Geneen Roth Quotes & Sayings

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. — Geneen Roth

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

You can be aware of your past without being it. — Geneen Roth

The big horrible thing isn't the plane crash or the earthquake or the diagnosis. When those things occur, we act, we know what to do. We live or we die. Hell is what we do in the meantime. It is the ways we starve our souls as we prepare for the future that never comes as planned. The true disaster is living the life in your mind and missing the one in front of you. — 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

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. — Geneen Roth

Awareness, not deprivation, informs what you eat. Presence, not shame, changes how you see yourself and what you rely on. — Geneen Roth

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. — Geneen Roth

You can deal with the loneliness one night at a time. But what you can't deal with is the idea of loneliness, the fear of it. — Geneen Roth

We keep wanting more because we don't let ourselves have what we already have — Geneen Roth

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. — Geneen Roth

If LOVE could talk to you about your relationship with food, what would it say? — Geneen Roth

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. — Geneen Roth

We eat the way we live. — 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

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

We need to build our friendships on truth and wholeness. We need friends who can be with us in our loneliness, not people who will cheer us up so that we don't feel it. We need friends who get furious with us when we are not being real or true to ourselves, not when we don't do what they want us to do. — Geneen Roth

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. — Geneen Roth

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. — Geneen Roth

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. — Geneen Roth

The problem with fantasy is the greatest benefit of fantasy: it prevents us from living in the present moment. — Geneen Roth

Its not so much that we believe what we see, but that we see what we believe — Geneen Roth

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. — Geneen Roth

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. — Geneen Roth

You will never stop wanting more until you allow yourself to have what you already have. To take it in. Savor it. Now is a good time to do that ... — Geneen Roth

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. (p. 44) — 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. (p. 84) — Geneen Roth

Chocolate, I am sure, is the concrete manifestation of love. — Geneen Roth

Women look at their bodies, and they're never thin enough. The financial advisors that I've talked to say they ask their clients, "How much money do you need in order to feel secure?" "X amount." Then, as soon as the client got the amount, it would double automatically. — Geneen Roth

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

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, it's not about food. Even with arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure. It's about your desire to flatten your life. It's about the fact that you've given up without saying so. It's about your belief that it's not possible to live any other way
and you're using food to act that out without ever having to admit it. (p. 53) — Geneen Roth

Just because we form an opinion about ourselves, or anyone else, doesn't mean it is true. — Geneen Roth

Be fully present for five minutes every day. — Geneen Roth

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

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. — Geneen Roth

Separate the desire to be thin from the desire to be cherished. — Geneen Roth

We are using the food as a doorway to understanding the rest of our lives. — Geneen Roth

Change, if it is to be long lasting, must occur on the unseen levels first — Geneen Roth

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. — Geneen Roth

Awareness is learning to keep yourself company — Geneen Roth

Our relationship with food
how, when, what and why we eat
is a direct expression of our underlying feelings, thoughts and beliefs about ourselves. It has to do with stances we take that get reflected not only in our relationship with food, but in all our relationships. It just so happens that the relationship with food causes enough conflict, grief, shame and hurt that we're willing to look at it. — Geneen Roth

The Eating Guidelines
1. Eat when you are hungry.
2. Eat sitting down in a calm environment. This does not include the car.
3. Eat without distractions. Distractions include radio, television, newspapers, books, intense or anxiety-producing conversations or music.
4. Eat what your body wants.
5. Eat until you are satisfied.
6. Eat (with the intention of being) in full view of others.
7. Eat with enjoyment, gusto, and pleasure. — Geneen Roth

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

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

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. — Geneen Roth

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. — Geneen Roth

We are strong where we were broken. — Geneen Roth

Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it's about knowing who you are. It's about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you believe you can't have it. (p. 163) — Geneen Roth

If we think our job here on earth is to fix ourselves, we will keep looking for the broken places. If we believe our job is to be kind, we will keep lavishing love on ourselves. — Geneen Roth

Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake. — Geneen Roth

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. — Geneen Roth

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

You are lovable, you are loving; your choices about food will reflect that, if you give yourself a chance. — Geneen Roth

You cannot spend your life wanting to be someone else, snipping off pieces of yourself you don't like, and suddenly expect, upon reaching a goal, to be confident, self-accepting, rooted like an oak tree in your being. — Geneen Roth

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

Just because we live in an insane culture doesn't mean we have to be insane too. — Geneen Roth

It's important to focus on the good in life and appreciate it. — Geneen Roth

We always want to change the channel in our minds because we don't like what's going on. It's uncomfortable. — Geneen Roth

Being exaltingly thin was, of course, the foundation for the visibility, the man, the adornments of this life-to-be; it was the prerequisite that made the rest of the dream possible. And since no matter how thin I got, I was frightened that I could wake up tomorrow and be fat again, the rest of the dream was forever ten or twenty pounds away. — Geneen Roth

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

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

If there are any cages in this marriage, it is I who have built them. And I who hold the key to their locks. — Geneen Roth

To discover what you really believe, pay attention to the way you act
and to what you do when things don't go the way you think they should. Pay attention to what you value. Pay attention to how and on what you spend your time. Your money. And pay attention to the way you eat. — 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

Love includes vulnerability, surrender, self-valuing, steadiness, and a willingness to face - rather than run from - the worst of ourselves. — Geneen Roth

Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds--our stories of loneliness, rejection, grief--that we don't realize they are in the past. They can't hurt us anymore. — Geneen Roth

No act of love is ever wasted. — Geneen Roth

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

There have been many articles about the top regrets that people have when they're dying. They are always, "I missed the ordinary moments." We miss those ordinary moments, and yet, that's what we're trying to distract ourselves from at the same time. — Geneen Roth

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

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

Meditation develops the capacity to question your mind. Without it, you are at the mercy of every thought, every desire, every wave of emotion. — Geneen Roth

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

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

The problem isn't that we have bodies; the problem is that we're not living in them. — Geneen Roth

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

We're always looking for the Big Love, the Big High, the next Big Thing to happen. We miss what's in front of us. — 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

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) — Geneen Roth

It's the nature of hearts to break. It's in their job description. When a heart is doing what it's supposed to be doing, it holds nothing back. And sometimes it gets broken. — Geneen Roth

How you eat is how you live. — Geneen Roth

You are not your past, not your habits, not your compulsions. When you get to know who you are, anything becomes possible. — Geneen Roth

Staying requires being curious about who you actually are when you don't take yourself to be a collection of memories.When you don't infer your existence form replaying what happened to you, when you don't take yourself to be the girl your mother/father/brother/teacher/lover didn't see or adore. When you sense yourself directly, immediately, right now, without preconception, who are you? — Geneen Roth

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. — Geneen Roth

Take time to thank your body. — Geneen Roth

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

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

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. — Geneen Roth

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. (p. 174-5) — Geneen Roth

I feel like it's been important for me to use my own personal experiences with food and money to help people to not feel ashamed. I felt so much shame about my own experiences. — Geneen Roth

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. — Geneen Roth

Bingeing is such an emotionally frenetic activity that no other concerns can exist in the same space. It is a hell that people who are food-sensitive are familiar with; and, because it is known, it is therefore not so terrifying as some of the problems that are outside our control. Problems like divorce, illness, death. — Geneen Roth

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. And yes, it really is that simple. — 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

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. — Geneen Roth

We start eating, watch television, surf the Internet, or go shopping and buy something. That gives us a rush of feeling, some adrenaline and excitement. — Geneen Roth

I think we all have a hunger that's hard to name. A lot of people who come to my retreats have never named it before, or else they've named it in church, but they can't actually see the connection between what they're doing with food and this yearning. I call it "the flame" that they have: They yearn for big answers to live a big life. But they have to start with the most basic fears. — Geneen Roth

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

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. — Geneen Roth