Thinner Peace

I've just found the funniest, most profound and wonderful book by Martha Beck (Oprah's life coach). The 4-Day Win.
I've always been her greatest fan....she's very irreverent - and her latest book The Four Day Win promises to change the way you think about your food and your body in just 4 days!

And I couldn't resist buying it especially after my last post about creating some healthier habits. Will power is not my greatest strength so I loved the premise of this book - Martha doesn't believe that losing weight has anything to do with willpower but the key is to adjust our behaviour patterns and the way we think about food. so far, so good.

It gets better - it's the funniest self-help book I've ever read. And so applicable that even slackers like me might lose a few pounds.
But the chapter that's made me laugh and think the most is the one on 'the most important weight-loss skill in the history of the universe'....and this is finding your 'thinner peace'.

Want to find your thinner peace? Let's do it now.

"First, hold your right hand, palm up," say Beck. "Imagine a 2 inch tall version of yourself in military uniform with a whip in one hand and gun in the other, stomping around your palm, shrieking deeply personal insults and commanding you to lose weight. This is the Dictator. Now hold up your left palm and picture your Wild Child here: 2 inches tall, dressed in skins and bark, covered in scars, waiting for an opportunity to escape or subvert the Dictator's brutal control. Watch until you can see them both clearly in your mind's eye.

Now, while watching these two mini-yous, I want you see that as dysfunctional as they both are, both of them are essentially good. The Dictator wants you to be healthy and beautiful. It gets frantic about your weight for the same reason you might freak out if you saw a beloved pet wandering into the traffic....

On the other hand, the Wild Child is the part of you that evolved to avoid starvation and captivitiy. It panics when the Dictator berates, shames and trieds to control it. It know the Dictator is planning to starve it. So it's not surprising that the instant the Dictator is weakened by stress, hunger, or environmental chaos, the Wild Child leaps into action and eats like a junkyard dog.

Think through the well meaning motivations of both your Dictator and your Wild Child, until you really understand that withink their limited perspectives they're doing their very best. Then offer them kindness. One useful method is to silently repeat these phrases fro the classic 'loving-kindness' meditation: "May you be well. May you be happy. May you be free from suffering."

Visualise until you can feel compassion towards both sides of yourself, says Beck. And when you get there, ask yourself this:

Who are you?

The only reason you can 'see' and offer kindness to both Dictator and Wild Child is that you're not either one of these. You've moved into a third realm of consciousness , which resides, literally in another part of the brain. Beck calls it the Watcher. "While both the Dictator and Wild Child make you want to overeat, your watcher self is not nearly as compulsive," she says.

In fact, according some medical psychologists, it's physiologically impossible for your mind to stay locked in a war of control when you're engaging its ability to generate compassion and appreciation. Beck calls this the place of 'thinner peace"!

Now here's a result....you can find your inner peace and have thin thighs too.

This is a really fantastic book for anyone who has ever struggled with issues on food and knows that diets don't work but didn't know what else to do.
Have a love in with your Wild Child and Dictator tonight.

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Comments

[Tim]

Great to see that lots of coaches, therapists etc. are now utilising the ancient idea of "integrating opposites" and locating the "I" beyond them.

Love,
Tim

[Steven]

One of the meditations in the I AM Course moves people "past" the opposites... and, certainly, if you've been eating as a way to address the unpleasant feelings that may arise when you're "stuck" on one of those poles, resting in/as the wordless experience beyond the opposites could lead to eating less.

In fact, I have one student who was doing this practice and kept emailing me to say, "Just so you know, I lost another 10 pounds this week."

I wish I had thought to make that into a diet book ;-)

Hmmm....