What is your drishty? An eating disorder perspective

An eating disorder is a crutch to make you feel more stable

The question of “why” often poses itself. Why did I/ my child have an eating disorder? Finding the exact answer to this can be useful but, over the years, I’ve come to realise that the general answer tends to always be the same. At some point in the person’s life, something rocked them enough to make them unstable on their feet. And what do you do when you become unstable? You reach for something nearby to stabilise you. An eating disorder is a crutch to help you feel more stable. That seems fair, doesn’t it? But. This is based on a lie.

Surprisingly perhaps, I’m not about to launch into how the eating disorder lies about thinness and food or, how the goal post will always move and that you will never be enough. You know this. The lie is that you should always be stable and that wobbling means you can’t stand on your own. The lie is that you need a crutch when you don’t. The eating disorder offers to fix a problem that isn’t truly one. We all wobble in life, some more than others because life presents us all with different challenges.

However, you never needed a crutch

I don’t know how much you know about yoga but try to picture someone doing a balancing pose in yoga (say warrior three). Now imagine someone comes along and pushes them, they are going to wobble and, almost certainly, fall. That’s similar to life dealing you with a bad hand and something really hard happening to you. You couldn’t predict it and it wasn’t your fault.

Imagine the person is wobbling simply because it’s their first try at yoga, they don’t really know what they are doing and, really, they just need more practice. I find a lot of young teenagers are in that category. They come to me at the age of 14/15, anorexic, telling me that they put lots of weight on when they were 12/13 and that they are now terrified of this happening again.

Hormonal changes during puberty is often a factor here. That aside, I’d say that those tweens simply didn’t know what they were doing with food. They had more freedom, stopped at the corner shop, perhaps more often than is reasonable, but it’s not a big deal. It doesn’t mean they needed their eating disorder to make them better, most young teens do that. There was no real problem, nothing that needed to be fixed. They just needed to grow into themselves both physically and mentally.

When being the best makes you miss the woods for the trees

Another configuration is someone who has strength and who could easily hold the pose. However, they don’t quite get that no one is going to give you a medal for lifting your leg the highest. They will want to showcase their athletic prowesses without giving too much thought to the value of stillness. So, they will push and push and might check the clock to see how much longer they have to hold. These people are likely to wobble and fall too. Pursuing the “best diet” at all costs is precisely likely to cost you a great deal, as you will have lost sight of your overall health.

Now imagine a person who is quite versed at yoga, it’s not their first time. They are more than capable, except that they haven’t quite got the principle of yoga, which isn’t based on competition. There’s only you and your practice, what the others are doing is irrelevant. So there they are, in their poses, but they want to check what everyone else is doing. They want to make sure they are not doing anything wrong, or they get distracted by the shiny Lulu lemon leggings over there. No doubt about it, they will wobble and perhaps come out of their pose. In yoga, like in life, you have to do your own thing instead of comparing yourself to others. The moment you start comparing your diet, or your body, with those of others, you’re in trouble even if you’re normally quite solid.

Your drishty is what keeps you stable

What’s the secret then? Well that’s your drishty. It means “focused gaze” and in yoga we use to hold still. You pick a point in the room and you stay focused on this while in a challenging pose. This enables you to withdraw into yourself and concentrate solely on you and your practice. This, I find, we tend to acquire when we age. We become less bothered by what the others are doing and we are more able to tune out the noise around us telling us to be blonder, younger, thinner etc.

Yet even those who are seasoned “yogis” are always at risk of wobbling because you never know who might come and push you. We all have bad days and the noise can sometimes get too much for all of us. That’s ok, it doesn’t mean you’re rubbish at yoga or even at standing, you don’t need a crutch. You might just need to sleep it over, to gather yourself, to rest etc. You might need to talk it over with someone so you can understand that the fault was in the person who pushed you and that you are still more than capable to hold still unaided.

Finally, I have come to notice that the people who wobble the most are those who just haven’t found their drishty in life just yet. It’s not always easy to find and you might need several attempts. They may struggle to find their purposes and their values preferring for now to look around at what others are doing and being swayed by popular opinion. Perhaps that explains why so many teenagers are falling prey to eating disorders? They don’t know who they are and what they want yet, so finding that point of focus is going to be harder.

Wobbling is part of your life practice

Know that it’s ok to change focus. You may wobble along the way. Remember, there’s no rule dictating that you have to keep the same focal point at all times. People also get their drishty wrong thinking happiness will come from doing that successful job, or earning that amount of money. However, if that doesn’t truly resonate with them, they will wobble. I often see people with no hobbies who are unstable. Usually, they either haven’t yet found what makes them tick, or they have found it but think it’s not cool enough. So, they don’t pursue it and instead chase something that society will more readily validate. If your thing is carp fishing and that’s what’s going to make you happy, then do that.

You know the saying: those who mind, don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind. Allow yourself not to mind because you are the only person who really matters.