session3.pdf

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction

Homework

Week 3

• Practice mindfulness formally for 45 minutes every day for at least 6 days this

week alternating between the Body Scan CD and Yoga I and Yoga II CD

• Practice mindful sitting meditation for 15-20 minutes a day.

• Read and reflect upon “Mindful Eating” article by Geneen Roth

• Pay attention to what you put or bring into your body: how much, when and how

often. Include food, drink, music, news, TV, worry, fantasy, etc. Our habits of

consumption reveal many facets of our conditioning, our attachments.

• Complete “Unpleasant Events Calendar”

• Continue to cultivate your intention to increase your level of awareness during

daily activities such as: eating, showering, brushing your teeth, washing dishes,

taking out the garbage, reading to the kids. . .

Reflections

The Summer Day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-- the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver, The House Light Beacon Press Boston, 1990.

www.BeMindful.org Steve Shealy, PhD 813-980-2700

An Interview with Geneen Roth on Mindful-Eatin g

(from The Sun January 2002 by Renee Lertzman )

There is perhaps no more recognizable trademark of compulsive eating than "grazing" at the

refrigerator. Most of us do it only when we're by ourselves. In her latest book, When You Eat at

the Refrigerator, Pull Up a Chair (Hyperion), Geneen Roth describes eating straight from the

refrigerator with humor and candor, and even suggests sharing the experience with someone:

Imagine you invite a friend over for dinner. Tell her that the two of you are going to eat the way

you eat when you are alone . . . Lead her to the refrigerator. Open the door. Stare. Begin picking

from Tupperware containers. Use your fingers. Grate through yesterday's Chinese food. Last

week's tapioca pudding. Make loud grunting noises of pleasure. Open the freezer. Try to chunk

off a piece of frozen cake with your fingers. When that doesn't work, hack it off with a carving

knife. Notice the fine spray of sugar settling on your floor.

I can appreciate her message, because I've been there, standing before the freezer in the home of

my childhood, eating my mother's frozen Hanukkah cookies or leftover sweets from a Shabbat

reception, hoping not to get caught. Like many women in our culture, I have experienced this

painful struggle over food: the desire to conform to cultural standards of thinness, coupled with

the unwavering conviction that once I’ve attained my ideal weight, I will be happy. It was Roth's

book Feeding the Hungry Heart (Dutton) that led me to connect my desire for love and emotional

nourishment with my endless quest to have enough to eat.

One of Roth's perhaps most well-known and controversial exercises helps people to experience

what they have as "enough": in conjunction with her advice to "carry a chunk of chocolate

everywhere," Roth teaches how to eat that chocolate slowly and with complete awareness. The

exercise, she writes, "reminds us to wake up, pay attention, stop reaching for what we don't

have, and focus on what we do have. It teaches us that we don't need a truck full of love to satisfy

our hungry hearts. When we pay attention, enough is possible."

Roth knows what it's like to struggle with food, having gone on her first diet at the age of eleven,

when she began skipping dinners to lose five pounds. "My mother always felt fat," she says, "and

didn't want me to follow in her footsteps." They fought over food and body size, and Roth

fantasized that, if she could be thin enough, she could please her mother and make everything

all right.

When she was twenty-two, Roth traveled to India, where she lived alone for four months in an

eight-by-ten-foot room with no running water. "It was a turning inward to something much

bigger than myself, or the family I grew up in," she writes. "I started believing again in goodness,

in kindness, and in something far vaster than I could see."

After her return from India, however, Roth went through a personal crisis: "I didn't know what I

was doing. I had no idea what I was good at, or what I could do, and being of service in some

capacity felt crucial to me." Unable to control the direction of her life, she turned to something

familiar that she could control: her eating. She became anorexic.

When she got down to eighty-two pounds, Roth realized what was happening and made another

change: she went back to school to study medicine. Within two months, she had gained eighty

pounds. "It was at that point," she says, "that I realized I was really, truly ruining my life.... The

size of my body, how much I weighed, what I put in my mouth, what I didn't put in my mouth,

what my life was going to be like when I lost weight—this was the center around which

everything else revolved."

www.BeMindful.org Steve Shealy, PhD 813-980-2700

At this crucial juncture, Roth took a writing workshop with poet Ellen Bass and began to put her

experiences down on paper. Her relationship to herself changed once more. She also read Susie

Orbach's Fat Is a Feminist Issue and "realized for the first time that maybe I wasn't a crazy

person, that perhaps what I was doing around food had some meaning, that there was some logic

around it.... I also understood immediately that dieting would never work."

Roth went on to write several best-selling books on food, self-love, and the relationship between

eating and intimacy, including Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating, Appetites, and When

Food Is Love (all Penguin). She has garnered a huge following of readers who feel she speaks

directly to the pain of overeating and underlying issues of deprivation. Though her subject

matter is serious, she addresses it with humor, kindness, and even unabashed joy. She invites us

to celebrate pleasure by eating exactly what we want, with awareness, and also to be willing to

"lose the suffering contest." She has led "Breaking Free" workshops around-the country for two

decades and recently added intensive retreats.

In person, Roth is warm, engaging, and charismatic. Her home in west Marin County, California,

is full of color and light, with a view of the grassy, rolling hills around San Francisco Bay. She

lives with her husband, Matt, her beloved and very fat cat, Blanche, and their new puppy,

Celeste. As we talked in her sun-filled kitchen, Roth would occasionally cut off a hunk of Gruyere

cheese and offer me a taste without missing a beat.

Lertzman: You've said that will- power, discipline, and commitment are "irrelevant when it

comes to dieting." But isn't self-control what dieting is all about?

Roth: I used to believe that if I deprived and punished and frightened myself enough, then

somehow I would change. But those strategies involving willpower and discipline—so celebrated

in our culture—weren't leading me anywhere. In fact, I was killing myself. I began to sense that

the way out was through love, openness, and trust, but I didn't feel any of those for myself at the

time. Still, once the idea of love and trust occurred to me, I knew that I could never go on a diet

again.

Lertzman: You are described as being a pioneer in the anti-dieting movement, but your work is

more of a psychological—and perhaps even spiritual— approach to food and eating.

Roth: First of all, our culture deals with eating and dieting and food as just a women's issue—

and a banal one, at that. New diets come out every month. Diet books are always on the

bestseller list. But people generally don't think of dieting, weight loss, and food in a particularly

deep way.

Sometimes dieting is seen as a feminist issue. That can be incredibly helpful, but it's not broad

enough. Other authors approach the subject from a serious health perspective, but our

relationship with food goes so much deeper than that. It's not just about what you put in your

mouth.

Food is both concrete and metaphorical—it's something we deal with every day, but it can also be

a doorway that leads into the hidden rooms of our lives. My relationship with food is a microcosm

of my relationship to being alive, to my beliefs about trust, pleasure, deprivation, and

nourishment. But looking at these deeper, underlying issues is considered subversive.

Lertzman: Especially if you're advising people to carry a piece of chocolate around in their

pocket.

www.BeMindful.org Steve Shealy, PhD 813-980-2700

Roth: Yes, some people actually think I'm saying, "Eat whatever you want, whenever you want."

That is not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying "Look; pay attention." Most people have hardly

enjoyed a meal in their life. There's no joy or pleasure in food for them, because there's so much

"I should, I shouldn't, I can't, I'm going to feel guilty about it afterward." I teach them how to

slow down. I'm basically saying, "We have a choice: we can taste what is in our mouth and

utterly enjoy ourselves, or we can remain unconscious of it and be in pain." People don't know

there is a choice. It doesn't occur to them that they can actually enjoy eating.

Giving them a piece of chocolate is a way to introduce them to pleasure and awareness. At my

workshops, there's an exercise in which we practice savoring a single chocolate kiss. Once, a man

told me that he had been bingeing on chocolate kisses for twenty years and had never eaten just

one. The one in his mouth was always the precursor to the ten that came after it, and the two

bags after that. But when he actually allowed himself to have one, and was present while eating

it, he didn't want another one. "It's when I feel I can't have one," he said, "that I want twenty."

In a normal dieting mentality, giving that man chocolate would be like handing an ax to an ax

murderer. "I'm supposed to eat chocolate?" people say. "But I'm already forty pounds

overweight." Yes, and you're forty pounds overweight in part because you're not allowing yourself

to have what you're having anyway, and you're not paying attention while you're having it. I am

asking people to stop, just for a moment, and think: Have I ever enjoyed chocolate, really? Do I

know how to enjoy food? Does it bring me pleasure? I know I'm bingeing all the time, but am I

paying attention to even one thing I'm eating? The answer is no.

So I am saying: "Show up, not just for meals, but for your life. Taste the food. Sit down. Focus on

what you're doing." What's the point of eating chocolate if you're not going to have a fabulous

time doing it? You're missing your whole life, because you never let yourself have it.

Lertzman: But if something brings us pleasure, don't we want to do it more? Don't most

Americans already "treat" themselves with rich food?

Roth: That's a good question. I also work with people on the experience of what it's like to have

enough. So many emotional eaters have a sense of never getting enough. They approach life from

an inner sense of poverty, and no amount of food, sex, clothes, or money will satisfy them. I ask

them to question the notion of being forever deprived, to recognize that it is in their minds,

though probably based on a real experience of having felt deprived in the past.

As a child, I couldn't get enough of my mother's love. But I was not in control of my mother. As

an adult, I was in control of how much food I ate, so I ate more to make up for not having had

enough of something vital in my past: in this case, love. I felt deprived and poverty-stricken

when it came to love, and that became part of my motivation for eating compulsively. For the

first twenty-five years of my life, I had a constant feeling that I could not get enough. Realizing

that I could get enough food—and still lose weight— was a major turning point.

If you want to lose weight, you can do it by eating only when you're hungry and stopping when

you've had enough. But this thought is frightening to most people, because it means taking

responsibility and trusting yourself. It goes against the machinery of the culture—particularly

the $33 billion- a-year diet industry. Most people like to be told what to do, especially when it

comes to food. That's part of the lure of diets they make people feel like children again, because

they tell us that we cannot be trusted to handle food; that we are not capable of making up our

own minds and having control over how we eat.

www.BeMindful.org Steve Shealy, PhD 813-980-2700

Lertzman: Why do you think people want to be told what to do?

Roth: It's easier. Many people say to me, "I’m tired of thinking about food. I don't want to spend

one more second thinking about it. Just give me a set of rules, and I will follow them." But the

problem is, people always break the rules. Something in them says, "I don't want to do this. I'm

not going to do this. In fact, I am going to do the opposite of this."

Dieting perpetuates that cycle of making rules and breaking them, which leads into deeper

issues of the heart, such as craving nourishment and gratification, and yet not really allowing

yourself to have it. It perpetuates the belief that if I am good enough, I'll be safe.

Lertzman: You've said that food can lead us into our heart and soul. How?

Roth: You can take any avenue into your heart and soul. Just start with the physical. The

physical is a reflection of the deepest part of yourself. You need to inquire into why you do what

you lo and slow down enough to pay attention and ask questions. For people who have a problem

with overeating, food is a fabulous way in. That's what I'm doing: I am taking this thread, and if

I follow it all the way, it will lead me to the bottom of my heart. It will lead me to everything.

Lertzman: When people come to your workshops, are they looking for a way into their "heart and

soul,'' or are they just wanting to take off some weight?

Roth: Usually, by the time people come to me, they have tried many other ways to lose weight,

and they are in a lot of pain. It's hard to know which is stronger the desire to lose weight or the

desire to, end the pain. If people simply want to lose weight, I tell them that I’m probably not the

best person for them to be working with: there are a lot easier and faster ways to lose weight.

Other people might have serious health issues to which losing weight is critical. Again, my books

and workshops are not for them.

Many people, however, want to lose weight simply because they believe it will make them happy

and stop their pain. So it's not so much the weight they want to lose but the pain. They are the

main audience for my work. At every workshop, I ask, "How many people have lost weight

before?" Everybody raises their hand. "How many of you were ecstatically happy after you lost

weight?” Two people raised their hands. "How many people believe that, when you lose weight

again, you will be ecstatically happy?" Everybody raises their hand again.

In order to lose weight through the approach I teach, you have to be mindful of a few guidelines.

These guidelines include not eating when you’re distracted, such as in the car, or while doing

something else; paying careful attention to the bodily sensations that you recognize as hunger;

and stopping when you've had enough.

But the first step is truly slowing down and noticing what you're doing. Most emotional eaters

not only eat to distract themselves; they distract themselves while they eat. They feel they are

not really supposed to sit down at a table and eat off a plate with silverware, because they're

already overweight. Every time they eat, there's a sense of guilt: I shouldn't be doing this;

therefore, I have to do it standing up, or in the ear, or behind somebody's hack. I have to sneak

food, hiding it not just from others, but from myself.

Because, at bottom, people feel they are not allowed to eat; they are not permitted to take up

space. They are ashamed to actually sit down and give themselves what they want. Simply to eat

with silverware, from a plate, changes the experience completely.

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