Eating in the Light of the Moon

For most of us, eating takes on meaning way beyond physical nutrition. It can be used as a substitute for love if we are feeling unloved. It can provide a kind of comfort, warmth, even security. This connection is easy to understand when you consider that as babies, our earliest experiences of being loved typically involved being held in our mother’s arms while we were fed. This can be a very powerful association especially if, later on in life, we feel deprived of sufficient experiences where we feel totally loved or accepted. In order to recapture our earlier experience of feeling emotionally nourished, we might try to re-create it by feeding ourselves food and not realize that it is love we are really hungry for.

Eating can be used as a means of providing comfort and support at times when we are feeling sadness or pain. This is a relationship supported by many families and by our culture. We are taught that any pain should be removed as soon as possible, that it’s a bad thing to experience. So when a child goes to the doctor and gets a shot, she is given a lollipop. Or if loved ones are feeling sad, we try to cheer them up by offering them something to eat.

Eating can be used to escape from uncomfortable feelings in much the same way that drugs and alcohol have been used and abused. If we are having a difficult time coping with confusing or conflicting feelings, we may discover that by starving, we are able to disconnect from our bodily sensations so that we can’t feel what’s inside, or we may discover that we can plunge into bingeing large quantities of food or eating small amounts of food nonstop whenever those feelings start to surface. You can’t breathe freely with a too-full belly, and if you can’t breathe freely, you can’t experience your feelings.

Remember the last time you ate a huge meal, when you really stuffed yourself? Remember the sensation you experienced before the guilt set in? You might recall a numbing sensation, where all feeling was blocked out of your awareness and, at least for that moment, you weren’t aware of the exam you had to take the following day, the fight you had with your husband, the job you dreaded going to.

For those who feel a pervasive sense of loneliness and emptiness, food can serve as a constant companion. Eating becomes something to do, a way of filling up the empty space in their lives by creating a sense of fullness in their stomachs. Others may starve themselves so they won’t notice their loneliness. That way they won’t have to take the risk of meeting new people or getting too close to others who they fear might reject them.

For many people, food is a means to communicate thoughts and feelings they don’t know how to communicate directly. The child who experiences her diet-conscious parents as very controlling may put on weight as a means of saying, “You can’t make me be just like you. I am my own person.” Or she may become anorexic to “really show them” who is in charge of her life.

We all use food to one degree or another for reasons other than physical nutrition. It only becomes a problem when it becomes the only thing we ever do to cope. Then we become like “one-trick ponies,” doing that same one thing over and over again to get love, to cope with emotional stress, to communicate our anger, to bear our sadness. A woman caught up in this cycle may experience herself as hungry, but she misinterprets this in all cases as a hunger for food.

Hunger can really be about much more than food. Hunger can be about the need for comfort and nurturance, the need for self-expression, the need for spiritual fulfillment. Any of these needs, when unfulfilled, can leave us feeling a certain emptiness inside. But when we interpret all hunger as a hunger for food, those other needs get buried deeper and deeper and never get taken care of.

To achieve freedom from struggles with food and eating, a woman must learn the language of metaphor. In the language of metaphor, hunger might represent a variety of feelings, needs, and desires. There are all kinds of examples of how our bodies speak to us in metaphor. A “pain in the neck” might really represent some nuisance or irritating situation in life that we need to take care of. We have all felt the need at one time or another to “get something off our chests.” We have all felt “heartbroken” and had “gut reactions.”

In order for a woman to recover from disordered eating she needs to discover the deeper meanings of her hunger, so that she can recognize that her desire to eat compulsively may be speaking to her about her greatest heart’s desire that remains unfulfilled; her tendency to stuff herself may be an attempt to stuff down “unacceptable” or “troublesome” feelings; her need to eat continually may be a reflection of the constant emptiness she experiences in her life; her obsession with having zero body fat may reveal a desire to hide her curvaceous femininity.

Long, long ago in Japan there was a jolly old woman who lived alone in a little house halfway up a hill. She had a few chickens that gave her eggs, but not much more. She usually had very little food to eat and often went hungry.

One evening when she was making a couple of rice cakes for her meager dinner, the rice cakes fell off her kitchen table onto the floor and proceeded to roll out the door and down the hill. Propelled by her hunger, the woman ran after them.

Down, down the rice cakes rolled, picking up speed as they rolled along with the hungry old woman in pursuit, until they came to rest against a slab of rock. Laughing and breathless, the old woman reached down to get her rice cakes when a long, scaly, claw-like hand reached out from behind the rock and snatched them up.

She peered behind the rock just in time to glimpse a large creature scrambling away through a narrow opening in the rock. “My dinner! My dinner!” she shouted, as she hurriedly followed the creature while it scurried through a dark, narrow tunnel. The creature did not stop until it reached a large cave where it was joined by several more strange-looking, large creatures.

The old woman stopped short and took in the sight of these ugly creatures who had horns on their heads, enormous mouths that stretched from ear to ear, and three red eyes that were all staring at her. She realized that she was now in a den of the Oni, Japanese demons that lived underground and only came forth at night.

Because the old woman was so hungry, she became more angry than frightened as she watched the greedy Oni gulping down her cherished rice cakes. “Those are my rice cakes!” she shouted at them. “You have stolen my dinner.”

“Well, come with us and make some more,” the Oni said as he headed deeper into the cave. The woman followed him, for she was now more hungry than ever and couldn’t resist the thought of eating a meal. They went down through a maze of tunnels until they arrived at a cave where there was an enormous round cooking pot. The Oni dropped a few grains of rice into the large pot and filled it with water.

“You’ll need more rice than that,” the old woman scoffed. The Oni just glared at her and handed her a flat wooden paddle. “Take this and start stirring,” he instructed

The old woman did as she was told, and to her amazement the whole pot was soon filled with rice. She made a huge pile of rice cakes for the Oni, taking care to eat some herself.

This was not at all what the old woman wanted to do, but when she realized she was surrounded by Oni and did not know her way home, she decided to keep her thoughts to herself.

The old woman proceeded to make rice cakes for the Oni while privately making plans to escape. She noticed that the water for cooking the rice came from a nearby stream, and she knew that the Oni did not like to cross water, so she figured if she could find a boat she would be able to escape. While she cooked and stirred the rice, she spotted an empty cooking pot that was a little bigger than she was and decided that it would serve very nicely as her escape boat.

The next day, while the Oni slept (for they were night creatures), the old woman put the stirring paddle into the empty pot and dragged it down to the stream. She hopped in and began to use the paddle to paddle herself downstream. But the sound of the dragging pot had awakened a couple of the Oni, and they rushed to the stream’s edge where they shouted in rage.

The old woman paddled faster and faster as she noticed that the Oni were sucking up the water from the stream and swelling up like monstrous balloons. Soon the pot ground to a halt against the rocky bottom of the stream and fish flipped and flopped about in the now dry streambed

“Here, have some fish!” the old woman shouted as she scooped up the fish and began to toss them at the Oni. The greedy Oni, who were always wanting more food, caught the fish with their claws, but when they opened their mouths to eat them, the water from the stream came rushing out and the old woman was afloat again, chuckling at her cleverness.

Eventually, the enormous cooking pot carried her to safety. When she came ashore, she left the pot but kept the magic stirrer and returned to her home on the edge of the hill where she lives to this day.

And she never went hungry again, for with the magic rice paddle, she was able to make as many rice cakes as she needed, and even have enough left over to share with her neighbors.

Stories such as this old Japanese folktale can help us move into the world of metaphor, where we can discover hidden meanings buried beneath the surface, where we can receive the clues that will guide us to freedom from our obsession with food.

The old woman, like so many of us, chased her food because she was driven by her hunger. What is the food that you chase? What might it symbolize? And what is the hunger you are trying to satisfy? For this woman, chasing her food led her to an encounter with hungry demons that lived hidden underground and had voracious appetites. You may recognize these demons as the ones you wrestle with within your own psyche, the ones that don’t show their faces in the light of day but become ever present when the sun sets. What is it they are hungry for? What do they want you to feed them?

Stories such as this and stories such as yours are not to be taken literally. If you do, the characters and the events will seem too preposterous to contain anything of value. But if you can sink deeper into the stories, let them meander around in your psyche, you will discover the truth that they carry amid the tall tales, a truth that can reflect your personal struggle and help reveal solutions to your particular predicament.

In this story, the demons that live underground, in the darkness, were called Oni. What would you call your demons that hide deep in the dark crevices of your unconscious? Addiction to Eating? Loneliness? Fear of Rejection? Financial Insecurity? Self-Loathing? Not-Good-Enough? Never-Thin-Enough? What is it that haunts you, nags at you, holds you captive, wants you to feed it?

Imagine that you have a magic paddle that can create a limitless supply of food to feed your demon. What would that food be? What does your demon want to eat? What does it want you to feed it? Attention? Love? Money? Self-Acceptance? Your Rage?

As long as we interpret our nonphysical hunger literally, we will attempt to use food to satisfy it, and we will remain hungry forever. But when we can define our hungers and develop a deeper awareness of what we are hungry for, we can begin to seek the appropriate nourishment.