Quotes by Geneen Roth

Most of our suffering comes from resisting what is already here, particularly our feelings. All any feeling wants is to be welcomed, touched, allowed. It wants attention. It wants kindness. If you treated your feelings with as much love as you treated your dog or your cat or your child, youd feel as if you were living in heaven every day of your sweet life.

Imagine not being frightened by any feeling. Imagine knowing that nothing will destroy you. That you are beyond any feeling, an state. Bigger than. Vaster than. That there is no reason to use drugs because anything a drug could do would pale in comparison to knowing who you are. To what you can understand, live, be, just by being with that presents itself to you in the form of the feelings you have...

Once you discover freedom, you want to capture it, never let it go.

When you ignore your belly, you become homeless. You spend your life trying to erase your own existence. Apologizing for yourself. Feeling like a ghost. Eating to take up space, eating to give yourself the feeling that you have weight here, you belong here, you are allowed to be yourself -- but never quite believing it because you dont sense yourself directly.. . . I started teaching a simple belly meditation in which I asked people to become aware of sensations in their belly (numbness and emptiness count as sensations). Every time their mind wandered . . . I asked them to begin counting their breaths so they could anchor their concentration. Starting with the number one and saying it on the out breath, theyd count to seven and begin again. If they were able to stay concentrated on the sensations in their belly centers, they didnt need to use counting as a concentration anchor.. . . you begin the process of bringing yourself back to your body, to your belly, to your breath because they -- not the mind medleys -- are here now. And it is only here, only now that you can make a decision to eat or not eat. To occupy your own body or to vacate your arms and your legs while still breathing and go through your days as a walking head. . . . Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake. A way to discover what you love. A practice to return yourself to your body when the mind medleys threaten to usurp your sanity.

Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds--our stories of loneliness, rejection, grief--that we dont realize they are in the past. They cant hurt us anymore.

Staying requires being curious about who you actually are when you dont take yourself to be a collection of memories.When you dont infer your existence form replaying what happened to you, when you dont take yourself to be the girl your mother/father/brother/teacher/lover didnt see or adore. When you sense yourself directly, immediately, right now, without preconception, who are you?

At some point, its 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.

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.

Your body is the piece of the universe youve been given; as long as you have a pulse, it presents you with an ongoing shower of immediate sensate experiences.

You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you wont discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself. (p. 84)

When you believe without knowing you believe that you are damaged at your core, you also believe that you need to hide that damage for anyone to love you. You walk around ashamed of being yourself. You try hard to make up for the way you look, walk, feel. Decisions are agonizing because if you, the person who makes the decision, is damaged, then how can you trust what you decide? You doubt your own impulses so you become masterful at looking outside yourself for comfort. You become an expert at finding experts and programs, at striving and trying hard and then harder to change yourself, but this process only reaffirms what you already believe about yourself -- that your needs and choices cannot be trusted, and left to your own devices you are out of control (p.82-83)

. . . hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. Being one place and wanting to be somewhere else . . . . Wanting life to be different from what it is. Thats also called leaving without leaving. Dying before you die. Its as if there is a part of you that so rails against being shattered by love that you shatter yourself first. (p. 44)

...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 cant 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.

Its never been true, not anywhere at any time, that the value of a soul, of a human spirit, is dependent on a number on a scale. We are unrepeatable beings of light and space and water who need these physical vehicles to get around. When we start defining ourselves by that which can be measured or weighed, something deep within us rebels. We dont want to EAT hot fudge sundaes as much as we want our lives to BE hot fudge sundaes. We want to come home to ourselves. (p. 174-5)

Weight (too much or too little) is a by-product. Weight is what happens when you use food to flatten your life. Even with aching joints, its not about food. Even with arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure. Its about your desire to flatten your life. Its about the fact that youve given up without saying so. Its about your belief that its not possible to live any other way -- and youre using food to act that out without ever having to admit it. (p. 53)

Our work is not to change what you do, but to witness what you do with enough awareness, enough curiosity, enough tenderness that the lies and old decisions upon which the compulsion is based become apparent and fall away. When you no longer believe that eating will save your life when you feel exhausted or overwhelmed or lonely, you will stop. When you believe in yourself more than you believe in food, you will stop using food as if it were your only chance at not falling apart. When the shape of your body no longer matches the shape of your beliefs, the weight disappears. (p. 80-81)

“Most of our suffering comes from resisting what is already here, particularly our feelings. All any feeling wants is to be welcomed, touched, allowed. It wants attention. It wants kindness. If you treated your feelings with as much love as you treated your dog or your cat or your child, youd feel as if you were living in heaven every day of your sweet life.”