Chocolate equanimity

Eating chocolate means I will have bad stomach, burning, gas, distention, about 24 hours later.
This has been going on about 6 months now. When I first heard about equanimity in a group discussion, I heard it described as the midpoint between desire and aversion. After the discussion on equanimity, I get to work the next day, the very next day, and about 10 feet from my office door someone has installed a peanut m & m's candy machine. So for 25 cents I can satisfy my desire and 24 hours later face aversion.

Oh, the places chocolate shows up. Last week I went to a workshop on Communication, the presenter is piling candy, like Halloween-time without the bags, on the table we sit at. For the whole morning, I resist the milky ways and kit kats and hershey bars. In the afternoon I eat two pieces. This is a chocolate appetizer. By the time I get home, I'm eating the chocolate cake in the freezer.

I volunteer at a retreat and eat grains and whole fresh foods. At the end of the occasion someone wants to celebrate and is busy in the kitchen making chocolate sauce for ice cream. I eat just a taste. When I get to work, I realize nothing happened with that little taste, so I eat one of the Whitham chocolates from the box I've been resisting for a month, then another, and that's so good, another. Discipline and equanimity disappear. Impulsiveness takes over. As impulsiveness takes over chocolate, impulsiveness spreads into the grocery store, buying anything I want on a credit card, it spreads to relationships, feeling impatient with people, expectations get bigger.

The Hungry Ghost with the tiny mouth, long skinny neck and gargantuan stomach manifests when chocolate shows up. Good tummy is saying enough, enough, we can't do this anymore. See the chocolate, feel the impulsiveness creep in the taste buds, feel how impulsiveness likes to be in charge, take over. Big bully. Give the bully space, don't fight him, just watch him, let him be and rest in the river.