Best 119 quotes of Geneen Roth on MyQuotes

Geneen Roth

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    Geneen Roth

    After initial needs are met—enough food, shelter, comfort—there is no correlation between money and happiness. That's a difficult thing for people to believe.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Geneen Roth

    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Geneen Roth

    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.

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    Geneen Roth

    Awareness is learning to keep yourself company

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    Geneen Roth

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

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    Geneen Roth

    Be fully present for five minutes every day.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Geneen Roth

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

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    Geneen Roth

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

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    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.

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    Geneen Roth

    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.

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    Geneen Roth

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    Geneen Roth

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

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    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.

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    Geneen Roth

    Hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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?

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    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.

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    Geneen Roth

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

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    Geneen Roth

    If you treat your feelings with as much love as you treat your dog or your cat or your child you'll feel as if you were living in heaven.

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    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.

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    Geneen Roth

    I live between fearing doom and wishing for it.

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    Geneen Roth

    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.

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    Geneen Roth

    Imagine treating yourself with the kindness that you show people you love.

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    Geneen Roth

    I tell my retreat students that they need to remember two things: to eat what they want when they're hungry and to feel what they feel when they're not.

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    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.

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    Geneen Roth

    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.

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    Geneen Roth

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

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    Geneen Roth

    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.

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    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.

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    Geneen Roth

    It's not life in the present moment that is intolerable; the pain we are avoiding has already happened. We are living in reverse.

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    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.

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    Geneen Roth

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

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    Geneen Roth

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

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    Geneen Roth

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

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    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.

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    Geneen Roth

    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.

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    Geneen Roth

    Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake.

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

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    Geneen Roth

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