Phasers

About 20% of my clients are “phasers.” Not the Star Trek weapon, but people whose healthy eating phases wildly (even though they “know everything” about nutrition, and might even be professionals—chiropractors, nutritionists, etc.). They eat super clean for a couple months or weeks and then they eat nasty for just as long.

If this is your pattern, there are plenty of things you can do in the domain of ACTION—foundations to build, habits to put into place, all sorts of little “tricks of the trade.” But the real change in this phasing-pattern comes PSYCHOLOGICALLY. I observe that there are essentially three keys to inner-transformation. Applied to this issue—phasing with healthy eating—they go like this:

1) Intention—Access the clear intention to SEE what’s really going on with you, psychologically, with your on-again-off-again eating. Really WANT IT.

2) Not Knowing—Dare the humility of really NOT KNOWING why you play out this pattern. If you’ve done a bunch of therapy or read some self-helpish books, you probably have a lot of theories as to why you vacillate with your eating, but if you REALLY knew, the pattern would shift. So free-fall into “I don’t have a CLUE what I’m up to with this pattern!” As Zen Master Seung Sahn Said, “Only don’t know.” (It’s the title of one of his books, too.) This disposition is porous and open and available to see and learn new things about why you do what you do.

3) Consciousness—Those two—Intention and Not Knowing—lead inexhorably to becoming CONSCIOUS of what your pattern is all about, what you’re “playing out” and so on. There are LEVELS of seeing. You can see something in your psychology in an abstract, intellectual way for YEARS without REALLY seeing it at all. But when you see some inner pattern in a deep, direct, visceral way, that pattern absolutely will shift (or your realtionship TO it will shift, with the same end result—powerful change).