When There Is No Watch(er)

A few weeks ago, I took my great uncle's 1976 Hamilton watch into the little clock shop on Williamson St across from Grandpa's Gun Shop. The night before, I had hugged a student goodnight and in the process, somehow caught the watch on her backpack, which then snapped the pin out of the strap that holds it onto my wrist. After searching around for a needle-like object in a haystack-like hallway, I gave up, and decided I'd just get a replacement.

I entered the shop, which I had always passed and wondered about but never had cause to enter, owning only newer clocks, and in it one worker, an older man, crouched with a magnifying glass and glaring light over parts of a clock. His posture one of a jeweler, his intention one of a poet. I felt bad interrupting him, but the bell announced my entrance. He was a bit brusque being interrupted for such a small thing in the middle of a clearly larger, and more lucrative, project, but he quickly put in a new pin and charged me for it. He asked, as he handed back the watch with a scratched glass face I now felt self-conscious about, how it was treating me. "Well," I said, "so long as I don't over wind it, it does really well. I love it. It was my great uncle's." He grinned a half grin, and I left.

Of course, later that day, it stopped working. It was a bit like when my car is making a funny noise that it won't make for the mechanic - I thought, just watch, I'll bring it back to him and it will be working again. Instead, I took it off, suspected I wound it too tight and left it at home. I also realized that one of the watchband straps that hold down the other end had come off in the backpack accident, and didn't want to have to deal with getting a new band, now, too.

I haven't put it on since. At first it was hard to not have a watch - so many people operate with just their cellphones now, but I often don't have pockets and am habituated to having the time on my wrist, not on something I have to pull out to see. Mind you, I trust my cell phone's time better than anything else, but deep inside, I'm an analog girl, and I prefer to have mechanical over digital.

It turns out I prefer neither. Now, as time has passed - or so the calendar tells me - I have relaxed a bit, learned to trust my own sense of time. This weekend I taught a photography workshop and I tested out my sense of time - has it been half an hour? An hour? - in giving talks, during shoots, and listening to others give talks. For the most part I was spot on with the time. When I wore a watch I never bothered, and now, now I don't bother either, but I also seem to know the time and also, time is less important to me. That is to say, actually, that time seems MORE important to me (eg how I "spend" it) but knowing the exact time seems less important. I haven't been late for anything or blown anything off accidentally, so it hasn't really caused problems, and I have to say it has caused benefits to not have the hour so accessible all the time on my wrist.

Buddhism talks about "the watcher" in meditation - the seemingly separate part of ourselves that "notices" when, for instance, we've moved our attention off our breath and onto passing thoughts. It is said that of course there is no separate watcher, that what we are thinking and our awareness of it are one in an ultimate sense, and that we have to let go of that duality in the long run, so we aren't always policing ourselves and seeing a divided self. This is a bit how I've been feeling about time - I feel somehow more in time, on time, a part of time, and that feels natural - as if before, with a watch I checked often, I were more separate both from time and from myself. Weight Watchers feels like this - only the inverse case helped - not paying attention caused disassociation, while checking in with time passing all the time caused disassociation with time. Curious that. Habits are habits and can trigger duality, separation. It's not the system or structure that is inherently a problem, it's how I use it, what I associate with it.

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.

What Gets Lost?

(Image of me at a student's farm teaching a retreat this last weekend,
by Dayna Flores)

"If you lose your mind, come back again"
A slogan from Shambhala Sun Camp

For over a month now, Dylan and I have been doing Weight Watchers. The first couple of weeks were awkward - adjusting to their point system, shocked by how little or much certain things "cost" me. But once I got used to it (and, in fact, went on 10 day retreat where I couldn't enter my info onto the online app or system all the time, which is how you really keep track if you are doing it online rather than "in person" meetings, but still somehow did pretty well, intuitively) it really made sense to me. It still does. There's a sense of how much something "costs" us financially, as always, can we afford to eat out, if so, how much, etc. Then there's now also a sense of what "costs" us physically - I worked out, I have some extra points saved up, so we can go to Culver's if we don't go out again this week anywhere with more than salads.

I like this way, frankly. I have tried "diets" with "calorie counting" before and it hasn't worked - too much to keep track of. This makes it simpler, and comes at a time when, due to Dylan reducing work hours to keep his sanity and assist me in my "business" side of teaching, we are on a tighter financial budget, too. As we buckle down on eating out to save money, we buckle down also on eating to save calories, fat, and weight. So far Dylan has lost 12 pounds, and I've lost 10.

"33 for 33" is our mutual goal - we both turned 33 this year, and losing 33 pounds for each of us would put us both in "healthy range" for our heights, etc, from where we were when we started. But as friends have pointed out, the benefits of WW are long-lasting - even if you don't consciously or electronically "track" your "expenditures" you become far more aware of costs and gains.

I feel it's a bit like a game, actually. Move this here, like Tetris, and weight will drop.
; )
There's strategy for sure - eat as many veggies as you want, basically, because they cost "nothing" in comparison to french fries. And so on, and so on...

This week a "hidden" gain/loss has come up - and it's a bit of both. A feeling of sadness, disconnect with my body has emerged - old trauma mixed with new stories and struggles. I have heard over the years about all that we carry in fat - hormones, emotions, toxins - and I wonder, can't help but wonder, if both literally and metaphorically I am losing some of the weight, the hidden fears and secrets, issues and suffering, that had trapped itself in my extra weight. Or even more likely, losing weight is taking away my barriers, my protection from these darker, harder places, all of which are centered around body image and body hurt. So far it actually feels harder, worse, than it has in awhile - I commented to Dylan that I am more aware now of how "fat" I feel because I am losing weight than I was while I was stuck at one place and in denial - but also real and raw, as if I am ready to work with all of this energy that's been caught inside me.

Food for thought, literally.

Watching the Watcher

We began Weight Watchers on Monday.

This is after a weekend of watching a friend interact with her WW app on her iPhone at a Buddhist program in Chicago being lead by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. We spent much of the time at the retreat talking about "who is doing the watching?" when we become, or aware, that we are thinking, or have even awareness of our object of meditation - breath, candle, sleepiness.

The sense of balancing watching - watching without judgment, watching with curiosity, watching from a slight distance, after all, if one is watching oneself, one has to be beyond one's own nose to do it - and yet, staying connected - is hard stuff. I appreciate just how difficult these practices I have been doing and teaching for years now actually are in a new way. In the past I've given up on tracking my spending because it always shocked me how little bits of spending add up so quickly. The same can be said for calories, for "spending" energy in output/activity and bringing in nutritious food that can be more easily and efficiently burned.

Which, if we take out the word "food" and just use "energy" could be the same said for yoga, for meditation, for writing practice, for Miksang photography.

Again, back to the "resolution" word for Dylan and myself from the last two New Years - "consumption" - watching our cycles of in and out with regards to money, to energy, to food. Somehow, though, my watcher has changed, is gentler, more curious when the "points" (calories+fat+fiber in WW speak) go over, more motivated to keep at the math than ever before. Maybe now is the time, the right time, to let the watcher watch over me. I watch my watcher and notice her newer personality and feel like I can trust her to do some of the work for me.

That's a nice feeling, to not have to watch the watcher, and let her do her job.