Daughter Jessica (age 10) was sicker yesterday than I have seen her since she was 2. Her head hurt. Her stomach ached. Curled on the couch, she refused all food, and slept on and off throughout the day. When she woke up this morning, seemingly two inches taller, she asked for cornflakes and milk. Then slices of pear. Then a piece of pizza. Then some frozen corn. Not long after she asked for a granola bar, insisting all the while that what she really needed was blueberries. She probably did.
What do our bodies know?
Often it takes being sick for us to turn our attention to our bodily sensations. At such times, our bodies, tired of whispering, explode with a snarl. Listen to me! And we do, for a while, wanting and eating exactly what will nourish us, until the glow of health returns and with it, our illusions of being a master mind. Once again we are vulnerable to suggestion and willing to override our sense of enough for a good time, in search of a comfort that eludes.
What do we really want—from food?
Concern over an increasingly international obesity epidemic, while well meaning, has thrown our relationship to food out of whack—or revealed just how out of whack it is. We want to eat whatever we want, look however we want, and be healthy—all at the same time. What is missing is the sense of our desire for food as having anything to teach us about any one of them.
Our bodies register the effects our persistent lack of attention, and then we blame them for not doing what “we” want. But the movements we are making are making us.
I have been reading a book called Why We Run: A Natural History that plots human evolution as driven by the desire to hunt. We are endurance predators, author Bernd Heinrich argues, whose physiology and metabolism—most notably our ability to sweat—qualifies us to outrun much faster animals in the heat of a prairie sun.
Most interesting, however, is Heinrich’s claim that our capacity to fall out of shape represents an evolutionary advantage—“neuromuscular flexibility.” Unlike some other animals, we easily lose muscle tone. Yet because we can fall out of shape, we can also get back into shape—a different shape—that will serve us in the quarry of new prey.
We evolved with the capacity to remake ourselves.
We can fall out of eating shape as well, moving far from our internal sense of what is best for us, and the reasons are similar. Our gastronomical flexibility enables us to remake ourselves. We can adapt to surpluses and shortages. Season to season, climate to climate, culture to culture, we cultivate a taste for available edibles.
Heinrich goes on to suggest that we not only can remake ourselves, we must. We are creatures who need to move: our own health and well being requires that we be working ourselves into shape. Whether the goal we are chasing is an antelope or a scientific proof, a book contract or a product’s sales, the process of pursuing it feeds us psychologically and physically, releasing cascades of internal nourishment. It primes our health—again not just the goal itself, but the acts of vision, persistence, and endurance that getting it requires.
It might seem that in contemporary culture, we no longer need to hunt for food. All we can eat is ever present, round the clock. However, the same work must be done—not the work of running and spearing, but the work of discerning what will nourish us and consciously going after it. We are born not knowing. As we grow we cannot not learn. We can deny that we are learning and eat what is offered, however, we will only find the pleasure we seek when we do the work that our adaptive, evolving desire requires.
We no longer have to change our menu season to season, but we still need to learn to follow the arc of our pleasure to a responsible, renewable sense of enough.
*
Every day, we eat. With every mouthful, we engage our senses. As every pattern of sensing and responding registers, it primes a desire for more or less of it, now or in the future. And over time, our desire evolves. We cultivate tastes. We learn what to want and not want. We adapt.
It might seem that this malleability is a reason not to trust our desire. The reverse is true. This malleability is what there is to trust.
Why? Because desire is not an end in itself. Desire is always reaching for what it wants. Desire is movement—a movement that is actively seeking information that will guide us to the pleasure we hope to secure.
The wisdom in this desire, then, lies in the reaching, grasping, sensing, and responding to what we think will nourish us. The wisdom is what erupts in sensations of discomfort and illness, obsession and unease, calling us to attend. We want more. There is more to want. More pleasure. More health.
As we participate in this process, our food becomes more than it is—fortified with ingredients that satisfy our deepest desire to be constantly creating our selves.
*
All along the way I have been railing against a mind over body approach to our relationship to food. Yet I don’t mean to disparage our minds—just our illusions of mastery. Mental activity is essential to the process of discerning wisdom in desire.
For minds remember. Minds predict. Minds attend. And in all three ways, minds help open up a space in us where the wisdom of our desire can emerge.
Minds remember to call on the cycle of breaths. Minds predict what will happen when we do. Minds attend to whatever movement the process stirs in us in response to the moment.
Minds remember what we have read and heard about nutrition, food quality, sources, and effects. Minds predict what will happen if we eat as we do. Minds attend to the shifts in our desire that occur as we learn, honoring and enabling them to be what they are.
Minds remind us: we are bodies first.
Next week: desire for sex
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
The Food Chain
Seventy dollars. That is how much more than usual our grocery bill was this week. Seventy—and we aren’t even buying milk, cream, butter, ice cream or eggs thanks to Daisy (our cow), our four faithful chickens, and our kids who milk and gather and feed. Why?
Last week’s headlines of food riots around the world suddenly feel closer to home. How vulnerable we are—dependent for our food on a vast network of relations, whose many fragile links reach all they way back to seeds in the earth. The fall of rain. A shaft of sun. A waft of air. The plants that make themselves. The animals who eat them. The food we buy relates us to all that is.
Shocked, we sit down to study the receipt. Yes, the kids are growing. We are buying more fruit and vegetables, more cereal and juice. We also do our best to buy goods that are either local or organic, and preferably both. Then there are those big ticket items—vanilla for our ice cream making (at $9. a bottle), maple syrup as a sweetener ($14.), and of course, diapers.
Even as we lament, I am thinking. The merchandise in our overflowing cart still costs much more than the ample sum we are shelling out for it. We aren’t paying—not directly or fully—for so many enabling factors: the roads on which our food travels to us, the crop subsidies that keep the farmers solvent, the immigrant labor that picks most produce, the topsoil lost on overly-farmed fields, the pollution of air, water, and earth caused by machinery, pesticides, transportation, and manure. I am trying to feel grateful.
A local farmer brings by a large bag of potatoes—culls from a local operation. Cheap. I get creative. What can you make with potatoes, milk, and eggs?? Custards, quiches and soufflés are right out—too “eggy” for my crew. So I am whipping up bread, pancakes, lasagna, brownies, muffins, and oatmeal bars. Try some!
It is how a cultural diet evolves, via such creative constraint. What do we have in abundance (think wheat, corn, milk)? What food can we make with it (think aisles of cereal, crackers, bread, and snack products; cheeses, butters, and ice cream)? How can we preserve what erupts once a year and have it year round (think tomato sauces, jellies, pickles, frozen everything, and pasta)? And then there is meat.
Our diet is derivative. Economic, political, and geographic forces, not to mention culture and tradition, set the menu. We learn to want what we know we can get.
Food prices soar, and we reexamine our choices. It is not only health concerns that prompt us to do so, though they can as well. We reconsider whether we should buy organic or local; whether we should splurge on the freshest fruits or go for the cans; or whether we should believe the claims made for oats, live bacteria, low fat content, hormone-free meat. Pushed out of our comfortable, comforting rut, the options are bewildering. How are we to decide?
There is an ethic implicit in the approach to desire described here whose reach extends far beyond the contours of our bodily space. What can our bodies know?
When we cultivate a felt sense of our desire for food—when we practice following the arc of our pleasure to a sense of enough—it is not just ourselves we are serving. When what motivates us to eat or not is pleasure, and when the greatest pleasure comes from an experience of nourishing ourselves, then any information that comes to us about our food hits us in a new way. The news from experts and scientists, journalists and commentators, strikes us in the gut—right where our attention is, and right where our sensations of pleasure register.
As I tune into the sensation of eating grapes, for example, the knowledge that their presence on my tongue represents the sweat on someone’s exploited back dulls the pleasure. Or, as the square of chocolate melts in my mouth, knowing that it was traded fairly heightens the pleasure.
Here, the advice of experts in science, politics, and nutrition does help—not by telling us what we can and should eat, but by providing us with information that allow us to make informed, attuned decisions on our own. There is no formula. Only an ongoing practice of heightening our sense of what we are doing as we eat. The movement I make is making me….
Yet, when we shift to this experience of ourselves, ironically enough, we also realize that our relation to food is not just about ourselves any more. The moving bodies we know ourselves to be are mere moments in an endless rhythm of becoming that is enabling us, alive in us, making the world as it is through us.
The cycle of breaths reminds us. We are earth, air, fire, water. So is the food we see, smell, taste, absorb and become. So is the world in which we live. What we take in to ourselves not only makes us who we are, it makes the world into what it is—and it can be a place that supports us in nourishing ourselves, or not.
As we cultivate a felt sense of ourselves as the movement making us, our desire evolves. It will; it can; it must. Our desire will grow in line with whatever we believe will give us the pleasure we seek. As it does, we no longer want foods that overwhelm and deceive our senses; we no longer want foods that require oppressing other humans or animals. We want what will allow us to find a sense of enough.
This is no temporary correction of calories. No willed deprivation. No feat of self control. It is permanent pursuit of the wisdom in our desire—the wisdom guiding us to the health and well being we seek. It is the only way that we can create a relationship with food—with ourselves and with our world—that will express itself in the health we want.
It takes time. Desire did not evolve in a day, nor will it. But even so, there is pleasure all the way.
Next week: Summing up food
Last week’s headlines of food riots around the world suddenly feel closer to home. How vulnerable we are—dependent for our food on a vast network of relations, whose many fragile links reach all they way back to seeds in the earth. The fall of rain. A shaft of sun. A waft of air. The plants that make themselves. The animals who eat them. The food we buy relates us to all that is.
Shocked, we sit down to study the receipt. Yes, the kids are growing. We are buying more fruit and vegetables, more cereal and juice. We also do our best to buy goods that are either local or organic, and preferably both. Then there are those big ticket items—vanilla for our ice cream making (at $9. a bottle), maple syrup as a sweetener ($14.), and of course, diapers.
Even as we lament, I am thinking. The merchandise in our overflowing cart still costs much more than the ample sum we are shelling out for it. We aren’t paying—not directly or fully—for so many enabling factors: the roads on which our food travels to us, the crop subsidies that keep the farmers solvent, the immigrant labor that picks most produce, the topsoil lost on overly-farmed fields, the pollution of air, water, and earth caused by machinery, pesticides, transportation, and manure. I am trying to feel grateful.
A local farmer brings by a large bag of potatoes—culls from a local operation. Cheap. I get creative. What can you make with potatoes, milk, and eggs?? Custards, quiches and soufflés are right out—too “eggy” for my crew. So I am whipping up bread, pancakes, lasagna, brownies, muffins, and oatmeal bars. Try some!
It is how a cultural diet evolves, via such creative constraint. What do we have in abundance (think wheat, corn, milk)? What food can we make with it (think aisles of cereal, crackers, bread, and snack products; cheeses, butters, and ice cream)? How can we preserve what erupts once a year and have it year round (think tomato sauces, jellies, pickles, frozen everything, and pasta)? And then there is meat.
Our diet is derivative. Economic, political, and geographic forces, not to mention culture and tradition, set the menu. We learn to want what we know we can get.
Food prices soar, and we reexamine our choices. It is not only health concerns that prompt us to do so, though they can as well. We reconsider whether we should buy organic or local; whether we should splurge on the freshest fruits or go for the cans; or whether we should believe the claims made for oats, live bacteria, low fat content, hormone-free meat. Pushed out of our comfortable, comforting rut, the options are bewildering. How are we to decide?
There is an ethic implicit in the approach to desire described here whose reach extends far beyond the contours of our bodily space. What can our bodies know?
When we cultivate a felt sense of our desire for food—when we practice following the arc of our pleasure to a sense of enough—it is not just ourselves we are serving. When what motivates us to eat or not is pleasure, and when the greatest pleasure comes from an experience of nourishing ourselves, then any information that comes to us about our food hits us in a new way. The news from experts and scientists, journalists and commentators, strikes us in the gut—right where our attention is, and right where our sensations of pleasure register.
As I tune into the sensation of eating grapes, for example, the knowledge that their presence on my tongue represents the sweat on someone’s exploited back dulls the pleasure. Or, as the square of chocolate melts in my mouth, knowing that it was traded fairly heightens the pleasure.
Here, the advice of experts in science, politics, and nutrition does help—not by telling us what we can and should eat, but by providing us with information that allow us to make informed, attuned decisions on our own. There is no formula. Only an ongoing practice of heightening our sense of what we are doing as we eat. The movement I make is making me….
Yet, when we shift to this experience of ourselves, ironically enough, we also realize that our relation to food is not just about ourselves any more. The moving bodies we know ourselves to be are mere moments in an endless rhythm of becoming that is enabling us, alive in us, making the world as it is through us.
The cycle of breaths reminds us. We are earth, air, fire, water. So is the food we see, smell, taste, absorb and become. So is the world in which we live. What we take in to ourselves not only makes us who we are, it makes the world into what it is—and it can be a place that supports us in nourishing ourselves, or not.
As we cultivate a felt sense of ourselves as the movement making us, our desire evolves. It will; it can; it must. Our desire will grow in line with whatever we believe will give us the pleasure we seek. As it does, we no longer want foods that overwhelm and deceive our senses; we no longer want foods that require oppressing other humans or animals. We want what will allow us to find a sense of enough.
This is no temporary correction of calories. No willed deprivation. No feat of self control. It is permanent pursuit of the wisdom in our desire—the wisdom guiding us to the health and well being we seek. It is the only way that we can create a relationship with food—with ourselves and with our world—that will express itself in the health we want.
It takes time. Desire did not evolve in a day, nor will it. But even so, there is pleasure all the way.
Next week: Summing up food
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Using the Cycle of Breaths
It goes against all common sense.
How can you say that if I cultivate the pleasure in eating, I will find a sense of enough? If I am feeling the pleasure, won’t I want to keep eating, to get more pleasure? Shouldn’t I rather work to decrease the pleasure I feel in eating and rely instead on meal replacements and protein shakes to divert my desire?
No. If we open ourselves to feel the pleasure of eating, the rhythm and arc of that pleasure, then we will also be acutely aware of the moment in which our pleasure starts to wane. And because we are, in that very moment, attending to our sensations as the source of our pleasure, we are more likely than ever to feel our fullness as a desire to stop. I can eat again later. Or tomorrow. At that moment the pleasure of eating morphs into the pleasure of knowing when to stop and doing so. We taste the pleasure of giving ourselves the experience of being nourished. Of getting what we need. Of having and being enough.
When we cultivate a sensory awareness of the movement making us, then, the desire to override what feels good in our bodies or stuff ourselves silly falls away. It does not fall away because our will power establishes its dominance, but because we realize that we want something else more. We realize that the pleasure we desire is not one we will find by denying or indulging our desire. We want the pleasure of moving with the wisdom in our desire, and following its arc to a sense of enough.
*
All well and good. But can practicing the cycle of breaths (see Jan 29, Feb 5, 12, 19, & audio version in side bar) really help?
(Are you breathing?)
Yes. As we practice the cycle of breaths, breathing to move and moving to breathe, our experience of our desire for food evolves. Desire is movement. It is movement in us that moves us toward whatever we believe will give us the experience we seek. So too, as we are ever getting new information about what works for us, our desires have the potential to change constantly.
When we move through the cycle of breaths then, its different perspectives help us release the potential of our desire to evolve in line with our rolling revelations of what will bring us the pleasure we seek. More and more we find ourselves wanting to eat what nourishes us, and wanting to do so as the condition for our greatest pleasure and health. We move with the wisdom in desire. Really?
*
Imagine yourself consuming a package of oreos. Imagine how delightful it would be. You will let yourself do it—release into your desire and get the sweet satisfaction you crave. All of it. You will become an oreo-eater, someone who nourishes herself this way.
With that tenth cookie, however, you begin to feel too full. Your stomach aches. You deny the ache. You want the satisfaction of eating the entire package. You begin to feel nauseous. A headache crops up. Your mind starts to blink. Listen.
What is happening? You want the pleasure of eating. Your desire has taken shape in the form of an ideal of what you need to do to get it: eat the oreos. More oreos equals more pleasure. It is an ideal that coordinates the impulse in you (for eating pleasure) and the options available in your world (oreos). Yet as you eat, you meet resistance in your sensory awareness to satisfying your desire. Pain! Discomfort.
If you experience this discomfort through a sense of yourself as mind over body, you may be tempted to interpret this pain as an obstacle to your full satisfaction. A nuisance. You will want eat another oreo just to prove that you are master of your body and can get what you desire. Yet every time you override your own resistance—in the name of greater pleasure—you dull your ability to sense what will give you the pleasure you say you want.
There is another way. If you can release into your sensory awareness, your experience of this discomfort will shift and the resistance will make sense to you as something to trust. You will know that your own discomfort is expressing the wisdom in your desire. The idea you have (more oreos) is out of sync with what will actually produce pleasure (stopping). The movements you are making to satisfy your desire are making you sick! Your best wisdom is crying out for you to stop.
Even so, it is not that easy. Even though you know that eating another oreo will make you ill—and you can feel it—you still want to eat it. The sensation of displeasure you anticipate cannot compete with your desire to taste now. What then?
If we rely on coercion and denial—regardless of how fine our intentions—we will inevitably crack, gobble up what we denied ourselves, and then eat more to compensate for our sense of deprivation. If we make our relationship with our self into a battle, we always lose whether we eat or not.
Alternately, we can call on the cycle of breaths (see side bar). Practicing the cycle of breaths enhances our vulnerability to the persuasive power of our own sensations. It helps us tilt the balance toward the side of pleasure that comes with a sense of enough. With every breath we are more able to sense and respond to our discomfort as moving us to make it stop… to stop eating.
Breathe to move and move to breathe.
Breathe and release the tension in your wanting into the earth. Let it go. Let it settle. Feel yourself sitting, standing, from inside yourself. Connected. Breathe again, and open up a space traced by the edges where skin meets air. Fill the space with oxygen and invite the reach and roots of your sensations to appear. Breathe again and plug the energy of your desire into your fiery core. What is it you really want? Where does your greatest pleasure lie? Breathe again and kindle that fire into fluid, flowing through you. Open to impulses to move that bring your senses back to the arc of your pleasure.
When you engage the cycle of breaths in this way, the feeling of fullness will grow stronger in your awareness than the watering in your mouth. As you breathe some more, remembering and recreating your connections with the elements, your desire will move in line with the sensations of fertile, free, fiery, flow you are awakening in yourself. It will spread out and gather again, along a trajectory of the respect-full attention you are practicing in relation to your own self.
Do you want that oreo? In the time space of breathing you will realize that it is not the oreo itself that you want—what you want is for the oreo to taste good. But the oreo won’t taste good if you are overriding your own sensation of fullness. It won’t give you the pleasure you want. The taste in your mouth deteriorates. It will only be the oreo I want if I am hungry.
A decision forms: I won’t eat it. Not now.
The move away from the oreo may be tinged with sadness, it is true. I am missing out! But that edge of sadness will be followed immediately by a gush of relief. You avoided the violence of overriding your bodily sensations and the inevitable pain that would follow. You lived through the moment in a way that nourished and nurtured you, creating the possibility in you for greater future pleasure than you would have had now. Honoring your sensations in this way, you create yourself as someone who can do so, wants to do so, and knows she can do so, for her own health.
The relief is delicious.
Next Week: Why this practice is a social, political, and economic act
How can you say that if I cultivate the pleasure in eating, I will find a sense of enough? If I am feeling the pleasure, won’t I want to keep eating, to get more pleasure? Shouldn’t I rather work to decrease the pleasure I feel in eating and rely instead on meal replacements and protein shakes to divert my desire?
No. If we open ourselves to feel the pleasure of eating, the rhythm and arc of that pleasure, then we will also be acutely aware of the moment in which our pleasure starts to wane. And because we are, in that very moment, attending to our sensations as the source of our pleasure, we are more likely than ever to feel our fullness as a desire to stop. I can eat again later. Or tomorrow. At that moment the pleasure of eating morphs into the pleasure of knowing when to stop and doing so. We taste the pleasure of giving ourselves the experience of being nourished. Of getting what we need. Of having and being enough.
When we cultivate a sensory awareness of the movement making us, then, the desire to override what feels good in our bodies or stuff ourselves silly falls away. It does not fall away because our will power establishes its dominance, but because we realize that we want something else more. We realize that the pleasure we desire is not one we will find by denying or indulging our desire. We want the pleasure of moving with the wisdom in our desire, and following its arc to a sense of enough.
*
All well and good. But can practicing the cycle of breaths (see Jan 29, Feb 5, 12, 19, & audio version in side bar) really help?
(Are you breathing?)
Yes. As we practice the cycle of breaths, breathing to move and moving to breathe, our experience of our desire for food evolves. Desire is movement. It is movement in us that moves us toward whatever we believe will give us the experience we seek. So too, as we are ever getting new information about what works for us, our desires have the potential to change constantly.
When we move through the cycle of breaths then, its different perspectives help us release the potential of our desire to evolve in line with our rolling revelations of what will bring us the pleasure we seek. More and more we find ourselves wanting to eat what nourishes us, and wanting to do so as the condition for our greatest pleasure and health. We move with the wisdom in desire. Really?
*
Imagine yourself consuming a package of oreos. Imagine how delightful it would be. You will let yourself do it—release into your desire and get the sweet satisfaction you crave. All of it. You will become an oreo-eater, someone who nourishes herself this way.
With that tenth cookie, however, you begin to feel too full. Your stomach aches. You deny the ache. You want the satisfaction of eating the entire package. You begin to feel nauseous. A headache crops up. Your mind starts to blink. Listen.
What is happening? You want the pleasure of eating. Your desire has taken shape in the form of an ideal of what you need to do to get it: eat the oreos. More oreos equals more pleasure. It is an ideal that coordinates the impulse in you (for eating pleasure) and the options available in your world (oreos). Yet as you eat, you meet resistance in your sensory awareness to satisfying your desire. Pain! Discomfort.
If you experience this discomfort through a sense of yourself as mind over body, you may be tempted to interpret this pain as an obstacle to your full satisfaction. A nuisance. You will want eat another oreo just to prove that you are master of your body and can get what you desire. Yet every time you override your own resistance—in the name of greater pleasure—you dull your ability to sense what will give you the pleasure you say you want.
There is another way. If you can release into your sensory awareness, your experience of this discomfort will shift and the resistance will make sense to you as something to trust. You will know that your own discomfort is expressing the wisdom in your desire. The idea you have (more oreos) is out of sync with what will actually produce pleasure (stopping). The movements you are making to satisfy your desire are making you sick! Your best wisdom is crying out for you to stop.
Even so, it is not that easy. Even though you know that eating another oreo will make you ill—and you can feel it—you still want to eat it. The sensation of displeasure you anticipate cannot compete with your desire to taste now. What then?
If we rely on coercion and denial—regardless of how fine our intentions—we will inevitably crack, gobble up what we denied ourselves, and then eat more to compensate for our sense of deprivation. If we make our relationship with our self into a battle, we always lose whether we eat or not.
Alternately, we can call on the cycle of breaths (see side bar). Practicing the cycle of breaths enhances our vulnerability to the persuasive power of our own sensations. It helps us tilt the balance toward the side of pleasure that comes with a sense of enough. With every breath we are more able to sense and respond to our discomfort as moving us to make it stop… to stop eating.
Breathe to move and move to breathe.
Breathe and release the tension in your wanting into the earth. Let it go. Let it settle. Feel yourself sitting, standing, from inside yourself. Connected. Breathe again, and open up a space traced by the edges where skin meets air. Fill the space with oxygen and invite the reach and roots of your sensations to appear. Breathe again and plug the energy of your desire into your fiery core. What is it you really want? Where does your greatest pleasure lie? Breathe again and kindle that fire into fluid, flowing through you. Open to impulses to move that bring your senses back to the arc of your pleasure.
When you engage the cycle of breaths in this way, the feeling of fullness will grow stronger in your awareness than the watering in your mouth. As you breathe some more, remembering and recreating your connections with the elements, your desire will move in line with the sensations of fertile, free, fiery, flow you are awakening in yourself. It will spread out and gather again, along a trajectory of the respect-full attention you are practicing in relation to your own self.
Do you want that oreo? In the time space of breathing you will realize that it is not the oreo itself that you want—what you want is for the oreo to taste good. But the oreo won’t taste good if you are overriding your own sensation of fullness. It won’t give you the pleasure you want. The taste in your mouth deteriorates. It will only be the oreo I want if I am hungry.
A decision forms: I won’t eat it. Not now.
The move away from the oreo may be tinged with sadness, it is true. I am missing out! But that edge of sadness will be followed immediately by a gush of relief. You avoided the violence of overriding your bodily sensations and the inevitable pain that would follow. You lived through the moment in a way that nourished and nurtured you, creating the possibility in you for greater future pleasure than you would have had now. Honoring your sensations in this way, you create yourself as someone who can do so, wants to do so, and knows she can do so, for her own health.
The relief is delicious.
Next Week: Why this practice is a social, political, and economic act
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Wanting More
Change your life! Ten steps, eight weeks, five principles to a new lighter, thinner, happier, more successful You! We hear such voices all the time, urging us to exert a mind-over-body self-control as our path to getting what we want. We traffic in illusions. Our will power is limited in its power and reach, especially when it comes to food, eating, and our bodily health. Pitted against ourselves, we never win.Then again, even if we can’t impose change on ourselves for long, it is also true that who we are is always changing. With every bodily movement we make we become someone new. We are constantly creating and becoming ourselves. Knowing this, we know what we can do: we can learn to participate in the changes that are already happening in us. We can learn to align our intentions with the currents of growing and healing alive in us. And for this, we glean vital cues from the sensations of frustration and longing, irritation and despair coursing through us: our pain is a potential for pleasure we have yet to unfold (Jan 8).
We want more from food. More pleasure, more health, more well-being. We want the experience of being nourished—of nurturing ourselves. And that desire for more is guiding us to move in ways that will make it so. We want change, and we will have it—not by inducing a temporary deprivation intended to correct our caloric stores—but by cultivating a sensory awareness of our own desire for more.
I have been reading a terrific book, Spark, about how exercise (of the complexly-patterned aerobic kind) builds better brains. Across the board the results are clear: more new neurons, more connective proteins, more possible patterns for neuronal organization. As the author claims, exercise creates an internal environment “in which the brain is ready, willing, and able to learn” (10). He goes on to argue what I also believe: humans have evolved to move. We humans must move in order to realize our cognitive potential.
Moving our bodies, however, can do more than boost our braininess. When we breathe to move and move to breathe, we open a space inside ourselves for feeling what we are feeling. We notice the sensations of our bodily becoming, and the frustrated, fragmented and flailing shapes of our desire. Moving opens new perspectives on these desires. We begin to discern their wisdom.
Specifically, moving our bodies can help us learn to find wisdom in our desire for food: we can learn to follow the arc of our pleasure to a sense of enough. A sense of enough is that felt sense that frees us to stop eating and move (Apr 1). It is not a chemical switch acting on its own; nor a lever we can shift at will. It cannot be determined abstractly or in advance in terms of calories or grams. Our sense of enough is rather a capacity for discernment that develops in us over time. It is a capacity that grows stronger and more precise as we attend to the arcs of our pleasure, or more rigid and inert as we practice overriding them. It is what lets us know that we have had the experience of being nourished that ultimately satisfies. For what pleases changes in response to what we are doing and feeling. As we begin to pay attention, we find that our desires evolve: we create and become patterns of sensation and response that align more and more with the pleasure we are capable of experiencing.
Eating dazzles our senses. All of them. We see our food, its shape, texture, color. The air pockets opening in bread, the drizzling of frosting on a bun, the red and white of a bitten apple. We hear our food. It crunches and crumbles, bubbles and drips; it resists the knife, squeezes against the edge of a fork, or eludes the scraping spoon. We feel our food with our fingers, our lips, our tongue, the insides of our mouth, our esophagus, our stomach. It is impossible to eat without seeing, hearing, and touching, even when thickly congested to the point where we cannot smell or taste.
So too the sensory experience of eating does not stop with the usual five. There is a sense of movement at work. I stretch my arm and reach for food. My fingers grasp a morsel, close around it, and draw it near. My hands pry meat from the bone, skin from a grape, seeds from an orange. A fist lifts the cone of ice cream to my lips. My mouth opens and shuts to cut and bite, tear and grind. Jaws lift and lower. I swallow mush, moving the pressure through a channel in my chest, to a quiet thud in my belly.
There is also a sense of time. A bite that pleases in one moment does not give the same sensation in the next. Our pleasure oscillates between eating and not eating, sitting and moving, forming arcs in our experience. I anticipate and await; I replay and remember, feeling the spread of nourishment through my cells. I beat pathways to my earliest movements of surrender in the arms of those who fed me. It is only human.
*
When we move, we breathe. When we breathe, we open our senses. When our senses open, we register impressions more acutely and notice more of our bodily selves. When our bodily selves appear, our experience shifts and we sense how our bodily movement is making us. When our experience shifts, so does our sense of eating; we sense how eating foods affects not just our noses and tongues, but the whole spectrum of our bodily becoming. When we respond by moving with this sensory knowledge, our capacity for discerning what will nourish us best grows. Our pleasure grows too. We know we are and have enough.
*
What is your sensory experience of eating?
What foods give you the most pleasure? Why?
What qualities do they have? Are they heavy or light, noisy or quiet, safe or risky, settling or quickening? Are they creamy or juicy, chewy or dry? Do they stick to the roof of your mouth, or land softly in your belly? What color are they? What consistency? Do they have a strong smell, a loud crunch, or a mouth-filling resilience?
What makes the food you most like to eat good for you?
Next Week: using the cycle of breaths to arrive at a sense of enough
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Can We Trust Desire?
(I was planning to post pictures of spring-coming. It is April! Then, over the weekend, it snowed—a solid six plus inches. White soupy splotches pock the barren ground. Next week!)
The last four posts have unraveled myths of diet culture, revealing how our ideas about the pleasure and value of food, and about how to control our desire for it serve to reinforce a common suspicion of desire. Our desire for food, we learn to believe, is to blame for our issues with bodily health and size. The myths form a carefully woven noose around desire’s neck. We have believed that they are true, and we have made them true by acting as if they were. Desire is a problem.
Nevertheless, we can wake up and note how these myths are not delivering on their promises. We are not happy struggling against our bodies, against our selves (and eventually giving in). We are not finding the pleasure that we seek. We long for a way out.
As the noose loosens, the relief is palpable. For a moment. Then fears those myths have propagated creep up from behind. Now we really will be fat! Desire is to blame and there is nothing we can do! Fantasies of the perfect drug or custom surgery flit through our minds.
The fear must go too. And once the noose loosens, we can breathe it away: we realize that the desire we have been blaming is not what we thought it was. That desire, as we have seen, is not a desire for endless quantities (Mar 4) of cheap food (Mar 11). Nor is our desire for food an entity that exists somehow apart from us that “we” can manipulate via diet plan (Mar 18) or exercise (Mar 25).
Our desire is us. It is a movement that is making us—we are what we eat. Literally. And whatever we desire to eat in a given moment is a result of the movements we have made—the patterns of sensation and response we have created and become—in the past, over time.
When born, we cannot eat without a set of arms to hold us. We cannot take warm pleasure-stirring nutrients into our bodies without also smelling, touching, tasting, hearing, and feeling another person’s body. The body of one we usually come to love. On whom we depend for our very lives. Nourish and nurture are forever entwined.
Every time we sense a desire for food arising in us and every time we respond, we create or reinforce in ourselves a pattern of sensation and response. We remember it. We become it. Over time, we refine our patterns. We not only learn what to eat, we learn what and how to feel when we eat. We learn what it feels like to be nourished.
Feed her one bottle every three hours, no more, no less. Get him on a schedule. Don’t spoil your appetite. Eat everything on your plate. Don’t disappoint your host. I never eat saturated fats. I never eat carbohydrates.
In the process of perfecting and refining our desire for food, the loudest voices are often those coming from those around us—those we love or those we revere; those we idolize or those whose lives we follow. For we, given our mind over body training, are obedient listeners. And as we train ourselves to listen to such authorities, we are cultivating our sensitivity to desire-triggers outside of ourselves.
You are walking down the street. You see a picture of an ice cream cone in a store window. You can smell it, taste it, hear the crunch, and feel the cold melt on your tongue. Your father used to buy you ice cream cones. You and your friend used to share them. You feel lonely now. Suddenly, you have to have one.
Desire for food is not really for food at all. What we want from food is not food, but the experience of being nourished. What we want is the experience of knowing and feeling that we have had enough. That we are enough.
You eat like a pig. She looks like a cow (or an elephant or a hippopotamus). He wolfed down his food. They have no control.
Desire is one moment in complex metabolism carefully calibrated to help us sustain a steady weight, regardless of what we consume on any given day. It is a metabolism designed to make energy accessible to us in a constant stream. We do not eat one meal every three weeks and sleep it off. We do not store up fat reserves during one season and hibernate through the next. We don’t spend a third of our lives grazing and another third chewing cud. We do best with small meals spread through the day. The animal bodies we are are designed to move.
Our desire for food is a desire, first and foremost, to move. It is a desire to stop eating—to reach that point where we can stop eating—and move on in our lives, so that we can find more food, and eat again.
Once we realize that we need not fear our desire for food, then our experience of it can begin to change. We can begin to work with it, to evolve it further, by attending to the sensations of eating pleasure and pain we have learned to ignore and override. We can begin to interpret the signs of our own dissatisfaction as clues guiding us towards the patterns of eating that will deliver the sense of enough we seek.
Any dissatisfaction we feel with our bodies or our eating selves tells us that we are not too far gone. We can bring our senses back to life. We can learn to follow the arc of our eating pleasure to a sense of enough. And we can create and become patterns of sensation and response that will guide us in doing so.
Next week: We find out how.
The last four posts have unraveled myths of diet culture, revealing how our ideas about the pleasure and value of food, and about how to control our desire for it serve to reinforce a common suspicion of desire. Our desire for food, we learn to believe, is to blame for our issues with bodily health and size. The myths form a carefully woven noose around desire’s neck. We have believed that they are true, and we have made them true by acting as if they were. Desire is a problem.
Nevertheless, we can wake up and note how these myths are not delivering on their promises. We are not happy struggling against our bodies, against our selves (and eventually giving in). We are not finding the pleasure that we seek. We long for a way out.
As the noose loosens, the relief is palpable. For a moment. Then fears those myths have propagated creep up from behind. Now we really will be fat! Desire is to blame and there is nothing we can do! Fantasies of the perfect drug or custom surgery flit through our minds.
The fear must go too. And once the noose loosens, we can breathe it away: we realize that the desire we have been blaming is not what we thought it was. That desire, as we have seen, is not a desire for endless quantities (Mar 4) of cheap food (Mar 11). Nor is our desire for food an entity that exists somehow apart from us that “we” can manipulate via diet plan (Mar 18) or exercise (Mar 25).
Our desire is us. It is a movement that is making us—we are what we eat. Literally. And whatever we desire to eat in a given moment is a result of the movements we have made—the patterns of sensation and response we have created and become—in the past, over time.
When born, we cannot eat without a set of arms to hold us. We cannot take warm pleasure-stirring nutrients into our bodies without also smelling, touching, tasting, hearing, and feeling another person’s body. The body of one we usually come to love. On whom we depend for our very lives. Nourish and nurture are forever entwined.
Every time we sense a desire for food arising in us and every time we respond, we create or reinforce in ourselves a pattern of sensation and response. We remember it. We become it. Over time, we refine our patterns. We not only learn what to eat, we learn what and how to feel when we eat. We learn what it feels like to be nourished.
Feed her one bottle every three hours, no more, no less. Get him on a schedule. Don’t spoil your appetite. Eat everything on your plate. Don’t disappoint your host. I never eat saturated fats. I never eat carbohydrates.
In the process of perfecting and refining our desire for food, the loudest voices are often those coming from those around us—those we love or those we revere; those we idolize or those whose lives we follow. For we, given our mind over body training, are obedient listeners. And as we train ourselves to listen to such authorities, we are cultivating our sensitivity to desire-triggers outside of ourselves.
You are walking down the street. You see a picture of an ice cream cone in a store window. You can smell it, taste it, hear the crunch, and feel the cold melt on your tongue. Your father used to buy you ice cream cones. You and your friend used to share them. You feel lonely now. Suddenly, you have to have one.
Desire for food is not really for food at all. What we want from food is not food, but the experience of being nourished. What we want is the experience of knowing and feeling that we have had enough. That we are enough.
You eat like a pig. She looks like a cow (or an elephant or a hippopotamus). He wolfed down his food. They have no control.
Desire is one moment in complex metabolism carefully calibrated to help us sustain a steady weight, regardless of what we consume on any given day. It is a metabolism designed to make energy accessible to us in a constant stream. We do not eat one meal every three weeks and sleep it off. We do not store up fat reserves during one season and hibernate through the next. We don’t spend a third of our lives grazing and another third chewing cud. We do best with small meals spread through the day. The animal bodies we are are designed to move.
Our desire for food is a desire, first and foremost, to move. It is a desire to stop eating—to reach that point where we can stop eating—and move on in our lives, so that we can find more food, and eat again.
Once we realize that we need not fear our desire for food, then our experience of it can begin to change. We can begin to work with it, to evolve it further, by attending to the sensations of eating pleasure and pain we have learned to ignore and override. We can begin to interpret the signs of our own dissatisfaction as clues guiding us towards the patterns of eating that will deliver the sense of enough we seek.
Any dissatisfaction we feel with our bodies or our eating selves tells us that we are not too far gone. We can bring our senses back to life. We can learn to follow the arc of our eating pleasure to a sense of enough. And we can create and become patterns of sensation and response that will guide us in doing so.
Next week: We find out how.
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