the planet more softly and developing openness and lightness and a more inquiring mind is a fundamental, but long-neglected, part of treating your food obsession. On this walk, you will meet and greet a lost essential self. This meeting is absolutely necessary to achieve permanent weight loss. Whether you need professional mentors, friendly support, or travels to distant lands, stay awake and pay attention.
How will you know when you meet your Buddha on the road? What does your spiritual self look like? What does “spiritual” mean? Could a gutsy, tough, and headstrong New Yorker be spiritual? Or does being spiritual mean giving up to become a dishrag? Can you just wave a white flag and be zapped thin? How would a person know if he or she actually surrendered?
You’ll know you’ve surrendered when you notice the following:
Symptoms of a Spiritual Awakening
1. Acting spontaneously without past fears.
2. Loss of interest in judging people.
3. A tendency to let things happen, giving up control.
4. Praying toward heaven while rowing toward shore.
5. Loss of interest in conflict.
6. Appreciating the body’s function rather than its form.
7. Loss of the ability to worry.
8. Frequent reminders that “if you spot it, you got it.”
9. Understanding that “they do it not to you, but for them.”
10. Trusting of your instincts, others, and nature.
11. Attitude of gratitude and abundance.
12. Personal acceptance, warts and all.
•••
“If you are willing
to serenely bear the trial
of being displeasing to yourself,
then you will be for all
a pleasant place of shelter.”
St. Thérèse of Lisi eux
Part one
1983
Jewish girls don’t bow, kneel, or genuflect . . . except in bed, of course.
So what’s a nice Jewish girl like me doing in a place like this?
A Buddhist monastery, no less.
Something I ate?
No, I guess it’s what I don’t eat that’s brought me to this.
When I pass through this chicken-wire gate, I, who make my living talking, will join others who are committed to total silence. I have been auditioning to enter this place for months.
Surrounded by pine-scented woods facing a large volcanic mountain, I listen to the stark alpine quiet that will be my home and wonder why I’m here.
At age ten I weighed exactly what I do now as a mature, premenopausal woman. Just before my tenth birthday, after dieting away thirty pounds, I went to a local malt shop to flirt. I wore a tight maroon skirt with wide black belt, bobby socks, and saddle oxfords. I was allowed to sip a milk shake, sucking the glass dry, as long as I didn’t have sex. In those days, sex was forbidden but chocolate indulged. Today it’s the other way around.
From then on, despite TOFU (The Occasional Foul-Up), I white-knuckled it most of the time, and then repeatedly picked myself up from those slips and got back on the horse. Though now seventy pounds lighter than my top weight, with approaching menopause, I am slowly regaining some weight.
That’s how I ended up in a small plane headed toward the Oregon border and Shasta Abbey with Yves, my lover and business partner, flying us in his beloved Bellanca Viking, a single–engine, wooden-winged aircraft named Lucy.
I’m always scared flying in Lucy as she takes us halfway across the country to my various lecture gigs and TV appearances. Sometimes we fly above 12,000 feet, requiring oxygen masks. One time, as we waited on the ground in Texas, Yves turned to me, white-faced, and said, “The wind shears and thunderstorms are too heavy. You go on ahead with a commercial jet while Lucy and I wait out the storm.” Another time while in Denver, we had to do numerous fly-bys to ascertain from the tower, “Yes, your landing gear is locked in the down position. Over.” Quite honestly, I figured that since we have to land again anyway, we should keep the gear down for the duration. Instead, we stayed over to get it fixed. What do I know about planes?
Anticipating more such surprises to delay my flight to Shasta Abbey, I bury myself in magazines and pistachio nuts. After a rather uneventful trip, Yves settles into a motel and we sit down to share a late supper. Consequently, I arrive at the abbey behind schedule.
While awaiting admittance through the chicken-wire gate, I ponder all it took to get me here.
I try to remember why or how I’ve come to this place. I know I fought really hard to get here. But why?
I didn’t even have a clue how I’d received the summer workshop brochure from the abbey.
Even though I am thin and successful, I am increasingly restless and bored. I know I need deeper connections. I’m in that state of perpetual longing, like when I leave that last bite of chocolate cake.
How often does that happen?
Despite decades of professional accolades, thousands applauding my message, asking for my autograph or photo, I never felt deserving of what came my way. I felt like an imposter, a rotten, bad seed. That fueled my hurried, workaholic overscheduling. It had everything to do with my overeating as well.
I never relaxed enough to enjoy the journey. I never surrendered to a spiritual way of life. I didn’t look or act like any of the people who appeared to be spiritual. They seemed calmer. They believed in God or believed in some kind of a universal oneness: “We’re all connected.” I didn’t get any of it. I didn’t buy into the God concept and relished being in charge of my life and the lives of others, even if I was a bad apple. I’m sure that rotten-to-the-core feeling caused my periodic returns to bouts of compulsive eating; my self-destruct button was still intact.
So, anticipating a chance to get away from the daily emergencies at my HOPE House treatment center, I’d called Shasta Abbey. I’d learned I enjoyed brief forays into the spiritual life, but I really didn’t crave total transformation. I wanted to lose weight, change a little maybe, but keep my winning personality.
Half a year earlier, on my first inquiry over the phone, I listen while on hold, trying to organize a monastery stay, when my reverie is broken with “How did you hear
