Tricyle Article published Winter 2024, “Finalist, National Magazine Award 2025”:
Abortion and the First Precept
Understanding abortion as the alleviation of suffering
By Katy Butler
On a hot August day forty years ago in southern France, Thich Nhat Hanh summoned me to his private room on the second floor of an old stone farmhouse. “I want you to take the five lay precepts,” he said, referring to the ancient Buddhist guidelines against harming oneself or others via killing, stealing, sexual exploitation, using intoxicants, and indulging in hurtful or dishonest speech. “The people who harmed you as a child violated the precepts. This will protect you.”
Not killing seemed obvious. I didn’t steal. I was faithful to my then-husband. I rarely drank. But how was I to protect myself, I asked Thay, if I didn’t speak up, and harshly if necessary?
“Some people think I am soft,” he said. “But I am strong.” He made a fist, bent one elbow until his sleeve fell back, and displayed his hard round bicep. “Right speech is not a matter of not saying things. It’s all a matter of art and timing.”
A week later, I committed to the precepts and took the dharma name True Lotus. It did not occur to me to examine my two abortions in their light. Perhaps I compartmentalized. Perhaps I figured this was one of the ways that liberal Westerners and traditional Asian teachers diverge—like reincarnation, psychedelics, and the Vietnamese Buddhist custom of serving the most novice male monk before the most senior nun. Or perhaps I didn’t want to think about it at all.
Only now, since the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled a national right to abortion, have I thought back fifty years and examined my actions in the light of the precepts and my values. I offer a moral defense of abortion by situating this commonplace, difficult event not in an ideal universe but within the lives of real women, including mine.
Context is everything. Both my pregnancies, like those of many accidentally pregnant women, arose within a web of relationships and started with a mistake. In 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade decriminalized abortion and just before my senior year in college, I hitchhiked alone from Middletown, Connecticut, to Baltimore, Maryland, to go camping with a former boyfriend who’d just returned from a semester in Paris. I do not understand why I thought this was a good idea. It was thoughtless and unkind. I’d just been fired from my summer job as a pizza waitress for “not having a woman’s touch,” and I wanted a break from living with my parents. I thought the boy understood that I had no desire to rekindle our romance. I was 21. I did not bring my diaphragm.
After we pitched our tent by a lake in backwoods Maine, the young man confronted me: Why had I dragged him all this way if I didn’t want to get back together? Within this penumbra of guilt and betrayal, I engaged in sex with him. When he dropped me back in Middletown a week later, a fertilized egg smaller than a salt grain had drifted down one of my fallopian tubes and landed without a whisper in my womb.
Labor Day came and went. Inside my body, I felt nothing out of the ordinary. The tiny being in my uterus was now a ball of rapidly proliferating cells the size of a poppy seed, known scientifically as a blastocyst. I registered for classes at Wesleyan, moved into an apartment, and definitively ended things with my former boyfriend. A week or two later, I became involved with someone else after a night spent looking into each other’s eyes on LSD.
The being inside me was now shaped like a tadpole and the size of a sesame seed. Women around the world have been secretly trying to miscarry these sparks of life for millennia: scalding in hot baths while soused on gin; jumping off tables; and swallowing bitter aloe, rue, pennyroyal, and toxic turpentine. I tried none of this, even when I realized that my period was two weeks late. In Connecticut, performing or undergoing an abortion was a felony punishable by one to five years in prison.
Pregnancy tests were not available over-the-counter then, so I went to a private doctor in Middletown. Of the weeks of misery that followed, one memory of feeling fully alive and joyful remains. Standing in the kitchen of my upstairs apartment on the shabby end of High Street, getting my pregnancy results over the phone, I felt a tide of warm, surprising happiness flood my body, from the soles of my feet to the tingling roots of my hair. I was fertile. I could get pregnant when I wanted to. Then my heart closed, and in a cold panic I looked for a way to end my pregnancy.
I did not want to think about it, for fear I wouldn’t go through with it. I remembered a Catholic high school friend telling me, “Abortion is murder.” I had never heard the phrase “forced motherhood” or questioned cherishing a life that has barely begun while ignoring the woman unwillingly carrying it. Nor did I know that the Catholic Church and American law had until the mid-1800s largely overlooked abortion until “quickening” at four or five months, when the fetus kicked in the womb and its claim on people’s moral imaginations began. I did know, though, that the legislature of New York State, ninety minutes over the state border, had narrowly voted to legalize abortion three months earlier.
Proponents of legal abortion often say “my body, my choice.” I did not think of the being inside me as a part of my body over which I had utter dominion, and I don’t think that now. Whatever was inside me—zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, or unborn child—had a claim on my moral imagination. And so did I.
I was facing four doors with a tiger behind every door. A Daisy Mae shotgun wedding was out of the question. There was no such thing as open adoption then, and the thought of disappearing into a Florence Crittenton Home and abandoning a baby I’d carried in my womb for nine months was more than I could bear. Even though I’d later learn that my mother was vehemently proabortion, I did not turn to my parents. With my sketchy grades and serial love affairs, I’d already disappointed them enough.
My images of single motherhood were drawn from pulpy True Confessions tales of seduction and abandonment and the Victorian novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. Tess, a pure peasant girl, is inveigled into sex by a rich wastrel who employs her on a farm. The baby she bears him dies in infancy. She later falls in love with a respectable young man who abandons her on their wedding night after she trustingly confides her shame-filled past. “Ruined” and unable to earn a living even as a milkmaid, she becomes the kept woman of her original violator, stabs him to death, and is hanged. Yes, it might seem absurd that I thought like this during the so-called Sexual Revolution, but I did. My “choice,” as I saw it, was between abortion and ruination. I sought to regain control not so much of my body as of my future and my life. I skipped classes one morning and took a Greyhound bus to New York.
The Upper West Side gynecologist, who’d been warm and charming when he’d fitted me for a diaphragm two years earlier, now coolly told me that an abortion would cost $1,200. I cried. It was more than I’d earned all summer to cover my food and rent for the school year. I left his office with the embryo inside me, now about the size of a lentil, with the budlike beginnings of arms.
My “choice,” as I saw it, was between abortion and ruination. I sought to regain control not so much of my body as of my future and my life.
Back in Middletown, I contacted a Protestant pastor, part of the liberal Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, which had referred women to safe abortions before they were legal. A week later, I was back on the Greyhound headed for their low-cost Manhattan clinic, where my abortion would cost $350. My former boyfriend had reluctantly given me half the money.
I look back in horror now at how lonely I was and how few people I confided in. I remember my utter solitude that day as I moved through one crowd after another: the packed and stuffy bus; the teeming confusion of Port Authority; the groaning, dirty gray subway; the throngs clattering upward into the noisy light; and the herd of anxious women from all over the country converging on a building on East 63rd Street.
In a crowded meeting room, a male doctor told a herd of us what to expect: oral sedation; an anesthetic injection; dilation and the scraping-out of our uteruses. He asked, “Any questions?” I asked how long I should wait before I had sex again. “Well, you’re not going to be doing that anymore,” he said. “Didn’t you learn your lesson?”
I was led, sedated and groggy, to a small room where a man in a white medical coat waited. I hiked my legs into the stirrups and closed my eyes. I remember no images, only a warm red darkness, voices, sounds, and snatches of conversation. I do not remember a tug in my womb, or cramping, or the clank of instruments. I do not remember a single soft touch, or anyone who counseled me, held my hand, or met my eyes.
A door creaked open and an authoritative male voice said, “You didn’t get it all. She has twins.” I think he added “boys,” though I hope it was too early to tell. They were no longer embryos to me, the size of a kidney bean, with a salamander’s soft fingers and toes. They were my babies, my boys.
As the instruments entered me again, my stoic reserve melted, and tears oozed from the corners of my eyes. I did not make a sound. A Scottish folk ballad called “The Cruel Mother” haunted me. Lady Margaret, impregnated and abandoned by her father’s clerk, goes to the edge of a green wood, where she “leans her back against a thorn,” gives birth to “two bonny boys,” and stabs them in the heart. When she later sees two boys playing at ball and yearns for her own dead sons, they reappear to haunt her: “O mother, O mother, when we were thine, you dressed us not in silks so fine. For you took out a wicked knife and did away with our precious life.” Five years after my abortion, in a session in a community peer-counseling program in San Francisco, I would weep and imagine those two wisps of boys knocking at the door of life, and how I’d shut the door against them.
Afterward, I took a commuter train to Old Westbury, where I slept on the couch of a female college friend and her boyfriend, who were teaching at the state university there. She remembers how sad I was, and how self-reliant. The next morning, I hitchhiked alone back to Middletown, relieved and numb. I don’t remember my new partner asking me much about what had happened, or me crying, or him holding me. In the weeks that followed, I was depressed, withdrawn, and averse to sex. He soon fell in love with another girl and moved out.
I had done the right thing. With my life no longer mortgaged to a disastrous future, I regained some influence—not control—over my life. I finished my BA, paid off my student loans by working for a lawyer in Colorado, and moved to San Francisco, where I got a starvation-wage job writing for an alternative weekly. In time, I would find the luck, guidance, money, and even love I needed to shape a more stable life. I sometimes wonder how my life, and those of others, would have turned out had I not been granted a safe, affordable, legal abortion at the age of 21.
In retrospect, I do not regret my abortion, or my grief. It was a wrenching, sacred, and morally necessary act. I am grateful to the compassionate men in whose hands my fate lay—the liberal Christian clergyman who’d earlier defied the law, my abortion providers, and the Jewish legislator from the Finger Lakes who ended his political career by casting the decisive vote to legalize the procedure in New York. I worry about who will help young women today whose lives are as messy as mine was then.
Looking back, I can see that if I’d observed the precepts before I got pregnant, I might have protected myself and others from harm. I violated the precepts on right speech and not exploiting others when I impulsively suggested that camping trip. I engaged in sexual relations, as Thich Nhat Hanh framed it, “without love and long-term commitment.” If times had been different, if I’d had an IUD, if I’d encountered Buddhism, if I’d been more self-loving, I might not have become pregnant at all. If, if, if. Here, let me hand you a stone.
If I’d carried those pregnancies to term, I believe I would have created greater harm, not only for myself but also for the boy I went camping with and two potential children who deserved a better start in life than I could have given them. I am still a Buddhist. I still honor the precepts. But I no longer give obeisance to abstract moral systems, formulated by small, privileged all-male groups, relying on absolutes and stripped of context and an understanding of how women struggle on the ground. Instead, I think of harm reduction. I sum up the precepts as “do not harm,” or “avoid unnecessary suffering, consider the situation, do your best, and minimize harm.”
I’ve recently learned that among the world’s great patriarchal religions, only Judaism and a few Protestant denominations accept abortion. Thich Nhat Hanh, who more than any other human being changed my life for the better, apparently assented to it in only extreme circumstances—for young Vietnamese refugee girls, for example, raped and impregnated by sea pirates. Even then, he sometimes helped persuade them not to abort because “the tiny living being within them also had a right to life.”
Only now do I understand that absolutist interpretations of the precept were formulated mainly by celibate male monastics who have never babysat a child for an afternoon. Only now do I fully understand how radically Buddhism has been shaped by the patriarchal cultures from whence it sprang, founded by a man who had abandoned his wife and son and had to be implored to share his teachings with women, including the aunt who had raised him from birth. The voices of women in Buddhism have long been muted, and the realities of their lives overlooked, although each new generation of teachers includes bolder women and more empathic men. I look forward to the day when real, breathing women have as much claim on our moral imaginations as tiny living beings they carry in their wombs.
Photo courtesy Katy Butler and Steve Talbot | Photographer unknown
One of the few teachers I found online who echoed my view that abortion is often the best moral way forward was the Tibetan Bön and Dzogchen master Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. “Bringing someone into the world under unfavorable circumstances without the necessary supports for the child to grow and be nourished only increases suffering,” he said in an interview with the Buddhist bimonthly Lion’s Roar. “This is equivalent to dying not just one time but many times in one lifetime, for both the mother and the child. Even though it is against Buddhist precepts to take a life, it is also not virtuous to give birth under circumstances that would increase suffering for oneself or another—a suffering that seems greater than ending a pregnancy that is unwanted.”
Yes, life is sacred. It flows infinitely from form to form, each form precious, flickering, evanescent, and without a permanent “self.” I did not dress those boys in silk so fine. I closed the door of life against them. They are flowers now.
In retrospect, I do not regret my abortion, or my grief. It was a wrenching, sacred, and morally necessary act.
Every seemingly separate thing arises from multiple causes and conditions. Abortion is widespread not only because contraceptives routinely fail but because we live in a culture that worships individualism, denigrates caregiving, underpays women, gives a pass to deadbeat dads, and provides scandalously little support to pregnant mothers and their children, particularly those who are Black or poor.
What happens in our wombs radiates out into the worlds in which we find ourselves. About three-quarters of American women who seek abortions live below, or just above, the federal poverty line. Roughly half are in their 20s, or are unmarried, or already have children. Only 4 percent of abortions occur sixteen weeks or more after conception. According to the 2020 Turnaway Study, those who seek late abortions for nonmedical reasons are often constrained by poverty. Living paycheck to paycheck, they must beg a relative or a foundation like Abortion Access for money to surmount legal barriers, such as compulsory waiting periods, sonograms, multiple doctor visits, and antiabortion counseling. It sometimes takes them weeks to raise money for child care, motels, gas, and plane tickets to clinics in faraway states with more liberal rules. State-created delays, erected by a religious lobby eager to protect fetal life, are intended to discourage abortion. But one of their unintended effects is to force poor women to get their abortions later, when the procedure is potentially more medically risky, traumatic, and morally fraught.
Four years after my first abortion I was hired by the city’s then-prosperous morning daily and rejoined the middle class. At 28, I stumbled into Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the Ventana Wilderness and opened, heart and soul, to Buddhism. A few years later, I married an admirable Zen student whom I’d met at a sesshin. A year or so later, I accidentally became pregnant again. (I’d had my IUD removed in the wake of the lethal Dalkon Shield scandal and was relying again on a diaphragm.) My husband and I viscerally, immediately, settled on abortion: Our young marriage was already rife with unspoken power struggles and bewildering silences. I assuaged my conscience by telling myself I wasn’t saying no to all babies—just to this baby at this time.
Besides, writing was my salvation.
Again, context is everything. On the day my husband and I walked into a women-run clinic on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco, abortion had been legal for twelve years. I remember the cloth napkin draped around the gurgling glass aspirator to hide its splattered contents. I remember a woman with perfectly groomed eyebrows holding my hand as a highly trained nurse maneuvered a tiny vacuum inside my womb. I remember my husband holding my other hand, looking into my eyes, compassionate and present. I cried. I was held. Nobody told me the sex of the embryo. It was a sacred and intimate experience, a necessary sorrow. I feel deep gratitude for the compassionate women who helped us, and for my former husband’s kindness.
We divorced seven years later. I have regrets about my behavior in our marriage, especially my harsh speech. But I remain at peace with our abortion and have rarely revisited it. I am not “pro-choice and antiabortion.” I don’t think abortion will ever be “rare.” I am proabortion as a sacred and often necessary moral act. Acorns are not oaks, fetuses are not children, and women are not broodmares. With a clear conscience, I focus my charitable giving on groups like Planned Parenthood, Abortion Access, and Turimiquire, a US foundation that funds the tubal ligations preferred by rural Venezuelan women who often have multiple children before they turn 20.
I have a photograph, taken three months before I first got pregnant. It is May 1970, graduation day at Wesleyan. I am walking along College Row with a crew of long-haired friends, on their way to pick up their diplomas. The couple who would shelter me in Old Westbury that fall are ambling behind me, smiling and dressed in blue jeans. It’s a sunny day. I am tall and slim, almost angular, striding forward in white flared jeans, Dr. Scholl’s clogs, and a characteristically determined look.
Confident and seemingly happy, we look like well-educated middle-class kids with the world before us, and in many ways we were. My woman friend wrote groundbreaking feminist books. Her then-college boyfriend still produces documentaries for public television. I became the writer I yearned to be and the Buddhist I had no inkling I would become. And twenty-four years after I met my second husband, I still revel in a loving marriage whose daily intimacy and ordinary beauty I couldn’t have imagined when I rode that Greyhound bus to New York.
We were young. We were walking the path toward our destinies. It looks like nothing will derail us. May young women everywhere have an equal chance to shape a decent life.
Link to read on Tricycle: https://tricycle.org/magazine/abortion-first-precept/?utm_source=BUTLER
Tricyle Article published Fall 2024:
Not Empty, Not Full
A food addict finds freedom in constraint.
By Katy Butler
Not long after I went to work for the San Francisco Chronicle, I bought an Econoline camper van with 112,000 miles on it and drove it to New Mexico to sit a sesshin with the fierce Rinzai Zen teacher Joshu Sasaki Roshi. I hoped to experience satori, which I imagined as a kind of spiritual and psychological washing machine. I was 28. I’d read only one Buddhist book. My prior meditation experience consisted of one summer week at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, into which I’d stumbled on a camping trip, looking for its famous hot springs. I didn’t realize that sitting a Rinzai sesshin would mean meditating, contemplating koans, and living in synchronized silence for eighteen hours a day, seven days straight. I only knew that one morning I’d come out of the Tassajara zendo into the clear mountain light, free of my usual turmoil and desperate ambition, and awake to a world alive, burgeoning, and lit from within. I hungered for more.
The sesshin was held in a former Catholic monastery in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, elevation 6,200 feet. On the night I drove in, with the muffler clanking, I was issued a faded black meditation robe and a springy cot in a shared room with four beds. At 3:30 a.m., I was ripped out of sleep by the clanging of a wake-up bell. It was early spring, and cold in the mountains. After two periods of silent meditation, we were marched out of the zendo and into the moonlight for walking meditation, double-time, under the barking orders of the head student, or jikijitsu. It was now 4:30 a.m. The sky was black and sparkling. Entranced by the full moon, I tripped on the hem of my borrowed robe and splatted into the icy mud.
I scrambled back into the line of silent black robes, just in time to retake my cushion. We chanted in homage to Kannon, the divine embodiment of compassion, over and over, faster and louder, to the tock-tock-tock of a hollow bulbous wood drum. I was largely estranged from my body then and didn’t realize I was hyperventilating. A bell rang. We stood up and bowed. I fainted. And so it went.
Midmorning, I scurried into dokusan, the one-on-one interview with Sasaki. He sat, as immovable as a granite boulder, in a small room.
“How old is Buddha?” he demanded. I reeled off whatever came into my head.
“Too wrapped up in yourself!” he said, and rang a bell. “More zazen!”
Lunch, in an outbuilding, began with unwrapping my bowls and chanting the Heart Sutra in impenetrable Sino-Japanese. With my mind consumed by Buddhist rigmarole, I took a mouthful of brown rice. The gates of my senses opened. The sticky capsules burst open beneath my tongue and teeth, releasing smells and textures that I’d never known could be hidden in plain brown rice.
I tasted brown rice and nothing else, except my own amazement.
I left the sesshin two days later in angry tears, no closer than ever to enlightenment, and muttering, “Buddhist Boot Camp.” But in that mouthful of brown rice was a glimmer of something I was thirsting for. I wanted to live more fully in my body and in my senses rather than in my plans and ambitions, which at the time revolved mainly around becoming a famous writer, finding a husband, and not feeling out of sorts so much of the time. When I got back to San Francisco, I sold the van and walked into San Francisco Zen Center’s meditation hall after my shift at the newspaper. And there my Buddhist practice life—three periods of zazen a day, slow and incremental—really began.
In parallel, I lived a secret life. The strange thing about my difficulties with food is that I had eaten so much and enjoyed so little. Cheap chocolates, shoplifted from supermarkets as a lonely middle-schooler. A jar of peanut butter, spoon by spoon until I was stultified, after my first love returned to Venezuela to be a fruitarian. Dove Bars on Halloween, after closing my door on the last child in her skeleton suit. At war with my simple human needs and desires, I had rarely been as present for all that sweetness as I had for that mouthful of brown rice.
I had eaten out of craving, boredom, loneliness, anger, exhaustion, hunger, and desire, and out of an emptiness and lifelessness I had no words for. I had eaten to feel loved, to jack up my energy, and to feel nothing at all. Like the alcoholic who picks up the first drink, once I started, I couldn’t stop.
Over the next two decades, I would live for a summer at Tassajara, complete several Soto Zen sesshins, marry and divorce a gem of a fellow Zen student, and study the Satipatthana Sutta (“The Discourse on the Establishing of Mindfulness”) and the Flower Ornament Sutra in France with Thich Nhat Hanh. Within the orderly quiet of Buddhist communities, my food problems were often quiescent. When I returned to lay life, compulsions and obsessions often structured the rhythm of my days.
I hit my lowest point in my early 50s. I was living in the basement of the suburban bungalow I’d once shared with my former husband, working remotely for an East Coast magazine and renting out the upstairs to cover the mortgage. Thanks to years of workaholic self-neglect and meditating in a crumpled half lotus, I had chronic back pain. I hungered to write a book but couldn’t organize anything longer than an article. I’d stopped meditating. An intense perimenopausal sexual relationship with a high-testosterone Zen plumber six years younger than I had ended, predictably, in disaster. I had no religious community, few friends, and no lover. My career was in the dumps and my body hurt.
In that dark apartment, I skipped breakfast like an anorexic. My dieter’s lunch consisted of cottage cheese, chopped fruit, and exactly six pecans. At suppertime I might microwave a “Healthy Choice” TV dinner. Still screamingly hungry, I would then gorge on ice cream or Little Schoolboy cookies until I was sick, and practice bulimia. That was two decades ago, yet I still feel shame—and a sigh of compassion for the pain I didn’t know I was numbing. Bulimia, I thought, was not a problem but a solution. I wouldn’t gain weight, and tomorrow would be a new day.
The new day would come, and with it another turn of the wheel of self-punishment, hunger, secrecy, flickers of pleasure, obsession, remorse, loss of control, and shame. I had little consciousness left to nurture, or even touch, my deeper hungers and thirsts: for meaning, creative expression, human connection, and ordinary life pleasures like taking a walk or making a friend. I could not face, much less heal, my broken life. Nobody knew what I was doing, not even me.
Like thousands before me, I would find that addiction is a strange beast only somewhat tamed by traditional Buddhist practice, in part because of radical changes in our food-and-drug environment. When Buddha awoke to the true nature of existence, the opium poppy was a thousand years from reaching Asia and hadn’t yet been refined into the white powder we call heroin. Likewise, fibrous sugar cane had not yet been industrially milled, in mass quantities, into the fine white powder we call sugar. (Americans now consume, on average, fifty-seven pounds a year.) I once heard Thich Nhat Hanh suggest that if one drank whiskey mindfully, one would soon stop drinking alcohol altogether. But concentrated substances provoke, in the physiologically vulnerable, an insatiable craving. Mindfulness did not prevent a revered Japanese Zen teacher from drowning drunk in a bathtub, or stop a brilliant Tibetan rinpoche from dying at 47 like a gutter drunk, or prevent his American spiritual heir from transmitting AIDS to one of the many students he seduced.
I had eaten out of craving, boredom, loneliness, anger, exhaustion, hunger, and desire, and out of an emptiness and lifelessness I had no words for.
Throughout my 30s and 40s, as a feminist journalist, I reported, with barely concealed outrage, on Western Buddhist communities, including my own, splintering in the face of unchecked cravings for “more,” be it sex, serial romantic love, social status, power, or beautiful things. I wrote about women navigating sexual land mines (including those set by Joshu Sasaki) as they tried to move in the direction of their own sacredness. But I did not, as Zen master Eihei Dogen suggested, “take the backward step that shines the light inward,” into my own compulsions. I did not know that there was a hungry ghost inside me that I would someday need to meet, modulate, and befriend.
Not long after I moved out of that basement apartment, I walked—ten minutes late and dressed to be invisible in rumpled jeans and shabby sneakers—into what people in Alcoholics Anonymous and its offshoots call “The Rooms.” (Out of respect for the 12-Step Tradition of Anonymity, I will not name my program.) I’d recently moved in with a man I’d met in a swing dance class. Blocked from secretly practicing bulimia, I was watching the numbers rise on the bathroom scale, failing at the Scarsdale Diet, and shoving pecans into my mouth at night like an automaton.
In that fluorescently lit parish hall, I didn’t feel the excitement I’d felt when I pulled into Jemez Springs in my broken-down van. I wasn’t looking for a spiritual experience, or even relief from the shame and mistrust I didn’t know I was carrying. I knew only that I needed to lose twenty pounds and couldn’t. And there I was, in a room full of bright-eyed women who’d shed three to ten times that much and kept it off for years.
A well-dressed speaker in a slim body passed out pictures of her former self, unrecognizable at 200 pounds. Sounding nothing like a member of my tribe, she expressed her gratitude to a “higher power.” Someone else read aloud some mumbo jumbo about food addiction being a disease of the mind, body, and spirit. I cocked my head. An addict? A disease? For eating a box of cookies? I’d never flown through a windshield, picked up a DUI, neglected my nonexistent kids, or called people at midnight sloppy drunk and pleading for bail money. I’d never even been enormously fat.
At the social break, I heard someone say, “Just weigh and measure your food, and the rest of your life will straighten out.” What did my sputtering career, the loss of my spiritual community, my depression, and my lack of money have to do with not eating sugar or putting steamed broccoli on a scale until it registered exactly 6.0 ounces? Someone else said, “Our eyes are broken, that is why we use a scale. We eat in black and white so that we can live in color.”
I later learned that I had unwittingly joined the “Blue Angels of 12-Step Programs,” notorious for its structure and discipline (much like the Zen I’d loved and chafed against). Strangely enough, given that I am an incorrigible rebel, I took to it—in time—like the knucklehead teenager who straightens out in the Marines. I got a sponsor, a digital food scale, and a mountain of Tupperware. I gave lip service to the notion that I was a “food addict” and stopped eating flour and sugar. I started each day with half an hour of “quiet time” and fifteen minutes of reading Buddhist texts. At night, I read two pages of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and wrote a gratitude list. I went each week to three AA-style meetings, where I heard people’s conversion narratives. At night I wrote down exactly what I planned to eat the next day. When the next day came, miraculously, that is exactly what I ate.
I stopped dieting, bingeing, and being bulimic. Freed from sugar highs and sugar crashes, I became less moody and irritable. I kept commitments. One day at a time, my life started to straighten out.
One morning not long after I started, I stood in the kitchen weighing out eight ounces of yogurt, six of cut-up orange, and a serving of oatmeal into three separate white bowls, reminiscent of the oryoki bowls of a Zen sesshin. Within the shell of the rushed, chaotic, boundaryless and ritual-starved secular world, I was creating a pause, a ritual, and a boundary. In Zen monasteries, I had chanted, “Innumerable labors brought us this food,” and asked to be freed from greed. Now I paid sacred attention until my scale registered 6.0.
Seated at the table, I picked up my spoon and tasted. Food—real food, not intoxicating white powders like sugar and flour—was no longer my seducer and my enemy. I could savor the cool yogurt, the chewy oats, and the orange’s zingy sparkle without fearing that enjoyment would open the floodgates to endless eating. Alive and in my body, I sensed the distinction between normal hunger and insatiable, addictive craving. Reclaiming healthy desire was a sacred and sensual moment for me, and a doorway to deep delight—the joy of being alive in my precious female body and my ordinary householder life. When the meal was over, I was done.
The historical Buddha, thin as a skeleton after six years of anorexic austerities, might have had a similar moment when he swallowed a spoonful of rice pudding offered by Sujata, a farmer’s wife. Revived from near-death, the Nepali prince set out on a middle path between restriction and gluttony, between punishment and neglect of the body, and losing oneself in sensual craving. Seven weeks later, he became enlightened while meditating in the shade of a pipal tree.
I wish I could say the same happened for me.
My first Zen teacher had told me that I was “very unconscious.” Thich Nhat Hanh said I knew “everything except how to live.” Before I encountered Buddhism, I had tried to think my way out of the paper bag of my own suffering. Living in a woman’s body, in a culture deeply confused about female eroticism and ethical boundaries, I’d often experienced my body not as a refuge but as a place of sexual vulnerability and roiling emotions. My interpretation of Zen practice, with its emphasis on sitting through physical pain, had unfortunately reinforced that distancing.
At Plum Village, Thich Nhat Hanh taught me to regard my body as a haven and as a sanctuary, a potential source of ease and bliss. Leading slow, relaxed walking meditation in the French countryside, he might stop to admire a bud on a branch. He encouraged us to enjoy our breathing and to notice and amplify our feelings of gratitude and joy, as a basis for meditative concentration and insight. But I could not fully make use of his teachings and enter my own body until I got my addiction to sugar—and, as it turned out, my daily life—under some control.
Beneath every addiction lies a secret painful story, be it the universal human uneasiness with things-as-they-are or, more specifically, personal griefs. This is mine: As a child, I was so terrorized that I jumped out of my own skin, and it has taken me decades to get back in. When I was 7, growing up in England, I accepted a ride from a polite stranger, a pedophile who left me feeling permanently stained. A year later, I stood at the stern of the Queen Elizabeth, bound for America with my family, watching Southampton disappear, leaving behind my best friend, Cathy, the park where I’d fed ducks anchored among the willows, and the great black drayhorse named Flower who clopped up our street twice a week pulling his cart of vegetables for sale. I entered a period of grieving for which I had no words.
In America, I wandered middle school in boys’ lace-up shoes and corduroy jumpers my mother had sewn, weaving through flocks of young women with bouffant hairdos, nylons, and flats. Boys catcalled me in the halls, knocked me into bushes, and mockingly asked me to “go steady.”
Bullied, traumatized, and ashamed, I came to fear that anything I did or said would reveal my essential wrongness. Like a hermit crab in its borrowed shell, I withdrew the soft parts of myself into a bony carapace. And I ate. Within a year, I could not bend over to lace up my shoes, run once around the track, or swing my body from one monkey ring to the next. My father called me “Mrs. Michelin.”
Beneath every addiction lies a secret painful story, be it the universal human uneasiness with things-as-they-are or, more specifically, personal griefs.
After several years of this subteen hell, I sent away for a manual on self-hypnosis. All one summer, I lay in my darkened bedroom, visualizing how life would be once I lost weight. I cut back on carbs and refused desserts. In September, I emerged from my bedroom like a moth, a shy, willowy figure with a waist and breasts. I went to parties. Boys asked me to dance. One afternoon I picked up a cookie. And another. Determined to never again be an ostracized fat girl, I discovered bulimia. And so it went, waxing and waning through the years, until I ended up in that dark basement apartment.
Before I walked into The Rooms, I had told nobody—no therapist, parent, or Buddhist teacher, not even my first husband—how badly I’d been bullied and how strangely I had eaten. But in the telling of our stories lies the release of shame. If intimacy in my Soto Zen community was primarily based on shared silence, my 12-Step practice has largely been based on telling and listening to life stories. Year by year, layer by layer, this storytelling communion has incrementally worn away my shame, the way a piece of broken bottle tumbled on a beach loses its jagged edges and takes on a rounded shape and cloudy beauty of its own. I understand better now that I am human—no better and no worse than the others who have shared their secrets with me. I remain a work in progress.
Paradoxically, given that the folk wisdom of the 12-Step Program is framed in the language of AA’s Protestant, Depression-era male founders, my recovery has gently looped me back to a consistent Buddhist practice. Almost every morning, I wake up at 5:00 and drink a cup of tea, as I look out of my window and over a ridge. I no longer sit in a formal Zen posture. (If something’s worth doing, I figure, it’s worth doing badly.) Following a foundational Vipassana text, the Satipatthana Sutta, I lie flat and explore, with as much compassionate curiosity as I can muster, the “body in the body” and the “feelings in the feelings.”
I sense the hair on my head, the spaces within my 75-year-old joints, the rumblings in my stomach, the agitation or warmth in my heart, the subtle sensations in my breasts and yoni. I thank my feet for carrying me and my ankles for balancing me. I sense the contents of my colon, my synovial fluid, my tears. This body, I try to remember, as the poet Rumi says, is a guesthouse, each day a new arrival. Fear, discomfort, gratitude, history, contentment, joy, resentment, anticipation: I try to welcome them all.
I will never know how much credit to give to my 12-Step recovery, and how much to the passage of time or my Buddhist practice. But since I walked into The Rooms, I’ve published two well-received books. For over two decades, I’ve reveled in an astonishingly loving, erotic, and stable relationship with my second husband, the man I met in that swing dance class. I remain at a slim healthy weight. I could not accomplish any of this before I got clean and sober with food. It has not happened overnight, any more than the “cure” for my somewhat feral personality turned out to be a thunderbolt of enlightenment.
What I appreciate most is not the external things but a softening of my mistrust of others, and greater gratitude, human connection, and joy. I have bloomed in the 12-Step sangha the way a paper flower blooms in a glass of water. I feel more at home in my body. I listen to what it tells me. I pick up the phone when I’m lonely, drink water when I’m thirsty, and nap when I’m tired. I go to the supermarket. Perhaps it’s the suburban version of chopping wood and carrying water. And given where I started, it’s a miracle.
I remain a cafeteria Buddhist and a 12-Step mélange. I take what I need and leave the rest. When I weigh and measure my food, I bring mindfulness and ritual to my daily life. When I avoid flour, sugar, and alcohol, I observe the lay precept not to poison my body with intoxicants or confuse the senses. When I make a phone call to a fellow addict who is suffering, I practice generosity, one of Theravada Buddhism’s six perfections. When someone encourages me to accept “life on life’s terms” and jokes that “there are claw marks over everything we’ve ever let go of,” I am reminded of the Buddha’s four noble truths: that our suffering comes largely from clinging, either to the way things are or the way we want them to be.
When I “humbly ask God to remove my shortcomings,” I recall the vow I made to Thich Nhat Hanh, to follow the five lay precepts. When someone suggests I turn to my higher power, I still struggle with the language and remember the Buddha saying “be a light unto yourself.” Nevertheless, I sometimes get on my knees and pray, to a shimmer I sense but cannot name, to help me be a decent person, one day at a time. When I “make a list of all persons we have harmed and become willing to make amends to them all,” I resonate with Buddhism’s ancient full-moon ceremony of communal monastic confession. I recognize what the poet Kabir called “the wanting creature inside me,” and try to let go of whatever that creature thinks might be gained from self-centeredness or manipulation.
Buddha’s eightfold path is traditionally divided into three parts: wisdom, or right view; concentration, or right meditation; and ethics (sila), or right conduct. Until I entered recovery, I could not effectively practice right conduct. And without stability, and the freedom from distraction and remorse that an ethical life provides, it is difficult to practice right meditation or to touch wisdom.
Every summer I return to Tassajara, where I first experienced bodhicitta, the desire to awaken. Reconnecting with my Buddhist roots, vowing to save all beings, I emerge from the zendo to greet the natural world, burgeoning and lit from within. At breakfast, I am sometimes ambushed by an explosion of sensations, like those I discovered long ago in a spoonful of plain brown rice. I feel supreme gratitude for my precious human life in an aging 21st-century female body. I am grateful to my current Zen teacher, who accepts my 12-Step practice, and to every teacher who supported me on this path.
And then I return to my suburban house, my marriage, and my 12-Step sangha, and drink in the simple practices of my ordinary life.
To read this article, and others, by Katy on the Tricycle website, click here: https://tricycle.org/author/katybutler/
Los Angeles Times Article published 12/19/2022:
Op-Ed: Harvey Weinstein’s latest trial and the ritual of degrading women in court
By Katy Butler
Harvey Weinstein’s Los Angeles rape trial, which ended Monday with the jury finding him guilty of raping one woman, was more than a one-off parade of salacious stories about a disgraced apex predator and a ritual dragging-through-the-mud of women who said they were violated. Its savage mistreatment of female witnesses is instructive to the approximately 300,000 American women who are raped each year and consider whether to involve the criminal justice system. Click here to continue reading.
Read or download the PDF version here: Katy Butler LA Times 121922
Wall Street Journal Article published 12/16/2020:
Covid Is Reshaping Death. And Maybe Life.
Our illusion of immortality is shattered. Let’s hope it changes us for the better.
By Katy Butler
The desire to die in the presence of those we love is so deeply ingrained that during the Civil War, soldiers dying on battlefields pulled out family photographs to create the experience in their imaginations. In 2020, the face-to-face family death vigil largely became an impossible luxury. While relatives wept on sidewalks, people with Covid died in isolation by the tens of thousands, attended only by masked nurses and aides holding iPads and dressed in hazmat suits. Click here to continue reading.
San Francisco Chronicle
How COVID pandemic is reshaping rituals of death and the way we mourn. 1/17/2021
Saying Goodbye
Oncology nurses Debra Rodgers, Debbie Roth, and Beth Calmes created this “bathing and honoring practice” to help families—and themselves—bring dignity and sacredness to a hospital death.
In Case of Dementia: My Wishes
A letter to Medical Advocates
San Francisco Chronicle
How to Prepare Yourself for a Good End-of-Life
Click here for a PDF version of the SF Chronicle article How to Prepare Yourself for a Good End-of-Life
The Wall Street Journal
The Ultimate End-of-Life Plan.
Click here for a PDF version of the Wall Street Journal article The Ultimate End-of-Life Plan by Katy Butler
The New Yorker
Vibration, Devotion, Issan Dorsey, Valentine, Notes and Comment.
The New York Times
What Broke My Father’s Heart: How A Pacemaker Wrecked Our Family’s Life; The Grim Neurology of Teenage Drinking; Many Couples Must Negotiate Terms of “Brokeback” Marriage; Beyond Rivalry, a Hidden World of Sibling Violence.
Click here for a PDF version of the New York Times article What Broke My Father’s Heart by Katy Butler
Los Angeles Times
Did Daddy Really Do It?; The Accidental Feminist; A House Divided; Bite by Bite, the Croissant Culture is Swallowing up the Ghettos.
Mother Jones
Great Boomer Bust; Step by Step
MORE Magazine
How to Access Your Inner Calm; My Life as a House; The Good Daughter: Becoming the Family Caregiver
Pacific Sun
Sacred Junk; Why Liberals Lose: An Interview with George Lakoff; The Great Divide; Reclaim Democracy.
Tricycle
Everything is Holy; The Lotus and the Ballot Box; Eye on the Ball; Say it Right.
Psychotherapy Networker
Being There; The Art and Science of Love; Small Things Often; Alice in Neuroland; My Life as a House; Skinner’s Box or Pandora’s Box?…
Common Boundary
Poetry as Path; Encountering the Shadow in Buddhist America
Whole Earth Review / Co Evolution Quarterly
Reporter’s Toolkit, Events are the Teacher
San Francisco: Don’t Call it Love
Sierra: Winning Words – George Lakoff Says Environmentalists Need to Watch Their Language
California: The Gilded Wilderness (New West Magazine)