Hunger's Many Tongues

Hunger speaks in many tongues. I say this a bit “in-cheek” because my own experience of it seems to be changing, different than it was, as I pursue the body-literacy path with perspective from the core. I’ve also encountered the work of Jan Chozen Bays, Zen practitioner-teacher and author of Mindful Eating (Shambala, 2009), who has charted a helpful schema by which to imagine hunger’s various expressions, languages, tongues. My mind likes nothing if not a helpful schema.

Chozen Bays identifies seven different kinds of hungers (Chapter Two), the most basic kind of hunger being physiologic, a request of our body for food, for warmth and survival. Other kinds of hungers, as human beings who have multiple and complex impulses of mind and body, include eye hunger, nose hunger, mouth hunger, stomach hunger, cellular hunger, mind hunger, and heart hunger. She also adds a kind of hunger that is actually thirst. Her supposition here is that ability to discern the kind(s) of hunger at play in any given moment creates a mindful pathway whereby we may thoroughly enjoy eating.

Too many of us thoroughly enjoy eating, you might argue. Too many and too much! Well, yes and no. Most Americans I know have a quite conflicted relationship with food. For instance, the foodie culture I love, in which I thrive. Many of us within these circles do live a life of delight focused upon food—its origin, freshness, exquisite taste combinations, artistry and more—but many of us are also more driven by it, to odd ends, than perhaps seems rational to others. We may visit four different grocery stores, taking well over 3-4 hours, in order to get just the quality of ingredients we desire.  While that may be entertaining, it also suggests a drive that is about more than just the food. Food is the focus, but its extraneous qualities of artistry and perfection in culture and taste organize this relationship to food.

Others, you may say, enjoy food too much—too much of it, too often. How often do we pull away from a restaurant table, with bodies in great discomfort because we’ve eaten what corporate restaurants have decided is one portion of food? A portion that would probably serve between 2-3 people, if not more in less-developed areas of the world? Is that enjoyment, or a mindless attention to other things while food is going into the body? What is enjoyable about such body-discomfort, in the end?

Chozen Bays observes the play-hard, eat a little, play hard habits of healthy young children. “Eating is secondary to the business of being a child,” she writes. And then she continues, “As these intuitive eaters grow older, eating is no longer a fueling stop. Food begins to serve many purposes. It is used to sooth, to distract, to procrastinate, to numb, to entertain, to seduce, to reward, and even to punish. The once straightforward relationship between hunger, eating, and satisfaction of our childhood becomes tangled up in all sorts of thoughts and emotions.” (p. 16). Speaking as a woman of classical (if not contemporary) beauty, I see the unwilling captivity of women in their/our mind-chatter about food all the time. Those who are so thin that food—or the willed lack of it—is a counter-intuitive way of being in control, sometimes to the point of dying (in extreme anorexia or bulima, for instance). Or those who eat what our culture force-feeds them, hiding themselves in layers of fat or clothes that are too large for their forms. That’s actually my strategy of choice. I will consistently wear clothes at least one size too large. Great way to avoid excess attention from men or women focused upon contemporary images of physical beauty and the cathected ways of forcing food/eating habits into conformity with this imagined ‘end.’

So how does one establish a healthy relationship with food, a mindful pathway whereby we may thoroughly enjoy eating, without attachment, drive, mental-captivity? Chozen Bays’s way is to discern which kind of hunger may be in play in each situation where food enters into awareness or choice. I do like the Zen wisdom with which she begins. “The Zen teachings encourage us not to worry about who started all this anxiety or guilt, or who is to blame for our unwholesome habit patterns around food. … The question we are interested in is, can we change it? If so, who can change it?” (p. 17). She says, “Yes,” to the first, and “Only you. You, just as you are,” to the second. Though I’ve not immersed myself in the book cited here, I have already found its mindful way of listening for kinds of hunger inordinately useful. I’m not nearly as straightforward about hunger as I used to think!

I’ve learned that there are ways to feed hungers that don’t involve eating at all. The longer I’ve engaged a diversity of body-practices—whether it be yoga in the morning, sitting practice at my (ir)regular intervals, gym-workouts, personal training, or more—the more satiated and whole my life has seemed to be. There are hungers in my way of being in the world, in other words, that I have traditionally understood as body/stomach hunger when in reality they were desires for visual stimulus, movement, deeper breathing or extended awareness, deeper connection. Because I’m a foodie, it was natural to look to food to satisfy any restlessness that emerged in my life. Because I’m an intensely verbal, mind-driven person, it was also natural to try to get out of my mind-chatter by means of food artistry, social engagements around food with friends.

I am also learning that I have been lonely in different parts of my body, a loneliness that food numbed but could never satisfy. My core, for instance. The more consistently I devote my way of seeing the world in a mindful path that moves through the core into the world, the less self-loathing I experience at my mid-section. The less disconnected I feel from my life, my family/friends, my world. The less hungry I am for substitutionary attachments, those things I attempt to grasp to cover over the needs or vulnerabilities I feel.

Ultimately, I’m beginning to experience hunger not as a fearful deprivation, that shaky-hungry sensation of not having enough and needing more immediately, but as a gentle signal that some new connection might be offered out in the world into my life. There’s a patient curiosity that seems to arise now as I feel a lack or emptiness that my mind begins to open to, listen for...to learn its name or ‘kind,’ its guidance or direction. Am I looking for beauty, artistry, attuned to eye hunger? When I smell freshly baked bread, am I really hungry for bread or do I just miss my family, like my father, who baked bread weekly when I was growing up? Am I seeking comfort or food? Stomach hunger is the one that drives me the most, so closely located and associated with pangs of anxiety and emptiness or loneliness I may feel in my core. As I have relied upon my mind for so very long, to navigate these hungers and needs for connection, mind hunger, allied with heart hunger, are close seconds with stomach hunger. Will this food assuage my fear, my anxiety, my intellectual prowess? I've even gone without food when I was hungry in order to enact my mind's strange sense of intellectual devotion. Sacrificing body food for mental focus somehow has been an act of prayer. Chozen-Bays calls this combination heart hunger, a signal of need for deeper connection in relationship somehow.

Regardless of name/kind, each of these 'hungers' now has a voice, a tongue, by which I may hear a new word, see a new image, sense a new way to be in the world. Each is a gentle signal, amidst my remaining (and probably constant) tasks of navigating food, society, and body demands and invitations. Hunger, of its multiple kinds, has become a welcome teacher. In this way, I still know loneliness, emptiness (not of the Buddhist kind), need, but there’s a spaciousness or breath about it, giving it a soft landing in my mind, my awareness.

I was sitting at breakfast yesterday morning, with my beloved. It was important for us to return to one of our favorite hang-outs for an early Shabbat-esque meal of bacon, eggs, and pancakes. This place does make the best pancakes I’ve ever tasted. I enjoyed ordering the weekly special. The scrambled eggs were just perfect. The bacon was heavenly. The one pancake with butter and syrup took on its Platonic ideal-form in my mouth and nose, with whiff of vanilla. And then enough became enough, at just the right moment. My body smiled, literally smiled, from the core of my ‘me.’

Eating, enjoyed thoroughly.