Someone asked a group on facebook for sharing exploration of The Work of Byron Katie “if anyone has gotten over an eating disorder using The Work, please share how”.
Someone else tagged me….knowing my extreme interest and devotion to healing, first, my own eating issues, and now helping others heal theirs.
What I love about the question is how much it helped me think about how I would answer it most precisely.
I didn’t want to write a whole lot on facebook (shocking, right?) but I knew the question was coming out of all we feel when we’re doing something that seems in direct opposition to our own best interest–actually harmful to ourselves.
Overeating, over-drinking, smoking, compulsive sexual behavior, TV watching, distraction, cleaning too much, over-spending, shopping, internetting, working.
All these behaviors can be so painful. And yet so difficult to stop.
Understanding what’s going on in the mind that triggers these behaviors is immensely helpful. In fact, for me, it’s been the only thing necessary to end the cycle of compulsion.
And being willing to stop.
(Willing is different than forcing, by the way).
Here’s one exercise that might help you, that I didn’t post on facebook when I commented on that person’s wonderful, painful question:
Write down what you hate about Not Eating. Or Not Drinking. Or Not Buying.
What is uncomfortable about it?
What’s the worst that could happen?
What happens if you feel all your emotions, and stop thinking you shouldn’t?
Your list may look something like this:
- If I stopped x behavior….I’d go insane
- If I stopped x behavior….I’d have nothing to do with my anxiety and nervous tension
- I’d be afraid
- I’d have to face silence, and fear
- I’d have to listen to the horrible voices in my head screaming at me (they feel very abusive)
- I’d start to cry
- I’d feel alone and lonely
- I’d be angry with myself for having a craving
- I’d be enraged…at everything
- I couldn’t handle it
Not me.
Without the belief, I do the next thing—I’m on a journey. I notice the moment here. I hear my thoughts, I imagine what it’s like if they weren’t true.
Turning the thought around: it takes a very short time, and is easy.
We’re only seeing if this could be just as true, or truer. It doesn’t mean it SHOULD be easy and for you it hasn’t been.
You get to find examples.
What I can find, is that I can sit with very disturbed emotions and thoughts, and not do anything about them. I have had thoughts I didn’t follow, that I just watched and didn’t believe.
Every night we usually go to sleep, and nothing is happening in those moments. We shut down and we’re not “doing”. We sometimes forget all the other moments in our day when we’re not doing that thing we actually wish we’d stop doing.
But holding the experience of whatever we’re calling “compulsion” or “self-defeating behavior” or “addiction”….
….without blame, rage, self-criticism, shame….
….we can do this just for a moment, and rest without being against it. Letting it be OK that this turmoil appears inside, like a thunderstorm.
Without the belief the turmoil will last for a long time and be very hard to overcome….I can wait, walk, talk with people close to me, be honest, be myself, rest in peace.
Turning it around again: It’s my thinking that is very long, and very very hard.
Yes, I thought so repetitively the same negative thoughts over and over: I should be thin, I’m ugly, I can’t earn enough, I’m not good enough. These all hit me hard.
I was eating and consuming war, not peace.
(But notice, a thought is energy, and can shift like the wind in an instant).
What if less is required, not more?
Much love,