The next day, I had a day off of work (it was Veteran’s day). I had a whole day in front of me with only one responsibility: to have lunch with the practitioner who had lead my second Beginner’s One Day Sit. Normally, on my day off, I make a list of all the things I want to get done. I time opening of stores with traffic with the time at which my roommates wake up, all in an attempt to make the most of having a WEEK day to myself. But this day, I just did what I did. I did laundry. I caramelized onions. I cleaned my room. I tried to fix my computer.
There were a bunch of times when I said to myself: It’s ten o’clock, what have you done? It’s noon, the day is half over! Hurry up, the sun is going down, you need to get this done before then. But each time these thoughts came up, I just acknowledged them as thoughts, as habits, as my stuff. I wasn’t mad about them, I just looked at them for what they were: insistent little kids who want my attention.
At the same time, I was having the opposite experience with my thoughts around food. Immediately after coming back from the zen center where I had had a full breakfast of delicious tofu, miso soup, and rice porridge, I felt this need to eat. At first, I rationalized the thought: I decided I was thirsty and so I drank some juice. But then, I still wanted to eat.
“You’re totally full!” I said to myself, but then I ate a banana anyway. And then I ate an orange. I went to my room and cleaned for a while, then brought something into the kitchen and decided I should eat some yogurt.
“Seriously, you just ate!” I told myself. “Save the yogurt for later!” But instead, I opened the fridge. There, next to the yogurt was the leftover chocolate fudge I had made for my friends who had gotten mammograms. I ate it.
“Dude! It’s 9 in the morning, and you are eating fudge! And you just ate a full breakfast! Stop it!” But I didn’t. Instead, I grabbed the mint fudge I had made, and ate all of that too.
“Okay,” I said to myself. “You just rushed through two delicious things of fudge without even tasting them! Stop this!” I stopped for a little while but came back a half hour later and had some chips and salsa.
So then I asked myself, “Why am I so mellow with my thoughts about time but so controlled by my thoughts about eating?”
And then I remembered that at the beginning of the practice period, the first thing I tried to “let go” of was time. And when I did this, I hadn’t done it with a goal or to reach some place in which I was free from suffering around time, I had just agreed to “let go” of it. And in doing this, I had started watching my relationship with time, learning my habits and making peace with them.
“Oh,” I thought. “I guess that means that I need to ‘let go’ of food. “ And by that I simply mean that if I want to not feel the way I did at the end of today (bloated, full of fudge that I didn’t even enjoy because I was just eating it, and kind of sick from food that was just snacky, not so wholesome), I need to spend some time observing my relationship with food. Notice it, experiment with it, see what my habits are around it. Maybe, just maybe, those thoughts will lose their power the way my thoughts around time have. Because my thoughts around time have lost their power because I actually practiced making peace with them and developing an awareness around my relationship with them. Huh- look at that, this practice actually works!
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