How Was Your Trip?

side of a truck that's been graffitied, paris, june 2013

It's the first question I get upon returning from Europe each summer.
Sometimes I get it when I take smaller teaching trips - Toronto, Chicago, even.
But there's nothing quite like being gone for five weeks to Europe.

It's a fair question to ask. A kind one. And one I often don't want to answer. Here's why.

Indoor Storms

Where have I been?
That's a good question.

I use this time of slowing down end of semester and year to consider how the past 365 days have gone. Where have I visited and taught, what has worked and what hasn't? These questions are crucial and it's not that I don't consider them throughout the year, of course. It's just that New Year's approaching brings revival to mind, and review.

The last month or so has been consistent with the rest of this fall - a blur of Hakomi therapy and resultant heavy emotional processing, weddings and other significant high-caliber celebrations, way too much travel for my own good without enough weekends off, buying the Shambhala Center here in Madison, and endless richness in my weekly writing classes. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to enact something I had been considering doing for awhile - actually using the last class of the week, Wednesday night, to write a "summary" of the week's replies from students and myself. Only, of course, it comes out in writing practice form, so it isn't a list, more a channelled essay. Because the first week I did it was a very rich and somewhat heavy topic (Sacred Space) the end piece blew us all away. This last week's (looking at images of landscapes and writing from there) didn't take as much out of me, but still helped to "process" all the 35 or so stories I hear each week. Anonymously, of course.

I hope to bring these pieces to this blog. I would like to let the students have that as a resource - a combined "hive mind" of wisdom that I don't want stopping at just me. Also, all of these pieces - mine and students' - I am ongoing collecting for an eventual book. Eventual meaning "I have enough on my plate right now but that doesn't stop me from planning it."

Today Dylan and I will finish hanging our new indoor storm windows, a somewhat dated way of keeping out wind that appealed to us when his grandfather in Maine demonstrated his to us a few months ago. I like this idea of the protection from leaking coming from the inside - and as my friend Morgan joked on Facebook when I first posted that we were considering them - "indoor storms are somewhat rare." It never hurts to have a little extra insulation for when things go a bit amok inside and not just out there, where tonight we are expecting our first big blizzard of the season.

The image the indoor storm windows give me is of a classic Tibetan Buddhist analogy: If you want to be able to walk the path, don't try to cover the whole path in carpet to keep your barefeet from getting poked and prodded. Instead, cover your own feet in shoes. Take responsibility for what hurts and work with it internally. This doesn't mean no social justice, but it does mean not making everything about us. Indoor storm protection seems like a good first step for me this way. After all, we can't stop the blizzard from coming, but we can keep the homefires burning.

Gaining and Losing, or, What Gets Lost Part Two

The title of my post on losing weight wasn't called Gaining and Losing, but that was the topic.

I got many responses - comments on the blog and also over email - people noting that they, too, had in some ways had mixed feelings about losing weight. I barely addressed what I meant by that, though, and a few folks were curious. So here it goes, an attempt to get at the nuances of those "emotions stored in fat" that I was talking about...

First, please hop over to Praying Horse to read her comments, as I'd basically be repeating them.
What I have encountered is that, on a literal, external level, I have surely used fat as something to hide behind; something to blame when I am feeling sad, something to excuse self-hatred or explain it. For example, I often tell Dylan that the first sign of depression (meaning, not of emotion, but of emotions being shoved under) is me talking about or thinking about how much I hate my body. I could be the same weight as yesterday and a week before, but the "hatred" arises out of discomfort with more than my body - with emotions, in particular. So on the surface level, the fat shelters me from my own emotions, and on a surface level, I have to deal with them more, face my self-hatred for instance, if it can't hide in my fat, metaphorically.

On an inner level, I definitely rank as an emotional eater: eating when bored, sad, scared; when feeling empty, angry, tired.

But on a secret level, the relationship between fat and emotions goes even deeper for me. This is where Praying Horse's comments really come into play. There's no science, and I am not purporting a theory, rather, talking about the emotional/physical response and my intuitive feelings about connection. The way to say it that feels right to me is something like:
As I am losing weight, I am burning through old emotions that are stored IN that fat.
I have literally had dreams of childhood or adolescence, flashbacks to emotional states, and been triggered by things that haven't triggered me in a long time. This also means the positive emotions, too: felt a happiness and calm, a peace and resilience (from time to time) that I hadn't felt in a long time. Where are these coming from? Intuitively I don't think they are coming from the *fact* of losing weight as much as, as I said above, what is stored in the weight.

I did acid when I was younger on and off for a couple of years. The going theory about acid flashbacks, which I no longer suffer but did for a few years after, is that they are stored in fat. If you burn that fact, the flashbacks are released. This is the intuitive image in my mind for this weight loss/emotion gain process. It ups the ante, means I am dealing with more, and more directly, and need to not cover it over with food.

So the process of exposure, of rawness, of losing my shell and opening up, feeds itself. It's very akin to meditation, what Chogyam Trungpa calls "being processed" - eg cooked. This imagery is powerful for me as well, for obvious reasons. Cooking breaks down the chemicals, softens the walls, makes the food more digestable, palatable, even flavorful. My emotions in the last months have been like food, for sure: juicy like steak, mashed like potatoes, crisp like salad.

As I burn through layers of both my hiding in weight and also hiding from myself in eating, as well as burning through the emotions buried in the fat, I'll keep writing about it. For now, though I wanted to say a bit more about it, so you'd actually hear the experience a bit more clearly.

Any others who have experienced something akin to this, please comment. Thanks for reading.