Chapter Four

Your Energetic Body
(Pranamaya Kosa)

Imagine that you are at a takeout restaurant grabbing a quick bite to eat after going to a doctor’s appointment. You are contemplating the menu and assessing what you want to eat, distracted by the many choices and aware that you don’t have much time before you need to be back at work. Normally you don’t leave the office, so you forgot to tell your boyfriend that you had the appointment. You could have met him for lunch since your doctor’s office is quite near where he works. After placing your order, you glance around the restaurant and see your boyfriend. Pleasure floods your body, your heart quickens, and you feel a rush of energy rise up through your core. You wave to catch his attention, eager to see him and connect. Your legs feel lighter and you are about to walk over to him when you notice that he is dining with an attractive woman several years younger than the both of you. They are looking at one another intensely. Shock grips your body. The warmth in your chest turns cold and your stomach clenches into a tight knot that feels like a pit. Your breath stops. You are suddenly paralyzed, unable to move.

Emotions are strong energetic currents that manifest in your thoughts and behavior. The feeling of being angry, having a panic attack, being in love, or as in the case above, being threatened romantically are felt as strong waves of energy in the body. These energetic states are intensely real and dramatic, though unless you express them to others, they are usually invisible. The second sheath of your Being is this energetic body. Emanating through and around your skin, bone, and organs is a buzzing universe of energy. Energy is a real thing in your body—your heart is a pump that is fueled by energy and your neurons exchange information through energetic impulses. Your moods, tension states, and feelings of relaxation are all governed by energy. Yoga brings new awareness to this omnipresent yet invisible aspect of your Being. Through this awareness, you can learn to manage and direct your energetic states with more consciousness and intention.

One of the greatest gifts of a yoga and meditation practice is that it opens you up to an appreciation of the subtle flow of energy in your body. In our culture, most of us are so entranced by big energy (TV, bright lights, loud music, gossip … ) that we have lost our ability to attend to, much less marvel, at, the small miracles of everyday life. Many of us, in search of BIG sensation, unwittingly settle for “BIG food.” One of my clients recognized that she found excitement in a day based on what she would eat. I don’t think she is unusual. David Kessler’s book The End of Overeating discusses the use of big, chemically enhanced fat and flavor that manipulate our taste buds and brain/stomach chemistry in order to encourage addiction to these substances. These artificially enhanced foods alter, might I even say pervert, our tastes so that subtle, natural flavors are lost on us. Instead, we seek hit-you-over-the-head textures and flavors that excite, rather than satiate, our appetites. Our gastrointestinal tracts have become amusement parks, leading us to seek out the thrills of a roller coaster (think about your blood sugar!) on a plate, or in a takeout bag, as the case may be.

Yoga and meditation are subtle practices. We do these practices so that we can turn inward and settle our attention and begin to notice things like our habitual energy patterns. This journey is a process that takes time and commitment. At first it may feel unnatural, like a waste of time. You may be so used to being continually stimulated that you feel lost when the noise is turned down. Be patient with yourself and with the practices. There is no other way to tune in to the subtle than to go through a period of withdrawal from the normal bombardment of noise. After a period of time, you will notice the feeling of a deep, satisfying breath, the pleasure of releasing a tight muscle, letting go of your jaw, and the gift of attuning to the gentle hum of life right under your skin.

Pitfalls: Barriers to Change

We will now use the traditional yogic concept of prana/energy to shed light on issues that are relevant to a Western lifestyle. First we address several “pitfalls” using the concept of energy to allow a different perspective. The pitfall of resistance is our first topic. Resistance is a powerful deterrent to change, but it can be managed when you have awareness of its energetic pull toward the status quo. We move on to address the pitfall of chronic tension, the pitfall of difficult moods and impulsive behavior, the use of food to self-medicate, and how these behaviors coalesce to create a problematic identity, which has its own energetic current. We then address the pitfall of hunger and how this almighty force can bring you to your knees if you are not well versed in energy-management skills. Then we move into the solutions offered by yoga. First we discuss how physical movement, particularly yoga, is a magnificent tool to address problematic energy patterns. Bringing more awareness to the energetic feel of your body gives you the power to shift out of tense or chaotic energy states without turning to habitual, unhealthy behaviors like overeating. The role that breath awareness has in helping you to relate more consciously to your energy is then discussed. Finally, the role of self-discipline and mindful management of your energy is addressed in relation to how yoga can help you integrate more awareness and conscious management of energy into your daily life.

What You Resist Persists

I first met Brenda about six years ago. She has large eyes whose stare evokes that of a deer in the headlights. She is tall, very pretty, and very thin. She had struggled with food restriction for many years before consulting with me. When she first came in she was very shaken, as in literally shaken, due to suffering a grand mal seizure as a result of electrolyte imbalance caused by food restriction. Brenda can go days without eating and she likes it. “It’s like a high, like you can do something no one else can do. I look at the other mothers in the park and the ones who are thin, and I say to myself, ‘I know what you’re doing! I know what you’re up to!’” Brenda had a rather wild look in her eye when she related this to me, and I could literally feel the pull of her anorexia as she spoke. Her weight was stable at the time, however, and she stopped therapy and I didn’t see her for several years. Then she came back. She had started restricting again, had had another seizure, and was scared. “I’m done with it this time,” she declared. “It’s so not worth it.” We worked together until she got pregnant with her second child and then she stopped coming again. I heard from her a few years later after another grand mal seizure nearly killed her. Thankfully, a friend was with her and called the paramedics, who were able to save her life. This time I think she has been scared straight. She is also more open to exploring the severe abuse that shadowed her upbringing in a rigidly religious home. She was beaten by her God-fearing father in measured, brutally self-righteous blows with the paddle that hung over the dinner table. Her mother, who also restricts food, subtly resented and undermined her adolescent daughter’s growing beauty and burgeoning sexuality. “I can beat you at this game” (being thin), Brenda remembered feeling toward the mother who wouldn’t protect her.

If anyone exemplifies the power of resistance, the drift back to the status quo, it is Brenda. Helping her come to terms with the unspeakable issues beneath the surface of her symptoms has been very important in her healing. But look what it took to get her there! And I am afraid that this is not unique to Brenda. Especially when you enjoy the payoff of your symptom, say the high from not eating or the comatose daze from bingeing, it is very hard indeed to give it up. Resistance is held in place by the obstacles to clear seeing identified in yoga as the kleshas. Attraction: “Oh, it feels good,” like when you bite into that first piece of pepperoni pizza dripping with cheese. Or conversely when you turn down the pizza and revel in the empty pit in your belly, feeling all-powerful for a moment. Then there is Aversion: “I will not tolerate that!” Like when you are feeling exhausted and hungry and the thought of another carrot makes you want to hurl—and stop off at Taco Bell. Or, if you restrict food, the thought of feeling full after a meal fills you with unspeakable dread. Ego steps in and supports attraction and aversion, announcing, “This is just how I do things, thank you very much.” This could also sound like, “I can’t do yoga because I’m not flexible.” Or “I don’t need to eat like other people do.” And of course there is Fear, who says, “God, no, I can’t handle that!” This strong feeling might be called up by fearing others will see you as incompetent if you can’t keep up in a yoga class. Or fear of living without your habitual comforts, “What else is there?” But most of all, we fear what lurks behind the symptom—the untold abuses, shames, and regrets that many of us harbor just beneath what is visible. The only way to loosen these knots formed by the kleshas is by facing the fears and feeling into the aversions. This means identifying what you are avoiding and accepting its presence in your life. If you dread the starkness of life without the comfort of food, you must feel into this by stepping away from the habitual use of food to fill space. You face your aversion to loneliness, which opens a new possibility. You have reached behind your symptoms and done something different and that is outside of your habitual pattern. A pithy slogan from Overeaters Anonymous tells us, “If you want to find out why you’re eating, stop eating.” And of course, for Brenda, it is the inverse, “If you want to find out why you’re not eating, start eating.” We must go to that uncomfortable place beyond our habitual pattern in order to feel into what we are avoiding. Yes, you will resist the change, but you can harness the power of your intention, feel the resistance, and make a change in spite of it.

Familiarize Yourself with Your Pattern of Resistance

I know that I am not alone in resisting my yoga and meditation practice. I was tickled one day when an excellent yoga teacher at my neighborhood studio announced during the beginning sequence, “Everyone in here is resisting, including me.” This made my own pattern of resistance more conscious for me, as well as transforming it into a shared experience. I have learned that it is not particularly helpful to ask “Why?” or even “What?” you are resisting. Instead, just feel it, make it conscious, and get interested in the energy of your resistance. For me it is an inner contraction, a pulling away that is best phrased as, “But I don’t wanna!” or “I’m scared.” Of what? Of whatever. Of being too tired, feeling too much, showing up, being seen, engaging. I have learned that the “I don’t wannas” and the fear dependably recede and often transfigure into a “Bring it on!” mode toward the end of a practice. The arc of this cycle has become familiar and predictable for me and is applicable to other endeavors in my life, including writing this. It is the great secret of action, and we all know this on some level. You know that once you start something it’s really not so bad. This includes your taxes, cleaning your closet, and your yoga practice.

Your resistance will show itself in various ways, such as:

“I don’t have the time.”
“I’m not very good at it.”
“It’s boring.”
“I don’t have the time.”
“I don’t wanna.”
“My favorite TV show is on.”
“I’ve had a bad day.”
“I don’t have the time.”
“I’m giving myself a break today.”

Yoga and meditation provide an opportunity to get to know your patterns of resistance and self-sabotage. If in the past you have taken on a new venture with enthusiasm and vigor only to have it peter out within a few days or weeks, consider this an opportunity to re-experience this pattern with more awareness and a different outcome. We tend to repeat patterns throughout our lives (remember samskaras?). As you become more familiar with your pattern of resistance, you become better equipped to ignore it—to wink and smile as you notice your self-sabotaging, defeatist kvetching and carry on with your larger intentions for yourself regardless.

It is important to get really familiar with the pattern and energy of your resistance. Visualize your retraction of self, the inward pull of your body into self-protection mode. For me, the “I don’t wannas” mentioned above are coupled with a physical experience of withholding energy right before I go into the yoga room. It is hard to describe, but I feel it as a wash of fatigue coupled with a dollop of fear and a sprinkle of doubt. If I had to visualize myself, I would be collapsing inward in order to protect my energy. As an interesting aside, when it’s an afternoon yoga class, I notice that my ankles are often a bit swollen before class and then less so afterward. So my resistance is both physical and emotional. By getting to know this pattern, it need not be threatening or “bad,” but rather a matter of fact. With awareness, you can counter your resistance by gently coaxing yourself toward the unknown. And over time, the unknown becomes more familiar, and you remind yourself that you know that you will feel better after you practice. It becomes known terrain that you trust yourself to navigate.

Anticipate Resistance

The next step to managing your resistance in a more conscious way is to anticipate it. I want you to think about the repetitive excuses listed above as a news ticker monotonously circling around your experience. Resistance is ubiquitous. It is also boring—it offers no new information and seeks to keep the status quo. It’s no big deal if you learn to recognize it, label it, and carry on with your commitments in spite of it. The more you do this, the easier it becomes and your resistance becomes weaker relative to your intentions. This gives you a feeling of great strength because you develop the confidence borne of knowing that You, your intentions, your values, and your capacity for change are larger than your resistance. Each repetition offers you the opportunity to do something different, but you have to be ready for the magnetic pull back to the status quo and determined to hold to the road of your larger intentions. As Iyengar says: “Humans innately resist change because we feel safe with what is familiar and fear the insecurity that comes with something new. We tend to live in a familiar fixed routine and try to avoid accepting or even feeling what is beyond the known … We seek freedom but cling to bondage.”

In the process of committing to a yoga and meditation practice, you can expect to bump up against a lot of resistance. For one thing, although sexy yoga pants abound in magazines and shops, the spirit of the practice of yoga and meditation are not supported in our cultural milieu. The spirit of these practices has very little to do with, in fact is antithetical to, a fixation upon how you look or image enhancement. Furthermore, in our daily lives most of us are inundated by to-do lists and are juggling various demands in what can feel like a nonstop race to the finish line. Because “everyone else is doing it,” it lends this style of living a veil of normalcy and even virtue. Although you may know that this is a very dysfunctional way to live, running from commitment to commitment, collapsing in front of the TV at night, grabbing takeout food on the way home … it feels “normal” because this is what you are used to. You also may feel as though you have no choice given the various demands on your time. You have to trust that by giving yourself over to the unfamiliar, new vistas of experience and possibility await you.

Here’s how anticipating resistance can help. Let’s say you promised yourself that you were going to go to yoga class after work three evenings a week. It is Wednesday evening and you are preparing to leave work after a stressful day. You feel like crap. You have a pile of undone tasks on your desk and your habitual pattern would be to grab a snack and plow through it. But you made that commitment to yourself, “Damn … !” You also remember your last conversation with your therapist and how you both agreed that you needed to be prepared to face your pattern of flaking out on your intentions. That settles it. Tired of the years of broken promises to yourself regarding exercise and remembering how good you felt after class on Saturday, you schlump out of the office and head to the studio. You get there just in time, dreading the practice because you are so tired. What if you can’t keep up? The thought of a cool glass of wine and the news sounds so good. The young girl at the desk checks you in and greets you with a big smile. You warm in response. The class starts out in child’s pose and the teacher holds the room in silence for a few minutes, merely suggesting that you connect with your breath. You feel very safe in the shared stillness. The weight of your body sinks in to the mat as your arms stretch over your head. You are surprised to feel your eyes well up a bit as you connect with the amount of tension you are holding in your body. You lift into downward facing dog and feel the blood flow through your aching shoulders and into your head. You have entered the practice. A new pattern is being born.

Allow a New Perspective

Remember the pictures you may have seen in school as a child where if you look at it one way it appears to be a vase, but then if you look at it with a different focus you see the profile of an old woman? This is a great example of how our perspective can get captured by one way of doing things, or looking at things, when another possibility is right there, “hidden in plain sight.” When you change your perspective on a “problem,” often you see that the problem actually hides a gift. Perhaps the pain created by your relationship to food has allowed you to be open to this book and will help you to re-prioritize your commitment to make more room for self-nurture in your life. In order to begin seeing the “problem” differently, however, you must first clear some space that allows you to have a different perspective on your life. Essentially, this means that in order to see the problem differently, you must DO something different. A shift in perspective only occurs when you break out of the familiar pattern/samskara. As long as you are doing the same old thing, you will see the problem in the same old way. In the example above, if you had plowed through your work and then gone home and had takeout food in front of the television, you would have conceived of the problem in the same old way. “I have no willpower.” “I always self-sabotage.” “I’m just too busy.” But because you did something different, you see the problem differently. “I carry so much tension in my body.” “I have been so driven in my life that I haven’t learned to take care of myself.” This new perspective comes from a place of empathy and self-love, rather than from a self-punitive and defeated place.

Reflections on Your Resistance

1. Look over the list of excuses for non-action (or continuation of self-sabotaging behavior) and check off the ones that you most commonly use.
2. Reflect further on your pattern of self-sabotage. How often do you make internal commitments to take better care of yourself? How long do you usually stay with these commitments? What reasons do you give for foreclosing on the process? (Remember, foreclosure means aborting your commitment when it gets difficult rather than holding form in the face of discomfort.) I am guessing you might be surprised to discover that your pattern of foreclosure is relatively consistent. This is actually good news because it allows you to see the stagnant quality to your resistance and can spark curiosity about what lies on the other side.
3. Now make a list of your intentions for the week. How often do you plan to meditate or do yoga? When will you practice? How will you manage your resistance?

The Energy of Chronic Tension

I recently saw a new dentist. He came highly recommended by my hygienist after my old dentist ran away to Hawaii. I had had a lot of faith in my old dentist and assumed he was keeping me in the know about the state of my oral hygiene. Apparently not. My new dentist is a very affable, young-looking man who means business. “Yep,” he commented to no one in particular as he examined my mouth, “this one’s an A-plus grinder.” “I am?” I inquired, genuinely surprised. “I’m not just a clencher?” “Nope,” he said definitively, “you are an expert, long-term grinder.” He went on to explain the mechanics of the situation in my mouth and the dire results of this unconscious habit. “My god,” I thought to myself, “imagine if I didn’t do yoga!” After this appointment, I became acutely aware of my clenching. I noticed the grim set to my jaw as I rushed through various activities, the fear nipping at my heels that I wouldn’t get such and such done in time. The pressure I continually put on myself to finish this, that, and the other thing before taking off to accomplish one more must-do on the list. It’s taken a toll.

Many people, like me, unwittingly walk around in a state of internal tension. This creates a mood that can quite easily plummet into depression or spike into anxiety. The tension is unconscious and is perpetuated by unhealthful forms of self-soothing, like overeating or overdrinking, which create a drugged state of exhaustion and numbness that masquerades as relaxation. Relating this to yoga terminology, chronic tension is a samskara/habit that is lodged in your energetic and physical body. Because it is all you know, you are not consciously aware of it. Like me, someone has to point it out to you. The tension is perpetuated by your thoughts and labeled with words like “stressed,” “pissed,” or “overwhelmed.” The tension is primarily physical and energetic. What I mean by this is it is not caused your thoughts or your urgent to-do list. These are just the hooks that you hang your internal tension on. The tension is lodged in the physical tissue and energetic feel of your body and in order to begin addressing it, you have to enter the world of your physical/energetic body.

Yoga provides a platform for you to begin noticing your chronic tension. You are in class standing in Warrior I, which is a strong standing pose often performed near the beginning of class to warm the body. You are aware of the burning in your legs and then the teacher says, “Relax your jaw.” “Oh,” you think to yourself as you soften the back of your throat and jaw, “I didn’t realize I was holding my jaw.” As you soften your physical body, you notice a shift in the feel of your whole body. This is an energetic shift that was precipitated by releasing your jaw and goes on to create a cascade of changes in the energetic current through your body.

I was leaving a yoga class the other day and started chatting with the woman sitting on the couch. “Sorry,” I said, as I clumsily grabbed my bag and accidentally jostled her, “I’m in a yoga zone.” “Isn’t is amazing?” she replied, “you just never leave a yoga class feeling bad.” I concurred wholeheartedly. “You are so right,” I had to elaborate, “sometimes after a run or the gym I just feel drained, but not after a yoga class.” This is the energetic magic of the practice. The way the teacher starts out by coaxing breath into your body. The conscious movement that is synchronized with your breath and shifts rigid or jangled patterns in your body into more rhythmic states. As you repeat this practice, a new awareness is borne in your mind-body that you can take off your mat. You begin to notice your holding patterns away from the mat and you experience the magic of how awareness automatically brings a change to your internal state. You can also go through the motions of a downward dog or forward bend on your own and benefit from the shifts these humble movements automatically create in your energetic body, particularly the more you practice them. As my teeth grinding habit so clearly shows, these patterns go deep and developing awareness is a process, coming in layers as you are ready for them. This illustrates the need for patience with yourself as you travel along the path.

Reflections on Your Tension Levels

1. How much tension do you carry from day to day? Some ways to assess this are your level of worry, your ability to allow things to not be perfect, and your ability to sleep and enjoy yourself.
2. Where do you store tension in your body? Common locations are the jaw, shoulders, and the stomach.
3. What are some positive ways that you could begin addressing your tension more proactively? Some examples are starting a yoga or meditation practice, taking a real lunch hour (as opposed to a “working lunch”), or taking a walk in the evening.

Food and Your Mood

Many people use food as a means of self-soothing. This can range from a reward after a hard day, comfort in the face of disappointment, or a salve for a chronically tense body and mind. This might sound like, “I’m feeling depressed, what can I eat?” But often the use of food for mood management is preconscious and habitual, meaning you don’t even realize food is a crutch because it’s such an ingrained habit. This applies to individuals who use food indiscriminately, without even pausing to reflect on hunger levels or mood states. A big bowl of ice cream in front of the TV is just what you do. The underbelly of this kind of habitual self-soothing is that although it serves as a form of self-medication for depression, anxiety, or stress, ultimately it only reinforces the problems. We will address this habit from an energetic perspective, conceptualizing food as a form of energy you use to shift problematic energy states in your body.

The unconscious use of food to self-soothe was an ingrained habit for Wanda, a forty-something woman I had been working with for years to address various issues. Compulsive eating was just one on a list including severe anxiety and marital problems. When I first met Wanda, she was a member of Weight Watchers, and had even trained to be a leader. At that time, therapy focused on helping her manage her chronic anxiety, which had spiked after her husband got drunk one night and informed her that he no longer wanted to be married. Devastated by the fear of abandonment, she clung desperately to the hope that she could fix the marriage. Her husband went along for the ride, dutifully attending couples counseling and going through the motions of marital life. Wanda’s anxiety worsened. She began gaining weight, angrily eating the brownies he insisted on making with her daughter without regard for her issues with food and compulsive eating. Finally, after discovering that he was involved in an affair, Wanda’s anxiety grew to a point where she could barely function. She shook all over, could not eat, and had trouble containing her tears in front of her eleven-year-old daughter. Over the next year, she made tremendous progress, finally accepting the fact that the marriage was over and finding a full-time job as a physical therapist after several years of not working. She continued to struggle with her weight and her eating, and it served as an anchor through the brutal period of dealing with her husband’s behavior and negotiating the divorce. During this trying time, she gave herself leeway to eat what she wanted and comfort herself with food. After she was through the divorce, she wanted to move forward and part of this, in her mind, involved shedding the extra weight she had gained.

Change was very difficult for Wanda because her evening pattern of compulsive eating was so driven and habitual that she was hard-pressed to identify the triggers to her overeating. Rather, she described “just finding” herself in the kitchen eating, usually without even having an internal conflict of “I want to/I shouldn’t.” The habit had become more ingrained over the past stressful year and seemed to function on its own accord, sweeping her along in its tide. Even before the year of her divorce, Wanda had had a long-standing pattern of using food for comfort. As a skinny kid, she could eat whatever she wanted. Adults would wag their fingers and say, “You’ll pay for that later,” but never bother to discuss good nutrition or mindful eating habits. Now Wanda was trying to strong-arm herself into losing weight. She would be very concerned about her weight during the day and would often subsist on an Ensure until dinner. Then, in the evening, when she was letting down from the day, she would consume large quantities of junk food while watching her shows on TV. This was her “reward” for the day. Her concerns about her weight, so prominent during the day, were put on the shelf until morning. Then she would awake depressed and anxious, ready to face another day of penance.

This disconnect between cause and effect is not uncommon for people who chronically overeat. This is not due to lack of intelligence! Well, let me rephrase that—this is not due to lack of cleverness. It is due to lack of intelligence, if we define intelligence in the yogic understanding as acting in ways that truly benefit us. Because we live in a very clever society, many of us suffer this form of lack of intelligence. Wanda’s disconnect from seeing the connection between cause and effect with regard to her compulsive eating was caused by her urgent need for self-soothing. Wanda’s long day of stress and starvation created such a press of internal tension (think “bad energy”) that her logical mind (if A, then B) was literally not accessible to her in the evening. Instead, driven by stress, loneliness, and the intense need for soothing, she was hell-bent to make herself feel better the quickest way she knew how. Her habit/samskara of using food for comfort lit up in the evening, and nothing was going to stop her.

A positive step for Wanda was joining Weight Watchers again so that she introduced more conflict into her evening pattern of self-soothing. In her case, introducing conflict into her habitual nighttime eating was good because she needed some motivation to bring awareness to her driven eating pattern. In addition to her eating disorder, Wanda has a virulent anxiety disorder, marked by constantly second-guessing her judgment, her parenting, and her basic acceptability as a person. Charming and engaging at one level, she suffered an ongoing litany of self-doubt just below her smile. Wanda powered through her days by suppressing her fears about her competence and ignoring the internal press of anxiety. Her core fear was that she would be discovered as incompetent and chastised by a punitive authority figure. This is not a pleasant way to live! The “energetic” component to her bingeing reflects her need to bring a “yes”—some permission and relief—into her inner world of self-doubt and negativity. As self-destructive as her evening binges were, they actually represented her attempt to take care of herself and balance her chronic fear with some pleasure and relief. By joining Weight Watchers, she introduced some conflict into her experience of evening bingeing/self-soothing. Taking away this ready salve for tension\ temporarily increased her anxiety. However, by interrupting this samskara/pattern, she opened a path to discover more beneficial habits of self-soothing. She began walking her dog after work, and after a few weeks found this to be a far more satisfying form of stress release. “I never want to walk Buddy when I get home because I’m so tired, but once I get out the door I am so glad that I made the choice. And I notice I’m not as tired when I get back.”

One of the first things to give way when facing negative mood states is healthful food and exercise choices, especially for those who do not have positive habits/samskaras around eating and exercise. A negative mood can so easily envelop you, becoming your “reality” and erasing the valiant goals you set for yourself in a more positive mind-set (was it just this morning?). The urgency for soothing in the moment supersedes all other intentions. “I don’t care” takes over and initiates a domino effect of negativity in your behavior, like bingeing, which brings on more destructive thoughts and behaviors, like self-hatred, procrastination, and social withdrawal. Physical depletion often contributes to the urgency for sustenance and comfort that accompanies a depressed or anxious mood. As you develop more awareness of your habitual anxiety or depression, you may notice that you use food to soothe the tension of chronic anxiety. Food can easily serve as a “yes” in a world of “no” (i.e., contraction and negativity). Perhaps soft, billowy, sumptuous substances allow a brief relaxation of your inner girdle of tension. Or eating crunchy, salty textures allow you to release the pent-up frustration that you don’t allow yourself to express directly. In contrast to the tension of anxiety, depression is a pushing down of energy in your life so that you are chronically depleted. Food can then be used as an energizer, a way to pump yourself up to face the next task, or it can be the reward to get to at the end of a task. If any of these uses of food apply to you, it is important to recognize that you are using food to self-medicate—and NOT beat yourself up for it. This requires you to bring a tone of mitri, or self-love, to your understanding of your pattern. You recognize that your use of food has served a purpose in your life, you have needed its support in the past. At the same time, it is vital that you develop skills to work with your tension, or suppression of energy, in ways that guide you away from using food as an energizer or soother. The yoga of food involves putting food in its rightful place in your life and not relying on it for energy/emotional management.

Reflections on Food and Your Mood

1. Reflect upon your habitual ways of coping with uncomfortable moods. What methods are self-destructive and serve to reinforce your negative feelings? What are your healthier, more productive coping methods?
2. What role does food play in mood regulation throughout your day? Does it provide something to look forward to? Or is it more a source of guilt and stress? Perhaps it is both.
3. What are some ways you can bring mitri/self-love to your problematic moods and intercede when you are vulnerable to overeating? Some ideas are journaling, music, taking a bath, or resting.

The Energies of Mood and Impulse

We all know that feeling of being carried away and doing something that we shouldn’t but just not caring at the moment. You are caught in a wave of energy and you are swept along in its current. “So what?” you think to yourself, “I’ll deal with the fallout later.” Sometimes impulsive behavior comes after a wave of intense energy—say being really angry and then throwing something. But sometimes impulsive behavior sneaks up on you and carries you along in a subtle grip that you barely notice. The yoga of food involves getting wise to how this form of impulsivity can create inadvertent overeating and sometimes more drastic binges.

I cannot tell you how many of my seemingly civilized meals have been tarnished by the inadvertent pattern of impulsivity. For example, let’s say I plan to go out to dinner with my husband. I look forward to it during the day, perhaps not eating as much as usual so that I will be sure to enjoy the meal. I tell myself that I am not going to overeat, but don’t think about it too much. We arrive at the establishment pleasantly hungry and are seated. The dining room’s ambiance is pleasant and sophisticated, the clink of silverware and wineglasses adding to the busy yet serene feel. The waitress introduces herself; she will be “taking care of us” tonight. I relax into the pleasure of being cared for. Then comes the wine and a pleasant buzz. “More wine?” the waitress appears and graciously refills my glass before she takes our order. “Oh, thank you,” I murmur, enraptured by the moment. We choose carefully and then sit back and await good things to come. First the savory salad with lightly dressed greens, just the right proportions of crunch, sweet, and creaminess. The bread is crusty and resilient, delicious with a little butter. Our appetites whetted, we are ready for the entrées, glancing up from our conversation when we catch a glimpse of the waitress in our vicinity. “Your entrées will be right up,” she assures us, noticing our eager looks in her direction. The entrées arrive and we descend into them. I don’t stop to consider how hungry I actually am at this point. The sautéed vegetables are tender and delicately spiced, the meat falls apart pliantly with just the right amount of resistance, the creamy potatoes bind it all together. “How are your meals?” the waitress inquires. “Don’t interrupt me,” I think as I reply, “Delicious, thank you.” “Would you like dessert?” Our waitress appears with the dessert tray after clearing our plates. “I’ll have the lemon tart,” says my husband. He’s a sucker for lemon desserts. “I’ll bring two forks,” our waitress assures us. At some point during the entrée there was a peep from in my body-mind, “Melissa, you’ve had enough. You should stop.” The food tastes so good and I just don’t want to hear it. “I’ll deal with it later,” comes my habitual response as I give in to the impulse to keep the stream of pleasure coming. Dessert arrives and the rest is history.

Impulsive behavior rarely has positive outcome and often leaves a big mess to clean up. The above scene is a rather minor example of giving in to impulse. Yet for me, the repeated abuses of my digestive system has created fallout that I am still trying to clean up. But at the time, these consequences don’t seem to matter. When you are in the grip of an energetic impulse that has a lot of current, it is very difficult to withstand its thrust. When it has built up without your awareness, by the time the wave hits, the force is much greater than your powers of restraint. Although I had a vague awareness of my tendency to overeat, I hadn’t actively planned a way to manage it. Thus, I was helpless in its current, especially after a few glasses of wine. Such ignore-ance commonly results in a food binge, an anger attack, or even having unprotected sex. The release feels good in the short term but the results can be dire, even life changing.

Vanessa does not have an eating disorder. She does, however, have a mood disorder wherein she experiences “meltdowns” that render her a “crazy woman” far removed from her usual contained, highly articulate, and insightful persona. Vanessa is in her early forties and had recently left a demanding corporate career when she contacted me. She sought therapy due to periodic episodes of out-of-control behavior, wherein she would act in a highly uncharacteristic way, like drinking large amounts of alcohol and driving away from her boyfriend’s home in an inarticulate state of rage and shame that defied translation into words. Helping Vanessa communicate these profoundly distressing states using language and name the precursors to her meltdowns was an initial step in gaining some control over these episodes. This is similar to what I did above when I named the precursors to my overeating and identified my habitual pattern of denial and self-sabotage.

Your ability to understand and name fluctuations in your mood and energy is fundamental to your ability to manage your impulses—in general and around food. You develop an understanding of your patterns, the precursors to impulsive acting out, and the unfortunate outcome of your behavior. The yoga of food helps you begin working with a more long-term view of your behavior in relation to food and to bring impulse control to your choices regardless of what your mood is like at the time. This will look and sound something like this—“I am feeling really depressed right now. I am physically depleted and feel bad about the comment so-and-so made to me. I am feeling like things will never change. I don’t care about being healthy because I know it will never happen. I want to eat that piece of cake (that whole cake?) because it’s the only comfort I have. But I also know that I need to find a better way to cope when I feel bad. I am going to walk around the block and then see how I feel.” Notice that you did not say, “I am not going to eat the cake.” Rather, you left it open, but made the huge step of delaying the impulse by interceding with another activity. This takes an ability to distance from the negative feeling, rather than being enveloped by it. This delay helps you develop something called the Witnessing capacity in your consciousness (we call this the observing ego in Western psychology). The Witnessing capacity helps you to distance a bit from the immediacy of your experience and observe your patterns. This can open up space for you to make different choices, as you see that your patterns are not actually “you,” but rather behavioral and emotional habits/samskaras.

About seven months into treatment, Vanessa came to a session looking quite distraught. She gave me a look of despair in the waiting room and walked barefoot into my office carrying her sandals, one of which was broken. “This is just a sign of how my day is going,” she said, gesturing to her shoe. She listed the litany of things that had gone wrong that day, missing her workout, the computer not working, breaking her shoe … But the real cause of her despair was not her broken shoe or malfunctioning computer. Rather, it was the creeping fear that she was not getting any better. “I went for a walk yesterday and the only thing that I felt was, ‘I did it.’ I don’t feel joy anymore.” Her determined attempts to do the right things to feel better (exercise, eat well, and socialize) were seemingly not effective in lifting her mood. “I don’t want to live this way!” she sobbed. Her fear of never getting better was the theme of the session. My job was to provide her with the containment and perspective that her parents had been unable to provide when she was a child. I was firm in my stance that she was getting better, that her feelings of despair, though real, were not accurate reflections of reality or her progress over the past several months. I spoke to her about her childhood history (when she was left in her room to tantrum for long periods without parental intervention) and how today she was re-experiencing the abandonment and desperation she had felt as a little girl when her only form of coping was to rage and scream. We discussed how she would take care of herself the rest of the day. She promised not to drink alcohol and agreed to share with her boyfriend that she was having a “bad day.” This was hard for her due to her shame about being so “weak” and unable to function normally. If Vanessa had food issues, she likely would have overeaten in response to her despairing mood. The danger for her was overdrinking and then raging at her boyfriend. Our session was well timed because it interrupted the pattern and brought awareness to the usual stream of events so that she was able to manage it differently.

Vanessa came in a few days later looking much more relaxed and calm. She had made it through the other day and agreed with me that things were not as dire as they had seemed. She also agreed that it made a world of difference that she had not acted out and “made a mess,” but rather allowed her mood to pass. She had the insight that even though something may not feel very good in the moment, like taking the walk or not buying alcohol, it’s like an investment in the future that you collect rewards on at a later time. “I felt really good when I woke up today because I realized that I made it through a really hard time without making things worse.” We discussed how the next time she has one of these days, she will have a concrete experience of containing her mood without acting out and making her despair tangible in “bad” behavior, thus reinforcing her feelings of being weak and broken. She now knows from her own experience that although she is suffering in the moment, the feeling will pass and she will emerge whole on the other side. She is on her way to developing mood-management skills that will aid in her quest to find meaning, and eventually joy in her life.

Mood management and impulse control require a larger perspective that allow you to see yourself experiencing a mood, rather than being the mood (“I will always feel this way!”). If you have an understanding of some of your challenging energetic/affective patterns, then you know that no matter how wretched you may feel at a particular moment, the feeling will pass. You also know that you can either make a mess by acting out, for example, by overeating, or you can find an alternative way to cope that keeps the broader perspective of your well-being in mind. You begin to appreciate the arc of your moods, recognizing that they reliably shift and how you cope with them has huge impact on your well-being on the other end of the mood. These observational skills are like muscles in consciousness. If you haven’t exercised them much, they will be rusty, and it will feel very unfamiliar. It does get easier over time as you dare to delay destructive behavior and instead learn to witness your emotional tides. Yoga is a tool that will help you build these muscles. It provides skills and guidance to self-soothe and thus, interrupt destructive patterns of behavior with different behaviors and a different attitude.

Reflections on Your Mood and Impulses

1. What negative moods do you frequently suffer from? Some examples are depression, anxiety, pessimism, low motivation, or feelings of futility.
2. Assess your mood-management skills and impulse control. Are you able to contain strong feelings without destructive behavior? Can you contain a strong urge to do something that will have harmful consequences or do you often find yourself surveying the wreckage of your negative behavior?
3. How do the capacities of mood management and impulse control relate to your issues with food? Do you act out difficult affective states with food? Do you have difficulty containing impulses to eat unhealthy food that your body does not need?

The Energy of Identity

Cindy, whom you met in the section on Core Body Beliefs in chapter 3, came from a home with a physically and emotionally abusive father and a passive mother. Her mother was unable/unwilling to protect Cindy from her father’s unpredictable outbursts. Then in her late teens, Cindy experienced a significant cycling accident which caused her to be hospitalized and in rehabilitation for several months. These traumatic experiences coalesced to form Cindy’s view of the world as an unsafe place where she had little power to protect herself. Learned helplessness is a concept from cognitive behavioral psychology that describes the impact traumatic experiences have on a person’s sense of self-efficacy, which is another term from cognitive behavioral psychology, referring to a person’s perception of his or her ability to effect change in the world. When you are exposed to traumatic situations in which you are powerless to protect yourself, you learn that you are helpless. Consequently, you do not attempt to improve your plight when conditions change and you can impact a situation. Your “story,” meaning the way that you link meaning to the events, is that you are helpless. Your identity supports this story and you unwittingly support a victimized plot line.

During her psychotherapy experience, it became apparent to me that Cindy filtered her experiences through the lens of being a victim. Though “true” in her early life, this framework now resulted in her negating her ability to effect positive change in her life. Cindy has a binge-eating problem. She re-creates the “story” of being a victim by allowing the impulse to eat and the rhythm of the binge to overpower her, again and again, giving up her power of choice and reinforcing the story of her victimization and powerlessness. Her relationship to food and her weight are just one expression of passivity in her life. Things happen to her, rather than being chosen, or co-created, by her. Her marriage, her job, her home, her body all are unsatisfactory things that she feels powerless to change. The energetic quality underneath her storyline of being a victim is a weak, collapsed pattern that she repetitively re-creates in a food binge.

Who you think you are carries a distinct energy. It has an energetic hold on you that makes it very easy, in fact at times irresistible, to keep doing the same things over and over. We create and re-create ourselves everyday. And there is an energetic force that keeps us stuck in creating the self that we may want to desperately change. These are our samskaras, or habitual patterns. The yoga of food is so powerful because if you believe that “you are what you eat,” then changing what you eat gives you immediate power to begin re-creating who you are. Pretty exciting stuff! However, changing the “stuff” of your body also involves bumping up against the energy of your current identity. The hard part is that you must be very patient with this process because your current identity isn’t going to want to let go. In the gap between applying new causes and seeing their effects the energy of your current/old identity will creep in like a slithery snake, “Who do you think you are, eating a salad? Don’t you know that this is a losing proposition? You don’t ever stick to anything.” These thoughts may be conscious, or more likely, they may be felt at an energetic level—a smoke screen of pessimism clouding your actions and veiling your mood.

A term I often use with clients is “collapse.” This is an energetic word. Your system collapses beneath the weight of the negative story line you keep telling yourself about yourself and keep making true with your behaviors. When you have a self-system that is dominated by a negative story line (“I am helpless”), it takes a lot of psychic energy for you to function. Consequently, your energy gets worn down by self-doubt and feared judgment from others. You are vulnerable to collapsing into a heap of helplessness when the demands of others and the world become too much for your flagging self-system to support. There can be a bizarre kind of comfort found in just giving in to your despair and reinforcing the energetic force of your negative identity. Having the rage, or the binge, and succumbing to your feelings of inadequacy feels like a relief due to the strain of functioning under the burden of chronic self-doubt. Some people actually find comfort in thoughts of suicide, “I’ll just check out and it will be over.” Vanessa described feeling cleansed, albeit shamed, after a meltdown and indeed she often showed renewed motivation to change following an episode. This obviously creates a negative pattern/samskara that is deeply damaging to your self. At worst, the pattern of collapse can become an identity that you live out by perpetuating a view of yourself as a damaged person, a perpetual patient/victim who is beyond help. Or periods of better functioning can be punctuated by intermittent collapses that continually bring you back to square one. Learning to connect with both your pain and your power is vital in the healing process. Your collapses are both habit and choice. “I can’t” is a toxic story line in your life that you make true every time you collapse. You must learn to affirm your feelings, no matter what they are, and also make a choice to not self-destruct in their wake. Put differently, you learn to tolerate your own energy without acting it out.

Cindy recognized that she wanted people to feel sorry for her. She craved recognition for the suffering she had endured, but in her effort to obtain this, she undermined her own power and self-esteem. I reflected to her that living out the story line of being a victim sabotaged her deeper wishes for health and well-being. Giving up her need for others to feel sorry for her necessitated that she learn to validate her own suffering. By affirming the realness and the difficulty of her past experiences (her story), she can grow beyond her need for others to validate this for her. This is an energetic shift wherein she honors her own experience and feelings, and provides a container for this within her own body, heart, and mind. Cindy must bring value to her interior experience, rather than depend on others to validate her through their recognition.

When you create a container for your experience, you can approach your experience with regard to its prominent story line, or you can slip beneath the story line and instead relate to the energetic quality of your experience. For example, “I am depressed because … ” or “I feel anxious about … ” are typical, story-based ways we relate to our experience. This involves dealing with the particulars of a situation, the content regarding what happened and why you feel so bad. It can be helpful to journal about these aspects of experience or talk about them with a friend or therapist.

Another approach is to not focus on the “because” or “about” (in other words, the story line), but instead get interested in the energetic quality of your mood state. You may notice that whether you are anxious about an upcoming event or ruminating about a difficult relationship, the energetic feel of your anxious mood stays consistent. Likely your throat and chest are tight, your stomach is contracted, or perhaps your shoulders are hunched. Energy tolerance provides a space wherein you learn to acknowledge and make room for your painful feelings on a physical/energetic level. The details of why you are feeling bad are not so important. Providing a container for your moods means that you allow yourself to feel a certain way without acting out your feelings, for example, “I’m depressed, might as well eat.” As your tolerance for feeling bad grows, you may come to see that no matter what the particulars of the story line for your low mood are (“I’m lonely.” “I’m fat.”), the predominant themes such as “I’m a loser,” or “nothing ever works out for me,” in addition to your physical experience (clenched stomach,
tight jaw and shoulders), remain consistent day to day and even year to year. And this is actually not bad news. Rather, it helps you get to know and accept yourself more fully. You know what your core issues are and therefore you are not surprised when they are tweaked. You bring the gentle voice of mitri, loving kindness, to your experience.

Cultivating an integrated, body-based level of awareness allows you to disengage from the righteousness or permanence of your feeling state (your “story”) and to instead notice the transience of, and variability within, your moods. An integrated, body-based level of awareness means that you integrate what is happening in your body with your conscious mind. You develop an understanding that your moods live in your body, while the story line lives in the ego. The ego seeks to solidify and make “true” your story line, no matter how bad it is. At least it’s familiar, the ego says, “At least I know who I am.” Your body, on the other hand, holds a more complex and changing reality. Yes, some of the ego’s labels and designations are true, perhaps you are feeling anxious or hopeless at the moment. But these conditions are changeable and fluid. Begin to notice the variability of your mood by connecting with the ebb and flow of energy in your body. By not solidifying your mood (“I’m depressed. Always will be. I’m going to bed.”), you have an opportunity to act differently. This might sound like, “I’m having one of my low, hopeless days. I’d like to just go to bed, but I think if I take a walk around the neighborhood I might feel a little bit better.” You interrupt the habitual pattern by introducing a new possibility. Your body feels a bit different after your walk and now something else is possible. Perhaps you feel able to call the supportive friend who told you to feel free to call when you are having a rough day. Rather than blindly acting out your story line and proving it true with self-sabotaging behavior, you open a new door where that may lead to a different outcome.

Reflections on the Energy of Your Identity

1. Reflect upon your “story” about yourself. What are the primary themes from your childhood? How do you perpetuate this story line in your life now?
2. Can you relate to the concept of “collapse”? How do you negate your power in your daily life?
3. What are some activities that you would be willing to try to intercede when you are headed for a collapse?

But I’m Hungry!

I have had clients tell me that they believe they may have been starved in a previous lifetime. Many a person has lamented, in the safe confines of my office, “But I’m hungry!” The impulse to eat and the experience of hunger is so often laden with frantic need, entitlement, and fear. People who have habituated to our food culture automatically interpret any twinge of discomfort in the body as “hunger.” Even the thought of having a salad for lunch may bring of a crashing wave of hunger/deprivation. The kleshas are at work here, particularly attraction (“Oh, it’s so good!”), fear (“I’m scared to be deprived!”), and ego (“Don’t tell me I can’t have it!”). These obstacles to clear seeing become deeply entwined with your eating patterns and cause you to go terribly astray. After many repetitions reinforcing habitual, driven responses to the kleshas, emotion and physiology are working in concert to create strong “hunger.” Well-intentioned plans to lose weight or be healthier don’t stand a chance when confronted with this powerful drive from within. However, by getting curious about your experience of hunger, you bring more consciousness to your habitual response to it and can begin to gently introduce positive changes.

Iyengar, in his discussion of pranayama in Light on Life, suggests a pause after exhalation. However, he warns that if the pause is prolonged, “you will feel a sudden lurch of panic and suck in air more greedily. This is our instinctive attachment to life reasserting itself.” I believe that the intensity and ferocity with which many people relate to food is connected to this “lurch of panic,” when the instinctive attachment to life is threatened. I have felt it myself when hungry and feeling a threat from within or without that my sustenance may be revoked. This is a primordial, energetic clutching to life, greedily taking in. You may know cognitively that your life is not in jeopardy when you feel strong hunger, however, the primitive energetic state of clutching subsumes your capacity to respond more consciously. This reaction is especially true if you are a serial dieter and have learned to expect deprivation as your due. Waiting too long to inhale is the same thing as waiting too long to eat, or not eating enough, which is the intermittent fate of the serial dieter. If you aren’t on a diet now, it’s only a matter of time until you will be. Expectations of deprivation have become lodged in your body-mind and will create the lurch of panic, which captures you in its immediacy. Bringing more awareness to your emotional and physical associations to hunger will widen your experience of hunger from this reactive lurch to a more curious and exploratory position.

Hunger is very subjective and it is very fickle. It is physical, it is habitual, and it is emotional. You can begin to relate to your hunger with regard to its energetic feel in your body. You likely know what I am talking about when I use the words and phrases “starving,” mildly hungry, “just right,” and “stuffed.” But do you really know how these states feel in your body? Do you have a sense of how hunger starts in your body, how it shifts from stomach to limbs to chest to mouth? In starting to examine its fluctuations, you begin to take note of its vagaries. Most of us have experienced the sensation of being very hungry and for whatever reason, not being able to eat, and having the hunger go away (or change into emptiness that is not experienced as hunger). Physical hunger, like the emotions, has an arc. It starts as a vague sensation in the body; it grows and peaks, then subsides, then re-emerges, and then subsides again. Hunger is not a static physical state. Becoming more aware of this variability is helpful because it creates a space where you can become more curious about, and less reactive to, your experience of hunger. You realize that it is an energetic pattern that ebbs and flows, grows and recedes. The lurch of panic is not a permanent state. In fact, it is not a helpful place to eat from, since it is reactive and anxiety-based. It is far better when you wait out the lurch and eat from a place of relative calm.

Hunger need not be a problem, at least amongst those of us who are blessed with an abundance of food to eat. It is your associations to hunger and your reactivity to the sensations that create difficulty. If you interpret hunger as a problem, if you feel threatened by it and tense yourself against it, then you will have a very hard time responding sensitively to your body’s actual needs. Because your response to hunger is so habitual, it takes practice to slow down and actually tune in to how hunger feels in your body. The second layer to this awareness is getting familiar with how you interpret the sensations of emptiness, gnawing, or fatigue, which accompany hunger. Do you become anxious, preoccupied with quelling these feelings as quickly as possible? Do you live in deprivation mode, as if someone is standing over you ready to snatch your food away? Does your stomach or jaw tense as if you are preparing for battle? These ingrained reactions are your problem—not your hunger. You will meet Sophie, discussed below, who felt a vague shame around the pleasures of eating. This is but one example of the odd associations to food and hunger that are often just beneath conscious awareness.

Geneen Roth has written many books about compulsive eating. She writes sensitively about the need to tune in to the feelings lingering beneath the compulsive eater’s obsession with food. She points out the harsh judgments that the compulsive eater has about her body and her needs, as well as the rigidity with which she approaches food, her body, and her needs. Roth’s work with women focuses on differentiating between emotional hunger and physical hunger and helping women learn to not respond to the former with food. She advises that physical hunger be approached with kindness and sanity.

Tune in to your hunger, decide what you are hungry for, create a nice place to eat, and enjoy.

Her advice is wonderful in its simplicity and inherent respect for the body wisdom we all share in relation to how to feed ourselves. I fear that for many of us, however, her advice is simply not enough. I do not mean to imply that some of us are inherently flawed or unworkable. But given the physiologically and mentally ingrained samskaras/habitual patterns of people who have been misusing food, in addition to the nutritionally distorted foods we are surrounded by, the world of physical hunger becomes a terribly complicated one to navigate.

For most people hunger is emotional. Pleasure, satisfaction, guilt, anticipation, excitement, disappointment, boredom … This is but a mere sampling of the conflict-laden responses many of us have to what lies before us on the plate. I’ve heard that the stress levels endured by waiters and waitresses rival that of air traffic controllers. What does that tell you? Your waitress may not have the lives of others in the palm of her hand as she slings dinner plates to their respective owners, but she might as well have if one were to gauge this by the enormity of others’ reaction to a late or botched order. Given the emotional intensity with which so many of us relate to food, it can become extremely complicated to distinguish between emotional hunger and physical hunger. Yes, there are clear-cut situations of binge eating in the absence of any hunger. But, more often than not, binges, and even just ordinary overeating, are triggered by hunger and the emotions surrounding hunger. These emotions, which can range from shame and panic all the way to giddiness and entitlement, can easily hijack your ability to interpret what your body needs and when you should stop. This lays the groundwork for poor food choices, mild overeating, or an actual binge.

Most often there is a gap between hungry and sated. There is a moment, right after finishing a reasonable portion, but before any satiety has registered in your body, that you may feel a strong desire (a “lurch”) for more. This quake of hunger is intense and in the moment can feel permanent. I believe it is here, in the gap between not enough and too much, that compulsive eaters and bulimics (and maybe even Joe Schmoe) lose their way and seek to stuff this gap with stuff—with the material. The ability to sit in this space, to recognize its transience, to not be engulfed by it, this is the fruit of getting more familiar with the energies of yearning and impulse. In this gap between “not enough” and “too much,” the distinction between physical and emotional hunger becomes an arbitrary one. Rather, the ability to tolerate your own hunger and emptiness, whether physical, emotional or a melding of the two, is the space of healing. Bringing compassionate awareness to these vulnerable energies feels better than any scarfed pizza, burrito, or ice cream sundae.

My husband’s maternal grandmother, who has since passed, was in her nineties when I first met her. She was a dignified, elegant older woman who garnered great respect in the family due to her stately bearing, kindness and firmness in just-right proportions. I had to laugh after Christmas Eve dinner several years ago when we were cleaning up and she found a tiny juice glass to save the smidgen of fish stew that was left over from the meal. I looked at her and said with great feeling, “A woman after my own heart!” I too hate to throw away food. Now, I am guessing that her issue stemmed from having lived through the Great Depression, while mine stems from living through my own smaller-scale depressions. It brings up a deep sense of loss for me. My husband gets annoyed with the foods I must put in the freezer to eat another time, knowing that months later the freezer will be overflowing with indistinguishable plastic bags filled with ice-encrusted foodstuffs that are beyond recognition. If you have a similar attachment, I challenge you to experiment with throwing away small quantities of food. This will help you to work with letting go and to feel into the emotional aspect of your hunger. When you are more comfortable with these emotional tides of longing and need, you will be better able to accurately interpret the concomitant physical sensations of hunger.

Hunger amongst the well fed (as opposed to those who literally don’t have enough to eat) is primarily an energetic pattern in the body-mind. Its force brings you to your knees and you seek anchoring in the material realm as you grab something to eat. And then you get lost in the lull of the rhythm of feeding—the act of chewing, swallowing, incorporating, it feels so good you don’t want it to end. It is so easy to lose touch with the energetic world of feeling, which though subtle, will tell you when you are full. It is also easy, in your dread of becoming lost in “not enough,” to cross over into “too much.” You anchor yourself in the domain of the concrete, the annamaya kosa/material body, as you seek to fill the gaps of your own emptiness with “stuff.” And here, in the ever so concrete realm of “too much” (“Oh, my aching stomach!”), at least you know where you are—you need to eat less. Conversely, for those of you who do not eat enough, the dread of “too much” supersedes the sensations of hunger. The challenge on both ends of the spectrum is similar—learning to integrate the concrete with the energetic and to trust your ability to do so. This means listening to the subtle impulses sent by your body and brain, and then responding to them accordingly. You learn to appreciate the sensations of satisfying hunger and learn to withstand the quake of emptiness that may shudder through you when you have had “enough,” knowing that it will pass.

Cultivating the capacity to calm the frantic response you may have to hunger is strongly related to the section on breath below. I urge you to read over the breath meditation a few times when you get to it and really feel it in your body. This gives you a concrete tool to work with as you seek to interrupt an unhealthy, habitual response to your experience of hunger.

Reflections on Your Experience of Hunger

1. Do you find yourself feeling frantic, entitled, compulsive, rigid, or angry around food? Which of the kleshas (unclear seeing, attraction/aversion, ego, fear) are at work here for you?
2. Do you relate to the idea of food as anchoring, a return from the more nebulous energetic body to the material world? How do you feel when this anchor is threatened, e.g., by a diet? What are some ways that you can anchor yourself without using food? Some suggestions are breathing, walking, or connecting with a friend.
3. Experiment with quieting down and tuning into your breathing before eating. What is it like for you to sit with hunger without immediately eating? How does hunger feel in your body? What emotions come up in response to your hunger?
4. Expand your food journal from what you are eating to focus more on how you feel after you eat certain foods. This is an opportunity to explore their energetic effect on your body. Notice how particular foods affect the quality of your hunger at the next meal.

Yoga-Based Solutions

Your ability to move and transform your own energy is a vital component of your relationship to food. At the most basic level, food is energy. Client after client has told me that food is their “comfort.” As mentioned, I think that taking in energy (ingesting food) is a preconscious attempt to shift internal energy. Again, you can think of it as an internal “yes,” allowing a softening of painful and constricted energetic states. The yoga of food helps you to use food for what it can do (provide nutrition to your body) and to distinguish that from what it cannot do (soothe an anxious mood or lift you out of depression). This section will ask you to experiment with a new way of managing painful or disorganized energetic states. Rather than medicating moods through the passive taking in of food, I am suggesting that you experiment with moving through “bad energy” using your breath and body. I use the word “experiment” to give you an exploratory attitude in this endeavor. You are not committing yourself to anything—you are just opening to new possibilities.

Creating Energy Through Movement

I remember as a young girl, probably around fourteen and before I had any positive experience with exercise, thinking to myself, “Who would want to exercise? It takes so much time and work. It’s really rather messy. Why not just sit around and eat less?” It seemed like a no-brainer. How wrong I was! The point of exercise has little to do with the calorie burn. It has everything to do with the energetic shift it creates in your body-mind. Yoga is a special kind of physical movement that is meant to be done with more mindfulness than ordinary exercise. This aspect of the practice is very important because it lights up consciousness in your whole body. Daniel Siegel, a psychiatrist and researcher on attachment and the brain, defines the brain as the “distributed nervous system” that integrates the whole body. This is a very interesting way of defining the brain because it takes us out of our head and into our bodies. So, although the electrical/chemical connections of our nervous system may be most concentrated in our heads, our “brain” extends down our spine and into our gut and extremities. Many of us live in our heads (preoccupied with cycles of repetitive thoughts) and do not enjoy connection or integration on this bodily level. Yoga engenders more integration through mindful breath and mindful movement. “Mindful” means that you bring consciousness, or attention, into your experience of your body, “Oh yes, my shoulders do feel really tight.” Or “I guess I’m really not that hungry after all. My stomach feels like a fist and I am hardly breathing.” That said, I believe that mindless exercise has a place in mood management and the yoga of food as well. When you are very upset, a downward dog and deep breathing can be helpful and grounding. So is a brisk walk around the block. The point is, you must begin to cultivate the ability to interrupt a negative energetic state with movement rather than relying on food. In fact, movement is the quickest, most effective way to impact your body-mind, and this will help unhook you from your dependence upon food. When you move, you breathe more deeply, your heartbeats quicken, and you are automatically brought out of your head and into your body. This may not be a pleasant place to be at the moment. However, it beats being disconnected from your body, which begets more destructive, self-sabotaging behavior. Sooner or later, you will have to come back home to your flesh, and the sooner you return, the less painful the reunion will be.

In my own experience, I often resist moving my energy. I am tired, frustrated, or preoccupied and it just seems like too much work. This resistance was especially true for me in the past, when I was experiencing more difficult, virulent energetic states. I learned through the repeated experience of moving through my resistance and doing it anyway (at that time, “it” was running), that moving energy in my body, inviting the expansion of my chest and lungs, increasing the beating of my heart and rhythm of movement in my extremities, flushed the negative energy and helped me shift out of very painful states to more manageable ones where I could direct my energy into fruitful pursuits, like journaling or even just doing the laundry. This experience of shifting my energetic state from a disorganized, sometimes chaotic, state to a more relaxed, coherent state was so powerful that over time physical movement became a primary coping tool for me. This does not mean that I no longer experienced resistance to exercise. I almost always at least slightly resist any activity that requires me to intentionally expend energy. But my resistance pattern is so familiar to me, and I am so used to ignoring it, that it exerts less and less power in my day-to-day life. My yoga practice has been fundamental to learning about and accepting these patterns in my body and has helped me engage more fully in other activities, like running and cycling.

Physical movement provides a tool to recalibrate your energetic system. Through your body, you begin to challenge your mental and emotional habits of resignation, avoidance, and withdrawal. Actions are a much more powerful way to impact your energetic system than attempting to change your thoughts, especially at the early stages of change. Through physical movement, and most particularly through yoga, you tap into the universal power that already exists within your own body. “The material body has a reality that is accessible. It is here and now, and we can do something with it,” according to Iyengar. Physical movement is a means toward not feeling at the mercy of your negative energetic patterns. Learning to bring consciousness into the body is a skill and a habit. And it is essential in learning to manage food issues. It is also a way to develop self-efficacy in relation to your own body. Remember, self-efficacy is a term from cognitive psychology that refers to confidence in your ability to initiate and effect change. When you have a food disorder, you lack self-efficacy with food and with your own body. Extremely competent, intelligent individuals dissolve into helplessness before the lure of certain combinations of fat and carbohydrates. According to yoga theory, it really has nothing to do with the actual tempting food and more about the relationship you have with your own longing and impulse. If the energetic states of longing and impulse are suppressed and sequestered, ensconced in shame, they will hijack any ability you have to refrain for a greater good. Think of Wanda’s nightly binges after work when she was driven by a toxic cocktail of fatigue, stress, and denied hunger. If, however, your longings for comfort and impulses to indulge are known and tolerated internally, if you know they are merely energy patterns that you can move through, then you know that you will survive their thrust and come out whole on the other side.

I am always tickled when a client discovers the power of physical movement, particularly if it’s yoga, under my watch. Miranda consulted me due to chronic depression that had begun about six years ago when she had moved to the area with her new husband. Miranda was twenty-nine when she finally decided to seek help. She had been against therapy because it seemed “weak” and believed that she should be able to get out of her funk on her own. Miranda was able to function adequately enough to get to her job as a bank manager every day, but when she came home in the evening, she was wiped out and ended up watching television and not doing much else. Miranda felt she was overweight, and this was a big source of contention in her marriage. Her husband was an ex-competitive swimmer who worked at a swim shop and coached part time. Miranda was the primary breadwinner, while her husband spent hours in the pool or hanging out with similarly inclined friends. Their marriage was marked by lack of communication, lack of shared time together, and lack of warmth. She was furious with him for his self-centeredness and his rejection of her, yet she did not express this directly to him and really didn’t even admit it to herself except on rare occasions when she was overwhelmed by her anger at him. Their marital distress finally culminated with her husband’s announcement that he was moving out. Miranda was devastated. However, she was also aware that this was a necessary thing due to the lack of emotional engagement between them. During her therapy sessions, we had at various times discussed her low energy, digestive complaints, and general unhappiness with her body. When the separation occurred, she began going to a local yoga studio that had opened right by her home. She described feeling really good about herself when she would leave the studio after the early morning class and soon she developed a sense of connection with a few of the other students. She told me that it felt very different from her previous experiences working out at the gym: “It’s hard to explain,” she said. “My body just feels really different when I do yoga. And I had an epiphany the other day in class. I looked around and I realized that I’m not the only one with issues here. I realized that everyone in the room was struggling with something. I found it comforting somehow.” Although she was very sad and frightened about her marital situation, she also said she felt stronger. She began looking for another job and was more able to discuss her needs and feelings with her estranged husband. When I last saw her, she was wondering if he was someone who could meet her needs, rather than her former focus on wondering if she could win him back. She was continuing to take better care of herself and exuded a sense of empowerment and confidence that was lacking when we first started to work together.

You must find another way to intervene at the level of the physical body when you are attempting to impact a habit/samskara of the force and depth of a food disorder or, as in Miranda’s case, a mood disorder. The good news is that breathing more deeply, pumping your heart, moving your energy, mindfully and mindlessly alike, will help you to work with the energy of this samskara. You lay down new tracks in your nervous system every time you practice these new habits of putting your resistance aside and forging into the unknown world of your body. This empowers you to deal with the realities of your life, which may be very painful, as with Miranda’s marital separation, but are far more manageable when faced directly than when avoided and denied.

Reflections on Your Relationship to Movement

1. What is your reaction to the idea that your habit of taking in energy/food to feel good can be transformed into moving energy through your body with physical movement? Do you think this could apply to you?
2. Have you had experiences with shifting your mood through physical movement? How powerful was this for you at the time?
3. What kind of movement are you most comfortable experimenting with when you are in a negative mood state and wanting to comfort yourself with food? Walking is the least threatening activity if your knees and back allow. Yoga, swimming, dancing and cycling are other options. I suggest choosing an activity and beginning to practice it regularly. Then it will be readily accessible to you when your mood hits the skids.

Yoga Practice: Another Way to Nurture

Yoga provides a structure for you to get really familiar with the ebb and flow of your energetic states, including your pattern of resistance and your use of food to energize or self-soothe. Vinyasa yoga refers to a flow of poses that are “placed in a special order.” What I enjoy about yoga is that it is very respectful of the energetic patterns that we share as human beings. Yoga sequences usually start out very gently by encouraging deep breathing coordinated with gentle lengthening of the muscles. As the sequence progresses, more energy is built up in the body, allowing deeper engagement of the body, heart, and lungs. The class peaks in more vigorous poses allowing you to sweat, move, and release. You are then brought down into opening poses where you allow yourself to benefit from the flexibility engendered by your vigorous movements. Hip openers and floor stretches are often done at this time. Many people, myself included, find themselves weeping gently at this phase of the practice. You are then guided into savasana, final rest, where you are allowed to let go of everything and enjoy the changed ebb and flow of energy in your body.

The conscious use of breath to warm and energize the body is integral to yoga. When you exercise, you naturally breathe more deeply, though sometimes your breathing can be more like panting, which stimulates the sympathetic branch of the nervous system (otherwise known as “fight or flight”). In contrast, yoga focuses on slow, deep, nasal breathing and brings your awareness to your tendency to hold your breath and “power through” difficulty, a habit that increases stress in your body. When you practice the same sequences over and over, you develop a familiarity with the flow that begins to feel comforting and nurturing. You will find that hanging your head in forward bends and downward dog feels really good at the beginning of class. Some yoga instructors even encourage you to moan audibly as you experience release of tension and increased blood flow in downward dog. As you breathe through your nose, you deepen and equalize your inhalation and exhalation, which has a calming effect on your nervous system. Another soothing posture is lying belly down with your forehead resting on your hands, exerting a slight pressure on your forehead.

You must practice these postures in order to experience their benefits. At first the postures with feel unfamiliar and you will naturally feel awkward or self-critical. You might say, “This doesn’t help with anxiety. I feel like crap because I’m so inflexible!” You leave the class feeling demoralized. I implore you to not give up so easily! Remember that we are like snowflakes. The experienced yogini next to you who is communing with her toes in a seated forward bend expresses the potential that lies in your body as well. She has just been practicing it longer than you have. You too can cultivate pleasure and intimacy in your body. Some of the postures are very difficult and you may find yourself full of dread—“Oh god, the back bends are coming.” This provides you the opportunity to notice how your tendency to dread things sabotages the moment. Back bends are an opportunity to open the chest and lungs and are thought to be helpful with depression. They are also very challenging because they take a lot of energy. They provide you with an opportunity to gather and focus your energy and stay with discomfort for a few breaths. Over time, you will be surprised at the flood of release that you experience when you come out of the back bend. The poses become like old friends. You meet up with downward dog and your body says, “Oh, yes, I know you. How are you doing today?”

The ebb and flow of discomfort and the rhythm of effort and release is central to what is healing in a yoga class. For me, it has become a metaphor for life. In life, you must engage and then you rest and release. There is a steady rhythm to this (like your heartbeat), and it is good. Yes, a part of me would really enjoy sitting around eating bonbons without a care in the world. But this is not how life on the planet is structured, and I would probably get bored anyway. Learning to accept the flow of life—you work and rest, engage and release, expand and contract—provides structure and safety on a day-to-day, even moment-to-moment, basis. There is a comfort in this flow and you can experience it through your yoga practice. And here is the most essential piece of the puzzle if you have food issues. My conjecture (and my experience) is that food has become your release, your “ahhhhh … ” moment when you let down the pressure and stress for a moment and become a biological creature experiencing pleasure and comfort. We all need this! Especially in our driven society, where so many of us live in a state of exhaustion and fear. However, you must find a way (many ways, really) to light up your pleasure circuitry and to allow a release that does not involve food and does not have a negative backlash. This will take time, practice, and faith. Through repetition, you will create new circuitry in your body-mind. Your old circuitry will still be active, but over time you can create competing behaviors and experiences that will eventually dismantle these old patterns. Yoga offers a nurturing way to rewire your circuitry and to experience the pleasure of release balanced with effort.

Sophie is a rather extraordinary girl who spent her adolescence encased in a ball of flesh. She stopped going to school at fifteen due to the teasing she endured about her weight. Her parents were disengaged, more preoccupied with Sophie’s older brother, who had a loud drug problem while she quietly ate. At twenty-two, subsequent to being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, she lost one hundred pounds in about a year. She achieved this through a combination of rigid determination, small meals exactingly spaced apart, intense exercise, and single-mindedness. She consulted me when she began regaining the weight. “Once I reached my goal, I didn’t know what to do. I felt lost so I started eating again.” Although it is difficult for her to let go of the rigid schedule of her food and exercise plan, she is learning to trust the rhythms of her appetite and need for movement. After disclosing to me that she went to the gym twice a day for two hours at a time, I asked if she looked forward to or dreaded her workouts. She admitted that they felt heavy and burdensome. She agreed to go to the gym once a day and the following week said that she felt good about this. We are emphasizing the importance of having pleasure in her exercise, as well as with her food. She looks rather sheepish when I ask her what she likes to eat and is surprised when she realizes that she feels a sense of shame when she “admits” to liking peanut butter or yogurt with granola. “It feels like there is something dirty about it.” I inquired again if she had ever experienced sexual abuse, and she said she had not. Her body shame stands on its own. We are slowly helping her dismantle this shame, first by making it conscious and next by introducing more pleasure into her daily life. She recently disclosed that she enjoys showers. She is considering starting to swim, as she enjoys the feel of water on her body. She is on her way toward giving herself permission to be in her body and trust the ebb and flow of pleasure and discomfort. Perhaps some day she will discover yoga practice, but in the meantime, she is discovering the meaning of yoga, union of mind and body, through connecting more sensitively with her body and making more room for pleasure in her day-to-day experience.

Reflections on the Flow of Work and Rest

1. What is your relationship to the flow of work and rest in your life? Dysfunctional relationships to this are evidenced in workaholics or those who “steal” relaxation by procrastinating necessary tasks. Or others who drive themselves to get things “over with” but find that the to-do list never ends.
2. How is your sleep? If you have trouble with sleep, it points to difficulties relaxing/surrendering.
3. Do you use food as an “ahhhh … ” moment of release and nurture? What are some other ways you could allow relaxation and release in your life?
4. As you develop a practice of using physical movement as a coping tool, it is important to bring awareness to how this impacts your breath. Shifting attention inside and cultivating breath and body awareness are vital steps in the healing process.

Energy and Breath

We have covered a lot in this chapter so far—the energy of resistance, the misuse of food for energy management, the energy of mood and impulse, and the energy of identity. Now we are getting into the solutions and addressing breath, which brings us into the heart of yoga. Breath awareness is fundamental to yoga practice and energy management. Breath is the primary way that we nourish ourselves—even more than food! If you are not breathing well, you are not well nourished at a basic level. In this section, we explore this most fundamental way we relate to our bodies at every moment. Bringing more awareness to your breath gives you an invaluable way to energize, nourish, and care for your vital self.

Your breathing is a strong indicator of “how you are.” It is impossible to be breathing fully and deeply and to be having a panic attack. It is impossible to be breathing fully and to engage in binge eating. My guess is that individuals who are restricting their eating are also not breathing fully. Rapid, shallow breathing indicates dominance of the sympathetic nervous system and preparation for “fight or flight.” Deep, slow, abdominal breathing is indicative of parasympathetic dominance and brings your body into a restorative mode. Breath is a unique function in your body because it is involuntary while also being accessible to your conscious control. This gives you the potential to have enormous influence over “how you are” on a physical, energetic, and emotional level.

Yoga emphasizes a conscious synchronization of breath with movement. Go to any yoga class and the instructor will likely encourage you to breathe through your nose and to gradually deepen and lengthen your breath as class progresses. Ujaiyi breathing is used in vinyasa yoga and is done by slightly constricting your throat (as you do when you whisper), which creates a soft, oceanic sound. Making your breathing more audible is helpful in bringing more consciousness to your breathing pattern. By increasing awareness of your breath, you develop a method for self-soothing that you can bring to your life beyond your yoga mat. For many people, shallow breathing is so habitual that they are unaware that they are breathing in a shallow, constricted manner. By experiencing moments of deeper, fuller breathing during your yoga practice, you have something to compare your habitual pattern of breathing with. “I don’t breathe!” a client once exclaimed to me in amazement, after taking some yoga classes. Once you realize how good it feels to breathe deeply, you begin to notice the difference when you are not breathing fully. Bringing more consciousness to your breath through yoga makes it more likely that you will catch yourself breathing shallowly in the car when you are “fighting” traffic on the way to work. You realize that you don’t need to “fight” traffic at all as you take some deeper breaths. Cultivating this bodily level of awareness will help you bring more awareness to your food patterns. Taking a deep breath before a binge will likely not do you much good (“the horse is out of the barn,” as they say). However, your awareness of your breathing and tension levels throughout the day will make it far less likely that you will be hijacked by a binge at the end of the day.

Pranayama is the branch of yoga devoted to the study and regulation of the breath. If you want to find out more about it, I include some valuable resources at the end of this text. For the purposes of this discussion, I am emphasizing bringing more conscious awareness to your breathing during your yoga practice, and over time, into the rest of your day. This is potentially a life transformative shift. When I do a guided-breath meditation with clients, they invariably tell me that they feel better. Often, I can sense a palpable change in their presence. They sink more deeply into the couch and engage with me in a more real way. Let’s try one right now to give you a taste of what I am talking about.

Breath Meditation

Get comfortable in your chair. Begin to feel into your body, shifting your attention from the outside environment to the inside world of your body. Become aware of the rhythm of your breathing. Breathe through your nose and gently constrict the back of your throat, allowing your breath to become slightly audible as an ocean like sound. Notice a gentle expansion as you inhale and a slight contraction as you exhale. This rhythm of contraction and release governs your breath, as well as every cell in your body and all life on the planet. So give yourself over to it right now and synchronize your breath with this rhythm, amplifying it subtly as you inhale and exhale. On your next inhale, gently take in a little more oxygen and as you exhale, extend the release so as to allow a little more room for your next inhale. Imagine yourself bringing in life energy and nourishment as you inhale and imagine yourself releasing tension, waste and toxicity as you exhale. “Inhaling, I take in energy and vitality. Exhaling, I release all that is not useful to me.” Begin to breathe with your whole body, imagining your breath like a gentle wave emanating through you. Feel your chest and rib cage expand more fully as you inhale and enjoy the release as you exhale. Notice the shift in your energy as your breathing slows and deepens. Take a few moments to feel the changes in your body and your breathing so as to highlight this experience. Remember that you have access to this calmer, more relaxed state at all times.

Breathing patterns are habitual and unconscious. Over time, through cultivating breath awareness, you can change your relationship to your breath and use this extraordinary function as a tool to both soothe and energize your body. The benefit, albeit subtle, is also very real. The key here is to remember that you are sitting on a storehouse of untold treasures. You have the key, but you must learn how to use it. Patience, practice, and not a little bit of faith are necessary ingredients to begin enjoying the treasures right under your nose.

Breathing Practices

1. Practice ujaiyi breathing. Start by whispering softly to yourself. Then contract the same area of your throat while breathing through your nose. The oceanic sound is very soothing.
2. Andrew Weil, a leader in alternative medicine, suggests that you conceive of the exhalation as the beginning of your breath cycle and that you follow your breath for a few minutes in this out-in rhythm. Exhalation as a beginning is a paradigm shift for those of us who are overly focused on taking in.
3. Take some deep breaths, focusing on lengthening your exhale relative to your inhale. Try breathing through your mouth when you exhale and push as much air out as you can. This will improve your capacity to take in more oxygen on your inhale. Lengthening your exhale relative to your inhale “turns on” the parasympathetic (restorative) branch of your nervous system.
4. Set your watch or phone to beep hourly. Take three deep ujaiyi breaths, focusing on lengthening your exhale. This simple method is a powerful way to begin retraining your nervous system.

Tapas: Discipline Yourself with Kindness

Tapas is a concept from yoga philosophy that is fundamental to the change process. And no, tapas is not referring to the delicious Spanish tidbits that you enjoy in a restaurant (wouldn’t that be nice!). In this context, tapas refers to the heat and gentle pressure applied in order to facilitate a change process. Tapas is wrought from the energy of fire. A common metaphor that is used to describe tapas is putting a soft clay pot into an oven. The heat from the oven creates a reaction in the clay that solidifies it into a more definitive shape and hearty structure. In your own growth process, you generate internal heat through the energy of your determination and you transform this energetic heat of intention into tangible action. It is tapas that gets you to lace on your walking shoes, get out your yoga mat, or go to the grocery store to buy ingredients for a healthy meal. Change occurs when you transform your nascent intentions (thought) into action (behavior). You need not feel completely confident in your intentions, but you carry them into action and the heat generated from this process burns through your insecurity. Through the consistent application of heat, and the ongoing repetition of new actions, pressure is applied to your mind and body, which results in slow and steady change. On a physical level, your body becomes stronger and more flexible. You make more mindful food choices and your body responds with increased vitality. On an emotional/
mental level, you bring tapas to the fluctuations of your feelings and impulses and hold steady in your commitments in spite of the ebb and flow of your emotional state. At first, changes will be subtle. You will notice that you have a little more stamina, a tad more flexibility, or more capacity to hold intense energies in your mind and body without succumbing to the temptation to disengage or explode.

Initiating a change process requires willingness to adhere to some sort of structure (think clay pot) in your daily life. You can begin at the level of the annamaya kosa/physical body and make changes in your daily diet and exercise habits. Though you are at the level of the physical body, you automatically impact your energetic body through your engagement of tapas. You engage tapas when you notice yourself feeling tired or overwhelmed about the changes you are making. This is an opportunity to not repress your feelings, but also not to act on your impulse to give up or self-sabotage. Rather, at these points you can reach for resources that will help you to strengthen your commitment to contend with reality in a more resolute way. These resources can include books, inspirational speakers, or people that you respect and can reach out to for guidance and inspiration.

Janice (of the chocolate syrup episode described in chapter 3) illustrates how people with extreme weight issues often have difficulty employing tapas in their personal lives. Janice is a meticulous employee in a responsible, corporate position. Her home, however, is often a mess and she uses fast food on a daily basis to self-soothe. Though disciplined in her day job, she lets it all go when it comes to care of herself. Janice is split in her capacity to utilize tapas. When it comes to her job, her friends, and her family, she responds to expectations in a steadfast and exacting way. When it comes to herself, particularly her body and her home, she collapses. These extreme polarities are not all that unusual. For many people, it is habitual to be over responsible for others and to neglect the self. Bringing more balance to your life involves pulling back from habitual patterns of self-sacrifice and neglect. This requires tapas on both ends—bringing boundaries to your commitments to others and firmness to commitments to yourself. This is difficult because you risk others’ anger at you for no longer selflessly meeting their needs. You have to choose yourself over others, which will feel “selfish” at first. Tapas is needed to sustain healthy commitments to yourself when it would be far easier to do what you’ve always done and self-soothe in a disengaged, habitual way, for example, by bingeing or watching television.

Janice was in the habit of succumbing to fantasy and consequent dissociating from the realities of her personal life. One day Janice told me that she had gone to one of the Twilight movies. “It was really dangerous for me,” she said. She described feeling herself getting pulled into the fantasy the film created. For Janice, this was a trip she could not afford to take because it reinforced a part of her that was already all too active, her capacity to remove herself from the reality of her body and allow her mind to become flaccid and disengaged. Iyengar explains the dangers of this tendency: “When we daydream, we are mixing fantasy and the dullness of sleep … This may be pleasant and soothing, but it leads nowhere. In fact, when we return to present reality, we may find it, by comparison, quite unpalatable. This is a painful state emerging from a painless one.”

For those of us who venture too far from the realities of our bodies and our lives, for example perpetuating ill health and stress by dissociated eating, or running up debt on the credit card, we must strengthen our ability to stay grounded in the realm of the real, gradually honing our capacity to contend with reality. This requires tapas, which is firmness in the face of the temptation to fly off into what we wish were the case, rather than contending with what is actually so. Tapas is actually a kindness to yourself, because it will bring about conditions that are far better than the fallout you perpetuate when you succumb to fantasy and denial of reality. The energy of the heat that you generate through your intentions, carried into action, burns through your denial and creates change. Like the clay pot, you, your body, and your life take on a more definitive shape and structure. The energy of tapas effects change in the realm of the real, your body/annamaya kosa. In Janice’s case, her ability to recognize her dissociation, and its dangers, was a crucial step in her growth process. This helped her to channel energy into more consistent, disciplined care of her body and her home.

Reflections on Self-Discipline

1. What are your associations to the idea of self-discipline? Do you consider yourself a disciplined person?
2. What are some disciplines that you would like to bring to your daily life?
3. How would you rate your capacity to bear up to reality? Are there particular areas that you are grounded in reality and others where you dissociate? Reflect on the differences between the two areas and why you make this split.

Balancing Your Private Economy of Energy

“I am so tired!” “I am exhausted!” “I’m just so tired, bone tired.” Eyes fill with tears as the experience of the body wells to the surface. These sentiments are a common refrain from many of my clients. A daily struggle to press against the limits of the body and accomplish the have-tos on the list. It’s heart-rending. My corollary to the term “the worried well” (the folks without severe mental health problems but who are nonetheless unhappy) is “the everyday sick.” We are the people without major health problems like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, or autoimmune issues, but who are nonetheless unhappy in our own skin and burdened by our bodies. Irritable bowel syndrome, thyroid problems, and pre-diabetes are examples of the plethora of problems the “everyday sick” are diagnosed with. Entering the domain of your body/annamaya kosa with an eye to tuning up your energetic system is the focus of this section.

You are an energetic system. As you already know, your energy is a limited resource. You make decisions every day regarding how you spend and how you replenish your precious stores. Energy drains are tasks that deplete you and give you nothing back. Think of negative relationships, obsessing over your weight, and self-abusive behaviors such as bingeing, cutting yourself, or getting drunk. Watching television, although a passive activity, is often an energy drain because it gives little to you and often leaves you feeling
lethargic and empty afterward. This is especially true when you watch it in excess. Reciprocal energy relationships apply to things like parenting, work, exercise, reading, and cooking. These activities all take energy, yet they also give energy back in the form of money, love, and increased health and self-esteem. Think of how you feel after spending time with your child in an engaging project where you are working together on something and enjoying one another’s company. You might feel exhausted afterward, but you also feel good about yourself and closer to your child. When your life is out of balance, your daily activities take more energy than they give to you, leading to chronic stress. This can set you in a cycle of wearily meeting obligations followed by fruitless attempts to restore yourself through passive activities like excessive TV watching, overeating, or overdrinking. If this is the case in your life, you need to find activities that feed your energetic system in more deliberate and truly nurturing ways. This requires you to become a sleuth regarding your energetic system, taking it upon yourself to assess what activities and attitudes rejuvenate you and what activities and attitudes deplete you and leave you feeling more drained.

The world is full of energy drains—fear, unrealistic expectations, and critical voices circulate around you every day. Likewise, there are many sources of energy in the world. Food, money, sex, music, nature, and other people can all be sources of energy. A healthy individual has a variable and flexible reliance on all of these sources of energy and a fluid relationship between giving and receiving energy. Distortions in energy management are exemplified by people who either hoard energy (for example, eating too much food, attention-seeking behavior, or being miserly) or leak energy (like overspending, talking too much, or engaging in frenzied activity). Many of us fall into extremes of alternatively hoarding and leaking our precious energy. It is quite common to hoard energy in one area and leak in another, for example, overeating food while leaking money. The art of energy management is finding an appropriate balance between what you are taking in and what you are giving out. This requires bringing consciousness to your energetic system and taking responsibility for how you are spending and replenishing your stores.

Individuals with food issues overvalue food as a source of energy. In need of comfort? A reward? Ability to get through the next task? When food is your “go-to” for energetic replenishment, you fall into this category of food overvaluation. Overvaluing food launches you into a negative energy cycle with food. Your energy is often consumed by thinking too much about food and overeating, followed by feeling sluggish and bloated physically and full of regret emotionally. The strain that excess, unhealthy food puts on your body depletes your physiological energy. If you think about it, it is a great irony that the way we are meant to bring sustenance and restoration to our bodies can become a primary source of energetic depletion. Your mental focus on food diminishes the energy you can put into cultivating other, potentially restorative activities. Food has captured your attention and diminished your appreciation of other sources of beauty and enjoyment in your life. I refer to this as “oral capture.” Some examples of this are “Yeah, spectacular sunset, love the pinks, but when the hell are we going to eat?” Or “Sure, the sex was pretty good, but dinner, out of this world!” If you recognize this tendency in yourself, be sure not to approach this with a self-punitive attitude. A little humor goes a long way. Think of George Costanza from Seinfeld, who in an attempt to bring together his two greatest pleasures in life takes a pastrami sandwich into the bedroom. There he is, in the middle of “the act,” emerging from the covers to lustily take a bite of pastrami à la Nine and a Half Weeks. So in your own life, just begin to take note of how often you are thinking about food during the day. Note whether you get excessively focused on what you are going to eat for dinner. Do you feel disappointed when you finish a meal? Begin to ask yourself, “What else might be enjoyable, nurturing, or sensual in my day?” You might not come up with anything at first and this is expectable. Asking the question, however, is important and already introduces a new possibility.

The yoga of food asks you to bring more consciousness to your energetic system. I suggest that you bring a wide lens to your exploration of how particular foods, as well as activities and people, feed or deplete your energy. You will discover that all foods and activities have a larger purpose and greater impact than how they feel in the moment. We all know that a bag of chips is pretty tasty and satisfying in the moment. But have you noticed their effect on your energetic system an hour later? Or six hours later? How about the next day? And the six hours of time you burned in front of the TV? How did that leave you feeling the next morning? Now consider the phone call that you enjoyed with your warm, interesting friend from college? The short walk that you took after dinner? The latter two activities are not preferable merely because all health magazines tell you to do them. They are preferable because they impact your energetic system in helpful and predictable ways. Yoga tells us that everything we do has a ripple effect that impacts how we feel and what we feel capable of in the moment and many hours later. This effect is often quite subtle, but when you tune in your awareness, you begin to notice these subtleties.

It is important to consciously take stock of the demands upon your energy and the activities that you engage in to replenish yourself, as well as the ways that you unnecessarily leak energy. Are you like Janice, selflessly jumping through hoops to please others and collapsing in the face of your own self-care? Or are you like Wanda, depleting yourself through a grueling day and then gobbling food in an attempt to regroup? Perhaps you are like me, weeping a river of tears when you must throw away the rotten bananas or wilted greens. Now consider what demands upon your energy are non-negotiable and what energy drains are self-sabotaging behaviors that you can change? What non-oral methods do you have for self-soothing and replenishing? Remember, passive activities like watching TV are not particularly restorative. It is also important to remember the ripple effect when you are making choices about what to eat and how to care for your body. You can get curious about how certain foods affect your energy for the day and even the next day. When choosing foods to eat, you may not only ask, “Is this nutritious?” but also, “How will this affect my energy and physiology?” When you eat, you can think to yourself, “Let this nourish my whole body.” You begin to send restorative intentions with the food you eat, which will positively affect your energetic system. This increases your motivation to make intelligent choices, realizing that the choice will go down your throat in a short period of time, but the food, and the intention with which you ate it, will have ripples you will need to contend with for many hours. In the same vein, you may notice, as I have, that if you start the day off with yoga or meditation, you are in a mind frame to make healthier food choices for the day. And when you’ve eaten well the night before, you are more likely to practice yoga or meditation in the morning. A positive samskara is in motion!

Reflections on Your Personal Economy

1. List all of the demands upon your energy. Include obsessive thoughts and mind games you play with yourself on your list. Then note beside each item if it is a reciprocal relationship (it gives you something back—for example, reading to your child) or an energy drain. Put check marks beside the energy drains that are optional, like negative relationships or rumination.
2. Now go through the list again. Look at the energy drains that are optional. Write down some concrete ways you can change this relationship so that it is not so draining.
3. Reflect on the ways that you hoard energy and the ways that you leak energy. How can you bring more balance to these distortions. Do you need to work on procrastination (that is hoarding energy), budgeting your money, or not gossiping? Do you think that you would have more energy if you shifted these patterns?
4. Assess your methods of energetic restoration. How much do you use food to energize, motivate, or comfort yourself? What are some non-oral options to this that you would like to cultivate?

Savasana

For those of you who have taken a yoga class before, you are familiar with savasana. It is placed at the end of a class and it consists of lying in a prone position where deep relaxation can occur. Its purpose is not only to allow the student to recover after a possibly strenuous practice, but also to allow absorption of the practice before running off to accomplish more tasks. We so often do not absorb what we take in—be it food or other sustenance. We frantically race along, taking in and checking off tasks without assimilation. In the spirit of encouraging more conscious assimilation, I am placing a brief savasana here in the middle of the text and encourage you to pause before routinely forging ahead. You have been presented with a lot of information to absorb and hopefully you have been given new ways to think about yourself and your relationship to food, your emotions, and your body. We are now ready to move from the realm of the physical and energetic body to explore your mind, or mental body. As you read on, I suggest that you consciously pace yourself so as not to become overwhelmed with the information and suggested tasks. This journey may start to feel like a laborious to-do list: revamping your diet, journaling your feelings, integrating exercise—and now meditation! It may be that you would like to take a break in even reading this book and instead backtrack and reinvest in some of the simple commitments suggested at the beginning of the book. I find that focusing on the level of the physical body can be very helpful when feeling overwhelmed because its concreteness grounds you in the real where you can take immediate action. When you are ready to move forward through the less tangible energies of emotion and into the realm of thought, pick up the book again. For it is here, in the fathomless realm of the mind, wherein lies your greatest human potential, as well as your most stunning fallibility.

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