The hardest thing about learning to be mindful is slowing down, is learning to pause.
I do meditation using the CALM app every day. Even though it is very difficult for me to make new habits I have made this one. Am I good at it? Do I do it “properly?” Do I sometimes fall asleep?
I’ve learned to ignore these questions and to simply concentrate on showing up and breathing. The bonus is the daily lesson that is almost like a devotion. This morning the lesson, the focus, was on how to break free from feedback loops in the brain. You do this by catching yourself just as you are falling into the loop. You stop yourself and breath into your center and break the loop. You do this over and over and over and over. And forever over.
Later when I was watching Caroline Winkler on YouTube, she mentioned the importance of the “Pause.”
Synchronicity.
Turns out the Pause is likely everything. It is the one thing I cannot seem to convince myself to allow myself to have. Time enough to breathe, time enough to make a decision or rather, as the Brits would say, to take the decision that I want.
I’m in a mindful food eating recovery counseling program. I started it back in 2017 and I resumed it in 2024. I have a problem with binging on sugar, which is not to say that I don’t overeat other things, but it is sugar that has always been the sticking point for me.
A few weeks ago I realized that when I get the craving to binge, I need to step in front of it and stop. And breathe through the craving. And let it pass away.
So far I have been unwilling to do this just as I have been unwilling to focus on eating my meals without distraction something that I did do in the beginning of this round of counseling.
How do I enter into that space between breaths? How do I sit still with a craving that, in the narrative mythos neverending story of my life, is so enormous, so all consuming that when I’m inside it makes me feel as though God will swallow me if I stop moving. Stop eating. Stop stuffing.
How do I sit still and let that wave of want and desire wash over me and dissipate? How do I surf that wave, how do I let that happen?
I thought about despairing because I’ve “fallen off the wagon” as it were. I haven’t seen food coach for over a month and I’ve had the “when the teacher is away the students will play” syndrome.
I see her this afternoon and I wanted to just fess up to all my sins go into every detail of the two birthday cakes that I had over the weekend all the icing all the bad feelings from all the icing and the blah blah and the woe is me but I am not going to do that.
Carolyn Winkler mentioned that “all or nothing” thinking is really just “nothing thinking” because you end up doing nothing. All or nothing thinking is the nothing syndrome that I often find myself in. How do I break free, how do I ride the wave instead of falling down to the bottom of the ocean?
I will do this by standing up, dusting myself off, and getting back to it.
My binge eating disorder is serious, it is life-alerting and likely wrecking my health as most eating disorders do (I live in a sort of denial of this). I have had it for most of my life and I probably will always have it. I will mess up, I will fall short, I will even despair.
But that does not mean that I have failed. it does not mean that I must make failure a habit.
I choose this day to make success a habit, to see myself as a successful person. I will simply move forward with my chin up and not do “better.” I will not judge myself harshly. I will compassionate myself and just keep doing. Keep moving forward.
And pause. And pause. And pause.
And Pause. Again.
~r.
