Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything
Chapter 3 Never Underestimate the Inclination to Bolt – Geneen Roth
In the spring of 1982, I found myself on a pay phone trying frantically to rent a helicopter so I could leave the ten-day retreat where I’d been for exactly fifteen hours… My therapist, Kate, had urged me to sign up for the retreat, but she forgot to mention that I’d have to spend fifteen hours a day meditating – and I’d forgotten to ask. Kate also neglected to tell me that I couldn’t talk or make eye contact with anyone the entire time. The guy on the phone asked me where I was. “In the middle of the desert,” I answered. “Joshua Tree National Park.” “There are no helicopter pads there, lady, and even if there were, you’re talking a lot of money. Thousands of dollars.” It was the second day of the retreat and I felt as if I was insane. In the shockingly silent meditation hall the night before, I had images of standing up and yelling, “Douche bag, douche bag!” like someone with Tourette’s syndrome. Clearly I needed to leave. I tried to think of alternatives to renting a helicopter – hitchhiking, begging, walking. None were feasible. Of the hundred and fifty people at the retreat – who I was now convinced were a cult of Buddhist zombies walking in slow meditative stupor around the grounds – I knew no one. My dorm room – with fifteen women and one bathroom – was crowded and stuffy, and despite the precept of nonviolence, I was ready to inflict great harm upon the snorer whose cot was next to mine. Bang her over the head with a large cactus. Spending ten days stuck in my own mind felt like being locked up in a cramped cell with a crazy person and not having any way out. “Twenty-five hundred dollars,” the helicopter rental guy muttered, and since my salary as an avocado and cheese sandwich maker at a local health food store in Santa Cruz was six hundred dollars a month, flying out of the retreat was out of the question. ******** Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron writes, “Never underestimate the inclination to bolt.” (note: Geneen is writing about compulsive eating, and she now leads retreats. What she says applies to any compulsion, obsession or addiction.) If compulsive eating (drinking, whatever) is anything, it’s a way we leave ourselves when life gets hard. When we don’t want to notice what is going on. Compulsion is a way we distance ourselves from the way things are when they are not how we want them to be. Ending the obsession is all about the capacity to stay in the present moment. To not leave ourselves…Compulsion is basically a refusal to be fully alive. Those of us who are compulsive (eaters) have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can’t stand it any longer, we binge. The way we are able to accomplish all of this is by the simple act of bolting – of leaving ourselves – hundreds of times a day. . . . Obsession gives you something to do besides having your heart shattered by heart-shattering events. Like watching your children get sick, like living while your spouse dies. Like being with your parents as they get old, wear diapers, forget their own names. Obsession gives you a plane ticket out of a particular kind of heartbreak. It gives you a helicopter ride out of the desert. It creates a parallel world, a hologram of emotions, passions, breathtaking reversals. It gives you the illusion of feeling everything without having to be vulnerable to anything. In the drama of obsession, you are the star, the costar, the director, the producer… There is madness in obsession, yes, but its value is that it drowns out the madness of life. Especially now, when we are living on verge of destroying ourselves and our environment. Not bolting – being awake without being drugged by food, alcohol, work, sex, money, drugs, fame or in denial (about the crisis we are actually in) – is asking a lot. . . . The desire to leave the retreat is an expression of the desire to leave the obsession itself, to pretend that it’s a minor problem that can be fixed in a few weeks with slight adjustments in exercise and portion control… But as the days pass, something unexpected happens. You become aware of something you never thought existed: that which is beyond the problem. That which the pain passes through. One retreat participant wrote, “The practice of bringing myself back to the present moment instead of careening around in my head is not one that comes easy to me… But I have had a shift here in seeing that real consistent practice of eating, breathing, showing up moment after moment – this is my true work. This is what a life can be. I see the commitment that staying will require…I see that doing this work requires humility and a willingness to return to myself, over and over and over. To be interested in what’s actually here. Having now tasted what it’s like to feel like my internal landscape is not strewn with land mines – that everything is truly workable and is (and I am) in fact lovable and worthy of love – I don’t want to go back to the way I lived before.” To stay, you have to believe there is something worth staying for – and then you have to bring yourself back, again and again. The initial glimpse of wonder, of love, of possibility, of expansion becomes a commitment to returning, to bringing yourself back each time you bolt. . . . The writer Natalie Goldberg says that we are always practicing something and most of us practice suffering. Why not practice ending your suffering instead of perpetuating it? Since you are breathing and eating anyway, moving around in your body anyway, why not spend that time waking yourself up instead of deadening yourself? Is there anything better to do with a life?
In the spring of 1982, I found myself on a pay phone trying frantically to rent a helicopter so I could leave the ten-day retreat where I’d been for exactly fifteen hours… My therapist, Kate, had urged me to sign up for the retreat, but she forgot to mention that I’d have to spend fifteen hours a day meditating – and I’d forgotten to ask. Kate also neglected to tell me that I couldn’t talk or make eye contact with anyone the entire time. The guy on the phone asked me where I was. “In the middle of the desert,” I answered. “Joshua Tree National Park.” “There are no helicopter pads there, lady, and even if there were, you’re talking a lot of money. Thousands of dollars.” It was the second day of the retreat and I felt as if I was insane. In the shockingly silent meditation hall the night before, I had images of standing up and yelling, “Douche bag, douche bag!” like someone with Tourette’s syndrome. Clearly I needed to leave. I tried to think of alternatives to renting a helicopter – hitchhiking, begging, walking. None were feasible. Of the hundred and fifty people at the retreat – who I was now convinced were a cult of Buddhist zombies walking in slow meditative stupor around the grounds – I knew no one. My dorm room – with fifteen women and one bathroom – was crowded and stuffy, and despite the precept of nonviolence, I was ready to inflict great harm upon the snorer whose cot was next to mine. Bang her over the head with a large cactus. Spending ten days stuck in my own mind felt like being locked up in a cramped cell with a crazy person and not having any way out. “Twenty-five hundred dollars,” the helicopter rental guy muttered, and since my salary as an avocado and cheese sandwich maker at a local health food store in Santa Cruz was six hundred dollars a month, flying out of the retreat was out of the question. ******** Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron writes, “Never underestimate the inclination to bolt.” (note: Geneen is writing about compulsive eating, and she now leads retreats. What she says applies to any compulsion, obsession or addiction.) If compulsive eating (drinking, whatever) is anything, it’s a way we leave ourselves when life gets hard. When we don’t want to notice what is going on. Compulsion is a way we distance ourselves from the way things are when they are not how we want them to be. Ending the obsession is all about the capacity to stay in the present moment. To not leave ourselves…Compulsion is basically a refusal to be fully alive. Those of us who are compulsive (eaters) have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can’t stand it any longer, we binge. The way we are able to accomplish all of this is by the simple act of bolting – of leaving ourselves – hundreds of times a day. . . . Obsession gives you something to do besides having your heart shattered by heart-shattering events. Like watching your children get sick, like living while your spouse dies. Like being with your parents as they get old, wear diapers, forget their own names. Obsession gives you a plane ticket out of a particular kind of heartbreak. It gives you a helicopter ride out of the desert. It creates a parallel world, a hologram of emotions, passions, breathtaking reversals. It gives you the illusion of feeling everything without having to be vulnerable to anything. In the drama of obsession, you are the star, the costar, the director, the producer… There is madness in obsession, yes, but its value is that it drowns out the madness of life. Especially now, when we are living on verge of destroying ourselves and our environment. Not bolting – being awake without being drugged by food, alcohol, work, sex, money, drugs, fame or in denial (about the crisis we are actually in) – is asking a lot. . . . The desire to leave the retreat is an expression of the desire to leave the obsession itself, to pretend that it’s a minor problem that can be fixed in a few weeks with slight adjustments in exercise and portion control… But as the days pass, something unexpected happens. You become aware of something you never thought existed: that which is beyond the problem. That which the pain passes through. One retreat participant wrote, “The practice of bringing myself back to the present moment instead of careening around in my head is not one that comes easy to me… But I have had a shift here in seeing that real consistent practice of eating, breathing, showing up moment after moment – this is my true work. This is what a life can be. I see the commitment that staying will require…I see that doing this work requires humility and a willingness to return to myself, over and over and over. To be interested in what’s actually here. Having now tasted what it’s like to feel like my internal landscape is not strewn with land mines – that everything is truly workable and is (and I am) in fact lovable and worthy of love – I don’t want to go back to the way I lived before.” To stay, you have to believe there is something worth staying for – and then you have to bring yourself back, again and again. The initial glimpse of wonder, of love, of possibility, of expansion becomes a commitment to returning, to bringing yourself back each time you bolt. . . . The writer Natalie Goldberg says that we are always practicing something and most of us practice suffering. Why not practice ending your suffering instead of perpetuating it? Since you are breathing and eating anyway, moving around in your body anyway, why not spend that time waking yourself up instead of deadening yourself? Is there anything better to do with a life?
2
1 Comment
1 Share
Like
Comment
Share
