Not long after I went to work for the San Francisco Chronicle, I bought an Econoline camper van with 112,000 miles on it and drove it to New Mexico to sit a sesshin with the fierce Rinzai Zen teacher Joshu Sasaki Roshi. I hoped to experience satori, which I imagined as a kind of spiritual and psychological washing machine. I was 28. I’d read only one Buddhist book. My prior meditation experience consisted of one summer week at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, into which I’d stumbled on a camping trip, looking for its famous hot springs. I didn’t realize that sitting a Rinzai sesshin would mean meditating, contemplating koans, and living in synchronized silence for eighteen hours a day, seven days straight. I only knew that one morning I’d come out of the Tassajara zendo into the clear mountain light, free of my usual turmoil and desperate ambition, and awake to a world alive, burgeoning, and lit from within. I hungered for more.
The sesshin was held in a former Catholic monastery in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, elevation 6,200 feet. On the night I drove in, with the muffler clanking, I was issued a faded black meditation robe and a springy cot in a shared room with four beds. At 3:30 a.m., I was ripped out of sleep by the clanging of a wake-up bell. It was early spring, and cold in the mountains. After two periods of silent meditation, we were marched out of the zendo and into the moonlight for walking meditation, double-time, under the barking orders of the head student, or jikijitsu. It was now 4:30 a.m. The sky was black and sparkling. Entranced by the full moon, I tripped on the hem of my borrowed robe and splatted into the icy mud.
I scrambled back into the line of silent black robes, just in time to retake my cushion. We chanted in homage to Kannon, the divine embodiment of compassion, over and over, faster and louder, to the tock-tock-tock of a hollow bulbous wood drum. I was largely estranged from my body then and didn’t realize I was hyperventilating. A bell rang. We stood up and bowed. I fainted. And so it went.
Midmorning, I scurried into dokusan, the one-on-one interview with Sasaki. He sat, as immovable as a granite boulder, in a small room.
“How old is Buddha?” he demanded. I reeled off whatever came into my head.
“Too wrapped up in yourself!” he said, and rang a bell. “More zazen!”
Lunch, in an outbuilding, began with unwrapping my bowls and chanting the Heart Sutra in impenetrable Sino-Japanese. With my mind consumed by Buddhist rigmarole, I took a mouthful of brown rice. The gates of my senses opened. The sticky capsules burst open beneath my tongue and teeth, releasing smells and textures that I’d never known could be hidden in plain brown rice.
I tasted brown rice and nothing else, except my own amazement.
I left the sesshin two days later in angry tears, no closer than ever to enlightenment, and muttering, “Buddhist Boot Camp.” But in that mouthful of brown rice was a glimmer of something I was thirsting for. I wanted to live more fully in my body and in my senses rather than in my plans and ambitions, which at the time revolved mainly around becoming a famous writer, finding a husband, and not feeling out of sorts so much of the time. When I got back to San Francisco, I sold the van and walked into San Francisco Zen Center’s meditation hall after my shift at the newspaper. And there my Buddhist practice life—three periods of zazen a day, slow and incremental—really began.
In parallel, I lived a secret life. The strange thing about my difficulties with food is that I had eaten so much and enjoyed so little. Cheap chocolates, shoplifted from supermarkets as a lonely middle-schooler. A jar of peanut butter, spoon by spoon until I was stultified, after my first love returned to Venezuela to be a fruitarian. Dove Bars on Halloween, after closing my door on the last child in her skeleton suit. At war with my simple human needs and desires, I had rarely been as present for all that sweetness as I had for that mouthful of brown rice.
I had eaten out of craving, boredom, loneliness, anger, exhaustion, hunger, and desire, and out of an emptiness and lifelessness I had no words for. I had eaten to feel loved, to jack up my energy, and to feel nothing at all. Like the alcoholic who picks up the first drink, once I started, I couldn’t stop.
Over the next two decades, I would live for a summer at Tassajara, complete several Soto Zen sesshins, marry and divorce a gem of a fellow Zen student, and study the Satipatthana Sutta (“The Discourse on the Establishing of Mindfulness”) and the Flower Ornament Sutra in France with Thich Nhat Hanh. Within the orderly quiet of Buddhist communities, my food problems were often quiescent. When I returned to lay life, compulsions and obsessions often structured the rhythm of my days.
I hit my lowest point in my early 50s. I was living in the basement of the suburban bungalow I’d once shared with my former husband, working remotely for an East Coast magazine and renting out the upstairs to cover the mortgage. Thanks to years of workaholic self-neglect and meditating in a crumpled half lotus, I had chronic back pain. I hungered to write a book but couldn’t organize anything longer than an article. I’d stopped meditating. An intense perimenopausal sexual relationship with a high-testosterone Zen plumber six years younger than I had ended, predictably, in disaster. I had no religious community, few friends, and no lover. My career was in the dumps and my body hurt.
In that dark apartment, I skipped breakfast like an anorexic. My dieter’s lunch consisted of cottage cheese, chopped fruit, and exactly six pecans. At suppertime I might microwave a “Healthy Choice” TV dinner. Still screamingly hungry, I would then gorge on ice cream or Little Schoolboy cookies until I was sick, and practice bulimia. That was two decades ago, yet I still feel shame—and a sigh of compassion for the pain I didn’t know I was numbing. Bulimia, I thought, was not a problem but a solution. I wouldn’t gain weight, and tomorrow would be a new day.
The new day would come, and with it another turn of the wheel of self-punishment, hunger, secrecy, flickers of pleasure, obsession, remorse, loss of control, and shame. I had little consciousness left to nurture, or even touch, my deeper hungers and thirsts: for meaning, creative expression, human connection, and ordinary life pleasures like taking a walk or making a friend. I could not face, much less heal, my broken life. Nobody knew what I was doing, not even me.
Like thousands before me, I would find that addiction is a strange beast only somewhat tamed by traditional Buddhist practice, in part because of radical changes in our food-and-drug environment. When Buddha awoke to the true nature of existence, the opium poppy was a thousand years from reaching Asia and hadn’t yet been refined into the white powder we call heroin. Likewise, fibrous sugar cane had not yet been industrially milled, in mass quantities, into the fine white powder we call sugar. (Americans now consume, on average, fifty-seven pounds a year.) I once heard Thich Nhat Hanh suggest that if one drank whiskey mindfully, one would soon stop drinking alcohol altogether. But concentrated substances provoke, in the physiologically vulnerable, an insatiable craving. Mindfulness did not prevent a revered Japanese Zen teacher from drowning drunk in a bathtub, or stop a brilliant Tibetan rinpoche from dying at 47 like a gutter drunk, or prevent his American spiritual heir from transmitting AIDS to one of the many students he seduced.
I had eaten out of craving, boredom, loneliness, anger, exhaustion, hunger, and desire, and out of an emptiness and lifelessness I had no words for.
Throughout my 30s and 40s, as a feminist journalist, I reported, with barely concealed outrage, on Western Buddhist communities, including my own, splintering in the face of unchecked cravings for “more,” be it sex, serial romantic love, social status, power, or beautiful things. I wrote about women navigating sexual land mines (including those set by Joshu Sasaki) as they tried to move in the direction of their own sacredness. But I did not, as Zen master Eihei Dogen suggested, “take the backward step that shines the light inward,” into my own compulsions. I did not know that there was a hungry ghost inside me that I would someday need to meet, modulate, and befriend.
Not long after I moved out of that basement apartment, I walked—ten minutes late and dressed to be invisible in rumpled jeans and shabby sneakers—into what people in Alcoholics Anonymous and its offshoots call “The Rooms.” (Out of respect for the 12-Step Tradition of Anonymity, I will not name my program.) I’d recently moved in with a man I’d met in a swing dance class. Blocked from secretly practicing bulimia, I was watching the numbers rise on the bathroom scale, failing at the Scarsdale Diet, and shoving pecans into my mouth at night like an automaton.
In that fluorescently lit parish hall, I didn’t feel the excitement I’d felt when I pulled into Jemez Springs in my broken-down van. I wasn’t looking for a spiritual experience, or even relief from the shame and mistrust I didn’t know I was carrying. I knew only that I needed to lose twenty pounds and couldn’t. And there I was, in a room full of bright-eyed women who’d shed three to ten times that much and kept it off for years.
A well-dressed speaker in a slim body passed out pictures of her former self, unrecognizable at 200 pounds. Sounding nothing like a member of my tribe, she expressed her gratitude to a “higher power.” Someone else read aloud some mumbo jumbo about food addiction being a disease of the mind, body, and spirit. I cocked my head. An addict? A disease? For eating a box of cookies? I’d never flown through a windshield, picked up a DUI, neglected my nonexistent kids, or called people at midnight sloppy drunk and pleading for bail money. I’d never even been enormously fat.
At the social break, I heard someone say, “Just weigh and measure your food, and the rest of your life will straighten out.” What did my sputtering career, the loss of my spiritual community, my depression, and my lack of money have to do with not eating sugar or putting steamed broccoli on a scale until it registered exactly 6.0 ounces? Someone else said, “Our eyes are broken, that is why we use a scale. We eat in black and white so that we can live in color.”
I later learned that I had unwittingly joined the “Blue Angels of 12-Step Programs,” notorious for its structure and discipline (much like the Zen I’d loved and chafed against). Strangely enough, given that I am an incorrigible rebel, I took to it—in time—like the knucklehead teenager who straightens out in the Marines. I got a sponsor, a digital food scale, and a mountain of Tupperware. I gave lip service to the notion that I was a “food addict” and stopped eating flour and sugar. I started each day with half an hour of “quiet time” and fifteen minutes of reading Buddhist texts. At night, I read two pages of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and wrote a gratitude list. I went each week to three AA-style meetings, where I heard people’s conversion narratives. At night I wrote down exactly what I planned to eat the next day. When the next day came, miraculously, that is exactly what I ate.
I stopped dieting, bingeing, and being bulimic. Freed from sugar highs and sugar crashes, I became less moody and irritable. I kept commitments. One day at a time, my life started to straighten out.
One morning not long after I started, I stood in the kitchen weighing out eight ounces of yogurt, six of cut-up orange, and a serving of oatmeal into three separate white bowls, reminiscent of the oryoki bowls of a Zen sesshin. Within the shell of the rushed, chaotic, boundaryless and ritual-starved secular world, I was creating a pause, a ritual, and a boundary. In Zen monasteries, I had chanted, “Innumerable labors brought us this food,” and asked to be freed from greed. Now I paid sacred attention until my scale registered 6.0.
Seated at the table, I picked up my spoon and tasted. Food—real food, not intoxicating white powders like sugar and flour—was no longer my seducer and my enemy. I could savor the cool yogurt, the chewy oats, and the orange’s zingy sparkle without fearing that enjoyment would open the floodgates to endless eating. Alive and in my body, I sensed the distinction between normal hunger and insatiable, addictive craving. Reclaiming healthy desire was a sacred and sensual moment for me, and a doorway to deep delight—the joy of being alive in my precious female body and my ordinary householder life. When the meal was over, I was done.
The historical Buddha, thin as a skeleton after six years of anorexic austerities, might have had a similar moment when he swallowed a spoonful of rice pudding offered by Sujata, a farmer’s wife. Revived from near-death, the Nepali prince set out on a middle path between restriction and gluttony, between punishment and neglect of the body, and losing oneself in sensual craving. Seven weeks later, he became enlightened while meditating in the shade of a pipal tree.
I wish I could say the same happened for me.
My first Zen teacher had told me that I was “very unconscious.” Thich Nhat Hanh said I knew “everything except how to live.” Before I encountered Buddhism, I had tried to think my way out of the paper bag of my own suffering. Living in a woman’s body, in a culture deeply confused about female eroticism and ethical boundaries, I’d often experienced my body not as a refuge but as a place of sexual vulnerability and roiling emotions. My interpretation of Zen practice, with its emphasis on sitting through physical pain, had unfortunately reinforced that distancing.
At Plum Village, Thich Nhat Hanh taught me to regard my body as a haven and as a sanctuary, a potential source of ease and bliss. Leading slow, relaxed walking meditation in the French countryside, he might stop to admire a bud on a branch. He encouraged us to enjoy our breathing and to notice and amplify our feelings of gratitude and joy, as a basis for meditative concentration and insight. But I could not fully make use of his teachings and enter my own body until I got my addiction to sugar—and, as it turned out, my daily life—under some control.
Beneath every addiction lies a secret painful story, be it the universal human uneasiness with things-as-they-are or, more specifically, personal griefs. This is mine: As a child, I was so terrorized that I jumped out of my own skin, and it has taken me decades to get back in. When I was 7, growing up in England, I accepted a ride from a polite stranger, a pedophile who left me feeling permanently stained. A year later, I stood at the stern of the Queen Elizabeth, bound for America with my family, watching Southampton disappear, leaving behind my best friend, Cathy, the park where I’d fed ducks anchored among the willows, and the great black drayhorse named Flower who clopped up our street twice a week pulling his cart of vegetables for sale. I entered a period of grieving for which I had no words.
In America, I wandered middle school in boys’ lace-up shoes and corduroy jumpers my mother had sewn, weaving through flocks of young women with bouffant hairdos, nylons, and flats. Boys catcalled me in the halls, knocked me into bushes, and mockingly asked me to “go steady.”
Bullied, traumatized, and ashamed, I came to fear that anything I did or said would reveal my essential wrongness. Like a hermit crab in its borrowed shell, I withdrew the soft parts of myself into a bony carapace. And I ate. Within a year, I could not bend over to lace up my shoes, run once around the track, or swing my body from one monkey ring to the next. My father called me “Mrs. Michelin.”
Beneath every addiction lies a secret painful story, be it the universal human uneasiness with things-as-they-are or, more specifically, personal griefs.
After several years of this subteen hell, I sent away for a manual on self-hypnosis. All one summer, I lay in my darkened bedroom, visualizing how life would be once I lost weight. I cut back on carbs and refused desserts. In September, I emerged from my bedroom like a moth, a shy, willowy figure with a waist and breasts. I went to parties. Boys asked me to dance. One afternoon I picked up a cookie. And another. Determined to never again be an ostracized fat girl, I discovered bulimia. And so it went, waxing and waning through the years, until I ended up in that dark basement apartment.
Before I walked into The Rooms, I had told nobody—no therapist, parent, or Buddhist teacher, not even my first husband—how badly I’d been bullied and how strangely I had eaten. But in the telling of our stories lies the release of shame. If intimacy in my Soto Zen community was primarily based on shared silence, my 12-Step practice has largely been based on telling and listening to life stories. Year by year, layer by layer, this storytelling communion has incrementally worn away my shame, the way a piece of broken bottle tumbled on a beach loses its jagged edges and takes on a rounded shape and cloudy beauty of its own. I understand better now that I am human—no better and no worse than the others who have shared their secrets with me. I remain a work in progress.
Paradoxically, given that the folk wisdom of the 12-Step Program is framed in the language of AA’s Protestant, Depression-era male founders, my recovery has gently looped me back to a consistent Buddhist practice. Almost every morning, I wake up at 5:00 and drink a cup of tea, as I look out of my window and over a ridge. I no longer sit in a formal Zen posture. (If something’s worth doing, I figure, it’s worth doing badly.) Following a foundational Vipassana text, the Satipatthana Sutta, I lie flat and explore, with as much compassionate curiosity as I can muster, the “body in the body” and the “feelings in the feelings.”
I sense the hair on my head, the spaces within my 75-year-old joints, the rumblings in my stomach, the agitation or warmth in my heart, the subtle sensations in my breasts and yoni. I thank my feet for carrying me and my ankles for balancing me. I sense the contents of my colon, my synovial fluid, my tears. This body, I try to remember, as the poet Rumi says, is a guesthouse, each day a new arrival. Fear, discomfort, gratitude, history, contentment, joy, resentment, anticipation: I try to welcome them all.
I will never know how much credit to give to my 12-Step recovery, and how much to the passage of time or my Buddhist practice. But since I walked into The Rooms, I’ve published two well-received books. For over two decades, I’ve reveled in an astonishingly loving, erotic, and stable relationship with my second husband, the man I met in that swing dance class. I remain at a slim healthy weight. I could not accomplish any of this before I got clean and sober with food. It has not happened overnight, any more than the “cure” for my somewhat feral personality turned out to be a thunderbolt of enlightenment.
What I appreciate most is not the external things but a softening of my mistrust of others, and greater gratitude, human connection, and joy. I have bloomed in the 12-Step sangha the way a paper flower blooms in a glass of water. I feel more at home in my body. I listen to what it tells me. I pick up the phone when I’m lonely, drink water when I’m thirsty, and nap when I’m tired. I go to the supermarket. Perhaps it’s the suburban version of chopping wood and carrying water. And given where I started, it’s a miracle.
I remain a cafeteria Buddhist and a 12-Step mélange. I take what I need and leave the rest. When I weigh and measure my food, I bring mindfulness and ritual to my daily life. When I avoid flour, sugar, and alcohol, I observe the lay precept not to poison my body with intoxicants or confuse the senses. When I make a phone call to a fellow addict who is suffering, I practice generosity, one of Theravada Buddhism’s six perfections. When someone encourages me to accept “life on life’s terms” and jokes that “there are claw marks over everything we’ve ever let go of,” I am reminded of the Buddha’s four noble truths: that our suffering comes largely from clinging, either to the way things are or the way we want them to be.
When I “humbly ask God to remove my shortcomings,” I recall the vow I made to Thich Nhat Hanh, to follow the five lay precepts. When someone suggests I turn to my higher power, I still struggle with the language and remember the Buddha saying “be a light unto yourself.” Nevertheless, I sometimes get on my knees and pray, to a shimmer I sense but cannot name, to help me be a decent person, one day at a time. When I “make a list of all persons we have harmed and become willing to make amends to them all,” I resonate with Buddhism’s ancient full-moon ceremony of communal monastic confession. I recognize what the poet Kabir called “the wanting creature inside me,” and try to let go of whatever that creature thinks might be gained from self-centeredness or manipulation.
Buddha’s eightfold path is traditionally divided into three parts: wisdom, or right view; concentration, or right meditation; and ethics (sila), or right conduct. Until I entered recovery, I could not effectively practice right conduct. And without stability, and the freedom from distraction and remorse that an ethical life provides, it is difficult to practice right meditation or to touch wisdom.
Every summer I return to Tassajara, where I first experienced bodhicitta, the desire to awaken. Reconnecting with my Buddhist roots, vowing to save all beings, I emerge from the zendo to greet the natural world, burgeoning and lit from within. At breakfast, I am sometimes ambushed by an explosion of sensations, like those I discovered long ago in a spoonful of plain brown rice. I feel supreme gratitude for my precious human life in an aging 21st-century female body. I am grateful to my current Zen teacher, who accepts my 12-Step practice, and to every teacher who supported me on this path.
And then I return to my suburban house, my marriage, and my 12-Step sangha, and drink in the simple practices of my ordinary life.