Quotes from 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.

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

anytime you truly listen to your hunger and fullness, you lose weight.

No act of love is ever wasted.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

I'd spent years saving for a future that was never coming to protect myself from a past that had already happened.

The process is the goal.

Your body is the piece of the universe you've 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 won't discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself.

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.

All any feeling wants is 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.

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.

I do believe that there are frozen places in ourselves - undigested pockets of pain - that need to be recognized and welcomed, so that we can contact that which has never been hurt or wounded or hungry.

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.

It's not about food. It's never about food. And it's not even about feelings. It's about what's below them. What's in between them. What's beyond them.

Every good enough mother teaches her child that no matter how bad it seems- no matter how many rejections or scraped knees or broken bones there are- it is going to be okay. Maybe not the way we wanted or hoped it would be, but still okay. A good parent returns a child to the place where she can trust that although she might be bitter or hateful for a moment, it's not the end of the world. There is love here. There is light and quiet here. There is peace.

There isn't a someday. There never was. No one has ever been to the future that you keep putting your life on hold for. All we ever have is now.

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

The most painful thing about the woman whose mother did not want her was not her mothers lack of love, but that in seeing herself the way her mother saw her, she cut herself off from her own love. We believe that because being wanted and being seen and being loved once depended on someone else, they still do.