Friday, August 07, 2015

Geneen Roth: Outrageous Kindness

“The obsession will end when you love yourself enough to stop hurting yourself. Who doesn't want to take care of what they love?”
― Geneen Roth

“People get old, get sick and die. Or they die suddenly. Or their deaths drag on forever. My friend Tory is dying a slow, excruciatingly painful death of bone cancer. Eight friends have died of breast cancer. Polar bears are dying. Honeybees are vanishing. The oceans are drying up. There is a part of me that wants my money back. That wants to say, 'I didn't sign up for this. I don't like the way this whole thing is set up and I won't participate in it.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“Ask yourself if you are in this for the long run--if it's only your weight you want to change or if you are willing to use your eating patterns as a portal to the inner universe. And if the answer is the latter, then there is no end to what you can learn, be, understand, become.”
― Geneen Roth

“Awareness is a way you keep yourself company. When you are aware you are being compulsive, you are no longer locked in the behavior. You have a choice to stop. That choice--and therefore awareness itself--is freedom.”
― Geneen Roth

“But replacing hunger for divine connection with Double Stuf Oreos is like giving a glass of sand to a person dying of thirst. It creates more thirst, more panic.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“You can't be stuck if you're not trying to get anywhere. Which, to me, means that when you stop fighting with the way things are, magic happens. You relax, open, and any action you take comes from alignment with what's true.”
― Geneen Roth

“If you decided to reteach yourself your own loveliness today, what would you do? How would you speak to yourself? Can you allow yourself that much?”
― Geneen Roth

“You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. It's possible to treat yourself with outrageous kindness beginning today.”
― Geneen Roth

“When you don't want to be where you are, you create suffering for yourself. Change happens through acceptance, kindness and relaxation--not resistance, not warfare, not fights.”
― Geneen Roth

“If you try to lose weight by shaming, depriving and fearing yourself, you will end up shamed, deprived, and afraid. Kindness comes first. Always.”
― Geneen Roth

“At some point, it's time to stop fighting with death, my thighs and the way things are. And to realize that emotional eating in nothing but bolting from multiple versions of the above: the obsession will stop when the bolting stops. And at that point, we might answer, as spiritual teacher Catherine Ingram did, when someone asked how she allowed herself to tolerate deep sorrow, "I live among the brokenhearted. They allow it.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“And.. are you willing to go all the way? To understand that food is only a stand-in for love and possibility and spirit? Because if you aren't, you will get caught up in gaining and losing weight for the rest of your life. But if you are willing, then the portal to what you say you want is truly on your plate.”
― Geneen Roth

“No act of love is ever wasted.”
― Geneen Roth, Feeding the Hungry Heart: The Experience of Compulsive Eating

“The process is the goal.”
― Geneen Roth

“You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won’t discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself.”
― Geneen Roth

“We keep wanting more because we don't let ourselves have what we already have.”
― Geneen Roth

“After you’ve looked at normal women’s bodies, look at yourself in the mirror. Stand there for at least three minutes, once a week, for six weeks. Every time you notice a stretch mark, a sag, a wrinkle, say to yourself, “This is what living looks like. This is what loving looks like.” And you will be telling the truth.”
― Geneen Roth, When you eat at the refrigerator, pull up a chair : fifty ways to feel thin, gorgeous, and happy

“People often mistake tenderheartedness for indulgence, as if being kind to themselves leads to lethargy—sitting around the house all day eating bonbons and wearing muumuus and pink rollers. This is simply not true. I often hear a variation on this statement: “If I’m not intolerant of my shortcomings, how can I ever expect to change them?” And the answer is, By doing the opposite of what you think you need to do to change. By being kind to yourself.”
― Geneen Roth, When you eat at the refrigerator, pull up a chair : fifty ways to feel thin, gorgeous, and happy

“Mothering is our first preverbal template for an existence in which we feel welcomed or rejected, loved or abandoned, many of us have fused our relationship with our mothers with our concepts of God.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“Pay careful attention to the bodily sensations that you recognize as hunger. When you feel yourself starting to get hungry, sit down for a few minutes (and if you can’t sit down, stand still). Where in your body do you experience hunger? In your throat? Your chest? Your stomach? Your legs? How is this sensation different from the sensation, let’s say, of excitement? Or loneliness? What happens to you when you feel yourself getting hungry? Do you feel that you need to eat immediately?”
― Geneen Roth, Breaking Free from Emotional Eating

“When you are not hungry and decide to eat, choose a food that you ate that day when you were hungry. Be aware of: 1. how the food tastes 2. how the taste was different when you were hungry 3. if you enjoy it as much as when you were hungry 4. what, since it’s not hunger, you are feeling 5. how you know when to stop eating”
― Geneen Roth, Breaking Free from Emotional Eating

“Live as if they know that they are worth their own time. Live as if they deserve to take care of their bodies. Live as”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“Women turn to food when they are not hungry because they are hungry for something they can’t name: a connection to what is beyond the concerns of daily life. Something deathless, something sacred. But replacing the hunger for divine connection with Double Stuf Oreos is like giving a glass of sand to a person dying of thirst. It creates more thirst, more panic.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“The relentless attempts to be thin take you further and further away from what could actually end your suffering:”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“I tell them that if compulsive eating is anything, it’s a way we leave ourselves when life gets hard. When we don’t want to notice what is going on. Compulsive eating is a way we distance ourselves from the way things are when they are not how we want them to be.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“Anytime you truly listen to your hunger and fullness, you lose weight.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“Compulsive eating is basically a refusal to be fully alive. No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can’t stand it any longer, we binge. The way we are able to accomplish all of this is by the simple act of bolting—of leaving ourselves—hundreds of times a day.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“When you decide that you need to lose twenty pounds because you are disgusting at this weight or that you need to meditate every day or go to church on Sundays because you will go to hell if you don’t, you are making life decisions while you are being whipped with chains. The voice-induced decisions—those made from shame and force, guilt or deprivation, cannot be trusted. They do not last because they are based on fear of consequences instead of longing for truth. Instead, ask yourself what you love. Without fear of consequences, without force or shame or guilt. What motivates you to be kind, to take care of your body, your spirit, others, the earth? Trust the longing, trust the love that can be translated into action without the threat of punishment. Trust that you will not destroy what matters most. Give yourself that much.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything


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