Geneen Roth Quotes

For some reason, we are truly convinced that if we criticize ourselves, the criticism will lead to change. If we are harsh, we believe we will end up being kind. If we shame ourselves, we believe we end up loving ourselves. It has never been true, not for a moment, that shame leads to love. Only love leads to love.

Treat yourself as if you already are enough. Walk as if you are enough. Eat as if you are enough. See, look, listen as if you are enough. Because it's true.

It's never been true, not anywhere at anytime, that the value of a soul, of a human spirit, is dependent on a number on a scale.

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, you'd feel as if you were living in heaven every day of your sweet life.

Most of us spend our lives protecting ourselves from losses that have already happened.

Weight loss does not make people happy. Or peaceful. Being thin does not address the emptiness that has no shape or weight or name. Even a wildly successful diet is a colossal failure because inside the new body is the same sinking heart.

Awareness is learning to keep yourself company

What you pay attention to grows. Pay attention to your loveliness, your magnificent self. Begin now.

Change happens when you understand what you want to change so deeply that there is no reason to do anything but act in your own best interest.

If you pay attention to when you are hungry, what your body wants, what you are eating, when you've had enough, you end the obsession because obsession and awareness cannot coexist.

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.

We eat the way we eat because we are afraid to feel what we feel.

Awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage.

If you think your job is to fix what is broken, you keep finding more broken places to mend.

No matter where you go, no matter how many gifts you give and receive this holiday season, unless you are actually present, it all flies by as if in a dream. Satisfaction in anything--a meal, an interaction, a gift, a sunset--depends on your willingness to take it in. Breathe. Feel your arms and your legs. You are allowed to love every little thing about yourself and your life. You are allowed to take up space and be all that you are. Really you are.

The purpose of a spiritual path or religion is to provide a precise and believable way into what seems unbelievable.

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.

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

You will stop turning to food when you start understanding in your body, not just your mind, that there is something better...Truth, not force, does the work of ending compulsive eating.

People come and go, pain comes and goes. But so does joy. And if our hearts are closed because we don't want to suffer, they won't be open enough to recognize the joy as it flies by.

I believe in love. And beauty. I believe that every single person has something they find beautiful and that they truly love. The smell of their child's hair, the silence of a forest, their lover's crooked grin. Their country, their religion, their family. And I believe that if you follow this love all the way to its end, if you start with the thing you find most beautiful and trace it's perfume back to its essence, you will perceive an intangible presence, a swath of stillness that allows the thing you love to be visible like the openness of the sky reveals the presence of the moon.

The way we do anything is the way we do everything. The way we eat is the way we live.

Imagine not being frightened by any feeling. Imagine knowing that nothing will destroy you. That you are beyond any feeling, and 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.

You can rescue yourself. No matter how you feel, no matter what you believe about your worth or your capacity to love and be loved, you can change.

You don't need a scale to tell you whether you're allowed to like yourself today. You are. You belong here. No matter what you weigh, you deserve joy and happiness.

Healing is about being awake. Being broken and whole at the same time.

No matter how developed you are in any other area of your life, no matter what you say you believe, no matter how sophisticated or enlightened you think you are, how you eat tells all.

You already have everything you need to be content. Your real work is to do whatever it takes to realize that.

Real change happens bit by bit. It takes great effort to become effortless at anything. There are no quick fixes.

. . . 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. That's also called leaving without leaving. Dying before you die. It's as if there is a part of you that so rails against being shattered by love that you shatter yourself first.

And if you worry that not finishing the food on your plate is a slap in the face of all the hungry people everywhere, you are not living in reality. The truth is that you either throw the food out or you throw it in, but either way it turns to waste. World hunger will not be solved by finishing the garlic mashed potatoes on your plate.

The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Your relationship with food is an exact mirror of your feelings about love, fear, anger, meaning and transformation.

Your relationship to food, no matter how conflicted, is the doorway to freedom.

All any feeling wants is to be welcomed with tenderness. It wants room to unfold. It wants to relax and tell its story. It wants to dissolve like a thousand writhing snakes that with a flick of kindness become harmless strands of rope.

It matters whether you see yourself as someone who is capable of effecting change or whether you see yourself as someone whose voice does not count. It matters whether you treat yourself with reverence or with carelessness. Every bit of work you do on yourself matters. Every time you choose love, it matters.

It's 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 don't 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.

Chocolate ... is not something you can take or leave, something you like only moderately. You dont like chocolate. You dont even love chocolate. Chocolate is something you have an affair with.

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.

The real work of this life is not what we do every day from 9-5...The real work is to be passionate, be holy, be wild, be irreverent, to laugh and cry until you awaken the sleeping spirits, until the ground of your being cleaves and the universe comes flooding in.

The relentless attempts to be thin take you further and further away from what could actually end your suffering: getting back in touch with who you really are. Your true nature. Your essence.

The truth is that it’s not about the weight. It’s never been about the weight. When a pill is discovered that allows people to eat whatever they want and not gain weight, the feelings and situations they turned to food to avoid will still be there and they will find other more inventive ways to numb themselves.

Come back to yourself. Return to the voice of your body. Trust that much.

For every diet there's an equal and opposite binge (bulimia which is binging and purging is another way of depriving yourself).

Ask: is what I'm doing and thinking right now bringing me closer to myself or farther away? Opening my heart or closing it? You have a choice.

My closet was full, yet I was always focused on the sweater I didn't have, or on the next pair of boots. I wasn't allowing myself to take in what I had. I could never experience what "enough" was.

There's a basic feeling of lack that we want to distract ourselves from. We want to fix it by looking outside ourselves, as if it is going to fill us up.

Diets are based on the unspoken fear that you are a madwoman, a food terrorist, a lunatic…The promise of a diet is not only that you will have a different body; it is that in having a different body, you will have a different life. If you hate yourself enough, you will love yourself. If you torture yourself enough, you will become a peaceful, relaxed human being.

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?

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.

Compulsive eating is only the symptom; believing that you are not worth your own love is the problem. Go for the love. You will never be sorry.