Healthy Living

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I was watching the Sex and the City Movie today, and one of the characters said something absolutely brilliant: “I eat to keep myself from doing the things I really want to do.” Thank you, Kim Cattral. I have been trying for at least five years now to manage compulsive eating, and not until she said that did I wonder if it is possible that I eat to stop myself from doing what I want to do. Is it possible that behind each person’s compulsive behavior is an attempt to stop themselves from going for what they really want? And if so, why would they stop themselves?
When I feel anxious, I usually eat. The eating stops the feeling like a big brick wall; in my mind, it controls the feeling from reaching overwhelming levels. However, behind the overwhelming emptiness is a desire to reach for something other than food. Why do I do this, when I want something other than food? I guess it could be that going for this thing involves facing the terrible emptiness that I don’t have it right now, and facing the fear that after I get it, I could lose it again. In order to move forward with my life, however, I need to stop covering the loss with food and accept that I can never get it back. In trying to avoid feeling the pain, we keep ourselves in constant pain, never allowing the opportunity for true healing to take place. We then begin to mourn, not for the actual loss, but for the loss of ourselves. We can lose everything in this world, but when we stop trying due to fear, we lose ourselves and any hope for freedom and healing that comes with it. Healing comes through facing fear and pain, not by arranging life in such a way as to not experience them.
I used to think that healing was something pleasant, easy, and relatively efficient. It is none of those things. Healing is a goddamn pain in the ass. It usually involves doing things which make yourself feel much, much worse before you get better. It mandates waking up each day and facing one’s fears, that which separates us from love, and doing so is extremely uncomfortable. The tediousness and terror of this is awful, and the natural instinct is always to stop. But it is necessary to keep going, even though every fiber of one’s being wants to stop. Healing is not pretty, it’s not glorious, it is often boring, frustrating, scary, embarrassing, and infuriating. I started going to therapy a few years ago, and only very recently did it become clear why, as helpful as it is, I despise therapy so much: it pushes my boundaries. It forces me to confront my fears, which is anxiety-provoking, and due to my resistance usually takes awhile, which is frustrating for a very impatient, idealistic person who expects each moment to be some goddamn, glorious revelation.
I recently started a regular meditation practice, at the advice of a good friend of mine, and longtime Daoist practitioner. Meditation is much the same. I spend most of my time thinking about how sitting sucks, my back hurts, why do I do this, why can’t this be great and beautiful and enlightening….but it’s worth it. Every time is worth it, because it helps me to tolerate the pain and nastiness of life instead of shying away from it. For an hour and a half I managed to sit with my ridiculous thoughts, and they didn’t obliterate me. It is these thoughts that frame our lives, and most of the time, we remain unaware of them. We have adopted paradigms over the years, as a result of our personal disposition and circumstantial events, to handle pain in life. They are meant to structure and give meaning to our experiences. They do, but the problem is that they are like creating a thesis before looking at any of the data. Some people might call this judgment, and we do it much more than we even realize. The result is a poorly written paper, in which the data is framed to fit our thesis, rather than the thesis, written to frame the data.
When patients go to see a physician, the physician first observes the cluster of symptoms, and makes a diagnosis. He does not first diagnose, and then look at the symptoms. But if he’s been specializing in a certain disease for thirty years and someone comes to see him with a similar cluster of symptoms, he may tend to diagnose that condition more than other physicians. The disease has become an underlying thesis in his mind. In our minds, the theses have become the underlying diseases. We get hurt, and then develop a maladaptive coping mechanism: a grand, sweeping thesis about the world to deal with this hurt, and avoid it in the future. The problem is that the thesis doesn’t hold weight, and because it’s not really true, it does us more harm than good. An example is looking at life and thinking that pretty much everybody out there is an awful son of a bitch. It protects you from getting close to people, and getting hurt by people again, but then you end up being really, really lonely. How do you heal from this disease? As scary as it is, you must let go of the thesis, and take the risk of putting yourself out there in life, one moment at a time. Healing, in its very nature, involves great risk. I wish someone had told me that, although I’m sure I would not have listened. Because we do not perceive the possibility of pain as a good thing, our fear prevents us from stepping outwards to do what is ultimately best for us. Facing our fears has value completely independent of the outcome, and we must live our lives by this, every day. Facing our fears is a terrible, nasty, scary, tedious pain in the ass: It is healing.
As a Christian, I supposedly believe that through believing in Christ, and his death on the cross for my sins, I am healed. Most of the time I sit around on my ass wondering why I’m not healed yet. I believe in Jesus, yes, I believe in him, but I’m not healed. This begs the question: What does it mean to believe in Jesus? Maybe I’m missing something. To believe in Jesus, one must look to what He did. He allowed himself to be shamed and abandoned by God to die on a cross, in order to give us freedom from what binds us. We experience these same feelings of shame, humiliation, and abandonment, and feel enslaved by them, afraid that they will overtake us. We do anything and everything to make them go away. But Jesus knew that making them go away was not the way to life. He faced these feelings, and all of the truth and lies behind them, on the cross. At one point he even said, “Father, father, why did you abandon me?” In that moment he experienced all of our sin, on his shoulders. Every lie, distortion, and fear, that tells us that God does not love us, that He has left us, that He does not exist. Every day, we ask of God, “Father, father, why did you abandon me?” But unlike Jesus, who despite the horrendous emotional, spiritual, and physical pain, did not give up, we do. We stop putting our fears of abandonment by God to the test, because it’s excruciatingly difficult to do so. We lose faith, and then we blame it on God. God never promised us a great life, relatively free from pain and strife. He promised us a life in which, through Christ, we are given the strength to confront our fears and return to the truth as He did. The truth is that God has never left us, and never will.

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