Category Archives: Living in the Solution

Measuring our compassion

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An idea that courses through virtually every spiritual tradition is compassion. Dictionary.com provides this definition: “A feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.” As we work through the 12 Steps of OA, we begin to feel truly compassionate, perhaps for the first time, as our hearts and minds become aligned with our Higher Power.

Some of us have simply been too self-centered to feel compassion. We may feel a distance from suffering and shut our minds to it, or we may dismiss it because we are not, ourselves, in the moment, experiencing the same suffering as another person is. If we are people pleasers, we may think we brim with compassion, but do we? What motives do we have in helping others? Is it possible that we seek the approval of others? Or that of the person suffering? Do we do help out of guilt or out of sympathy or empathy? Who are we really trying to help—ourselves or the other person?

When we get through the 12 Steps, we do not emerge as saintly peacemakers, and we certainly couldn’t keep it up even if we did. We are human beings, we are prone to the same pratfalls of ego, the same biases and stubbornness that any person has. Just because we are more reasonable than we were doesn’t mean we are entirely reasonable. We are works in progress, and compassion is a very good measuring stick for our spiritual condition.

See, the great thing about OA is that as we get better, we are learning how to help another person get better. We can measure our compassion by our willingness to help another addict. Judgment is the opposite of compassion, and through it we claim to ourselves that we are different than another person. Do we judge an OA member for how they work their program? For their size or the speed of their physical recovery? Do we judge them for talking about The Steps too much during meetings or for talking too much about personal problems? How often have we judged another person’s recovery by what they look like across the room from us—only to learn that they’ve already lost more weight in OA than we have to lose in the first place?

Our twelfth Step tells us that we must help others with our affliction, if we are to live long and happily. To do so, we must develop compassion by countermanding the judgments that appear in our heads. After all, the person we are judging is just like us!

Outside of OA, we have even more opportunity to measure our compassion. We need only look at the front page of the newspaper. Pick a tyrant, a political figure, a drunk driver, a shooter, a serial killer, a child abuser, or an animal abuser, anyone whose actions set your anger ablaze. Then ask yourself what terrible suffering must have led them to their present state. Ask what awful mental illness, cruel experience, or deprivation could lead a person to such hideous actions. Our recoveries do not depend on determining who is right or who is wrong; they depend on our willingness to be helpful to God and others. If the person you picked from the headlines asked you to help them stop eating compulsively would you?

When we close ourselves off from compassion, we judge. When we judge, though, aren’t we really trying to separate ourselves from what we are afraid of and from what we believe are the worst parts of ourselves? Anytime we point the finger at another, aren’t three of our fingers are pointing back at ourselves?

If we are to live and prosper in OA, we must help others. If we must help others, we can’t allow our mindless judgments to get in the way of our spiritual work and attitude. We must flip our judgments back over to compassion. We must remind ourselves that we are works in progress, and that God is turning our defects into assets daily. Otherwise, we’ll spend our time yelling at the radio or TV, complaining about those we love, and sitting in meetings wondering why everyone else seems more at ease than we are. Or else just eating.

Giving…and getting…the minimum

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OA is not like many other aspects of our lives in many ways, and here’s one. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition. In most endeavors in our lives, we make predictable, incremental improvement. Educators will be familiar with Piaget’s learning curve (or J-shaped curve), for example. Or think about learning a musical instrument, where progress evolves over time, roughly proportional to how much we practice and how much tutelage we receive.

OA’s results are predictable, but they are not incremental. Our literature tells us that if we don’t work the entire program we won’t find recovery. But if we do work it, we will be changed and freed form our obsession. The Big Book puts it in stark terms: “Half measures availed us nothing.” If we just do part of the program we won’t gain recovery incrementally. In fact, we won’t gain anything but self-knowledge and possibly weight. Self-knowledge as the Big Book smashes home upon us, does absolutely nothing for us in combination with our self-will. If it did, we wouldn’t need OA!

We can pick apart our psyches, and many of us will discuss during meetings the crooks and bends in our personalities that feed our compulsion to eat. And that information alone has absolutely no use to us in recovery. We’ve tried to leverage these understandings for years, often with the help of psychology professionals, and in many cases rather than help us recover, they’ve keep us mired in our self-pity. We may identify more and more with our problems so that we struggle to see other possible avenues our life might take.

The whole point of the 12 Steps is for us to find a relationship with a Higher Power that works for us, to clear out everything inside our minds and hearts that keeps us from that HP, and to let God change us so that we can then be helpful to others. “Trust God, clean house, and help others.”

  • Trust God: The first three Steps help us establish at least a willingness to seek God.
  • Clean House: The middle five Steps help us identify the crap inside us that’s in the way of recovery, be changed by HP, and clean up our past.
  • Help Others: The last three Steps help us maintain an attitude of humility and helpfulness.

Once we’ve worked the Steps and begun to live in the solution each day, we find real recovery. Before then, we may have found ourselves not eating compulsively for a time, but that’s only part of what recovery means. We are promised that if we don’t grow spiritually, we will eat again. If we don’t do business with God, write inventory, speak it to someone, let God change us, make amends, monitor our behavior, ask God for guidance, and help others, then our disease will creep up when we least expect it and grab us by the throat.

Remember, our illness is always getting stronger. It’s progressive, which means it never gets better, only worse. So we have to keep growing spiritually to stay ahead of it. If we only do the minimum, we will get the minimum: nothing. If all we do is avoid binge foods, we’re only dieting. If we are only going to meetings, we will not recover by osmosis. We must ask for help in working the Steps. If we’re putting off writing inventory, we aren’t making spiritual progress, and we will find the food increasingly tempting. If we stop working the middle Steps, we won’t realize the famous Ninth Step promises read after each meeting. If we slacken off on our latter Steps, we will lose touch God, stop helping others, and drift back toward misery and food.

This isn’t opinion. It’s experiences we can and have observed in ourselves and in others.

Look at those OAs in our area whose recovery we admire. We see that they keep up not only with their food plan and meetings, but with making their amends, praying, doing their daily 10th Step, helping others, and working the tools of the program. They also don’t shout their recovery to their hilltops but share it with humility that others may be helped by it.

Does that seem like a lot of work? Sometimes it does to us. Does it seem like a lot more work to be miserable, bursting out of our clothes, and unable to do anything about those conditions? Yes, and it seems like a death sentence: one where we slowly die physically long after we’ve withered to a husk of ourselves emotionally and spiritually.

If we are going to meetings, we must keep coming back. Nothing can happen for us if we isolate and don’t ask for help. But we also need to know that if all we do is go to meetings, we won’t get better because human aid is not enough. If we are stuck in the first three Steps, we must pocket our pride, swallow our fear, and make time in our lives for the action Steps. Otherwise, we won’t change on the inside at all.

Because this is all or nothing. The lasting result (peace, joy, happiness, serenity, and freedom from compulsive eating) will only be given us once we do all the required work. We don’t get them a little bit at a time. If we do the minimum, then the minimum all we’ll get.

5 Ways to Get a Full Serving of OA

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We compulsive eaters have never cheated ourselves. A full serving for us means enough servings to make us full…and then some. It means an extra dip of a spoon or scooper into whatever serving dish or container we’re holding. It means mounded measuring cups or eating those last bits because we’d “hate to see it go to waste.” We’d rather it go to our waist than to waste!

So why do we resist a full serving of OA?

What’s a full serving of OA look like? It’s about following an ages-old piece of OA wisdom:

  • Program first.
  • Then family.
  • Then work.

Our members share stories all the time about how our illness degraded or ruined their family relationships. How it made them less productive workers or even got them fired. If we don’t put program first there may be no family or job to return to. This disease kills, so eventually there may be no life to return to.

It’s like that old story about a reluctant OA telling a longtime member, “I’ve always had a problem with commitment.” The OA veteran, not giving an inch replies, “You don’t have a problem with commitment. You’ve been committed to compulsive eating for the last thirty years.” We all have the ability to work this program and to put it first. The question is whether we’re in enough pain to listen to the voice inside us that wants to get better.

Here’s 5 proven ways we can get a full serving of OA!

  • Treat compulsive eating like the killer disease it is: We can’t BS ourselves about the severity of this disease. It will kill us spiritually, emotionally, and physically. It destroys us from the inside out.
  • Keep making meetings: Sometimes we let our minds dictate our meeting schedule instead of listening to our desire to get better. We get “busy” or “tired.” Better to attend a meeting while tired than to be back in the place of being sick and tired of being sick and tired.
  • Get, and use!, a sponsor: If we are truly powerless, then we cannot get better alone. We must ask another person for help. If we have a sponsor and aren’t working closely with them, then it’s time to get honest about why we have a sponsor.
  • Work the Steps: OA is not an intellectual exercise. We can’t think our way out of the illness. The Steps are an action plan that gets us better. Do the Steps seem scary? Perhaps. But aren’t they less scary than the devastation of our disease? Of dying too young? Of a lifetime of physical debilitation, foggy thinking, depression, and enslavement to the likes of Betty Crocker?
  • Raise our hand to sponsor: If we don’t help others, we will eat again. Our literature and experience tell us so. Abstinent but plateauing? Raise a hand to “get someone started.” Done the Steps but feel uneasy about sponsoring? Trust God and raise that hand! Anyone with long-term recovery will tell us that sponsoring is the lifeblood of their recovery.

Get a full serving of OA starting right now!

Rites of Renewal

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This past week players reported to camp at Fort Myers for Red Sox spring training. It’s an annual rite of passage, and for many northern New Englanders, the first day of spring training is an early sign of the warmer months. Even if we can’t be with the team, we see footage of their workouts, and we can imagine ourselves in the warm Florida sunshine. We feel a little lift, a little relief from the winter blues. The cycle of renewal that leads us out of the post-holiday doldrums has begun again.

OA creates in us a similar cycle of renewal. We are led out of the doldrums of compulsive eating and toward a period of growth that leads not only to our personal rejuvenation but also toward a lifetime of better days. The Big Book tells us that when we do the Steps “we are reborn.” From the point at which our adventure in OA begins, we sense the hope emanating from those in our meetings who have experienced long-term recovery. Like a ballplayer whose previous season was ruined by injury, we realize that the slate can be wiped clean, and we can start over. We let others coach us and guide us so that we can tap new and heretofore hidden resources inside us. We do the legwork, the drills, the stretching because we are ready to go to any length for success.

Steps One, Two, and Three represent something like those thirty spring exhibition games that precede opening day. In them we are building the foundation on which an incredible journey will be taken. We round ourselves into willingness the way a player rounds into midseason form. Where the ballplayer is getting down his timing at bat and his footwork in the field, we are getting used to attending meetings, calling OA friends, taking a sponsor’s suggestions, reading OA literature, and becoming action-oriented instead of passive victims of our disease. Where a baseball player restores his confidence through spring repetition, we gain confidence in a Higher Power through the repetitions of OA actions that separate us from food and draw us closer to the solution.

The fullness of rebirth will come from Steps 4 through 9 where we will fully develop a relationship with a Higher Power that will solve our problem on a permanent one-day-at-a-time basis. This is like the long baseball season. Baseball plays every day, and it rewards those players and teams able to keep their focus on the day ahead, not on what other teams are doing or on where they will travel next week. We stick to the twenty-four hours ahead of us, and we work at the middle steps diligently. Unlike a baseball player who knows when the season is over, we don’t know when our window of willingness will close. Our disease is in the background, cunningly telling us that OA won’t work or that we don’t really need it after all. By working the Steps and continuing to attend meetings and use the OA tools, we keep this voice at bay long enough that God can change us from the inside out.

But unlike baseball, our season never ends. We are reborn, and then every day thereafter, we are renewed. Of course, we work at that daily renewal. We use Steps 10, 11, and 12 to stay in the spiritual game. When we fail to use them, when we allow the clatter and clamor of life to distract us from them, we feel it. So we keep at it. But it’s not such a grind. Ask anyone who has experienced long-time recovery, and they’ll tell you that trading a few minutes of prayer and meditation each day is entirely worth it. They’ll also tell you that working with others is one of the joys of their life.

There’s one other important difference from baseball. In OA there are no winners and losers. We are all winners so long as we keep coming back. No one is the MVP of OA or the world champion. Well, actually, perhaps God is, however we each define God for ourselves. But among the humans in our rooms, we are all just another player on the roster, each trying to recover and help others do the same.

So as reports from Florida drift in, you’ll hear that such-and-such is in “The Best Shape of His Life” or that so-and-so’s fastball looks faster than ever. It’s the hope of Spring. In our rooms, we get to listen instead to the reports of members who are experiencing renewal each day after their harrowing experiences with the ravages of this disease. True reports that give hope rather than project it.

The Force Is With Us, Always

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This weekend, the new Star Wars movie has opened with as much fanfare as perhaps any movie ever. One of the chief ideas driving the story of the Star Wars saga is “The Force,” an invisible spiritual energy that binds the universe together and gives people powers they wouldn’t otherwise have. Those who believe in it will give one another the benediction, “May the Force Be with You.”

In OA, we are also granted special powers beyond our own abilities. The Force is with us! This is most outwardly obvious in our relationship to food and our physical recovery. The first Step tells us that we are utterly powerless over food. We can’t control it whatsoever. Our bodies usually indicate this whether we are fat or too skinny or bouncing in between. The second Step tells us that we won’t be restored to any kind of normalcy around food without a Higher Power. For the Star Wars inclined, we must use The Force. Or more accurately, let it use us.

Of course, that’s not all there is to it. We are also powerless over our feelings and emotions. Our literature tells us that our physical compulsion to eat actually begins in our minds. We first obsess about food in reaction to our feelings. The disease centers in our minds, and we are activated before the first bite is taken. We need a Force to help us here as well, and the Steps show us how to call upon that Force when we need help conquering the fears and emotions that drive us to hurt ourselves with food. Because we obviously can’t cope with those things ourselves, or we would have done so already.

Of course, this all means that we have also had a spiritual sickness. We have shunned God and left the idea of a Higher Power to die on the vine. We need the Steps and the guidance of someone with experience to help us find our Higher Power and tap into Its amazing flow of positive energy. In the original Star Wars movie, Luke Skywalker’s mentor Ben Kenobi says things to him such as “Feel the Force,” “Let go of your feelings,” and “The Force will be with you, always.” Sounds pretty familiar, right? Our sponsors and the program are telling us to feel the presence of a Higher Power; to let go of what troubles us and give them to God; and that our HP will always be there for us, no matter how grave the situation. Whether the crisis occurs in a galaxy far, far away or just behind our eyes, the answer is the same! Spiritual principles are the same everywhere: Trust and rely on God, whatever your concept of God is, whatever you might call God, no matter what the situation is. That’s what OA tells us that the essence of spirituality is. An idea that is shared through virtually every spiritual or religious concept out there.

Finally, the Jedi in the Star Wars saga use their Force-given powers unstintingly to help others. That’s exactly what OA asks of us. Think of others, ask God how we might be helpful to someone besides ourselves, and let our spiritual discoveries lead us to new ways to bring peace and goodwill to the world.

Hey, it’s fun to see incredible aliens, watch spacecraft hurtling through the stars, and enjoy the thrill of evil enemies meeting their match. But right here, in our own lives, we get to enjoy the benefits of a Force if not “The Force.” We aren’t granted superhuman powers, but rather the amazing power to be merely human. To walk among people with our chins up, meeting the world on its terms, and living happy lives instead of turning back to the dark side that our disease has chained us to for so many years. The Force is with us. Always!

Thanksgiving; Thanks for giving; Thanks, giving

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Now that we’ve dispensed with the eating part of Thanksgiving—amateur day for the non-compulsive eaters—let’s have a closer look at the idea behind it.

While the circumstances of the first celebration of Thanksgiving Day in America are a matter of historical debate, we do know that the holiday has its roots in England and Europe as a day of prayer and celebration for an abundant harvest. An annual feast that shared the bounty of the year’s labor in a degree and manner that was otherwise special in the hardscrabble colonial world. Today, we can have a Thanksgiving dinner whenever we want, and as food addicts, we often do….

But that notion of giving thanks for abundance is powerful because it is really about giving thanks for life and the means to sustain it. As addicts, our life is as day-to-day as the colonists’ was. While a crop failure, a vicious summer or winter storm, or simple pestilence could destroy their lives on any given day, we need only take one bite or one swig of a trigger item and we’re on the road to perdition. Research recently written about in the New York Times suggests that adopting an attitude of gratitude, even when we’re not sure we mean it, leads us to a higher quality of mind and life. We addicts know this. Fake it til you make it! When we become full of thanks, of gratitude, we don’t need to eat because we now see abundance all around us: family, friends, jobs, material well being, physical well being, we can increase the list ad infinitum. We are filled with spiritual things instead of self-pity, self-recrimination, resentment, and any of a dozen other negative feelings in which we can only see ourselves. We forget everything good in our lives and seek relief in the one thing we know to do…eat. Giving thanks isn’t merely a good idea, it’s an essential way of life for people who are constitutionally predisposed to the centrality of their suffering.

But how about another way of looking at it? What if we insert a certain preposition in the word Thanksgiving? Thanks for giving. Here we can choose to observe our Higher Power at work in our life. We aren’t only grateful for something, we are grateful to Something. We can celebrate our relationship with the God of our understanding with thanks for being able to receive our blessings. What this means is that we have opened ourselves to help. We have torn down the walls between us and our Higher Power, however we may conceive of an HP. Without this turn of thought, we cannot see the abundance in front of our faces. Before program we not could truly receive from God; we thought we were providing our own blessings. In recovery our eyes are opened to the truth. Indeed, in many cases the family, friends, and circumstances that used to drive us to the fridge now delight us. Did they change? No, we changed by letting God into our lives.

Finally, what about thanks, giving. Here we might think about these two words sequentially. That is, in the way that step 12 guides us. If we are thankful, we must demonstrate it. To keep our attitude of gratitude, we must give it away. Good words signal a grateful mind, good deeds a grateful heart. If we are thankful for family and friends, are we telling them we love them and being of help and service to them? If we are thankful for OA, are we providing service? Or do we just attend meetings and let others do the work for us? Most important, if we are thankful for recovery, no matter where we are at in that journey, are we giving it away by helping newcomers? Do we greet them warmly? Do we call them? Do we tell them about our experiences so that they can identify with us and find a home in OA? We are told that if we do not carry this message, we will return to our old ways. We have to give it away if we want to keep it. And to return to our old ways means to die. First spiritually, then emotionally, and then physically.

We are never cured of the disease of compulsive eating. We have a daily reprieve. When we remember to tell God how grateful we are, we pave the road to ongoing recovery. When we tell other people how grateful we are, even those not in program and perhaps even strangers, we bring a little peace into someone else’s day. Thanksgiving is a day when “normals” take a moment to count their blessings and then feast. Just as we are significantly more experienced at feasting than they are, becoming similarly expert at counting our blessings will make our blessings count more and lives saner and happier.

There’s No God in Gossip

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Today a guest poster takes on a topic of subtle importance.

There’s no God in gossip. I learn this at work, at home, among friends. Sometimes by positive reinforcement (I don’t gossip, and I feel better for it), sometimes by negative (I gossip, and I feel worse for it or confused by it). When I gossip, it’s because I want control. By pulling the information I want out of others and by doling out morsels as I see fit, I feel like a master spy orchestrating events to come to a conclusion of my devising. The reality is, in fact, humiliating.

You see, when I’m gossiping and trying to gain control, it’s usually of situation that doesn’t exist now and probably won’t ever. Or it’s of a situation I can never control. It’s all a fantasy world ordered by my ego, designed by my mind, and shaped by my fears. When I gossip, I am trying to dictate the flow of information to fill in the missing parts of the fantasy world in my head. Is this person my friend? Who is allied against me? What can I count on happening? What surprises lay in store for me? What’s the real scoop?

The sad part about it? I’m wasting all my creative energies by taking bad things that happened before (and maybe not even to me) and projecting them into the future. What if instead of gossiping and indulging these dark fantasies I simply applied my focus to the task at hand? My work. My marriage. My friendships. To helping others, in other words. That’s where the program tells me God is. Not in controlling.

In fact, gossiping can be harmful not only to me, but to others. Obviously, I’m wasting others’ time to begin with. But by gossiping, I’m yanking people out of reality and into my projections. I’m potentially filling them with misinformation that they might act upon or that might negatively impact their perception of another person or a situation. After all, slander is gossip’s frequent traveling companion. I’m sowing seeds of confusion or even enmity.

At its most reductive, when I’m gossiping, I am substituting gossip for God. I am not trusting and relying on God, I am trusting and relying on my smoke-filled back-room skills. Just like I substitute food for God when I’m eating compulsively. The hit from food doesn’t last very long. It’s a poor and short buzz. Gossip is little better. I want to know more and more, and I like the surge of power that comes from sharing it with furtive declarations such as “This has to stay between us….” But anything that gives me that surge is suspect. It’s always my self-centeredness trying to wrest control of me from my spiritually awakened self.

There can be a fine line between gathering necessary information and gossiping. Anyone who has worked in middle management knows that when you are trusted with the care of others’ professional lives, it’s important to know what changes may be coming or what tensions exist between departments. The question is how to know the difference between necessary discussion and gossip.

It seems that, for the most part, my intuition signals me. When I’m about to cross the line from legitimate water cooler talk to gossip, I tend to get a strong gut-level indication. A wincing of my conscience, perhaps. Sometimes I listen to that signal, sometimes I don’t. When I do, I feel freer. As I write, I realize that the best way to handle these situations is to enter them with God. If I ask for help and guidance before beginning to speak with someone, I stand a better chance of listening to that intuitive thought. If I listen to that thought, there’s no doubt I’ll have a better day.

In the end, the biggest of the big pictures is that God will help me no matter what the outcome of any situation. I can count on that, so the need to control doesn’t exist. Literally does not exist. It only seems real, but it’s a figment of my addict mind’s imagination. Just like the magical powers I give to food when I eat compulsively.