Another author you might be interested in is Ecknath Easwaran, especially his book
Take Your Time. If anyone has read any of the
Laurel's Kitchen cookbooks, this is the teacher they talk about.
http://nilgiri.org/
fkwan, what you say reminds me of a couple of things (my apologies in advance, this is probably going to get long!)...
Some years ago I was having a discussion with a friend who had realized that his life wasn't working in many ways. He was doing some soul-searching to determine why it wasn't working and may have gone through some therapy, too. He thought that knowing "why" things weren't working would make it possible for him to make the necessary changes.
He knew what changes needed to be made - it wasn't like he didn't know what to do. But by trying to determine why he did what he did, he was just delaying the inevitable: making the necessary changes. If he just made the changes, his life would have worked! If the "why?" was still important, he could worry about that while living a life that worked!
We may be hardwired to be lustful instead of chaste, gluttonous instead of temperate, greedy instead of charitable, slothful instead of diligent, wrathful instead of patient, envious instead of kind, and prideful instead of humble. What has kept our behavior civilized over the generations are habit and tradition. What has changed is that lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride have become not only socially acceptable, but are encouraged.
In the mid-90's I read an article (which I have saved somewhere) in
Prevention magazine called "How in the World to Stay Slim." It disucssed the habits and traditions of eating and exercise in various cultures and countries around the world: Japan, China, Burma, Sweden, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands and Italy.
Obviously, the foods eaten by the people in these countries varied significantly, but their habits didn't. They moved more (as in walking, biking and so on), they ate smaller portions, they didn't permasnack (though many of them had routine times for specific snacks -- like the English tea), desserts and sweets weren't part of daily life and they typically had a starchy food that was more important in their diet than meat (rice, bread, pasta, potatoes and so on). I think there were one or two more things that I can't remember.
These habits, as well as the specific foods eaten, had been followed for not only generations, but centuries in these areas. Greed and gluttony weren't issues because the habits were so ingrained. You didn't overeat because it wasn't the habit; it wasn't socially acceptable. As Reinhard says in the book, Jews and Muslims don't obsess over whether or not to eat pork or shellfish, and there aren't mountains of articles on how to avoid them, because the habit is not to eat them.
In his 2004
New York Times article "Our National Eating Disorder",
Michael Pollan wrote:While our senses can help us to draw the first, elemental distinctions between good and bad foods, we humans rely heavily on culture to keep it all straight. So we codify the rules of wise eating in an elaborate structure of taboos, rituals, manners and culinary traditions, covering everything from the proper size of portions to the order in which foods should be consumed to the kinds of animals it is O.K. to eat. Anthropologists may argue whether all these rules make biological sense, but certainly a great many of them do, and they keep us from having to re-enact the omnivore's dilemma at every meal.
One way to think about America's national eating disorder is as the return, with an almost atavistic vengeance, of the omnivore's dilemma. The cornucopia of the American supermarket has thrown us back onto a bewildering food landscape where we once again have to worry that some of those tasty-looking morsels might kill us. At the same time, many of the tools with which people historically managed the omnivore's dilemma have lost their sharpness, or simply failed, in the United States today. As a relatively new nation drawn from many different immigrant populations, each with its own culture of food, we Americans find ourselves without a strong, stable culinary tradition to guide us.
We may not have our own culture of food or a strong, stable culinary tradition in terms of
what to eat, but the peoples of the various populations that have created our country have (or had) many of the same habits. Since the mid-to-late twentieth century, we've chosen or been taught to ignore most of them.
I've come across this in several places:
I am your constant companion. I am
your greatest helper or heaviest burden.
I will push you onward or drag you down
to failure. I am completely at your command.
Half the things I do you might as well
turn over to me and I will be able to do
them quickly and correctly.
I am easily managed - you must merely
be firm with me. Show me exactly how you
want something done and after a few
lessons I will do it automatically. I am the
servant of all great individuals and, alas, of
all failures as well. Those who are great, I
have made great. Those who are failures,
I have made failures.
I am not a machine, though I work
with all the precision of a machine plus
the intelligence of a human. You may run
me for profit or run me for ruin - it
makes no difference to me.
Take me, train me, be firm with me,
and I will place the world at your feet. Be
easy with me and I will destroy you.
Who am I?
I am Habit.
Habits are important!
)
to make the total transformation ... usually somewhere between one and two years ... getting through completely the cycles of the seasons and all that they engender ... holidays, rituals, expectations ...memories...