Five Own the Dark
Six Dusty Countries
Seven Lean into Loving Longing
Eight Honor Your Incarnation
Nine Seeking “Judi-ism”
Ten You’re Here Now
Epilogue Bloom Where You’re Planted
I can never repay my debt to the countless monks, teachers, mentors, sponsors, fellow wounded healers, and friends who have helped me trudge the path to self-acceptance and care. Those include Beverly R, Elaine P, Muriel Z, Arlyn R, and Kat G.
I’ve also been supported in this journey by my goddess group in New York—Catherine Boyer, Laura Beecher, Polly Howells, Marta Elders, Marianne Schottenfeld, and Susan Bogas. My “spooks” group in Palm Springs guides my path with wise ladies too numerous to mention. A great spiritual midwife, Elizabeth Stephenson, has been a constant source of excitement, fun, fantasy, and whimsy. I’m even now using her super-spiritual name for higher power, GGATI (God, Goddess, All That Is).
My writing has been nursed so patiently by Ray “Rusty” Straight, Deborah Herman, and my editors at Central Recovery Press, Nancy Schenck and Helen O’Reilly. My assistant, Jeff Hughes, has also helped with countless Internet and computer glitches that eventually taught us more than we ever wanted to learn. (A lot like the spiritual path.)
The most profound blessing found on this path has been my beloved lifetime companion, Henry Kaplan, who senses all the right moves and guides while adapting, cherishes while provoking, and loves me as much as I love him. His irreverence keeps me humble, alive, and open. Definitely a tastier morsel than any bagel.
“Howd-ja-doit?”
“Howd-ja-looz-althatwait?”
“Howd-ja-keepitoff?”
That’s always what I’m asked.
Most people just want to know, “Whadjeet?”
They think it’s only about the food.
When I opened the nation’s first eating disorders unit in 1975 in Los Angeles, every new patient was contemplating an inpatient admission because he or she couldn’t stop eating compulsively. Naturally, the greatest interest was focused on that most treasured love object: the food plan.
Of course, to lose weight and keep it off, you have to know a lot about food. Most of my patients were already amateur nutritionists. Like me, they had read it all and done it all. None of us was fat for lack of trying to lose weight. I had fought my obesity since childhood, and had gained and lost thousands of pounds. At age eight, I was taken to a specialist. We prayed for a thyroid problem that could be beaten with white pills. My mother held my hand as the doctor put me in stirrups and checked for pregnancy. It was the start of a lifetime of failed answers from Western medicine. I never returned for a GYN exam until I was twenty-two and truly pregnant.
Hoping for some magic fix kept me fat. There were no chemical or hormonal imbalances.
No such luck.
I just loved to eat.
I once asked my mother about a picture of me at age five standing on the dusty, coal-covered porch on Scranton’s South Side. “Why’d you let me gorge myself with a corncob in each hand?”
Mom answered, “You just loved to eat. You were always hungry. I’d give you dinner and you’d say, ‘Mommy, I want more.’”
I know today that I was ravenously hungry for a spiritual connection not to be found in food.
My “more” mantra has now become almost four decades of giving up more for the satisfaction of enough. I’m now enough. Life is enough. Today I get enough to eat.
At age twelve I started dieting for my senior prom, which ultimately I went to fat, asked as a mercy date because I was the prom chairperson. Being fat, however, didn’t totally wreck my dating career since I had “such a pretty face” and was wild enough to date ne’er-do-wells and “lesser companions”—men I wouldn’t take out in public. During my early career as a drug addiction counselor, I even dated a few patients. These guys were hip, slick, and cool and knew how to make a fat girl feel sexy. During my first round of Weight Watchers, I had a crush on a drug counselor. I told him I wouldn’t go out with him until I “hit goal weight.” He went back to drugs before I got there. There was always something.
I eventually became a nine-time loser at Weight Watchers; I lost each time, and I was later hired as a consultant. When I tried acupuncture, the needles fell out of my ears. Protein drinks and restrictive diets worked until I ended those forays and binged. The truth is that most of us are expert “dieters” for as long as we stay on the diets.
All diets work. Take your pick. Mark Twain said, “It’s easy to stop smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times.” But how do we stay stopped? What does one do when firm resolve lessens and eating excess food seems the best alternative?
We eat. And, as overeaters, we eat a lot. And we usually regain more weight than we lost.
For permanent weight loss, I had to first learn that there is more to life than four ounces of protein, a cup of vegetables, and ten laps around the pool. And there is more to beating the weight game than intellect. I certainly was smart enough to stay thin. But to stay at a healthy weight, knowing stuff is only part of the equation. The permanent weight-loss goal lies somewhere beyond reason. In fact, I have found that the smarter we are, the more trouble we have surrendering to spirit. I had to surrender to my spiritual instincts. Transcendence cannot be cooked up from a recipe. The spiritual path is personal and precarious. We must first hit our own wall, lean into it, stay awake, accept help, get honest, own our dark side, live at risk, forgive softly, laugh gratefully, give generously, and trust the body’s still voice to tell us how. Then we’ll each find personal wisdom in our own Buddha nature.
A client once told me, “I get up in the morning and my head mugs me.” Being in your own head is like being caught behind enemy lines.
So many are now going under the knife, people are beginning to understand how hard it is to lose weight and keep it off. Most know that the statistics indicate a 98 percent failure rate for all dieters, with only 2 percent achieving lifelong, permanent weight loss. I’ve been in that 2 percent for more than three decades now, and I’d like to expand that slim margin by inviting you in.
We’ve all read about our national overeating epidemic. Americans have a super-sized appetite for fast foods, but that’s not our only problem. Our national girth has more to do with our spiritual connections—how we live, how we think, how we fight, how we love, how we die. We compete and strive to win. We overwork, overplay, overthink, and then eat mindlessly and ravenously. Genetics might load the gun, but environment pulls the trigger.
The journey
