Food for Thought A quarterly newsletter from The Center for Mindful Eating Members Only TCME offers CEUs for members, member-only programs, and discounts. Visit the Web site for more information. Listen to TCME Unable to attend a teleconference? Not to worry. TCME is now recording these programs for our members. They are on the TCME Member’s Web site. Free Patient Handouts Looking for professional handouts to give to your patients? Visit our Web site and click “Newsletters.” Tell a Friend about TCME’s free monthly e-newsletter, Mindful Bytes. It is a great way to learn about upcoming programs at TCME. Member Support Your $40 TCME membership is how TCME is funded. We appreciate your tax deductible donation. Welcome to The Center for Mindful Eating TCME is a member-supported forum for professionals interested in understanding the value of mindful eating. TCME identifies and provides resources for individuals who wish to help their clients develop healthier relationships with food and eating, and bring eating into balance with other important aspects of life. Mindfulness practices have been shown to have a positive impact on many disease states and health concerns, and mindfulness approaches are increasingly being applied to eating and food choice. The benefits of mindful eating are not restricted to physical health improvement alone. Practitioners may find that mindfulness and mindful eating can affect one’s entire life. The Center for Mindful Eating does not promote a singular approach to mindful eating but is committed to fostering dialogue and the sharing of ideas, clinical experience, and research. About This Issue How can acceptance help us? In this issue, we will explore the wisdom from Char Wilkins, Donald Altman and Jan Chozen Bays. Char Wilkins asks: What can be more difficult than accepting that “I’m OK”? Donald Altman helps explain that acceptance is the first step toward meaningful change. Jan Bays offers practical suggestions on how we can bring acceptance into our lives. And last, we are pleased to introduce you to author Jean Fain, who is this quarter’s guest writer. We express our gratitude to the many individuals who have become members of TCME over the past year. Their tax-deductible donations allow us to continue to provide valuable services. If you are not a member, please consider joining. Anything EXCEPT Acceptance! By Char Wilkins, LCSW, MSW “But I can’t accept that I’m OK as I am. If I did, I’d just eat more and more!” There’s a lot of fear associated with accepting ourselves as we are right now. Maybe that’s because we think that if we do, we won’t know how to act, won’t know who we are, or we fear that we’ll never change. That’s understandable, because our beliefs, which were shaped by our history, are powerful driving forces in our lives. However, there’s a price to pay. Maintaining even well-established beliefs requires a lot of energy. If you believe you are bad or lazy, you must maintain that status quo. Otherwise you’d have to allow for the possibility that you’re neither bad nor lazy and that you are just afraid. Fear comes disguised as many emotions and behaviors, but when W W W . T C M E . O R G www.tcme.org Spring 2013
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Food for ThoughtA quarterly newsletter from The Center for Mindful Eating
Members Only TCME offers CEUs for members, member-only programs, and discounts. Visit the Web site for more information.
Listen to TCME Unable to attend a teleconference? Not to worry. TCME is now recording these programs for our members. They are on the TCME Member’s Web site.
Free Patient HandoutsLooking for professional handouts to give to your patients? Visit our Web site and click “Newsletters.”
Tell a Friend about TCME’s free monthly e-newsletter, Mindful Bytes. It is a great way to learn about upcoming programs at TCME.
Member Support Your $40 TCME membership is how TCME is funded. We appreciate your tax deductible donation.
Welcome to The Center
for Mindful Eating TCME is a member-supported forum for professionals interested in understanding the value of mindful eating. TCME identifies and provides resources for individuals who wish to help their clients develop healthier relationships with food and eating, and bring eating into balance with other important aspects of life. Mindfulness practices have been shown to have a positive impact on many disease states and health concerns, and mindfulness approaches are increasingly being applied to eating and food choice. The benefits of mindful eating are not restricted to physical health improvement alone. Practitioners may find that mindfulness and mindful eating can affect one’s entire life. The Center for Mindful Eating does not promote a singular approach to mindful eating but is committed to fostering dialogue and the sharing of ideas, clinical experience, and research.
About This IssueHow can acceptance help us? In this issue, we will explore the wisdom from Char Wilkins, Donald Altman and Jan Chozen Bays. Char Wilkins asks: What can be more difficult than accepting that “I’m OK”? Donald Altman helps explain that acceptance is the first step toward meaningful change. Jan Bays offers practical suggestions on how we can bring acceptance into our lives. And last, we are pleased to introduce you to author Jean Fain, who is this quarter’s guest writer.
We express our gratitude to the many individuals who have become members of TCME over the past year. Their tax-deductible donations allow us to continue to provide valuable services. If you are not a member, please consider joining.
Anything EXCEPT Acceptance!
By Char Wilkins, LCSW, MSW
“But I can’t accept that I’m OK as I am. If I did, I’d just eat more and more!” There’s a lot of fear associated with accepting ourselves as we are right now. Maybe that’s because we think that if we do, we won’t know how to act, won’t know who we are, or we fear that we’ll never change. That’s understandable, because our beliefs, which were shaped by our history, are powerful driving forces in our lives. However, there’s a price to pay. Maintaining even well-established beliefs requires a lot of energy. If you believe you are bad or lazy, you must maintain that status quo. Otherwise you’d have to allow for the possibility that you’re neither bad nor lazy and that you are just afraid.
Fear comes disguised as many emotions and behaviors, but when
it comes to accepting how our life really is, the flavor is often resistance. Pushing away – which is resisting – is exhausting. And if all your energy is going into pushing away what you don’t want (for example, “I have to have brownies now”), you can’t be moving toward what you want. You can’t go in two directions at the same time. Only by accepting the thought or experience that is happening right now can you begin to move toward a healthier way of eating. When we start from where we are, we have a vantage
point from which to view the landscape, get the lay of the land so to speak, and see that we have choices.
Acceptance is often thought to be passivity. Far from it. Accepting that you ate a dozen doughnuts because you were lonely isn't weak, it's courageous. Accepting that dieting doesn't work for you is also courageous. It can be frightening to let go of a one-size-fits-all diet regimen and to undertake learning how to tune in to the different hungers of your body, mind and heart. Being with each moment of your life, seeing things as they are, gives you the gift of having a platform from which to work that is free from draining emotions such as denial, suppression, resistance and
resignation.
We’ve all had the experience of giving a gift to someone who couldn’t accept it without staunchly protesting she didn’t deserve it or outright refusing to accept it. Think about how that pushing-away energy felt coming toward you and how you, as the giver, felt. Perhaps you felt disappointed, embarrassed, ashamed or angry. When we don’t accept ourselves, the same dynamic is set up within us, causing turmoil, confusion and
shame, which are so uncomfortable that we reach for food or drink to sooth or numb the pain. Cheri Huber,
author and founder of Mountain View Zen Center, puts it this way:
Non-acceptance is always suffering, no matter what you’re not accepting.
Acceptance is always freedom, no matter what you’re accepting.
When our minds grab onto a desire, we find ourselves trapped by the tremendous force of that craving. Rather than trying to prolong a pleasant thought or experience, or trying to get rid of or protect ourselves from a pleasant or unpleasant experience, mindfulness accepts the experience as it is, observing it carefully, moment to moment. Observing alone allows a shift to
take place. And even if we find that we can’t let go of thinking about having the brownies, we can explore with kindly curiosity the thoughts, feelings and physical sensations as we eat them.
“Mindfulness does not react to what it sees. It just sees and
understands. Mindfulness is the essence of patience.”
Bhante Henelopa Gunaratana
How can mindfulness help us to be more accepting? When we are mindful, we accept everything that arises into our awareness. We accept our thoughts and feelings, even the ones we hate having. We accept our experiences, even the ones we wish we weren’t having. In this way we learn to be understanding of ourselves – in order to understand what we really need and want. Be gentle and kind with yourself. As Bhante Henelopa Gunaratana goes on to say: “You may not be perfect, but you are all you’ve got to work with. The process of becoming who you will be begins first with the total acceptance of who you are.”
Try taking more moments to pause and relax. When you pause, you interrupt your reactive conditioned behaviors and you step into the present moment. When you take a breath and relax, you can better meet your thoughts and feelings with acceptance. Gregory Kramer, creator of Insight Dialogue states, “Accepting is to the mind what relaxing is to the
.orgThe Center for Mindful Eating www.tcme.org
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Acceptance is often thought to be passivity. Far from it.
body.” You can learn to relax and accept both body and mind little by little by being mindful.
We’d all like to be something other than what we are and do it in one leap. Just tell me how high to jump and I will. But to get to the second floor in our home, we need to climb the stairs one step at a time. We can see that we need each and every step to get to the next floor. Deep down most of us wish we could end the exhausting striving and just be who we are, just be real. But as long as we live with an image of how we wish we looked or weighed, we are not real. As long as we resist who we are right now, we are not real. When we begin to accept “me,” it may be uncomfortable and certainly unfamiliar and imperfect. The real may feel unreal for quite some time, but one step at a time, one breath at a time, one bite at a time will get us there. Char Wilkins, MSW, LCSW, is a mindfulness-based psychotherapist She is a certified MBSR instructor, trains professionals internationally in MBSR, MBCT and Mindful Eating/Conscious Living (MECL). She serves on TCME Board, and can be reached at www.mindfulpath.com
Finding AcceptanceBy Donald Altman, M.A., LPC
What is acceptable in your life and what is not? Do you spend an
inordinate amount of time worrying about what you absolutely cannot bear to have
in your life, such as how much food you eat, what you eat, when you eat, how much you weigh, and how your body looks? The effort and energy it takes to push away what you don’t want is, quite simply, exhausting. How exhausting? Imagine, for a moment, a fish that is painfully hooked by a sharp lure. The more the fish fights and resists, the more exhausted and stuck he becomes. If that image makes you cringe, that’s okay! You are about to discover how acceptance can free you and get you unhooked.
First of all, anyone can get “hooked.” It happens all the time in the form of things we either desire and crave, or in those things we want to avoid. Fortunately, the attitude of openness and acceptance can help anyone loosen the hold of painful hooks, from rigid thoughts to compulsive behaviors. To begin, let’s define the word acceptance. For our purposes,
acceptance is an attitude, a way of opening to things as they really are. For example, if you are feeling sad or miserable, you can accept that you are feeling sad and miserable. Acceptance does not mean that you will dwell on it and resign yourself to feeling this way
for the rest of your life (or for the rest of the hour)! Acceptance allows you a kind of safe detachment that doesn’t leave you exhausted, upset, and feeling worse.
Rather than resisting, acceptance is a first step toward meaningful change and reducing your suffering by just being present with your very human circumstances. Take a moment to look at the following quote:
When we scratch the wound and give into our addictions we do not
allow the wound to heal. But when we instead experience the raw
quality of the itch or pain of the wound and do not scratch it, we
actually allow the wound to heal.—Pema Chodron
What would it be like for you to open up to the raw experience of noticing even the most obsessive food-related thoughts or cravings? This means not reacting to them,
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Rather than resisting, acceptance is a first step toward meaningful change and reducing your suffering by just being present with your very
but letting yourself notice them in a more open and spacious way—without scratching! Of course, I’m not saying this is easy. If you have ever been bitten by a mosquito (and who hasn’t), then you know how difficult this can be. But then, you also know what happens when you scratch and scratch and scratch.
Acceptance means you can watch whatever is happening in your life with an open heart and an open mind. Most important, acceptance is also self-acceptance, a way that you can nurture yourself as you find new choices and healing.
Donald Altman, M.A., LPC, is a psychotherapist, former Buddhist monk, award-winning writer and author of the new book The Joy Compass. Other books
include One-Minute Mindfulness, 12-Weeks to Mindful Eating, Meal By Meal, The
Mindfulness Code, and Art of the Inner Meal. Donald consults and leads
mindfulness workshops around the country. He currently serves as Vice
President of TCME. His website is www.mindfulpractices.com. Contact:
We have a choice. We can either accept each moment of our life or we can resist it. Resisting what is happening is like driving through life with the brakes on. It creates a constant sense of friction, burns a lot of energy and can make us feel chronically irritated and depleted. You may say, well, if I accept things as they are (for example, if I accept that I am eating in unhealthy ways), I will have no reason to change. Actually the opposite is true. True change begins from the solid foundation of awareness and acceptance of what is true.
We can eat in unhealthy ways and deny it, which only perpetuates the habits we wish to change. Or, we can accept it, acknowledging that “I ate an entire bag of chips without noticing it because I was watching TV.” Only when we accept what has occurred can we move, one small step at a time, to change our behavior. “Next time I
will put a few chips in a bowl and eat each one slowly and mindfully. I will have my little party with chips before I turn on the TV.” Notice that acceptance and a plan to change do not involve self-criticism – just noticing and planning for change.
Practice exercise #1: Sit quietly for a few minutes with your
hands at rest. Open your senses to all the
sensations you perceive, the
many touches on your skin,
and all the sounds in the room. Invite each
sensation into your awareness with curiosity.
Practice exercise #2: Several times a day, when you realize that you are resisting what is happening (traffic jam, unexpectedly long meeting), take three deep breaths and say silently, “This is the truth of what is happening now. I will stay aware and be curious about what is happening.”
Jan Chozen Bays, MD, is a pediatrician and Zen teacher. She wrote Mindful
Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyous Relationship to Food and How to
Train a Wild Elephant, a collection of 53 mindfulness exercises. She can be reached
through her website: www.zendust.org.
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Resisting what is
happening is like driving through life
with the brakes on.
Our MissionTCME is a nonprofit, nonreligious organization whose purpose is to incorporate
mindful eating into new and existing programs. We offer a variety of resources, including The Principles of Mindful Eating, which is available at our Web site and
is free for reproduction for educational purposes.PO Box 88
The practice of self-compassion – treating yourself like a good friend or loved one – may be centuries-old news, but it’s new again. Not only did Tara Parker-Pope’s blog on the subject make headline news last year, it was the #1 most emailed NY Times article of the day.
When you think about it, it’s not hard to understand why Americans are gobbling up info on how to go easy on yourself. A steady dose of self-compassion has been proven to work like antidepressants without the negative side effects. It decreases depression and anxiety, improves concentration and perspective.
What’s more, self-compassion is not only safer than any diet pill or appetite suppressant, it’s proving effective in treating eating problems. In a persuasive, oft-cited study, dieters who fell off the “diet” wagon, but still thought kindly of themselves didn’t
indulge in emotional eating. In contrast, dieters with their characteristic critical mindset reflexively overindulged despite their best intentions.
But how do you stop beating yourself up and start going easier on yourself? Got a minute? Here’s a quick and easy compassion-enhancing practice for right now or the next time you catch yourself in the throes of self-criticism. If you’re walking down the street, feeling self-critical – maybe you caught a less-than-flattering glimpse of yourself in a store window or bumped into someone who’d last seen you when you were looking better, or maybe divorce has thrown you back into the dating scene – rather than give yourself a hard time, try a little tenderness in the form of a walking meditation. It’ll give you the calm and confidence you need to make your way toward greater health and well being. Here’s how:
As you continue walking, breathe deeply, and silently repeat the traditional phrases of loving-kindness meditation:
o May I be safeo May I be healthyo May I be happyo May I live in ease
If you come across others who could use some compassion – a homeless person, an elderly neighbor, a new mother and her baby – mentally send some their way:
o May you be safeo May you be healthyo May you be happyo May you live in ease
When it makes sense, return to the “I” phrases (May I be safe….) and notice the difference self-compassion makes. Even one compassionate minute has the power to lighten your mood, brighten your outlook, and enhance your ability to make healthier choices. Why put off feeling better tomorrow when you can take a compassionate minute today?
Jean Fain, L.I.C.S.W., M.S.W., is a licensed psychotherapist and a teaching associate in psychiatry at Cambridge Health Alliance, a
teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. In her private practice in Concord, Mass., she
uses hypnosis and mindfulness to treat everyday eating issues. Her no-diet book, "The
Self-Compassion Diet," was named one of 2011's 10 new, noteworthy diet books by
Time.com. Her health articles have appeared in O: The Oprah Magazine, Conde Nast
Traveler, Shape and more. She has dedicated her work to helping others keep physically,
emotionally and mentally fit. Visit www.jeanfain.com. Credit: First published
in the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jean-fain-
