Eisenstein on school

Check out this short video of Eisenstein. It's part 2 of 3, but it stans well on its own.

The Ascent of Humanity

I'm reading another book by Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity. It's very slow going. I read a section and have to take a break to chew the words. It's amazing. It has taken me 2 weeks to read 2 chapters.

I have some quotes to share:

Thanks to god Technology, we will leave behind all vestiges of mortality and enter a realm of without toil or travail and beyond death and pain.

This is a message we seem to hear a lot. Yesterday I heard it from the cashier at the cash register. She pointed to the way that most money is electronic today, and that this is an example of a trend to a virtual life (which, when complete, presumably mimics real life exactly?)

One thing I like about this quote a lot is that if you remove "Thanks to god Technology", it sounds like a message we're used to hearing from many religions. That suggests that science and technology is a religion for us today.

Next quote, when discussing the way that language is used to separate the words from the speaker:

The goal would seem to be to pretend that the words had no human author at all, existing purely as objective facts. Indeed, use of the first person is considered bad from in academic writing - a convention the author of the present work finds ridiculous!

How witty.

Patterns of behavior and the subconcious

Some quotes from Yoga of Eating, ch 13 - Dieting and Self-Acceptance, which got me thinking.

[Y]our body shape is integral to your current pattern of being. It's your body's proper and appropriate response to how you live and who you are.

and

If the body-soul has decided that obesity is the appropriate response to a given set of psychological, spiritual, and physical conditions, it will use whatever mechanisms are necessary to achieve this state.

So, if you decide to make some change in your life to reduce your weight (like cutting out carbohydrates), your body may respond with increased appetite, aversion to exercise, or reduced metabolism. 

What's interesting to me about this is not what it says about dieting and weight loss, but what I can learn about my deep unmet needs and fears and wounds and how to heal them.

I think of the choices I have made which have lead to my current body shape. I didn't overeat just once, and suddenly get fat. I did it over, and over again. I was proud of my reputation for someone who eats a lot of food. I also have eaten many, many sweet foods. I no longer eat Hostess, but that doesn't stop me from consuming plenty of sugar. As a teen I would eat Betty Crocker frosting straight from the tub. 

There's more to this than just "here's how I ate and got fat". Perhaps a pattern of behavior like this is indicative of an unmet need that the "body-soul" is trying to fulfill. That means our habits can be a tool for understanding the subconscious. Let's look at some examples from my life:

I think I wish to be healthy and attractive and fit, but somehow that hasn't stopped me consistently making decisions that took me away from those ideal. Why is it?

I think of all the times I could have ridden my bicycle somewhere, when the weather was fine, and I had enough energy, and I had enough time, and the ride was quite doable, and somehow I talked myself out of it. Why?

I'm not just fat: I am also terribly inflexible. I can't come anywhere close to touching my toes, legs straight. This is inconvenient a lot of the time, but that hasn't motivated me to stretch regularly. Why don't I stretch?

I also have pretty bad posture. I carry my head well forward of my shoulders. This means pain in my head, neck, shoulders, and back, and sometimes secondary pain in other parts of my body. Why don't I hold myself with good posture?

There's some reason I have made these decisions this way, consistently, for so many years. This isn't just about discipline or habits or not knowing that I was harming myself or not knowing a better way to do things. There's a reason I have stuck to these patterns of behavior that goes beyond such things. 

It seems clear to me that this is the work of my subconscious (cue ominous music). There's some unmet need behind these patterns of behavior. They can give me a starting point for digging in to my deeper self to discover those unmet needs and maybe find some healing.

I don't think I can group "overeating" and "overweight" in to the same behavior pattern. When researching food issues recently, I came across a story of a woman who would binge on food, and then work out excessively to burn the extra calories, so she could stay thin. This person had one issue that motivated the overeating, and another that motivated her to burn it off.

A friend used to binge and then go on strict diets to keep her weight down. She had one issue that motivated the eating, and another that motivated the dieting. Her life coach encouraged her to stop the diets. She promptly gained a lot of weight, and she seems to be a much happier person, having let go of that harsh treatment of herself. I think her thin shape was an expression of her self-loathing, and her fat shape is an expression of her love for herself and her joy in life. 

I talked about harmful behaviors above, but this applies to all my consistent patterns of behavior, including the ones I like. Digging in to those can help me understand myself in ways that I want to be careful not to change.

In Harville Hendrix's Getting the Love you want he hits on a similar notion when he says that your spouse's consistent complaints about your are likely to lead you to childhood wounds and your adaptations to those wounds. He's right, but you can go further and look at all consistent observations, from your spouse, friends, coworkers, family, and self.

Take a look at how you live your life. What are the things you do a certain way, consistently? Why?

What I really want

Continuing on thoughts from Transformational Weight Loss.

Last night at dinner I stopped in the middle of the meal to get a drink of water. While standing at the sink I asked myself "do I want to eat another serving?" I noticed that I was hunched over, and corrected my posture. Immediately the pressure in my stomache became uncomfortable. I realized that I was holding myself in a hunched position to avoid the discomfort of being so full, and to make it possible to eat a little more. I decided not to eat more at that time.

Later I made a quick run to Safeway for some essentials. We usually buy our groceries at a food coop, so the Safeway is always a bit of culture shock for me. It's enormous; there are so many cashiers; there is a lot of non-food things, like school suppies and motor oil.

There are also a ton of candy / desert / junk items, like soda, cookies, cakes, pies, chips, etc. Safeway's cakes look pretty good, and they kept catching my eye. I was tempted to buy one, but had some reservations. I want to reduce my body fat, and a cake probably makes that harder, but I'm trying to follow Eisenstein's rule of "eat what I want" instead of "eat what I think I'm supposed to eat". I was also afraid that if I brought it home, the kids would wolf it down, and I don't want them eating that junk. "Protecting" them by eating it in secret seemed like a really bad idea, just because eating in secret is a warning sign for me, and I didn't like the hipocrasy of giving a cake to myself but not to them.

I decided to follow my true desire, if I could hear it. I asked myself "what do I really want right now?" I tried imaging eating different things, etc., to see what message my body would send about my needs. I immediately had the answer: "I want my back to stop hurting". I stretched a little right there, went home, and took some ibuprofen. No cake.

I had been unaware of that back pain the whole time. Ignoring pain is something I've gotten good at, and I want that to change.

The pain is telling me something more than "take ibuprofen". It's saying something like "sitting that way is harmful" or "these muscles want to be stronger". Unfortunately I'm suffering from a long, slow chest cold right now, so there's not a whole lot I can do about it right now, but I'm keeping the message in mind until I feel better.

Fearing the end of addiction

I few years ago I read The Yoga of Eating by Charles Eisenstein. Every time I read something he writes, it resonates with me. He is able to see clearly and then tell us what he sees. I just finished another book of his, Transformational Weight Loss, which I sometimes call Yoga of Eating II: More Yoga of Eating.

I was trying to explain a tenet to Reid, now 7 years old:

When you eat, your body sends a message about whether this is a food you need right now. You can trust this message. The thing I've gotten away from is being able to hear this message. You can probably hear this message more clearly than I can, because I have more practice not listening to it.

When you eat what your body doesn't need, if you hear the message clearly, you will not like the taste of the food.

He asked me if that meant that he might eat some cotton candy and not like it. I gave him a simple "yes", but realized that I had a deep fear of that happening. I was afraid of the possibility of junk food not tasting good, of comfort food not providing comfort. As I thought about it further, I found that I've had that fear for a long time, but hadn't been aware of it before. When I read The Yoga of Eating and tried to put what I learned in to practice, I think this fear blocked me, but I didn't know it at the time.

As I tried to understand the fear, I realized I had fully faced it once before: when I was thinking about quitting smoking. It went like this: I knew the powerful desire I would feel when I went too long without a cigarette, since I experienced it every day. Every minute the craving gets stronger, the misery gets more intense, and it just continues. Whenever something prevented me from getting my fix (say, being in an airplane), it was very stressful. When I considered the possibility of quitting smoking, my subconscious didn't register it as "Ahh, freedom from that dependency and an end of the misery of craving", but as "I will never be able to satisfy that desire, and the misery will increase forever". Instead of hope, I had despair. I had to recognize that fear before I could actually quit. I was entirely successful, and haven't smoked for 9 years.

I know that I use food as a distraction, from anger, boredom, loneliness, or physical pain. (For some people, fatigue goes on the list, but I use a computer for that one.) I am so used to doing this that I usually don't realize it, and just think "I am hungry". The other day I overate and the feeling was so uncomfortable I kept thinking I wanted a snack, because the flavor would distract me from the discomfort. Silly, huh?

Anyway, when I consider the possibility of hearing my body's true messages about food, and that I might try to eat a cookie or a pizza or whatever and not enjoy the flavor (because I don't need the nutrition), that idea is really scary. My fear is that I will want a distraction from something, and food just won't work. I'll be stuck with the discomfort, unable to divert my attention, because I don't like cookies all of a sudden.

I want to get to the bottom of this.