Shrinking violets- part 6!!!

[janiebug 0]

Judy, have fun and enjoy all the positive attention you will get, you and Bob have worked HARD and are so deserving of all the praise!!

I hope Walmart does not win!! Bad bad news for me if it does.

Everyone have a GREAT weekend!!

[kity 2]

HOME GIRLS!!!!~

We had a wonderful minication...Santa Barbara was gorgeous! Our drive up to Neverland Ranch yesterday was beautiful....green rolling hills and low fog, then the sun was shinning and it was 72!!! We had lunch in this little small old town called Los Olivos and bought fresh raspberry jam from the raspberry farm! It was just beautiful Sorry if I sent you too many Neverland pix... it was just really cool to be there!

The wedding was great! There was a 6pm appetizers and cocktail reception (open bar all night:biggrin:). The bride and groom were both there, enjoying their friends and family. Then at sunset, we all walked downstairs and into the sand and I wedded (?) them barefoot in the sand! It was really nice. Then upstairs to a full steak and chix dinner, more cocktails and dancing!! Funfunfun!!!

We woke up WAAAAYYYY too early and came home. It was 57 at the beach and is already 105 here!!! We unpacked and jumped in the pool...now are in pjs on the couch!

Judy, can't wait to here all about it...after the pool of course! haha

Thanks for all the bday wishes...I am so blessed to have such wonderful friends!

oxoxxoox

[mdrai 3]

Judy, I bet you guys are the talk of the town with your gorgeous gardens! Enjoy the day -- you've earned it!

Pam, that sounds so lovely! I loved the NL pics... did you see MJ while you were there?... what?... huh??? He died???

Good luck w/that, Janie! Yikes!

Hi Laura & Haydee & lil' beans!

We're headed out to see Toy Story 3! Yay, popcorn for dinner! & maybe my free b'day Coldstone ice cream for dessert! Ooooooh, I am so bad!!

[janiebug 0]

Now there is a new proposal that showed up in the paper that has a Stein Mart in the Plaza. My mom is all for that. Do you guys know what Stein Mart is? It is sort of like an upscale Marshalls/TJMaxx, but smaller. My mom loves the store. Hopefully I can go Tuesday night and see.

I hope you had a great Birthday Pamela, it is odd, you were gone last year for your birthday, I am thinking you don't like to be home on your birthday..........

Judy been thinking about you all day!!

Got a very nice thank you note in the mail today!!!!!!!!!!

Hey Laura, I LOVE Russ's pic on Facebook, he commented on something you wrote and saw Carson's pic there at the keyboard. Toooo cute!!

Michelle, any birthday weekend festivities?????????????

[janiebug 0]

Good morning.

Can't believe that I am the first one to post!!

Going to have lunch with a friend of mine today, then come home for some stuff around house. Nothing major planned, then really busy day tomorrow.

UPS tried to deliver something to my house that needed a signature, and obviously wasn't home, so I called them to change the address to my work, and they charge $6. to do that! I was shocked!! Okay I am cheap, but really..................

[Teachlady 3]

Good afternoon, Violets..

Just back from church and going to let lunch settle in before I head to the pool for the afternoon. Bob has to go out of town for an ecclesiastical council for someone to become ordained, so I'll be on my own for the afternoon and evening. Not a problem cause I really need some down time after the Garden Walk yesterday. It was a very big success. We had about 100 people walk through the gardens and the most common word I heard was "peaceful". They loved my clematis vine and all the painted windows on the fence. I'm going to take a video of the gardens and post it on Facebook later today or tomorrow. Now all that work is done and we can relax and enjoy the flowers for the rest of the summer. I am looking forward to spending my days out on the deck after the surgery.

Off to the pool and some tanning, exercise and probably sleeping!!

Everyone have a great afternoon.

[kity 2]

Hey Girls~

Late morning!!! Woke to rain but went to work out then home to shower and church! Been a great morning!

Now I am gonna watch my Big Brother After dark (I have 6 hours taped) and be hella lazy. Susanne left this am for phx to take mom to doctor.

Love you girls!

xoxoxo

[Teachlady 3]

Good morning, Violets..

I'm off to the hospital to work my shift. I have to make a ton of the patient education packets so they have some in reserve. I won't be back there for a longggggggg time.

I ordered books for the Kindle...

The Cookbook Collector (a novel), Little Girl Blue (bio of Karen Carpenter) and They're Watching (a thriller) and I STILL have enough left on the card for a couple more!! THANK YOU so much!!!

Dreary day today. Bob is going to the hospital to be with his church organist. She is having........wait for it.......................knee replacement surgery! She has the same doctor as I do. I need to go and drop off my Advance Directive and then I'll be good to go for mine. I just want it over and done with. This waiting is the pits.

Off to work. We take the dogs to the groomer today and then Bob goes out to Kris's this afternoon to watch her dogs for awhile.

Everyone have a great day!!!

[janiebug 0]

Judy, waiting for stuff like that is the pits, it will be here before you know it!! That Karen Carpenter Book sounds interesting, there was a review of it in People, I am sure you saw it there also. Who will contact us when you are out of surgery? Can we also get a nightly update? Am I asking too much???

Busy day here, actually really busy, I haven't had a busy day like this in a while!

Alright everyone make this a good one!!!

[kity 2]

Morning girls~

skipped the gym this am...decided on coffee instead! I have an HRC mtg later, then back home. My cell phone is kaput??? so I guess I get a new phone! Haydee, which one do you have?

I am hooked on the Big Brother After dark...my favorite guilty pleasure!

Judy, glad you liked it...many happy readings as you recoup!!

Jane, sending you a card this week!

Michelle, are you in vuvuzela withdrawl yet?

Haydee, how was the pool all weekend?

Laura, I need to re-reply to that email...omg, that was funny!

Anyone else watching BB?

xoxoxox

[Teachlady 3]

Just back from my hospital shift. I gave the doggies their happy pills and now waiting to take them in, in an hour.

Janie.. I downloaded the 3 books based on the reviews in People this week. And Bob has been instructed to text the Violets when I am out of surgery. I have a friend who works at the hospital and she was able to get my surgery time before they call me to confirm it tomorrow. I have to be there at 6:30 a.m. Surgery will probably be at 8 and I should be out and in recovery by 10.

Off to have some lunch. Not looking good for pool time. No sunshine at all and looking like rain.

[Haydee 2]

No BB for me. I think I watched the first few seasons then no more. My g1 went kaput a few months ago so I have the motorola blur. Its basically the same phone as the g1...

Pool was great, I was in it allll weekend. My mom made mole for us Saturday and my dad grilled steaks and corn on Sunday. My hair is really taking a beating with the sun and the salt from the pool. Janie, tell me what to do so my hair isn't like straw...

Michelle, how was toy story?? I've been wanting to go see it. Oh I also wanna see despicable me. Heard that one was hilarious. Has anyone seen that one?

I've been having strange dreams lately. They are very vivid as soon as i am waking up but I forget them as soon as I am fully awake. Don't know if that makes sense...

Another crazy day at work today... I'm so hungry and its barely eleven!

[Daisalana 33]

Pam, the charges still haven't reversed, and we have pointed it out all weekend going "Man that's some expensive porn.".

Esp. when Russ was givin me crap about spending money on buying APPLES yesterday, I'm like we spend $100 in 1 second of porn, I can buy 3 apples!!! ;D

Anywho I brought a yogurt, apple, and tuna salad for today's lunch/snacks. I ate yogurt & apple already and I'm STARVING. I don't think that tuna salad is gonna cut it......

I had a horrible dream last night Haydee--I've been having weird dreams too, that's a hormone thing I do believe.

But last night I dreamed we put C down for a nap, then went on an 8 hour road trip and completely forgot about him. So I was reeling thinking about him stuck alone in his crib for 8 hours during the day, etc. Then we had to drive HOME 8 hours to get him (some reason calling mom didn't occur to me in my dream). I woke up sick to my stomach from the whole thing.

[Teachlady 3]

Porn????? Apples??????

[mdrai 3]

You know those pregnant girls, Judy... crazy cravings! :thumbup:

I have the "Cookbook Collector on reserve @ the library. Right now I'm reading "Little Bee". How about that new Oprah fav? Women, food, and God... O says it'll "end your war with food". Here's an excerpt:

Women, food, and God

by Geneen Roth

When I was in high school, I used to dream about having Melissa Morris's legs, Toni Oliver's eyes, and Amy Breyer's hair. I liked my skin, my breasts, and my lips, but everything else had to go. Then, in my 20s, I dreamed about slicing off pieces of my thighs and arms the way you carve a turkey, certain that if I could cut away what was wrong, only the good parts?the pretty parts, the thin parts?would be left. I believed there was an end goal, a place at which I would arrive and forevermore be at peace. And since I also believed that the way to get there was by judging and shaming and hating myself, I also believed in diets.

Diets are based on the unspoken fear that you are a madwoman, a food terrorist, a lunatic. The promise of a diet is not only that you will have a different body; it is that in having a different body, you will have a different life. If you hate yourself enough, you will love yourself. If you torture yourself enough, you will become a peaceful, relaxed human being.

Although the very notion that hatred leads to love and that torture leads to relaxation is absolutely insane, we hypnotize ourselves into believing that the end justifies the means. We treat ourselves and the rest of the world as if deprivation, punishment, and shame lead to change. We treat our bodies as if they are the enemy and the only acceptable outcome is annihilation. Our deeply ingrained belief is that hatred and torture work. And although I've never met anyone?not one person?for whom warring with their bodies led to long-lasting change, we continue to believe that with a little more self-disgust, we'll prevail.

But the truth is that kindness, not hatred, is the answer. The shape of your body obeys the shape of your beliefs about love, value, and possibility. To change your body, you must first understand that which is shaping it. Not fight it. Not force it. Not deprive it. Not shame it. Not do anything but accept and?yes, Virginia?understand it. Because if you force and deprive and shame yourself into being thin, you end up a deprived, shamed, fearful person who will also be thin for ten minutes. When you abuse yourself (by taunting or threatening yourself), you become a bruised human being no matter how much you weigh. When you demonize yourself, when you pit one part of you against another?your ironclad will against your bottomless hunger?you end up feeling split and crazed and afraid that the part you locked away will, when you are least prepared, take over and ruin your life. Losing weight on any program in which you tell yourself that left to your real impulses you would devour the universe is like building a skyscraper on sand: Without a foundation, the new structure collapses.

Change, if it is to be long-lasting, must occur on the unseen levels first. With understanding, inquiry, openness. With the realization that you eat the way you do for lifesaving reasons. I tell my retreat students that there are always exquisitely good reasons why they turn to food.

Can you imagine how your life would have been different if each time you were feeling sad or angry as a kid, an adult said to you, "Come here, sweetheart, tell me all about it"? If when you were overcome with grief at your best friend's rejection, someone said to you, "Oh, darling, tell me more. Tell me where you feel those feelings. Tell me how your belly feels, your chest. I want to know every little thing. I'm here to listen to you, hold you, be with you."

All any feeling wants is to be welcomed with tenderness. It wants room to unfold. It wants to relax and tell its story. It wants to dissolve like a thousand writhing snakes that with a flick of kindness become harmless strands of rope.

The path from obsession to feelings to presence is not about healing our "wounded children" or feeling every bit of rage or grief we never felt so that we can be successful, thin, and happy. We are not trying to put ourselves together. We are taking who we think we are apart. We feel the feelings not so that we can blame our parents for not saying, "Oh, darling," not so that we can express our anger to everyone we've never confronted, but because unmet feelings obscure our ability to know ourselves. As long as we take ourselves to be the child who was hurt by an unconscious parent, we will never grow up. We will never know who we actually are. We will keep looking for the parent who never showed up and forget to see that the one who is looking is no longer a child.

I tell my retreat students that they need to remember two things: to eat what they want when they're hungry and to feel what they feel when they're not. Inquiry?the feel-what-you-feel part?allows you to relate to your feelings instead of retreat from them.

Sometimes when I ask students what they are feeling in their bodies, they have no idea. It's been a couple of light-years since they felt anything in or about their bodies that wasn't judgment or loathing. So it's good to ask some questions that allow you to focus on the sensations themselves. You can ask yourself if the feeling has a shape, a temperature, a color. You can ask yourself how it affects you to feel this. And since no feeling is static, you keep noticing the changes that occur in your body as you ask yourself these questions. If you get stuck, it's usually because you're having a reaction to a particular feeling?you don't want to feel this way, you'd rather be happy right now, you don't like people who feel like this?or you're locked into comparing/judging mode.

So, be precise. "I feel a gray heap of ashes in my chest" rather than "I feel something odd and heavy." Don't try to direct the process by having preferences or agendas. Let the inquiry move in its own direction. Notice whatever arises, even if it surprises you. "Oh, I thought I was sad, but now I see that this is loneliness. It feels like a ball of rubber bands in my stomach." Welcome the rubber bands. Give them room. Watch what happens. Keep coming back to the direct sensations in your body. Pay attention to things you've never told anyone, secrets you've kept to yourself. Do not censor anything. Do not get discouraged. It takes a while to trust the immediacy of inquiry since we are so used to directing everything with our minds. It is helpful, though not necessary, to do inquiry with a guide or a partner so that you can have a witness and a living reminder to come back to the sensation and the location.

Most of all, remember that inquiry is not about discovering answers to puzzling problems but a direct and experiential revelation process. It's fueled by love. It's like taking a dive into the secret of existence itself; it is full of surprises, twists, side trips. You engage in it because you want to penetrate the unknown, comprehend the incomprehensible. Because when you evoke curiosity and openness with a lack of judgment, you align yourself with beauty and delight and love?for their own sake. You become the benevolence of God in action.

A few years ago, I received a letter from someone who'd included a Weight Watchers ribbon on which was embossed "I lost ten pounds." Underneath the gold writing, the letter writer added "And I still feel like crap."

We think we're miserable because of what we weigh. And to the extent that our joints hurt and our knees ache and we can't walk three blocks without losing our breath, we probably are physically miserable because of extra weight. But if we've spent the last five, 20, 50 years obsessing about the same ten or 20 pounds, something else is going on. Something that has nothing to do with weight.

Most people are so glad to read about, hear about, and then begin any approach that doesn't focus on weight loss as its main agenda that they take it to be license to eat without restraint. "Aha!" they say. "Someone finally understands that it's not about the weight." It's never been about the weight. It's not even about food.

"Great," they say, "let's eat. A lot. Let's not stop."

And the truth is that it's not about the weight. Either you want to wake up or you want to go to sleep. You either want to anesthetize yourself or you do not. You either want to live or you want to die.

But it's also not not about the weight.

No one can argue that being a hundred pounds overweight is not physically challenging; the reality of sheer poundage and its physical consequences cannot be denied.

Some people at my retreats can't sit in a chair comfortably. They can't walk up a slight incline without feeling pain. Their doctors tell them their lives are in danger unless they lose weight. They need knee replacements, hip replacements, LAP-BAND surgeries. The pressure on their hearts, their kidneys, their joints is too much for their body to tolerate and still function well. So it is about the weight to the extent that weight gets in the way of basic function: of feelings, of doing, of moving, of being fully alive.

The bottom line, whether you weigh 340 pounds or 150 pounds, is that when you eat when you are not hungry, you are using food as a drug, grappling with boredom or illness or loss or grief or emptiness or loneliness or rejection. Food is only the middleman, the means to the end. Of altering your emotions. Of making yourself numb. Of creating a secondary problem when the original problem becomes too uncomfortable. Of dying slowly rather than coming to terms with your messy, magnificent, and very, very short?even at a hundred years?life. The means to these ends happens to be food, but it could be alcohol, it could be work, it could be sex, it could be cocaine. Surfing the Internet. Talking on the phone.

For a variety of reasons we don't fully understand (genetics, temperament, environment), those of us who are compulsive eaters choose food. Not because of its taste. Not because of its texture or its color. We want quantity, volume, bulk. We need it?a lot of it?to go unconscious. To wipe out what's going on. The unconsciousness is what's important, not the food.

Sometimes people will say, "But I just like the taste of food. In fact, I love the taste! Why can't it be that simple? I overeat because I like food."

But.

When you like something, you pay attention to it. When you like something?love something?you take time with it. You want to be present for every second of the rapture. But overeating does not lead to rapture: It leads to burping and farting and being so sick that you can't think of anything but how full you are. That's not love; that's suffering.

I'm not exactly proud to say that I have been miserable anywhere, with anything, with anyone. I've been miserable standing in a field of a thousand sunflowers in southern France in mid-June. I've been miserable weighing 80 pounds and wearing a size 0. And I've been happy wearing a size 18, been happy sitting with my dying father, been happy being a switchboard operator. But like many people, I've had the "When I Get Thin (Change Jobs, Move, Find a Relationship, Leave This Relationship, Have Money) Blues." It's called the "If Only" refrain. It's called postponing your life and your ability to be happy to a future date when then, oh then, you will finally get what you want and life will be good. You will stop turning to food when you start understanding in your body, not just your mind, that there is something better than turning to food. And this time, when you lose weight, you will keep it off. Truth, not force, does the work of ending compulsive eating.

The poet Galway Kinnell wrote that "sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness." Everything we do, I tell my students, is to reteach ourselves our loveliness.

Diets are the result of your belief that you have to atone for being yourself to be worthy of existing. Until the belief is understood and questioned, no amount of weight loss will touch the part of you that is convinced it is damaged. It will make sense to you that hatred leads to love and that torture leads to peace because you will be operating on the conviction that you must starve or deprive or punish the badness out of you. You won't keep extra weight off, because being at your natural weight does not match your convictions about the way life unfolds. But once the belief and the subsequent decisions are questioned, diets and being uncomfortable in your body lose their seductive allure. Only kindness makes sense. Anything else is excruciating. You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved.

The Sufi poet Rumi, writing about birds learning to fly, wrote: "How do they learn it? They fall, and falling, they're given wings."

If you wait until you have Toni Oliver's eyes and Amy Breyer's hair, if you wait to respect yourself until you are at the weight you imagine you need to be to respect yourself, you will never respect yourself. To be given wings, you've got to be willing to believe that you were put on this Earth for more than your endless attempts to lose the same 30 pounds 300 times for 80 years. And that goodness and loveliness are possible, even in something as mundane as what you put in your mouth for Breakfast.

Beginning now.