Attending the 62nd OA Birthday Party felt like a spiritual supercharge, a re-vitalizing way to start off the new year. The meetings were held via Zoom for safety reasons, of course. Admittedly, zooming the entire weekend for a total of 25 hours was exhausting, but it was doable with breaks and in the end was totally worth it. [Aside: I had the fortunate pleasure of attending my first OA Birthday party in 2020, in person, oblivious to how much the world would change just 2 months later.]
I took a ton of notes this weekend because I heard so many things I needed to hear:
God is in the PAUSE. It stands for Postpone Action Until Sanity (or Serenity) Enters. That's a crucial one for me right now. I've just added pretzels and non-whole wheat crackers to my abstinence list. Those are the foods we always have around the house and are so easy for me to reach for when food thoughts pop into my head-- usually around 3:45 when I get home from picking my kids up from school, or when I don't know what to do next.
The PAUSE brings me to another gem heard in the bday Zoom rooms: I'm not responsible for my first thought, but I am responsible for the 2nd thought and the first action. Just because I have the thought, doesn't mean I have to act on it.
If my first thought is "A pretzel rod sounds really good right now," that's when I pause and my second thought can be the prayer "God, please take away my desire to eat a pretzel." But if my second thought is "I am going to walk over to the kitchen cabinet and get myself a pretzel rod" and my first action is I walk over and get one, then that's a problem. My disease wants me to think if I have the thought, I have to act on it but I don't. That's the compulsion at work.
If I find myself still thinking about the food, my first action can be texting another OA member or reaching for a pen to write about it. Sometimes I just write the words, "God, please take away my desire to eat X right now." I can also ask myself if something is keeping me from peace at that particular moment and write about it.
It's not that we eat 3X a day, it's that we STOP EATING 3x a day. Oh man, this one really resonates with me. Sometimes I eat a healthy abstinent meal and I just want to keep eating. I think "This isn't enough. What else can I have?" If I act on this thought, it's the death of me, the rationalization that what I've eaten isn't enough and it's okay to eat more.
What this tells me is, I need to make sure I give enough thought to what's on my plate and make sure it's enough. If I find that whole wheat crackers round out a salad, then I need to make sure I include those crackers with the meal.
One of my big takeaways from the weekend is that I need to make more phone calls in order to build that network of "buddies" I hear people talk about. Trudging buddies. God squad. Choir of Higher Power. Whatever you want to call them, I don't have them. The group of people I can put on speed dial-- or to bring it into this century-- people to put in my phone's "favorites," which just doesn't have same ring. Whatever you want to call them, they're the folks I can always reach out to in those moments when the food calls to me.
