temporary. To separate the body into two sections, one fat and one thin, is to deny self. Thinking of ourselves as being surrounded and protected by fat—rather than seeing the fat as an integral part of the whole person—blocks the ability to relate to other people lovingly. We cannot allow anyone to get too close until we expand the consciousness to embrace all of one’s self and recognize that the barriers we put up against self and others are imagined. Once we understand that barriers are only mind images, subject to our control, we no longer need fat to keep the world from closing in.

In A Search for God we read: “We should never allow ourselves to feel separate and apart from God or our fellow man; for what affects our neighbor…affects us. The people of the earth are our great family. We should love without distinction, knowing that God is in all. By making ourselves perfect channels that His grace, mercy, peace, and love may flow through us, we come to realize more and more the Oneness of all creation. Let us keep the heart open that the voice of Him who has called may quicken every thought and act. His ways are not hidden, nor far away, but are manifested to those who will hear and see the glory of the Oneness. Through the activity of the will is the method by which each of us should prepare himself as a channel for forces that may assist in gaining a greater concept of the Oneness of the Father in the material plane.” (ASFG 1, p. 116)

Fear of appearing self-centered
Many who desire slimmer, healthier bodies express difficulty because of the time and energy expenditure involved. Always taught to put the interests of others ahead of their own, some feel conflict when attempting to merge their own need to be thin with the need to be of service to others.

Laura, a wife, mother of school-aged children, and secretary to an executive, wrote, “Every minute somebody needs something from me. I love my family and my job, but I never have time to think about myself except for being unhappy about letting myself gain 40 pounds. I hate the way I look…”

The implication in Laura’s letter is that to give to herself the time and energy she needs to lose weight would take something away from those for whom she cares—her family and her boss. To sacrifice the needs of others for her own might cost her in terms of family affection and her career.

Laura’s letter further indicated that she feared appearing vain and selfish to others, but even more afraid of seeming so to herself. Her life was centered on service to others, and the idea of doing unto herself as she would do unto others made her anxious.

Self-involvement with thinness seemed appalling to her. At the same time she had needs of her own: “I love my family, but…”

Laura’s need to like the way she looked created conflict because she felt the time would be taken away from others. She felt she had time to love everybody but herself. Resentment can result when our own needs are always suppressed. Resentment toward those we love, plus anxiety about how to meet our own needs and everyone else’s too, restricts our flow of love. Our whole lives then become unbalanced. Therefore, giving to our selves first, fulfilling our desire for whatever we define as a slender, healthy body is liberating. Appearing acceptable to ourselves frees the mind to think of others, unhampered by self-recrimination. Taking care of our needs results in being less self-centered and more willing to go and do for others. When we know ourselves the truth sets us free.

Fear of competition and jealousy from and of others

Negative impulses, which might be horrifying, can arise when the body starts changing. Suddenly we find ourselves having to compete in a thin world, where our self-worth is ranked according to outward appearance. This has sent many screaming for sanctuary back inside a shelter of fat.

Being fat may allow us to remain outside the arena of human emotion, where life is played out against a background of bright lights and loud music. Imagining ourselves competing where someone is always prettier, smarter and thinner makes us feel so inadequate, we just want to give up, as did Martha, who wrote:

“I was an account executive for four years during which time I battled constantly to keep my weight down, so that I appeared more efficient, competent and trustworthy. I got so tired of feeling judged by my appearance, I finally couldn’t take it anymore and quit.

“The first thing I did after quitting was gain 28 pounds. Now I’m contemplating trying to lose it, but I can’t bear the thought of having to compete again…”

To Martha and others, competition equals being thin. Maybe this is because in our society beauty and personality are marketable qualities. Beauty contestants vie for money, prizes, and glory. Cute baby contests and Queen-of-the-Prom consciousness perpetuates the myth that, somehow, beautiful is better, and somehow manages to ignore the fact that beauty is both subjective, debatable, and probably temporary.

Also, in a thin world, one may be asked to deal with jealousy from others and of others, both painful experiences. Without a sense of balance, a sense of place, and an understanding of ourselves in relation to others, withdrawal from society seems preferable. But in A Search for God, we read: “We should let neither flattery, criticism, nor opinions of others turn us aside from those vital things for which we stand—those things that are lifting us upward and building within us that which will endure until the end. Let us turn within to see if we are being true to ourselves when temptations arise. We know that we cannot be true to others unless we are first true to ourselves.” (ASFG 1, p. 33)

Fear of feeling powerless or too powerful
Some of us may fear that a major accomplishment such as losing a lot of weight would make us feel too powerful. We fear misusing the power. Another person may feel just the opposite. Some feel that reducing the body mass means losing the ability to overpower an imagined enemy. A feeling of frailness interpreted as weakness may accompany weight loss. Both fears may exist alongside one another within the same person.

After losing 33 pounds, Susan wrote, “I get so happy when I realize I’m no longer fat. I feel like I could do anything. Sometimes I feel like I could fly. That scares me and makes me want to eat. Then some days I feel so tiny that I could be stepped on, like a bug. And I think I’d better eat (and get bigger) so they can see me…”

Susan’s fears illustrate the point that either fear places the self-image in jeopardy. These anxieties must be balanced from within, else no significant weight loss will be permanent.

Power is not to be feared. In A Search for God we read: “Knowledge is power, yet power may become an influence that brings evil, when it is not used constructively…Secular knowledge is man-made. The knowledge of God does not bind us to dogmas, or man-made beliefs; rather it sets us free.” (ASFG 2, p. 82)

Fear of imagined expectations of self and others
While imagined expectations from others create tension, we fear most what we might expect from ourselves if we were not fat. If we feel that to be thin is to be different, then we will no longer know whom we are, how we’ll look, how we’ll react, how we’ll feel. We won’t know ourselves. We’ll feel strange. Strangeness can feel threatening to one who has trod the same path time and again. The unknown path to permanent thinness is paved with questions that begin, “What will I do if…?” We what if ourselves to death. There is safety in sameness.

If we change we may have to do something different to live up to our own expectations, never mind someone else’s. If we believe that being fat is the only thing preventing us from some major accomplishment, then when the fat is gone, so is our excuse. No longer can we say, “If I weren’t fat I would get a promotion, get elected to office, get a boyfriend, get a girlfriend….” No fat, no excuse.

If we fear that being thin would mean we’d have to accept additional responsibilities, we might use weight to avoid activities we do not like:

I’m too fat to get a job, cook dinner for my husband’s boss, go to an office party with my husband, do volunteer work at the hospital, take a Scout Troop, and on and on. There would be no sin in admitting we don’t want a job, hate housework, feel insecure or inadequate, uncomfortable or bored. Guilt about avoiding social and charitable functions creates even more anxiety, which in turn, compels more eating and more weight gain. God does not expect of us what we do not expect of ourselves, but what we expect of ourselves, God expects of us.

In A Search for God we read: “If we would have life we must give life. If we would have joy we must make joy in the lives of others. If we would have peace and harmony we must create peace in self and in our relationships with others. This is the law, for like begets like. We do not gather olives from thistles, or apples from bramble bushes, neither do we find love in hate.” (ASFG 2, p. 38)

Neither do we plant corn to grow tomatoes, nor cookies to grow skinny.

Fear of sexuality
Of the many fears that motivate obesity, the easiest to recognize but the most difficult to deal with is fear of the sexual nature. Among the most poignant letters I ever received was one from a 28-year-old woman who had reduced her weight by 80 pounds, but who still had 50 pounds to lose.

“I thought getting fat would protect me from men. I’ve learned through psychiatry that I need to be protected from myself.

“My father ‘touched’ me when I was young. He wasn’t as bad as other fathers I’ve read about, but I know he made me feel that I must be bad because even though I was only nine, I knew what he was doing was wrong. I blamed myself because, after all, he was my daddy, and he couldn’t be wrong, so I must be doing something to make him act like that.

“Then when I became a teenager, boys were so attracted to me it scared me. I could not understand why they behaved toward me s they did because I never felt like I measured up to the other girls. My mother said boys don’t act like that toward ‘nice girls,’ so I believed I was not a nice girl. Now I know that isn’t true, but I am still afraid to let myself become attractive...”

I thought this reader would benefit greatly by professional counseling. No one should have to carry this burden alone.

Fear of perfection
I include fear of perfection as one of the primary fears about losing weight because Edgar Cayce spoke of the destiny of the body. He said we could only take a perfect body back to our Maker. Which body was he speaking about?

“Our body is the temple of the living God, of the living soul. Is it to see corruption? Is it to be lost entirely, or is it to be glorified, spiritualized? As our body is a structure in which we manifest as a portion of the whole, so our body is in the keeping of its Keeper, even within us. What will we do with it? God gave us free wills. God Himself does not know what we will destine to do with ourselves, else would He have repented that He made man? God has not ordained that any soul should perish. What of the body? Have we ordained, have we so lived, have we made our temple so untenable, that we do not care to have it glorified?” (ASFG 2, p`54)

Glorified how? What is perfection?

“Our Lord resurrected and quickened His body. He is our pattern. So we, as He, must overcome death, overcome that transition, overcome that which is the conscious change of being in all matters, all phases, all experiences, that we may be one with Him, as He is one with the Whole.” (ASFG 2, p.57)

That is perfection, therefore…
“…If we would be like Him, then we must so live, so conduct ourselves, that our body may be one with Him, and be raised a glorified body to be known as our own.” (ASFG 2, p.54)

Resurrection? Of this body?

Does this mean we are supposed to be able to resurrect in the same physical body we are living in now?

I, for one, would not want to.

For most of us, resurrection of the body we presently occupy seems a little far-fetched. So while we work on overcoming “the conscious change of being in all matters, all phases, all experiences…” which will include, no doubt, walking on water and through walls, what about right now?

I’d be satisfied just to lighten up and quit getting so nervous when things go too right. I’d like to stop taking myself so seriously and laugh more. I’d like to enjoy my efforts and the results.

Some say God finds humans to be delightful creatures; He reveals himself to us through our humanness. Every blunder can become a blessing, every cross a crown when we trust Him, supposedly. The changes we would make in ourselves hasten through developing an objective eye and a sense of detached humor about our mistakes and our accomplishments.

The late Dr. Gina Cerminara, in The World Within, wrote: “…any deviation from harmony or proportion or health is indicative of some psychic necessity somewhere.” (p.51)

Therefore, it seems a worthwhile effort to develop insight into conditions that produce a compulsion to overeat. But this must be done without getting sidetracked by ego-glorification and selfishness, else the soul seems to sense it and blocks the way to physical improvement until we can handle it. Improving ourselves physically is work worth doing if we can do it with an attitude of objective, humorous detachment.

Again, from The World Within:
“…all of us, men and women alike, can be prompted by the long-range view of many lifetimes, to the awareness of our own obligation to strive consciously for beauty, on all levels of being.

“This must be done almost impersonally, however, and without sensual attachment; in the spirit, as Cayce puts it, of ‘making a perfect sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God.’ It must be done with the same sort of terrible compulsion that an artist feels to transfer some beautiful proportions in stone. For unless it is done out of such an impersonal passion for beauty itself, and out of a kind of sense of obligation to render to the universe a gift at least as beautiful as the most insignificant of nature’s handiwork, the beautiful body we create will become itself a terrible snare, trap, and delusion.” (pp. 80-81)

Fear of Success

2008-10-11T14:15:00.002-04:00

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I’d like to introduce to my alter ego. Her name is Betty Blob and she lives in a cage in my head.
One night, on the way from the living room to the bathroom, I stopped off at the kitchen and gained nine pounds. I tried to relieve an anxiety attack with a jar of macaroni salad. This was in the days when I still ate pasta, and I nearly did myself in. It took me three weeks to recover from the knockdown-drag-out fight with Betty Blob, one of my greatest teachers.

Betty Blob is one of a committee who took up residence in my brain when I was much younger. She has been with me most of my life. Listening to her has gotten me into a world of trouble more than once. She wants to eat all the time, and she likes to run the show; only she rarely has my best interests at heart. She has kept me entangled in fear and fat for too long. Popular advice says if I will love her and integrate her into myself so she will feel safe, she will stop being so demanding. Maybe that will happen someday, but experience has taught me that if I give her an inch, she’ll take a mile.

My early childhood was scarred by taunts of “Fatty, Fatty, two by four, can’t get through the kitchen door.” My fifth grade teacher, skinny ol’ Mrs. Freeman, wouldn’t let me square dance on stage because I “spoiled the looks of her group.” Yes, the woman actually said that. To this day I remember that every time someone mentions square dancing. If these teachers only knew what kind of karma they create when they hurt children, they’d probably mend their ways.

As a teenager, from Monday through Thursday I saved up calories so I could eat on Friday nights like a “normal” person. I ended up married at 15, mother of two sons at 17, and generally incapable of coping with life, much less my expanding waistline. It would be decades before I would be strong enough to deal with anything even remotely resembling an actual feeling, especially when that feeling was fear.

But God had a plan.

WORKING UP TO DEALING WITH FEARS

Sometimes it is best to gradually work up to dealing with fears.

By age 17, I had pretty much had it with organized religion. But one night my husband and I were sitting in a high school auditorium at a non-denominational meeting in Augusta, GA. The speaker was named Welcome Detweiler. I felt someone lay a hand on my right shoulder. Startled, I turned around to see who it was. No one was there. About that time I heard a quiet voice speak as clearly as if the person had been standing there: “You’re mine,” the voice said; and I figured it must have been Jesus. I surely hope it was, because I felt a surge of energy run through me like electricity, and I’ve been trying to hear and obey that voice ever since, sometimes without much luck.

That still, small voice has had a lot of competition, from Betty Blob as well as the others on the committee that lives in my head. So, like the Israelites, it would seem I’ve spent a lot of time wondering around in the wilderness on a journey I could have made in a fraction of the time had I been able to listen better. But, like the Israelites, I now understand more each day of how God teaches us. I now see my twisted route as part of God’s plan, and I trust His hand to be there no matter where it leads. But that trust was a long time coming.

After my second son was born I became so desperate about my weight I cried out to God for help. I remember standing in front of the bathroom mirror, holding a razor blade to my wrists. My beautiful little boys were playing in their bedroom, and the thought flashed through my mind that they really shouldn’t be subjected to the sight of their mother dying in a pool of blood. In dazed despair I suddenly found a phonebook in my hands. As if in a dream, my finger pointed to a doctor’s name in the Yellow Pages. I dialed the number and made an appointment for the next day, and he put me on a fast. Ninety days later I was 65 pounds thinner, $750 poorer, and pregnant. But I was alive, and 270 days later I was 45 pounds fatter, and the 21-year-old mother of three sons.

In addition to Betty Blob, youth and immaturity account for much of the idiotic eating I did in those days. In all fairness, this was 1962, and we didn’t know then what we know now. The doctor who supervised the fast had no time to work with me on retraining my eating habits. The 65 pounds came off because he took me off food completely and prescribed food supplement tablets, gall bladder pills, thyroid pills and diet pills. Up to 40 pills a day were rattling around in my emerging rib cage. It is always easier to eat nothing than to consistently choose rightly. When the pregnancy occurred, all the doctor really had time to say as I rushed out the door to the gynecologist was, “You have to start eating again.”

So I did. Boy, did I!

Potato chips, chocolate milk, mayonnaise and white bread sandwiches, sometimes with a few tomato slices thrown in for variety—all standard fare for someone Southern born, Southern bred and Southern fed. By 1969, a tactless but honest surgeon told me I looked like a mattress with a string tied around the middle. I remember one especially masochistic day, sitting down for Pete’s sake—as if the measurements weren’t bad enough while standing—I actually sat down and measured my hips. I even exhaled! I watched the tape register 60 inches.

What I do not recall is how I dealt with the facts of my life on that day. There I was, a 28-year-old, 240-pound mass of misery that lacked only six inches measuring horizontally what I measured vertically. But I wasn’t miserable because I was fat, I was fat because I was miserable way down deep inside, so deep it can't be felt because if you felt it you’d kill somebody. But part of God’s plan was for me to find the Edgar Cayce readings. In 1970, I read Jess Stearn’s The Sleeping Prophet, Tom Sugrue’s There is a River, and Hugh Lynn Cayce’s Venture Inward. It was a very good year.

By the time I waded through those three books, I was hooked. I didn’t care that I had been raised as an orthodox, fundamentalist, dogmatic Christian. Everything I read about Cayce made sense. But it was two years later that I finally heard about an inquirer’s meeting with Edgar Cayce’s name attached to it.

My main interests in those days were psychic phenomena, Atlantis, reincarnation, karma…all those neat goodies that are so much fun to study, but may not have a whole lot to do with real life, until application enters the picture. And application they don’t tell you about at inquirer’s meetings. That comes as a rude awakening later.

So one night, it was probably a Tuesday – seems like all inquirer’s sessions are held on Tuesdays – I waddled into a Savings and Loan Association Community Room (most of these sessions are held in community rooms), and there stood little bitty Dee Shambaugh Sloan (who at the time might have weighed 100 pounds dressed for skydiving). She was lecturing on the connection between the endocrine system, colors, karmic memory at cell level, energy flow, and the Lord’s Prayer. I did not understand one word of it, but it sounded absolutely fascinating.

Dee seemed to be talking to me when she spoke of the spiritual centers being connected to the glands of the body, particularly the thyroid. After all, my thyroid had tested under-active all my life—surely the reason I was fat. So when Dee said that meditation could balance the spiritual centers, including the thyroid, my ears perked right up.

My only experience with meditation had been sitting in a field in Ft. Lauderdale with a bunch of hippies whose main interest in life was to try to move clouds! Even then I knew better than to mess around with clouds, so I gave up. I didn’t know that meditation was physical as well as mental and spiritual, and I didn’t know that meditation was listening.

What does listening have to do with losing weight?

Everything.

Every single one of us comes into the earth plane with a certain consciousness, and the only way to alter that consciousness is attunement with God. For once that inner-life connection is made with the still, small voice within, the information we need to learn yet another lesson can be heard, sometimes dramatically.

One Saturday afternoon in 1972, after study group had been meeting at my house for about three months, I was dressing to attend a son’s Little League ball game. I was rushed for time, but I needed to meditate. It sounded simple enough. All I had to do was sit still for fifteen minutes, quiet the body and the mind, and listen to the God within speak to me. Nothing to it.

Well, for three months I had been sitting with a mosquito biting my toe, my eyes itching, dying of thirst, hating that miserable chair and thinking every single day that I’d never get the hang of this meditation thing. But I kept at it every single day, and that’s the point. Meditation lesson number one is: Hang in there—even though it does not seem to be doing one bit of good. I wasn’t even sure what good it was supposed to do, except to make me a better channel for God in the earth, whatever that meant. Then on that Saturday afternoon in June, I found out what it meant.

The day had passed uneventfully. Saturday chores had crowded the time, making meditation inconvenient. As I began to dress for the ballgame, dreading the Florida heat—gads, it’s hard to stay cool when you’re fat—an inner nudge prompted me to take a couple of minutes. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to be late for the game. Besides, the bedroom was air-conditioned. The ball field wasn’t. So I sat down on the floor, made my usual clumsy attempt at a half-lotus position—equally as difficult as keeping cool when you’re fat—and began to try to meditate. This time something was different.

This time I entered an altered state of consciousness. I heard the voice speaking. The exact words are not important, but afterwards, I was certain that I would succeed at losing weight this time where I had always failed before. It felt as though it would only be a matter of days, weeks at the most, before I’d be ravishingly slender and gorgeous.

Needless to say I didn’t exactly announce it over the loud speakers when I arrived at the ball field. One must be very careful to whom one confesses hearing voices. But I was so certain of the authenticity of the voice, I half-expected to shrink four sizes during the drive to the field. I honestly think I was disappointed when no one raved about how much weight I’d lost in the last 20 minutes. Five years later and finally thin—well not exactly finally—I’ve had my share of maintenance problems—I was and still am learning: It ain’t what you know, it’s what you do that counts. I wrote a book based on that meditation.

Weight that could have been lost safely within a year or so took five years to lose because I’m a slow learner, and spiritual knowledge without action makes things worse. Knowing what to do and not doing it is worst of all. Trying to “be spiritual” is a lost cause.

Week after week, we sat around in study group talking about learning to serve others, then we’d hold one another accountable for actually trying it in our lives. The A Search for God books say we can discover our purpose in life and our true relationship with a loving Creator by being a channel of blessings, healing and help to other people. I tried serving my family, but at first it backfired. For one thing service, to them, meant cooking. That’s all we knew: food plus food equals love. After all, nothin’ says lovin’ like something from the oven. Just ask the Pillsbury Doughboy. Would he lie? For another thing, I was beginning to relax about being fat. I was becoming spiritual. God loves fat people, too, doesn’t He?

Couldn’t one look like a mattress with a string tied around the middle and still be beautiful on the inside, where it counts.

Another meaning of spiritual in those days was to be calm, quiet and peaceful (a condition completely unnatural for me), so I moved through my days “practicing the Presence” with what must have been a glazed look in my eyes. There I was, cooking and smiling and generally acting like a zombie, and being patient with the kids while they wrecked the house. My husband, bored to the teeth with all this spirituality, told me to knock off all the self-righteous junk and forget that bunch of nuts I was meeting with. He wanted his life back.

Now, some would ascribe selfish motives to his demands, but the Cayce material clearly states that studying the readings is supposed to make one a better whatever-it-is that one is, be it rocket scientist or fat housewife.

“If self-development is our aim, then we must begin just where we are. It will do no good idly to wish to be in some other condition or surrounding; for, unless we have mastered our present one, the second state will be worse than the first.” (A Search For God, Book 1, p. 17)

I could not imagine a worse state than being a fat housewife, and now my husband was angry with me too. There I was, trying to get out of that condition, and things were getting all balled up. I was confused, hurt, frustrated.

“The first and last obstacle to overcome is understanding ourselves. Until we are fully aware of all that constitutes our existence we have no right to say that this or that is the aim and goal of life.” (ASFG 1, p. 17)

Holy cow! No right?

It could take forever to become “fully aware” of all that constituted my existence—and it was only existence—it surely wasn’t living. And to “master the present state” to me meant one thing: lose weight. I did not know then that it wasn’t about losing weight. And yet, something called “full awareness” had to be achieved before I could even claim the right to set goals for myself—a perplexing paradox. But at least I was beginning to get a glimmer of why, though I’d been on every diet devised by mankind, I was still fat. So I decided to sit down, shut up, and listen again.
I heard: The body is the temple and yours needs remodeling. I didn’t quite know how I was supposed to accomplish this if I couldn’t even set goals for myself. I just knew I’d have to begin where I was because wishing was not enough. Being spiritual was not enough. Something was moving, and though I did not know it yet, it was I, getting ready to face my fears.

Why Oprah is not skinny

2008-10-03T15:43:00.008-04:00

See that basket of roses on the right? They were from Oprah. That's Jessee the Maltese and Amber the Persian, nosing it up beside the roses.

Almost ten years ago, on her TV show, Oprah debuted her size 10 body in a pair of Calvin Klein jeans. She had lost 67 pounds on a so-called elitist weight-loss method that cost $400 a week to start, not including long-term maintenance and private and group therapy. I was working at the now defunct Clearwater Sun newspaper in Clearwater, FL when this event occurred, and my editor asked me what I thought about it. Another reporter, She Who Shall Remain Nameless, had written a column taking Oprah to task and accusing her of not being a real person, "like she used to be." Her column began, "Dear Oprah," and included what seemed to me to be snide and undeserved accusations about why Oprah would not tell how much she weighed, and other things that were none of this columnist's business.

I wrote a rebuttal to the "Dear Oprah" column, beginning with "Dear Blank, Excuse me, but who do you think you are?" I chewed her out, point for point, ending with, "In the name of common decency, people like you ought to get off your almighty high horse and give the girl a break." The editor ran the first column on the left hand side of the page, my column on the right, with a giant photo in the center of the page of Oprah in those jeans at the moment of the big reveal. When it came out I sent the whole page to Oprah. Pretty soon, I received a hand-written note from Oprah, thanking me, saying the first column had been on her desk for two weeks, and that I had said everything for her that she'd wanted to say. A few days later the five dozen roses in the photo appeared in the newsroom. The card reads, "Thanks for giving a girl a break."

At the time Oprah was a size 10, so was I. Now, it is apparent that Oprah has not maintained her whole weight loss any more than I have. My ideas about why any of us gain it back may not be very popular, but here goes. I think we regain weight because we want to. And it has nothing to do with the method by which we lost it.

When I was 100 pounds overweight, it took five years to lose it but I maintained the loss for around 11 years, all but ten pounds or so. That ten pounds kept me preoccupied with my favorite pastime: life, liberty and the pursuit of lean. I fiddled around losing and regaining it, then losing it again simply because losing weight is so much fun and provides such a sense of accomplishment. I really hated to give it up, so I didn't.

Then something happened in the family that upset me. Looking back with 20-20 hindsight, I can see that the situation was really serious and required my immediate and full attention. However, because I had lulled myself into an illusion of control, I didn't take it seriously when I began to eat whatever was convenient instead of taking the time and trouble to assure my nutritional needs without overdoing it on calories. I have never had to binge to gain weight. I've only had to give in to convenience, and stop working out.

This situation became a crisis eventually, and the more I tried to fix it, the angrier I got. I was failing miserably in my self-appointed role as rescuer, and everything began to go wrong. Six months and 60 pounds later I woke up to what was happening but it was too late.

I wanted to get fat to demonstrate my anger because I was unable to express it honestly. I couldn't be outwardly angry so I turned it inward. That's when I discovered there is no such thing as control. The only way not to get caught in the illusion of control is to patrol behavior. Feelings simply can't be trusted to accurately gauge one's emotional well-being. Nothing matters except behavior.

I never really feel wonderful about eating right and working out. I just either do it or don't do it. Lately, I've done very well with my Mostly Raw Real Food lifestyle. But when I don't, when my behavior begins to revert back to self-destruction, I take it as a warning that some buried emotion is motivating me which needs to be explored. That's when I sit down with paper and pen and begin to write: "I want to be fat because..." and finish that sentence no matter how long it takes. Then it occurred to me how Oprah would finish that sentence:

I want to (have to) be fat because of ratings...

Oprah may feel she must keep some extra weight on her; otherwise, few of us could relate to her. As rich and powerful as she is, if she were skinny too it would be unbearable for us, as it must have been for She Who Shall Remain Nameless, back there ten years ago. When I was a size 10, it was okay for Oprah to be also. But now? Who knows, our political differences notwithstanding.

Truth be told, I lost that 60 pounds but have danged near gained it all back AGAIN. (...sigh...)

Oprah's roses are long gone. So are Jessee and Amber. But the basket lives on as my dog Lily's toy basket, witness to lessons still unlearned.

Eating Real Food, most of it raw

2008-09-30T12:32:00.008-04:00

I said a couple of days ago that I'd started a raw foods diet because I heard about it on CNN. Let me rephrase that. I'm not that big an idiot. I wouldn't do anything JUST because I heard about it on CNN, or FOX, or any other TV station. What I meant was, after carefully researching the ins and outs of eating mostly raw foods, I decided it sounded healthy for me at this stage of my life. The woman on CNN lost 160 pounds. I'm just trying to get into my favorite old beat-up jeans over there in the picture on the right. I've lost a few pounds, but even more important, I think I have more energy.

Actually, to be totally accurate I'm eating Real Food but only about 80 percent of it is raw. I've had small bowls of steel cut oats each morning, and yesterday I steamed a cauliflower and creamed it in the food processor with Molly McButter. I'm not off salt yet, nor am I particularly interested in giving up salt due to my good blood pressure numbers. But I'm following a blog that bears the Fitness Spotlight logo, written by Richard Nikolevy, http://www.freetheanimal.com/, which is loaded with good anecdotal information on changing the way our bodies function by eating only real food. He isn't a nutritionist but on Richard's site there are other links which lead to more information, all of it truthful and accurate as far as I can tell. I swerved into other blogs which also bear the Fitness Spotlight logo. Fitness Spotlight is dedicated to disseminating information people can actually use, much like I enjoyed doing when I was a weight control advice columnist for a now-defunct Florida newspaper, the Clearwater Sun, which I still miss.

Another site I'm using to further inform my decision to deprive diet-food designers of any more of my hard earned money is http://www.bodyecology.com/, by nutritionist Donna Gates. Body Ecology is a way of life that I'm not quite ready to embrace, but I firmly believe we should investigate everything, take what we can use and leave the rest. My job is just to pass along what I learn, get into my favorite jeans, and...oh, yeah...grow new lungs!

ADVICE OF THE DAY
What are the best foods? The ones Nature grew. What are the best exercises? The ones you'll do. Use what you already know about health and nutrition and more information will find its way to you. As you grow spiritually and your consciousness evolves and transforms, you will naturally ease into the life you are meant to live. Pray to be shown what is right for you.

Starting a raw foods lifestyle

2008-09-27T10:57:00.013-04:00

9/27/08 -- Two months until my 67th birthday.

See those jeans on the right...I can fit into the lighter ones; the darker ones (my favorites) I can't.

Yesterday on CNN I heard about a young woman who lost 160 pounds in two years by eating only raw foods. I immediately knew it was the answer to my inability to reverse the weight gain of the past few months (then undo the past 10 years) And I’m going public. I’m going to get into my favorite pair of old beat-up jeans or die trying. Yes, at 67, jeans still matter. But it goes beyond jeans. Now it is about health.

For people over 60, health becomes everything. We chase after health like catching it means we wouldn't die. We spend millions to get it back once we’ve lost it. I haven’t lost it completely but my list of concerns is growing. I don't worry about dying. I just don't want to live sick.

Oh, sure, my blood pressure and cholesterol numbers are perfect. So is my sugar. According to my blood I’m the picture of health. But I smoked for 40 years of my adult life, beginning at age 12. Blood tests don’t show damaged lungs, but COPD and sleep apnea pretty much determine which exercises I can do, where I can vacation, that sort of thing. So the weight has to go because it would help my breathing. Maybe I could even get rid of that damned CPAP and mask that make me look like Hannibal Lechter. Bill would be happy about that. And I'm rebuilding healthy lungs through cellular rejuvenation meditations. But that's another column.

(My mother is 85, and I am convinced that what we do during our 60's determines how we will be in our 80's. My mom didn’t have the information that my generation of 60-somethings has. She did not give up processed foods. She did not exercise ever. Any chance she had of relieving stress lost out to back pain. Between the heart surgery 20 years ago and receiving a pacemaker a couple of years ago she didn’t take charge of her health. She left it up to a myriad of doctors. Today she told me she is still waiting on the pill that will make her feel better. I pray one will appear.)

Another reason the weight has to go is because exercise is the only treatment for COPD. In June I sprained my ankle and it has not healed, probably because of too much weight on it. Curtailing my exercise in favor of the ankle has worsened my breathing. So in addition to eating mostly raw foods I will be doing floor exercises (which can all be done on the bed!), water aerobics and stretching, plus some mild upper body weight work. And I’ll be reporting here daily how it is going. I also have to report to a COPD online support group daily. We try to keep each other breathing and on track. We are like a family.

Being able to breath while wearing those old jeans on my birthday will be the best gift I ever gave myself.

Food Addiction - is it real?

2008-09-16T13:23:00.005-04:00

The following article was sent to me by Carol Solomon, http://www.stresseating.com/ because I am a fan of EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique). She asked that I pay this forward to friends, so I decided to turn my blog over to her today. This is great information. You can learn more about EFT and download an 87-page instruction manual for FREE by clicking on the link in the sidebar.

Take it away, Carol.

Do you feel addicted to food, especially sweet treats?

If you struggle with addictive-like behavior when it comes to sugar, you are not alone.

Researchers know that our brains are wired to love sweets, and are studying the food addiction qualities of foods high in sugar, flour and fat.

Even attorneys are getting into the act. While large companies such as Kraft (maker of Oreos), say that their research is not "aimed at creating consumer dependency", they do share expertise with their corporate counterpart, Phillip Morris.

The attorneys who won huge settlements against the tobacco companies believe they could repeat their wins, if they could prove that food companies hid any addictive qualities of their foods.

Moments after you indulge in sweet treats, your brain's pleasure center releases opiate-like substances.

The same brain chemicals that create narcotic highs also keep you coming back to sugary treats.
Food addiction is real.

Early studies on lab rats showed that rodents have a ravenous taste for Oreos. In experiments, the rats poked the cookies, sniffed them, and ate them to excess. Many rats even took them apart and licked the fillings . . .just like humans.

According to Ann Kelley at the University of Wisconsin, "even bacteria swim toward sugar."
The same sort of opiates that create the rush of drugs such as heroin also shape how the brain gets pleasure from food, especially foods high in fat and sugar.

Brain scans in human subjects have shown that Oreos and other sweet snacks act on the same brain pleasure centers that respond to addictive drugs.

The thought and sight of ice cream set off the same neurological pleasure centers in healthy subjects as the images of crack pipes did for drug addicts.

Of course, all this doesn't PROVE that food is addictive, and some people have more of a problem than others. But addiction researchers are coming to a more certain conclusion - sugar is like alcohol and other addictive substances.

Our brains and bodies respond in very similar ways.

Food has the ability to change your appearance, your health, your mood, and your self-esteem.
When you think about it that way, I hope it makes it easier to make more conscious and healthy decisions . . .peacefully.

Hugs, Carol

Carol Solomon, Ph.D. MCC Master Certified Coach

P.S. If you'd like to learn dozens of successful strategiesfor a lifetime of weight loss without dieting, the best place to start is my ebook.
Go to . . .http://www.slimforevermembers.com/ Download your copy and start losing the weight you want now!

A New Way of Being in the World

2008-09-10T14:08:00.007-04:00

This post is for my 17-year-old grandson, Sam, who wants to be a doctor. Everyone, feel free to read over his shoulder.

Dear Sam, I wish you could have heard the radio show I listened to today. Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., a cellular biologist I wrote about a couple of days ago, and Gregg Braden, an author whose books you've seen on my shelves, were talking about how there are new diseases in the earth with which we've never dealt. They said the new science, science so new it hasn't made it into the text books, will be needed to deal with these diseases which are part of the upheavals occuring now in the earth."Our children will need it to address these problems," Braden said.

Lipton and Braden are both fans of Einstein. They reminded us that Einstein said we can't solve a problem with the same thinking that created the problem in the first place. So the good news and the new thinking is: We are NOT victims of our genetics. We can transform our physical biology by changing our beliefs at the cellular level. That means people don't have to be overweight because of genes. Nor do we have to accept the message society has taught us about how aging is hard. It doesn't have to be hard, if only everyone would listen to Braden and Lipton's joyous message of hope.

Lipton was cloning stem cells back in 1965 when he realized that stem cells were reacting to their environment. He says human beings are giant Petri dishes, with 95 percent of our behavior being influenced by the environment we grew up in. Only five percent of what we do is original with us. The rest is in reaction to what we have been taught. We are just acting out somebody else's program. We can rewrite our software!

Sam, since we can't go to Santa Cruz and hear Lipton and Braden in person, here's the next best thing: Log into http://www.scienceforlife.net/; click on CONTACT TALK RADIO. Scroll down and play the Lipton/Braden show. It was a rebroadcast of the show that launched CONTACT TALK RADIO, but the show is available 24/7. It is an hour long, but it would be an hour well spent for anyone who feels the need to wade into the fray. People all over the world are beginning to get this in a big way. Your grandmommie is not so far out on the bleeding edge anymore.

Today was the first I'd heard about Science for Life, but I could hardly wait to share it with you. Another show worth listening to also involved Bruce Lipton in dialogue with Rob Williams, the developer of PsychK, a psychology technique that deals with reprogramming the subconscious mind.

Sam, look around. Allopathic medicine as practiced in the United States is no longer sufficient. It has helped create a society of sick folks, kept alive at the mercy of the drug companies. It does not have to be that way. We are learning a new way of being in the world. Spontaneous transformation at all levels is possible. My darling grandson, I pray you will be a part of this great work.

And since your sister will never forgive me if I don't mention her, let me just add that I have known for many years that you, my beautiful Julia, are gifted in too many ways to count; but even at the tender age of 15 you already possess insight, perception and intuition that most adults can barely begin to fathom.

I love you both with all my heart and pray for you and your family every day.

P.S.
Links to everything I am sharing are listed in the sidebar under SPIRITUAL TECHNOLOGY LINKS.

Love, GM

Standards to Live By

2008-09-09T14:26:00.009-04:00

THE MISSING LINKS

We don't hear much about standards any more. We hear more about how we can have what we want just because we want it. Wishin' don't make it so. Never has. Never will. However, it is true that "as a wo/man thinketh, so is s/he" (Proverbs 23:7). So, what sort of Standards are guiding our thinking? (See References)

Each one of us shows outwardly what have been our inward Standards, even if we have never identified any particular words or phrases as such.

Our lives as well as our bodies are thought forms, and, as such, can be re-formed by different thoughts. To find a direction and guidance for these thoughts, we can look within for a word or phrase that defines the Standards by which we want to live.

What do I mean by Standards?

A Standard is the behind-the-scenes reason we bother to do whatever it is we do.

WHAT A STANDARD IS NOT
A Standard is not the same as our purpose for being here. Our purpose is what we have to do; the Standard is why we have to do it. A Standard does not mean a goal. Rather, Standards define the motive, purpose, intention behind our goals.

The following are examples of four types of Standards:

1. Overall Standard – To listen for and obey the voice of God

2. Physical Standard – A healthy slender body
Q. What do I have to do to live up to the standard of a healthy slender body?
A. Apply what I already know about nutrition and exercise.

3. Mental Standard – A healthy, balanced, mind
Q. What do I have to do to live up to the standard of a healthy balanced mind?
A. Apply what I already know about what keeps our minds healthy as we age

4. Spiritual Standard – A soul that is free to serve, guided by Holy Spirit
Q. What do I have to do free my soul to serve?
A. Listen, then act on the attunement made while listening.

Meditation is one way to attune to our concept of God the Father.

There are many ways to meditate. HERE IS ONE WAY:

Sit or lie down, with your Overall Standard in mind. (Mine is to listen for and obey the voice of God as I understand God.)

Say the Lord’s Prayer, as taught by Christ (Matthew 6: 9-15) . Or repeat a phrase such as, "Be still and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10). Repeat as needed for focus.

Be still and listen for fifteen minutes.

Pay attention for the next twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes.

Repeat daily.

With meditation as part of your lifestyle, and your Overall Standard firmly in mind, you are ready to become one of the few who will do what you set out to do. You will succeed where others fail because you possess the secret to reaching your goal. You are ready to begin acting on what you know about nutrition and health. Working from the standpoint of a Standard, rather than a mere idea or a diet plan, or a fixed program, leads to internal revelations that produce external transformations.

Actually writing down our Standards helps to firm up our commitment to spiritual development and physical transformation; however, setting a direction for growth without making some movement in that direction serves only to increase a sense of fragmentation within us. Jesus expressed this principle in His teaching, ‘No man, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.’ (Luke 9:62) If we set our sights upon a new orientation and the work it will entail, and then look back to the old ways and fail to apply what we know, we make it impossible to grow and transform as we desire.

We must let go of ideas that have not served us well and to replace them with a personal Standard that will motivate us into closer attunement with the Creator. This is the way to live at the center of our being and achieve cooperation between the body, mind, and soul. Transformation is a natural result.

References:
International Standard Version (©2008)Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is fair, whatever is pure, whatever is acceptable, whatever is commendable, if there is anything of excellence and if there is anything praiseworthy-keep thinking about these things.
New American Standard Bible (©1995)Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.
GOD'S WORD® Translation (©1995)Finally, brothers and sisters, keep your thoughts on whatever is right or deserves praise: things that are true, honorable, fair, pure, acceptable, or commendable.
King James BibleFinally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
American King James VersionFinally, brothers, whatever things are true, whatever things are honest, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief

2008-09-04T16:27:00.005-04:00

I love to be proven right. Since the 80’s I’ve been writing about weight control, saying fat cells have minds of their own. Now, I don’t understand how it works, but a scientist has discovered that fat cells – all cells – indeed are conscious, aware, and react to their environment just as we do. Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., is a cellular biologist who discovered that “cells are miniature people” and wrote a book about it, The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles, (Mountain of Love/Elite Books, 2005)

“The Biology of Belief is a groundbreaking work in the field of New Biology…Dr. Lipton is a former medical school professor and research scientist. His experiments, and that of other leading edge scientists, have examined in great detail the processes by which cells receive information. The implications of this research radically change our understanding of life. It shows that genes and DNA do not control our biology; that instead DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell, including the energetic messages emanating from our positive and negative thoughts. Dr. Lipton’s profoundly hopeful synthesis of the latest and best research in cell biology and quantum physics is being hailed as a major breakthrough showing that our bodies can be changed as we retrain our thinking.” (emphasis mine) ( See http://www.beliefbooks.com/)

In an interview published by Mystic Pop, Dr. Lipton said cells “are living in communities with each other that is an exact parallel to what we share. We have such limited vision that we tend to look at ourselves as individual entities. Yet, we fail to perceive that the real living entity on this planet is an organism called Humanity. We are the cells in the body of that humanity as much as the single cells in my body are living in their community, creating this thing called me.” (You can read the entire interview at http://www.brucelipton.com/.)

The first time I heard this idea was in 1972, studying Edgar Cayce, who said we are “cells in the body of God.” But I never understood what that meant until Lipton explained it. Cayce said that each cell “contains the entire universe,” and Lipton elaborates: “Each cell has its own life. You can put it in a Petri dish, you put some food on one side of the dish and toxins on the other side of the dish, and they’re smart enough to be over at the food in a few minutes (They move away from the toxins.). They know what’s going on. They know how to communicate. And ultimately, the significance is, at least to those with a scientific awareness of fractals and fractal geometry (repetitive, self-similar patterns), the relevance of this mathematics implies that the structure of cells, in their community is a pattern that is redundant to the structure of cells of people in our community. This explains why self-destructive ailments, like auto-immune diseases, are such a big issue on the planet. The reason is what’s going on in our global community; the vibration of that is manifesting to the same parallels as our internal community. It’s all predicating one on top of the other. What’s happening in one is happening in the other. The more we become destructive in our outer world, the more we end up becoming self-destructive internally. That’s what we are seeing reflected in this current health crisis.”

And in the current obesity crisis.

To make sense of Lipton’s findings and apply them to ourselves in our quest for slenderness and health, we have to realize that a change is needed in consciousness at the cell level. How do we make this change? By changing our beliefs. Which ones? The belief that we are powerless over our genetics, that our metabolism is slow, that everything we eat makes us fat. According to Dr. Lipton, “Conventional belief says we are not responsible (for our genes) ... We are robots until we exercise our power and then we are free.”

In a seminar downloadable to members of Shift in Action, through the Institute of Noetic Sciences, http://www.shiftinaction.com/, Dr. Lipton said his life was transformed in a millisecond when he realized that “each cell is a programmable chip that you can change by typing in new information. Cells are programmable by belief.”

He continued, “Autoimmune disease is self-destruction – undergoing a process that is part of nature’s plan for getting rid of us if we don’t shape up and reorganize our lives.” I thought that was an interesting choice of words: “shape up.” However, he insists there are stem cells within each cell in our body: “Stem cells will replace the entire body. You’re not old unless you believe it.” Or fat unless we believe it?

According to Dr. Lipton, cells live in community to one another and perceive the community through brain within each cell. They listen to one voice – the voice of brain, which is sending signals about the environment. Cells don’t know any better than what brain tells them. What is perception of environment by brain? BELIEF! What happens if we have a misperception? Belief overrides biology.

What are the beliefs underlying the obesity crisis? We have all the nutritional information we could possibly ever need. What undermines our ability and desire to apply the knowledge we have? What other change in consciousness is needed?

I wrote in Beyond Dieting back in 1983 that if we have chosen weight issues to serve as our teachers, then applying nutritional knowledge is not enough. We have to act on what we know about meditation, prayer, reveries, visualization, journal writing, dreams, ideals, goals, attitudes, emotions, life influences (past and present), and self-image building, as well as food and exercise choices. It was true then and it is still true.

However, today, the battle for the almighty dollar is motivating the spread of misinformation by the food and pharmaceutical industries, and we have to wake up and fight back. How? By recognizing fear as the problem.

We are afraid of feeling hungry or having a little pain somewhere. We fear facing our responsibilities toward others, getting sick, change in general, life in general. We fear having nothing to blame but ourselves for our unhappiness. Stress and anxiety are crippling us. We hate our jobs but we fear not having a job, even if the job is toxic to us.

But now we know, really know, that these feelings, attitudes and emotions reside within our cells and can be reprogrammed. It is no longer just a bleeding edge theory (as my son calls it). When we can observe cells in a Petri dish reacting in fear to a toxin, it is no longer just theory. It is fact. Cells have all the survival instincts of any animal and when faced with danger will protect themselves. Do fat cells perceive hunger as dangerous?

The processed food and diet industries drive fear deeper into our psyches by advertising that suggests hunger is something to fear and to avoid at all costs. Would we really die if we spent a few hours hungry? Do we really have to have snacks divied up into 100-empty calorie packages? I’m talking to myself here.

We’re always being told we have to do this, that, or the other or we will get sick. We must believe it because so many of us are sick. What if we weren’t sick? What if all of a sudden everybody figured it out and got well? What if we did not need pharmaceuticals and health care and diet foods? We could totally crash the economy. Oh, let’s do! That would be fun. Then we could rebuild on healthier, saner ground.

Seriously, Dr. Lipton has answered the question I asked a week ago: Would fat cells respond to prayer? I’m not waiting on someone else to do the experiments. I’m doing my own.

RECIPES - Yogurt Cheese - Day 8

2008-09-03T08:00:00.006-04:00

HOW TO MAKE YOGURT CHEESE

Today isn't about metaphysics or the cosmic implications of anything. Today is about good food, specifically, yogurt cheese. Yogurt cheese is a miraculous concoction that can be made into many other miraculous concoctions.

Why eat yogurt cheese? Because it tastes great and because of the nutrition boost when the whey has been removed: more calcium per ounce than other dairy products, no fat, low in calories, sodium, cholesterol, and lactose and has a wonderful smooth texture with a flavor somewhere between cream cheese and sour cream, and that's just for starters. Add flavorings and you will wonder how you ever got by without it.

To begin, use natural regular, nonfat yogurt, which contains no gelatin. Gelatin prevents the whey from draining off. Extra-creamy may not separate so avoid it also. Plain yogurt is best.

Start with a 32 ounce carton of plain yogurt. Line a large strainer or colander with a thick layer of paper towels, or clean dish towels, or clean muslin and place it into a deep bowl. You need room for the whey to drain into the bowl. Empty the 32 ounce carton of yogurt into the container. Cover the yogurt with another thick layer of whatever type toweling you are using. To expedite the draining process, place something clean and heavy on top of the toweling. I use a heavy marble globe, which shortens the draining time to about 4 hours. Otherwise, refrigerate and allow the yogurt to drain overnight or longer, pouring off whey as necessary.

After the yogurt has drained to the consistency of room temperature cream cheese, discard the whey and add your choice of ingredients and flavorings (suggestions follow), cover and refrigerate yogurt cheese until ready to use. Generally, 32 ounces of yogurt will yield approximately 1 3/4 to 2 cups yogurt cheese and an equal amount of whey. The quantities will vary slightly depending on the brand.

Flavorings for baked potato toppings:
(Add any or all of the following)
Garlic powder to taste
Dried onion to taste
Black pepper or Lemon pepper to taste
Molly McButter to taste
Red or Green hot sauce to taste
Liquid smoke to taste
Bacon or soy bits if desired
Pimentos, chopped
Green or black olives, with or without pimentos

This combination of ingredients also makes a good sandwich spread, vegetable dip, or topping for crackers and toast. You can add anything to yogurt cheese that you would add to cream cheese or sour cream and enjoy without worrying about animal fats.

Be smart. Eat yogurt cheese at every opportunity instead of mayonnaise or any of the margerines. Mayo weighs in at 100 calories per tablespoon. It is healthier to enjoy those fat calories as olive oil, and nuts.

Sweet additions for desserts:
(Add any combination according to taste)
Sugar or artificial sweetener
Vanilla, almond, lemon, butternut and butter liquid flavorings
Crushed pineapple, drained
Chopped almonds, pecans or walnuts
Molly McButter

Use your desired combination of ingredients as a base for dessert recipes which call for cream cheese and sour cream.

As a fruit dip:
Flavor up yogurt cheese any way you would like and scoop it up with sliced apples. Splenda (or generic brand), Molly McButter, and almond flavoring is one of my favorites.

Cheesecake
http://www.myrecipes.com/ has a good cheesecake recipe using yogurt cheese.

Tomorrow I'll introduce you to Bruce Lipton, a cellular consciousness researcher whose work blows my mind. This guy is not about metaphysics, but rather quantum physics. And, yep, it applies to spirituality, weight control and fat cell consciousness.

See you tomorrow.

Consciousness and Fat Cells - Day 7

2008-09-01T16:31:00.011-04:00

BELLY FAT

I'm so excited! For most of the 36 years I've been delving into all things spiritual, I have contended that fat cells have a mind of their own. They think. They create. Like cancer cells, they possess survival instincts. They want to live, therefore they drive us mentally and emotionally right off the cliff, if necessary, to keep us from starving them into oblivion. They want to survive, and they don't like being hungry.

Now researchers have discovered that fat cells of the obese differ from fat cells of leaner folk. (I've been telling them that all along.)

Medical school researchers in the fields of diabetes and endocrinology analyzing fat cells in obese people report in one of the many Harvard-sponsored health tip newsletters, Everyday Health, that fat cells in fat people are "sick."

Click on http://www.everydayhealth.com/ to read the whole news release. In the Search Box, type in "Sick Fat Cells." I can't quote it all because it is copyrighted material.

This news is huge because if researchers can identify that fat cells in fat people treat proteins differently than do fat cells in lean people, it is a significantly shorter hop to fat cell consciousness experiments and identifying under a microscope how fat cells in obese people react to outer influences differently than fat cells in lean people.

In Healing Words, the Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine, (1993, HarperSanFrancisco), Larry Dossey, M.D., describes experiments with bacteria and prayer which show that bacteria respond to prayer. These experiments demonstrate, to me at least, that it can't be too far-fetched to believe that fat cells might also respond to prayer. Dossey's book has become a classic and should be read by everyone who wants to understand the evolution of transformative consciousness. Dossey describes consciousness as "the part of the mind that is aware." But he goes on to say, "We will never be able to take full advantage of the power of the mind to shape our health--including the mind's use of prayer--until we broaden our concept of 'consciousness'" That includes cellular consciousness.

Health advocates insist that belly fat is dangerous because it actually participates in causing diseases such as diabetes. My question is, why does one type of fat cells cause disease when other types do not? How many types of fat cells are there?

I'd be happy to volunteer my belly fat cells for the sake of scientific research.

Day 6 - FAT - What they aren't telling us

2008-08-31T20:09:00.008-04:00

Please do yourself a favor and click on http://www.pbs.org/. In the Search Box, type in FAT, What They Aren't Telling You. Watch the preview video and then decide if you want to purchase the DVD of the program. I taped it, watched it, and plan to watch it again.

A group of professionals are admitting it takes much more than we have ever been told to achieve and maintain a healthy weight and waistline, and pretty much shoots holes in the idea that all we have to do is eat less and exercise more and we'll all be skinny. In all my 36 professional years of studying, writing about and living the subject of weight control, no expert has ever admitted that my body's response to food and exercise may be, will probably be, very different from yours.

This is huge.

No more one-plan-fits-all sizes, ages and body types.

KNOW THYSELF

Which exercises are best? The ones we will do.

Which foods are best? The ones Nature grew.

When things are going great, eating right is easy. But for those other times, here's a poem from my book, Beyond Dieting:

A POEM

If life were but a joyful high where I just soared and touched the sky

I'd never think of pie.

But life's down here where all's hard sell and I'm just muddling through the hell

and chocolate chips are swell.

When I'm not bored but busily attending to the needs I see

I sip only plain tea.

As often, though, my worldly cares are met with blank unfeeling stares

but not from the eclairs.

(Hey, Google! Sure hope the Blogger Beast gets his spacing problems fixed! Thanks, Lin)

Day 4 - Progress, not Perfection

2008-08-29T07:39:00.008-04:00

Three consecutive days of eating "right" and thinking about how I want to develop this blog have answered the questions I asked on the first day:

Q. Why do I think about food all the time?
A. Addiction, allergies, and attitude. I was born allergic to milk. Caused asthma. My uncle Demp had to milk his goat to feed me. So what am I addicted to? Ice cream? And what is my attitude about ice cream? Just this once won't hurt. Food is my drug of choice. Used to be nicotine and food. Now it's just food. Never mind that people are starving all over the world. I'll get to that later.

Q. Why have I regained so much weight after losing 100 pounds and keeping it off for eleven! years? What was different about those 11 years of mostly slender sobriety and the past 14 years of constant struggle?
A. Attitude. As a newspaper feature writer and columnist I was doing worthwhile work that I loved so much I'd have done it for free. I was experimenting with food instead of eating too much. I tried new diets and wrote about them. I'm a born researcher. And once I learn something new I love to share it. That's what I want to do with this blog -- disseminate information. And when I'm doing work I love eating the right amounts of the right foods comes natural and easy.

But this is not just another diet blog. We have enough doctors, nutritionists, psychologists and personal trainers telling us what to eat and which exercises are best. This is all good information but we know more now that we will ever be able to use so I have no interest in jumping into that fray, except to share from time to time recipes that are too good to keep to myself, and to link you to relevant websites and news articles of interest. According to my latest blood work, I suffer from none of the obesity-related illnesses. My cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar are great. But because I was a smoker I have COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder). I smoked off and on for 40 years of my life. I quit once and gained 30 pounds. After our newspaper closed I wandered in the wilderness for awhile, then hit the road as a truck driver. So after six years of not smoking, I started back, but I didn't lose the 30 pounds. Like many other drivers, I gained more. I came in off the road because of the COPD. We also have enough truck drivers.

What we don't have is a clear understanding of the metaphysics of obesity. Most of us in this country suffer not from physical hunger but from spiritual hunger. We need a new language for exploring our longings, which go much deeper than pounds and inches. Let's create one together. Let's not wander aimlessly through lifetime after lifetime through mazes of wild emotions and dead-end attitudes. Let us be about the Father's business of helping each other.

Send me your thoughts, questions, links, and tell me whether or not it is okay to use your name. You may comment through the comment feature at the bottom, or email me at linonlife@gmail.com.

P.S. I've stayed out of politics all my life, but at this time of political hype and hubub, here's my two cents worth: If you can't stand what's happening in our country, check out http://www.spiritualprogressives.org/.

Me Thanksgiving 2007

2008-08-28T22:42:00.003-04:00

2008-08-27T18:37:00.004-04:00

I wanted to share this video because it makes a lot of sense. Hope it helps you as it did me.

Two good days... yesterday I was so busy getting this blog going I only ate 560 calories, but today was closer to 900 calories. Yes, these are too few, but I've been sitting on my backside so I didn't need much. I've been concentrating on getting past the belief that I cannot create a blog. I am old and fat. Only young, slender people can create blogs. Wrong!

It is not easy. What worthwhile thing is easy? I've already proven to myself it is worthwhile because I bounced out of bed this morning, eager to see if Google's crawler had found us yet. This is quite a change from staying in bed, hugging my pillow, grieving over my son. Plus, for two days I have not eaten too much, and I'm looking forward to stepping on the scales Monday morning. I can't get too excited because whatever pounds are gone have been coming and going regularly for the past six months. I'm old enough to remember actress Valerie Harper (Rhoda) saying she lost and regained the same 10 pounds over and over because she liked the feeling of accomplishment. I can relate. Only I'm not dealing with 10 pounds. More like 50 pounds.

One day at a time.

2008-08-26T12:17:00.006-04:00

The purpose of this blog is to help myself get to the spiritual roots of my problems with food. If it helps someone else along the way, fine.

When I still had one hundred pounds to lose, I thought if I could just stick to a diet everything else in my whole entire life would be okay. The weight would come off and all my problems would be solved.

After my son ended his life on March 4, 2008, I found out life isn't about dieting. It is not about losing weight. Numbers on a scale do not mean a thing, except for the meaning we assign to them. Percentages of body fat have nothing to do with who we are or what we are trying to accomplish.

No, the true challenge of carrying around too much fat is not visible on a scale. For some of us, the true challenge of obesity is spiritual. I've learned that sticking to a diet does not make everything alright. But neither does not sticking to a diet. Eating correctly isn't the answer but neither is eating wrongly. Since Tony died I have been mostly eating wrongly. I've gained a lot of weight back. I had already gained but now I've gained more. I'll tell you how much later. I am not living the life Tony wanted for me. I am hurting myself as well as my two remaining sons and other loved ones.

See http://linonlife.googlepages.com/linonlife then hit your Back Button and come back here.

(This blog is not going to be about Tony's death. Suffice it to say that for a moment he took his eyes off the Light and the Darkness swallowed him. Now I'm trying to prevent the Darkness from swallowing me. I will write about Tony when I am able. Later, I will share his journal pages in the hope of helping someone else. If you have lost a loved one to suicide, go to http://www.forum.forsuicidesurvivors.com/.)

Meanwhile, life isn't about dieting. Don't make it about food.

First, let me make it clear that I am not a nutritionist. I have no medical degrees of any kind. I have, however worked with the principles of transformative consciousness in my own life for more than 30 years. And for several years I wrote a weight-control column called "Countdown" for a newspaper in Florida, the now defunct Clearwater Sun. Even then, consciousness fascinated me. Pioneers of consciousness are discovering that every cell in our bodies hold or consist of consciousness. Mind resides within each cell.

Fat cells have consciousness. They have minds of their own! They want to live and thrive! They want to have life and to hell with what we want! How do I get my fat cells to cooperate?

Though 10,000 diet plans reside in the collective American consciousness, we are fatter than ever. It is human nature. According to the apostle Paul, we do the things we don't want to do and don't do the things we do want to do. We blame these shortcomings on a weak will, or the subconscious mind. But the truth is, our fat cells are working against us.

For the sake of full disclosure, in 2003 I rewrote my first book, Beyond Dieting. It was first published by A.R.E Press, Virginia Beach, VA, 25 years ago in 1983. It was based on the work of Edgar Cayce and my respect grows daily for the work Edgar Cayce did, as other organizations such as The Institute of Noetic Sciences sponsor programs which confirm how far ahead of his time Cayce was. And in the 25 years since Beyond Dieting was first published, all manner of other sciences have also confirmed the validity of the information that came through Edgar Cayce while he was in a trance state, reading for people who had asked for his help. Much of the information I want to share in this blog comes from that book, which is probably no longer available. So I am not selling books. I am reworking and sharing information that helped me before and I pray will help me again so that I don't eat my way into oblivion because of my son's suicide.

So, back to the fat cells that are working against us. These cells may have been born out of thoughts formed by gluttony. We'll talk more about gluttony later. For now, consider this: A person will eat what his consciousness allows. In some parts of the world people eat dogs, cats, and roadkill. Some perfectly civilized people eat cows, while others worship them. What we eat depends on how we feel about it. My fat cells feel just fine about eating ice cream by the gallon. But at least a couple of brain cells know better, or I'd weigh 400 pounds.

If Life isn't about dieting and food, what is it about?

I'll have to get back to you on that.

Seriously, up until six months ago, when Tony killed himself, I thought I knew what life was about. I thought it was about "being about the Father's business." Granted, the "Father's business" takes many shapes and forms. How do I know I am about my Father's business? My soul expresses joy.

Well, I was right. Today, for about two seconds, I felt joy. A tiny flash of joy and hope crossed my mind. Why? Because today I took the first step back to the life Tony wanted me to live - this blog is part of it. If what I write helps someone, I am about my Father's business. When the food I eat nourishes my body and satisfies my soul as it did today, I am about the Father's business. When my actions are in sync with my desires, I am about the Father's business. And joy is the tip off.

Am I still in pain over losing Tony? Of course. That will probably never end. But as I said in one of my other books, Spiritual Secrets of Learning to Love, A.R.E. Press, 1994 (out of print), pain and joy are two halves of the same whole.

Today I meditated for the first time in a long while. I have been meditating off and on for 36 years. Meditation affects how we perceive and experience life. Mental perception and soul experience work together to form our feelings about our surroundings, our circumstances and the lives we are living. This is why some poor people do not know they are poor, and some rich people do not know they are rich. The same can be said about fat people and thin people. Distorted body images prevent us from seeing the truth about ourselves. Meditation helps clean out the subconscious mind, where we store patterns, addictions, habits, memories and ego. The subconscious mind is where the battle between spirit and flesh is fought. The subconscious mind does not want to relinquish its authority, and it does not surrender without a fight. However, even though the subconscious mind does not always have our best interests at heart, it can learn new responses through meditation.

I know all this. Meditation cuts through the subconscious clutter to the soul mind. We can teach the soul mind and the physical mind to cooperate with each other. When they gang up, so to speak, on the critters that live in the dark, dank dungeons of the subconscious, the subconscious has to surrender. Majority rules. (Now, please don't get hung up on which level of mind is named what. Different disciplines assign different names to the levels of mind.) But what I know and what I do are two different things.

I need to review. There are four levels of Mind:
1) Physical Mind - the one you are reading this with.
2) Subconscious Mind - the one nagging you to go eat a cookie.
3) Soul Mind - the one that lives on after we are dead and gone from this planet, and it will help you now to resist that cookie if you ask. This is where free will lives.
4) The fourth level of Mind is known by many names: Spiritual Mind, superconscious collection of all knowledge, the collective unconscious, the mind of God, the Divide, the Door, the Way, the I AM. This level of Mind does not give a rip whether or not you eat the cookie. It isn't about cookies. This goes waaay beyond cookies. It is about Oneness with Love (a/k/a the Father's business).

More on the Soul Mind

Please pay attention. This is important because this is where we make choices about what to eat. The soul mind, being the seat of free will, chooses not only the foods we eat, but whether those choices are guided by Spirit or the latest food fad. The soul mind is selective. It can choose between good and evil. It can move toward or away from its Creator. It can opt for life or death. It can choose to sleep. It dreams. It can choose to die. It can be banished. It can banish itself. It can even be blotted out forever. The soul mind does not maintain its individuality eternally unless it chooses to. My physical mind is not running the show. The soul mind is in charge. It very well could be running amok, or even asleep.

What about Spirit, spirit, and soul?

I need to say this, even though it is difficult to understand. It underlies many of our behaviours. Your soul's mind and mine are animated by spirit, and this spirit too is known by many confusing names: Universal Soul, Soul-of-the-Soul, Oversoul, Infinite Energy, the Collective Soul, the First Cause. Spirit and soul are different. In the same way an apple's seed is distinct from its peel, spirit is distinct from soul. And Spirit with a big S is different from spirit with a little s. First, there is spirit that impels all life non selectively. That spirit does not distinguish between a mosquito, a tree, and a mugger holding a knife. That spirit is the life force that flows through all things without judging whether they are good or bad. However, Spirit with a big S has been transformed by the work of Christ. We call this Spirit holy. The Holy Spirit knows us individually and lives inside us as The Comforter through the work of Jesus (John 14:16,26). The best possible outcome is for the soul mind to decide to seek guidance from the Holy Spirit. Surely the Holy Spirit holds power over my screaming fat cells. As I said, all this goes waaaay beyond cookies.

For those of us for whom food and our reactions to food have created serious physical, mental and spiritual problems, choosing the right foods symbolizes our efforts to live better lives, to be healthier people, to fulfill our purposes for being here. Dieting is not the answer. Some of our problems revolve around health; others focus more on social issues and our inability to relate to and care about other people. But all of us have souls. Some souls express joy or distress; others don't seem to care. I hope to help those in distress and in so doing to help myself. I must find the truth about why thoughts about food plague me night and day. The refusal to choose life over death carries cosmic implications. Why is my soul mind choosing death? Why is my soul mind allowing the garbage in the subconscious mind to dominate so many of my decisions? What are the metaphysics of obesity?

Why did I regain all this weight? Was it just bad choices?

This day is set before thee carrots and cake. Choose thou.

Cheers!

Lin