It’s Not About the Cookie

I once had a client, let’s call her Molly, who wanted to learn meditation for one particular reason. She was an elite athlete - a swimmer- who spent a good part of every day swimming and working out. She also ate a strictly vegan diet and followed all the advice of her coach when it came to her food, workouts, and training. But she had a secret.

“Every night, at around 11pm, when my wife and I are in bed, I get an urge I am powerless to resist,” she confessed. “I swing my legs over the side of the bed, tiptoe down the stairs, and eat a chocolate chip cookie.”

She explained how she was sure the cookie was the cause of her elevated anxiety and that the cookie was standing between her and true greatness in the pool.

“I’ve tried everything to get myself to stop. I tried not buying the cookies, but then I ended up going to the store at 11:30pm and buying them. I tried telling my wife to stop me but she is usually fast asleep by then. I was thinking maybe meditation would work?”

“What if you gave yourself full permission to eat the cookie?” I asked, “but your job, from the moment you have the urge to the moment you go back to bed, is to pay full attention to how you feel in your body as you are doing it?”

At first she was too afraid to give herself permission, afraid she would go absolutely crazy and eat every cookie in the box if it was really allowed.

“Okay, then you give yourself permission to eat every cookie in the box. You just have to do it - every single stage of it - with full awareness and attention.”

She smiled, shocked at the proposition, but agreed to give it a try.

When I met with her the following week, she was excited to tell me what happened.

“I did it!” She reported, before I even had the chance to ask. “I did what you said and told myself I could have as many as I wanted, but I forced myself to pay attention to every single minute of it.”

“And?” I asked.

“You know, it was like someone threw all the lights on in a game that was all about sneaking around in the shadows. When I paid attention to the desire for the cookie, it wasn’t really about the cookie. In real life, the cookie was fine, but I don’t even think I finished it.  The desire was actually all about a desire to be “naughty” - to break rules, when so much of my life is bound by discipline and being “good.” It was about my wanting to be free.” The experience was a breakthrough for her. The permission to eat the cookie illuminated the underlying desire for freedom that the cookie represented.

This “aha” moment caused Molly to ask the scary and exciting question, what if she could be less good and more free elsewhere in her life, so she didn’t have to sneak it in under the cover of night? What if following her desires - even small ones - more regularly through the day could help her live a more balanced, less punishing life? 

 Mindful eating (and mindful sneaking around to eat) focuses on one particular kind of desire – hunger, and desire for food. When it comes to other desires, however, like sexual desire for other people when we are in a committed relationship, or desire for drugs or alcohol when we are in recovery, the answer might not be to give yourself permission to actually partake of the thing you are desiring. All cases of desire, however, in my experience, require us to become familiar with the sensations and textures of the desire itself in order to properly work with it. All require a nonjudgmental permission to be felt, in their totality, even if not acted upon. As Simone DeBouvoir wrote, “you can’t have everything you want, but you can want everything you want.” And you will want everything you want, no matter how inconvenient or ashamed that you are of it. Our job is to flip on all the lights to become aware of how the desire feels - all the way through - in the body.