I’ve binged on brownies more times than I care to remember.  I used to use a few dirty clothes as an excuse to give myself access to the pop and candy machines at the laundromat.  Once, after starving myself for weeks on the Air Force Diet, I weakened, drove 23 miles to a truck stop, bought a carton of 12 Cherry Mountain Bars, and ate most of them on the drive back home.  Chocolate is not the only sweet thing I’ve binged on.  Candy of all kinds, pies and cakes, cherries, blueberries, watermelon… I’ve overdone them all.

More times than I’m comfortable admitting, I’ve cut those things out then relapsed.  I educated myself and understood, nearly 40 years ago, that sugar was harmful to my health.  I abstained from it off and on for three decades or so before I learned that wheat and gluten were probably just as harmful to me.  Once I cut that out, cutting out the other crap became easier.  I went along, doing okay for several years, sticking to a healthy diet, not thinking about my weight, just trying not to be sick.  It worked about as well as can be expected for someone who has abused her body as extremely as I have for as long as I did.  As a side-effect, losing about half my body weight has made it easier to get around, too.

I think I overdid the healthy eating thing some at first.  It was sorta white-knuckle, grin-and-bear-it a lot of the time, or just bear-it.  Some of that was necessary.  I had a systemic yeast infection that required a ketogenic diet to knock it out.  However, the draconian self-denial was harmful to my peace of mind.  Cautiously, one-by-one, I have added some things, such as gluten-free pizza, that have put some fun back into eating for me without triggering any binges.  I knew it was risky to try chocolate again.  I thought about it long and hard, preparing myself for a strong exercise of will if a binge threatened.

I knew from the start that I couldn’t handle sweet stuff.  Last winter, three times on cold evenings, I put a spoonful of Ghirardelli’s unsweetened cocoa powder in a mug with a tablespoon or so of hot water, stirred it all up, then filled the mug with unsweetened almond milk.  It was mostly bitter, with just a hint of sweet from the almonds.  The aroma was heavenly, reminding me of a carnival in Ghirardelli Square.  My preference for Ghirardelli chocolate is largely motivated by happy memories of San Francisco.  (In a similar way, a visit to Hershey, PA, put me off Hershey’s chocolate for life.)  I inhaled the vapors, sipped the chocolate, and let it warm me from the inside out.  No cravings were triggered.  I wasn’t tempted to overdo it.

Emboldened and encouraged by the successful experiment with the unsweetened cocoa, and tempted by a walk through the candy aisle at the supermarket, I picked up a bar of bittersweet chocolate.  These 4 oz. bars are scored into 8 squares, and I ate that entire bar, half a square, 1/4 of an ounce, at a time.  Before the first taste, I promised myself that if it triggered any craving or tempted me to gobble down the whole thing, I’d give it to Doug and tell him not to let me get my hands on it again.  Knowing that I needed some limit or guideline to consumption, and familiar with my own tendency to rebel at rules and restrictions, I kept them simple and loose.  I wouldn’t eat more than half of a half-ounce square in any one day, not eat them on any two successive days, and never when my blood sugar was low. 

That must have been inspired thinking there.  I enjoyed the first little treat, was only slightly tempted to eat more immediately, and when I saw the bar in the pantry the next day it wasn’t hard to leave it there and wait until the following day for another piece.  Before that bar was all gone, I was forgetting about the chocolate for several days, up to a week or more between treats… no big deal.  I recognized the mild cravings I did have as wanting sweetness more than wanting chocolate, and so…

The next bar of chocolate was 70% cacao, not so sweet.  Scharffen Berger is a brand I’d never tried before.  It has rich fruity chocolate flavor and I enjoy it occasionally without any temptation to overindulge.  I call this success, and I call it transcending the addiction because if I was just abstaining, forcing myself not to indulge, I’d still be addicted, just not “in active addiction,” as we say in NA.  Of course, I have no idea whether my methods would work for anyone else.  They work for me.

For more than half of my lifetime, while doing psychic readings for people all over the planet, I have answered thousands of questions about love.  I also answered questions about money and a lot of other subjects, but love was the issue uppermost in most of my clients’ minds.  The readings did not come from me.  They came through me.  Sometimes, I recorded readings I did in person.  When my medium was written words, I always read what I had written.  Going back over them, some things I said or wrote were new ideas to me, or different, unusual takes on old ideas. 

I probably learned more from those readings in the aggregate than all my clients combined.  Someone receiving a piece of information that way might tend to think of it as peculiar to him or herself, of little universal significance.  For me, channeling the same information and advice time after time to a wide variety of people, I caught on to the universal significance of what I was saying.  When I started associating with other psychic weirdos like me, they reinforced those universal verities.  Consequently, I went from being a generally unhappy, emotionally needy seeker of wisdom and truth, to a happy and loving seeker of wisdom and truth.

Quoting myself here:

“We set ourselves up for disappointment when we try to trade love or anything else such as money, flattery, service or power, for love.  Loving can hurt unless you love unconditionally.  If you ask anything at all from those you love, you’re likely to ask for things that those you love will not or cannot give.  If you let that stop you from loving, you lose and everyone loses.

“The experience of loving without needing anything in return is a great feeling.  It is a higher octave of love.  Love is a form of energy.  By radiating it out, we establish a flow of it that enriches, enlightens and empowers us, and brings us together with ALL.” (Unconditional Love FAQ)

I now know that love and happiness, to be the real true things themselves, must come from within.  We don’t fall into, find, earn or buy LOVE.  If you “fall in love,” it’s probably limerence.  That kind of love is often a euphemised manifestation of the biological reproductive imperative, and it can be complicated by attachment disorders.  There’s nothing wrong with the mating urge in itself.  It’s a useful mechanism for perpetuating the species, but when it hits someone whose infancy and childhood weren’t conducive to healthy bonding, it might not last long enough to ensure that the offspring have the care and protection of both parents through childhood and adolescence.  In successful, long-lasting pair bonds, somewhere along the way at least one of the partners does some real loving.

That’s what love is:  something we DO.  It is a choice: choosing to BE loving, to DO love.  We can choose to aim it in a tight beam at one individual, who may or may not appreciate being the focus of such a beam.  We can spread it out to family, friends and those with whom we share bonds of kinship, philosophy, or whatever, or we can broadcast it to the universe at large.  The supply is unlimited.  The more I love, the more I can love.  If you feel you’re loving too much, you’re probably not loving at all.

Happiness has some things in common with love.  The best kind, the real stuff, comes from within.  It is a choice.  It doesn’t need a reason to be.  Unconditional happiness, being happy for no reason at all, is about as joyous as life gets.  I highly recommend it.

I hate the lies they tell.  It’s the old, “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” thing. To me, lies are terrible, despicable, destructive things, but, to me, nothing is unforgivable, either.  If someone lies to me, and I recognize it as a lie or find out later that it was, it will change our relationship, certainly.  I’ll be more cautious with that person, less likely to take anything he says at face value.  In other words, I’m not likely to forget the lie, but I will forgive the liar because hanging onto resentments and grudges is self-destructive.  It makes no sense to pile that on top of the injury caused by the lie.

Some of the wisest advice I have ever been given was to transcend fear and practice universal unconditional love.  I can discern that this is wise advice, a good idea, in several ways.  The nearer I come to achieving it, the happier and more harmonious I become.  Loving my family and close friends unconditionally has made me happier and made our relationships closer.  It has decreased our conflicts, because the “unconditional” part of it has erased all my expectations.  They don’t disappoint me or let me down, and aren’t subject to the repercussions that could result if they had.

In some ways it is easier to love people I know than to love everybody equally, and in other ways it is not so easy.  I can relax into a state of just loving the whole universe, impartially, dispassionately, as somewhat of an abstraction.  That’s not so easy to achieve with people with whom I have regular contact, conflicting interests, different ideas, etc.  In my family, we’re always stepping on each other’s toes, rubbing each other the wrong way, misunderstanding what is said.  To stay in a loving frame of mind here requires mindfulness and willingness to forgive.  I seem to be able to manage that more readily with my family and friends than I am, say, for example, politicians in general and Republicans in particular.

I’m wondering if everyone currently active on Xanga, all those who have been here and posted since John announced the relaunch fundraiser, have seen his post.  Can it be that there are those who have not?  I’ve been to about a dozen of my old friends’ sites, and only one of them has blogged about the relaunch.

Just in case, here it is:

 Relaunching Xanga: A Fundraiser