I Have a Body: Health for Your Body, Serenity for Your Soul 
by Lisa Barstow

The Buddhists tell us that we have a body but we are not our body, a mind but we are not our mind, an ego but we are not our ego. I wish that I had heard this fifty years ago, but at age eleven I was stressed about budding breasts, a period that was my big present on my birthday that year, and trying to please my dear thin mother who could already see that I wasn’t built like a Vogue model. 

The years between the beginning and end of my menstrual flow were pretty much about the belief that most of who I was, was indeed a body, and if I could tame its need to eat through diet and exercise, then I might at least look like Gidget or Sandra Dee. Later on, as I matured, I set my sights on full breasted actresses with tiny waists. To wish for a lanky body like Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly, my mother’s favorites, would have been futile and ridiculous. Never one to pressure myself, I chose Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell as my body role models.

“But I have always LOVED food,” I would moan to myself when it was obvious I was wishing on the wrong star. “ Its not fair that my friends call me Steinway and Stub, it’s not fair that Maggie’s legs are so skinny and she can eat all she wants.” Mom wasn’t buying the “it’s not fair routine.” Her litany was “sweetie, you can enjoy a scoop of cottage cheese in a half a canned pear just as much as a deli sandwich and chips, just try it.” I would eat to please her when she was around, but at night while everyone slept I’d sneak to the kitchen and make a huge tuna and cheese with lots of mayo sandwich and gobble it down, with chips, in my room while I watched the Late Late Show on TV. I wasn’t fat and I wasn’t skinny, but I sure did care about food.

“An attractive body is a must to find an attractive man,” was another mother mantra to be chanted at Saks Fifth Avenue where I was being fitted for my debutante dress. To show up as a plump deb wasn’t anything to kid around about, so after a summer of drinking daiquiris and eating huge deli sandwiches while working in New York, I was ready to join the group of other impossibly plump ingénues at the Park Avenue diet doctor everyone of my mother’s friends were raving about. I popped tiny blue, pink, yellow and green pills three times a day and lost fifteen pounds in six weeks just in time for the first ball over Thanksgiving vacation. The downside was that the doctor never mentioned not to drink while I was taking amphetamines, and I passed out a few times in the cab on the way home. Thank God I didn’t embarrass myself and faint on the dance floor. People might have thought I had a drinking problem when all I was doing was tripping on speed.

Fast forward about thirty years, three babies, a widow at thirty-seven, and married for a second time at forty seven. All through those years I was in an all out intensive search for the Holy Grail of Thinness. Guess what? It doesn’t exist in diets. Not for someone who has used food all her life to celebrate every happy time and to cushion the sting of painful times. My body weight was like a yo yo, going up and down, up and down. Finally, I had had enough. I’d stop this incessant obsessive dieting, swinging through life on a scale, and eat what I wanted. I’d see what would happen and pray to be satisfied with the body God gave me. 

Then one morning I woke up and I didn’t have a waist. My stomach had eaten my waist. At fifty- five the menopausal years had created a soft body pillow right between my hips and my breasts that were way way out of Gidget’s league by then. But do not think I had that pear look, oh no, I gained my weight all over so I was well proportioned, thank you God. I was looking like the grandmother that I was, and yet I didn’t feel right in this new body. It wasn’t me. 

“You are not your body,” I heard the Tibetan monk say. So, do I need to find out about the essence of me and bring my body along? After all, I will be living in it for a good many more years, I hope. 

That’s when everything changed. I expanded in to stop expanding out. Instead of a diet I found a practice, a new way to be with my body and the food I loved to eat. I began to live a day at a time and be willing to be willing to do what I had always known I could do but didn’t know how until I surrendered my will. 

“What is that sweetie?” I heard my mother, who no longer had to cope with a body, ask me one day. 

“My self will has kept me in denial Mom. I have an addiction to sugar and flour, an obsession with food. Now I know that I must love myself, no matter what,” I told her. 

“Be healthy in body, mind and spirit. Follow a program of abstinence as a way of life, not a diet. Ask for help from other people whose compulsive eating keeps them from being happy. Connect with God.”

“Oh yes, dear, feed your soul, but remember your body is the temple and it comes first. It is difficult to grow in mind and spirit if you let your body down.”

“You mean be thin don’t you Mom?” I grumbled back, fearing that even the spirit world had a judgment about being too large.

“Oh heavens no, you are beautiful just as you are, no matter what. I am talking about health for your body and serenity for your soul.”

“That’s a lovely thing to say, Mom, thank you. I sure do wish you could have said those things to me when I was young.”

“Me too,” she answered with a sigh of regret from that space between the worlds, “but I wonder if you would have heard me? You were so busy sneaking out to the kitchen at night and eating those sandwiches.”