the trifold path

This post is a little disjointed- so many new ideas I want to get down. It's something that will take some time to make more sense.

Wow. I think in one of our conversations today Abbey and I really hit on something deep- and important. It began in such a mundane way. I had gone to Walmart to get storage bins (I'm mad at Target at the moment and decided to give some cash to their mortal enemy today, even though I dislike Walmart even more) and saw a shirt I liked. 100% cotton, a red checked pattern (very atypically for me, I have been getting way into fire colors lately, which I find very interesting), camp style. So I took it into the fitting room to make absolutely sure it fit.

If you have tried on clothing at Walmart, you know what a revealing experience it can be. It's not every day (at least for those of us with no room of mirrors at home) you get to contemplate your body from every conceivable angle. The shirt had its own good qualities: the fabric was comfortable, the stitching solid, the buttons well chosen. But one quality was inescapable: no matter how nice the shirt was, I looked lousy. Of course, it had nothing at all to do with the shirt.

I went home, shirtless, full of inner resolve. I suddenly had the feeling this was my last chance to make lasting change. Whether that was just fear, or just bulldada, remains to be seen; but how it felt was exactly was undeniable, and it completely enveloped me.

Abbey, to her eternal credit, changed gears as soon as she heard me relate my Walmart experience and we sat about drawing some new lines in the sand. Change diet, yes, be more religious about the workout schedule, sure. We'd already had this conversation. But she really surprised me. The first words out of her mouth were about how I have a switch in me regarding my relation to food, and that switch needed to be turned off.

Perfect analogy; and, so true.

I'm not just looking to relieve hunger when I eat. I am also looking for entertainment and comfort. The ritual provides me with identity and stability. I'm beginning to realize all my creative energy goes into food preparation. And it's self-perpetuating because I do it every day, I'm pretty good at it, and it's an essential behavior, so it's easy to sink all of my creative momentum into it. But it's a black hole; in the end, there's nothing to show for it except for a spare tire and atherosclerosis. Well, we all get fed, sure, and I have the skills to cut basil in a chiffonade. But it's beginning to depress me thinking of all the more interesting things I could have been doing with that momentum.

What's been missing from my previous attempts to lose weight and get into shape is my mind has not been into it. This is so obvious now you it's as if the fact has been slapping me in the face for decades and I've become an expert at ignoring it.  You hear this platitude about sports and business all the time: is your head in the game? That phrase never struck me as being all that important in my life- until now.

The tools a person can get the mind in sync with the body are wide ranging; the two that appeal to me the most are meditation and guided imagery.  The goal is to reprogram the mind- to turn that switch off, or, more usefully, rewire the switch to perform a new function. Of the elements necessary for my personal transformation, I see this as the most important of all. It's the been the main instrument of my self-sabotage for a long time, and it didn't have a name before today.

I'm struck by the similarity of this triad- food, exercise, meditation- to the three parts of Freud's famous tripartite mind: Ego, Superego, and Id. Surely we know what the Id's domain is: food. The urge to eat is universal in nature; the desire to eat comes from the most primitive part of the brain. Of the three ships with which we are concerned, this one is the hardest to steer. Changing its relationship with food is like trying to change yellow's relationship with lemons. It doesn't seem right to even try, sometimes.

The Superego is exercise: the action we take upon our environment to survive. Although the urge to fight or flee is primitive as well, the forms action can take require strategy and sometimes a measure of skill. Logic is an integral part of action, whether the action be ill-advised or not. The more we act, the greater our need for calories. And the Ego provides the balance between the two. It's the navigator. In many people this guidance is either only needed minimally, or happens naturally, even automatically. For some of us, the connection is not so straightforward. It's up to each of us to find a way to straighten this parts of the self out as needed. I see this as my goal right now.

It remains to be seen if this is just the latest trick I have concocted to convince myself I am really doing something to improve my situation, only to abandon it, give in to my lower impulses, and wait for the next great idea to fool myself all over again.