A new (outrageous) way to look at a cake …

 

I want to do a recap but it’ll take too long.  If you want freedom from food, you’d better check out the first three parts of this mini-series, starting here.  Otherwise you’re likely to say, huh?  Wtf?  Which would be frustrating for me and a waste of time for you.  Nothing else is true, in the world, other than what I’m throwing down here.

 

I’ll wait until you’ve read them *taps foot*

 

Ready? Okay.

 

So what the fuck has any of this got to do with overeating?

 

Well because sugar, if you are only ever experiencing your thinking, as in, your thinking is literally creating the sounds, smells, flavours, look and feel of the present moment, then it’s your thinking that’s creating the sights, sounds, smells and all round juicy experience of the sandwich, or Cinnabon or huge pile of spaghetti too.

 

Whatever it is you’re seemingly hooked on can’t be touching you directly because it doesn’t have the power too.  Like everything else in the world, it’s only a rough outline.

 

You are creating the experience of your habit.  From the taste of the first bite to the feeling that washes over you as the cake disappears down the gullet, to The Nudge you feel beforehand that makes you buy it in the first place, you are the creator of it all.  You are not experiencing something objective.  It’s your thought that’s creating the experience of the treat.  Even down to the taste.

 

Because no one has pointed this out to you before, like that we’re only ever feeling our thinking, not the physical world itself, you think you’re feeling the food directly.  You think that cake is good.  End of.  You think that it’s the cake that’s making you love it, because it’s delicious and you’ve developed quite a taste for it.  You take this as red but it isn’t true.  You feel your thinking when you experience cake.

 

Your thinking creates the taste and feel and even the smell of it as you munch on it. Your thinking creates the whole shebang.  Your thinking says you love it and it’s good and you want it and that first bite is the best feeling on Earth.

 

The truth is cake itself is neutral, raw data.  Like everything else in the world it’s nothing.  A colourless, odourless, tasteless outline.  You create the feel of it, the taste of it, the experience of it.  You create the meaning of it, for you, through thought.

 

The moment you see that you are feeling your thinking, not the cake itself, that the cake has no power to “make” you feel something or “make” you behave in a certain way, it loses its power to do so.  It flat out, stops existing for you, in your reality.  Where there was a squidgy chocolate number, there’s now just a dark outline in your reality with a question mark over it.

 

You can’t feel anything outside of your own thinking, so anything outside of your thinking may as well not exist.  And something that may as well not exist, doesn’t exist.  If something doesn’t exist for you, then it doesn’t exist at all.  How can it?

 

You can’t feel it or experience it, so it has no effect, and something that has no effect doesn’t matter.  Something that doesn’t matter, doesn’t exist.  You can’t feel other peoples’ feelings and thoughts about cake. You can only feel your own.  So once you stop investing in the thoughts and feelings you have about cake, by recognising cake is only a collection of thoughts and feelings, cake straight up disappears.

 

But wait, splutter splutter.  I know there are cakes lined up in the baker’s, all lovely and waiting for me patiently to indulge.  I can practically see them.

 

Yes but you can’t experience them directly, or objectively.  You have created your experience of cake with your thinking.  You don’t walk into the baker’s and feel the baker’s, you feel your thinking about the baker’s.  You don’t smell the cake directly, you smell your thinking. You are walking around the world in a bubble of thought.  You don’t taste the cake when you eat it, you taste your thinking.

 

Your experience of the cake is coming from within your individual bubble of thought, which you live in, all day long.  So the moment you decide to stop investing in that particular flavour of thought, by recognising it is only thought, the cake all but disappears.  It still exists, but it doesn’t exist FOR YOU anymore.

 

You are the one who is clutching on to the cake, claiming it’s “making” you feel and behave in a certain way.  You are imbuing it with magical powers.  The moment you see that it’s you who won’t let it go, that it’s your thoughts that are creating the whole damn experience, cake (or bread or whatever) leaves you alone.  It has to, because it had no power to cling to you in the first place.

 

So that feeling that comes over you on a Friday afternoon, the one that says, life is not worth living if I don’t have a cake with my afternoon cuppa, I’ve been working all week, I deserve one, I even went to the gym twice.  Give me a cake.  GIVE ME A CAKE.  CAKE ME. 

 

That’s a thought coming from inside you.  You are pushing up against a wall of thought.  You aren’t feeling the cake itself.  You are feeling thought.  You are always feeling thought.  In this instance that thought says, gimme cake.

 

Your lower brain has noticed Friday afternoon is a cake day and is helping to ease your passage towards it on the presumption that if you did not repeat your typical Friday afternoon cake eating activity, you would surely die.  The thought lands as a nudge stronger than a pair of crossfitters thighs because every time it’s taken you down this road before, you’ve merrily skipped along behind.  Not being stoopid the lower brain has continually turned up the volume of its Friday afternoon nudge.

 

As a society we haven’t yet evolved to see The Nudge as thought, so when we feel that tell tale pull towards the object of our desire we don’t just roll our eyes and let it go away, we assume it means something.

 

So we (without realising) grab onto it.  By fretting about it.  Even if we did call it out as thought, it’d still feel like a mountain that we didn’t know how to climb.  I mean, thought or no thought, it feels damn strong, right?  So our only option is to label the substance addictive and start looking for an emotional disturbance from our past that’s likely to have caused us to “become addicted”.

 

When you can’t see thought’s role in habits and so-called addictions, you have no choice but to put yourself very much in the frame as the cause of the problem.

 

We’re looking in the wrong place though.  It’s not you.  It’s brain wiring gone awry.  To fix this we have to take the emotion out of it.  This isn’t a “you” problem, it’s a brain problem.  Actually it’s a thought problem.

 

Your desire to eat until you have to loosen your belt buckle night after night hasn’t got anything to do with the food itself, or your character.  You aren’t weak or in need of psychiatric care.  You could have started shopping compulsively over the years and the brain could have wired itself up to send you nudges towards The Gap on a regular basis, with cake being something you could totally take or leave.  It doesn’t make either type of nudge meaningful or representative of hidden emotional flaws.

 

So you see, it doesn’t matter how entrenched the problem eating habits are, your brain could be wired up to encourage you to eat until your tears taste of sugar, but this still wouldn’t be some calamitous addiction brought on by substandard genes or something you must go and atone for with a priest.  It’s a thought habit, which you could almost say exists purely by accident.

 

Honestly, whether we’re talking food or some other type of behaviour, your particular brand of habit is neither here nor there.  You happened to have wired your brain up to want, say, cake or bread.  Big deal.  Sugar sets off the dopamine cannons too, so again, you didn’t really stand a chance.  All your habit actually is, is a symbol of the relationship you have with your thoughts.  Those who believe they have power over their thoughts (and exercise that power, consciously or otherwise) have no bad habits.  Those totally enslaved by their thoughts – so generally spend a lot of time feeling angry and anxious and guilty (because that tends to be the flavour of thought when left unchecked) – have lots of habits.

 

If anything your food issues that are ruining your life are quite helpful because they’re forcing you to into the solution of seeing the layer of thought that separates you from the food, and therefore everything else in the world, and as I will show you, that is the key to mastering life.

 

I’m not asking you to forcibly change the lustful thinking that’s developed over the years between you and the cake, or tell yourself over and over that you don’t want the cake or that cake is gross in a “fake it ‘till you make it” kind of way, I’m asking you to recognise you are thinking.  That’s all.  For with that comes the recognition that the cake is only nice, FOR YOU.  It isn’t objectively nice in other words.

 

That little shift is all you need to start standing aside and letting those nudges slip past, without taking them so seriously.  Thoughts can’t “make” you act.  When you see that it’s your thought that’s creating your yearning for a bit of cake, and then creating the feeling and experience when you do have one, you start seeing you have a choice on whether or not to act on those nudges when they ride in over the horizon.

 

Still with me? Coolio.  We’re getting close to the end ——–>