A Job for Howard

“It's a terrible feeling, isn't it — the self-will run riot? Here you long to inwardly resemble the Dalai Lama humming to himself, or Therese of Liseux at dawn Christmas morning in prayer.”-Anne Lamott

I snapped! Well, some "I" did. I hate hanging in there to watch it, too. That’s worse than the snappage. To date, I have lost about 18 pounds (I strive to weigh myself once monthly only) and I had the sense I underate at lunch yesterday. A few hours after when John was snacking on blue chips a part of me ‘went wild’ and just ‘had’ to have chips and cheese together. That I did and that was that but I felt rebellious after and really not happy after dinner was over. 

That was of course yesterday, not necessarily related to what happened this day. Yet today I did have enough at lunch but I still went for a bread/cheese snack and not in the way it’s recommended either, at least by my sponsor. I’m having a hard time knowing what is right for me, separating it from what I feel I should be doing according to my sponsor, even though my sponsor says there is no wrong way.

I like her a lot. She is younger than me—but that barely comes up. Her background is highly resonant with my own -- most especially when it comes to spiritual beliefs. She has defined her higher power as a guiding force of connection through us all, and that very much is how I've come to think of 'my' higher power. She’ll refer to God and that suits me fine, as it’s rather cumbersome to refer to praying to "my inner guiding feeling of human connection".

Whatever the definition, I am struggling with lining my eating up with my inner sense of what makes sense for me, my higher power, or my mentor, as it’s sometimes called in my Zen practice. I feel myself lining up instead with an inner rebellious child who is hopping mad that she’s being forced to do what she doesn’t want to do. She has her system of control, flawed as it is, in place and tolerates the horrid inconsistencies around her by paying close attention to her food kingdom, reveling in the knowledge that there she lords over her ‘loyal’ but inanimate subjects of chocolate kisses, chocolate chip cookies, and an array of warm, buttery comfort food. She isn’t going down with a fight on this one.

I know she’s not after food. She’s after reassurance that there are steady, dependable things available just for her. The toleration of her as only one part of me after so many years of thinking I am the part she comandeered is in and of itself a huge undertaking. I can. I will. I want to—I know that, how? Ah…. Looks like a job for the mentor.

“I like to think that some even turned to Howard, who can be kind of a generic god for agnostics, a big warm caring galoot of divine presence — Howard, as in, "Our father, who art in Heaven, Howard be thy name."—Anne Lamott