Top 95 Geneen Roth Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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.
Geneen Roth
#3. Separate the desire to be thin from the desire to be cherished.
Geneen Roth
#4. 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
#5. You are not your past, not your habits, not your compulsions. When you get to know who you are, anything becomes possible.
Geneen Roth
#6. 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.
Geneen Roth
#7. Imagine treating yourself with the kindness that you show people you love.
Geneen Roth
#8. The purpose of a spiritual path or religion is to provide a precise and believable way into what seems unbelievable.
Geneen Roth
#9. 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
#10. Awareness, not deprivation, informs what you eat. Presence, not shame, changes how you see yourself and what you rely on.
Geneen Roth
#11. anytime you truly listen to your hunger and fullness, you lose weight.
Geneen Roth
#13. Your relationship to food, no matter how conflicted, is the doorway to freedom.
Geneen Roth
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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.
Geneen Roth
#17. If you want to eat when you're not hungry, you're hungry for something else.
Geneen Roth
#18. Just because we form an opinion about ourselves, or anyone else, doesn't mean it is true.
Geneen Roth
#19. Your body is the piece of the Universe youve been given.
Geneen Roth
#20. 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
#21. Be fully present for five minutes every day.
Geneen Roth
#22. Just because we live in an insane culture doesn't mean we have to be insane too.
Geneen Roth
#23. 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
#24. Healing is about being awake. Being broken and whole at the same time.
Geneen Roth
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. The problem with fantasy is the greatest benefit of fantasy: it prevents us from living in the present moment.
Geneen Roth
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Being hungry is like being in love: if you don't know, you're probably not,
Geneen Roth
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. We are using the food as a doorway to understanding the rest of our lives.
Geneen Roth
#36. Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake.
Geneen Roth
#37. 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
#38. 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.
Geneen Roth
#39. 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
#40. 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
#42. 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
#43. We eat the way we eat because we are afraid to feel what we feel.
Geneen Roth
#44. We keep wanting more because we don't let ourselves have what we already have
Geneen Roth
#45. 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
#46. Love includes vulnerability, surrender, self-valuing, steadiness, and a willingness to face - rather than run from - the worst of ourselves.
Geneen Roth
#47. Come back to yourself. Return to the voice of your body. Trust that much.
Geneen Roth
#48. 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
#51. I live between fearing doom and wishing for it.
Geneen Roth
#52. Real change happens bit by bit. It takes great effort to become effortless at anything. There are no quick fixes.
Geneen Roth
#53. 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
#54. Change, if it is to be long lasting, must occur on the unseen levels first
Geneen Roth
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. For every diet there's an equal and opposite binge (bulimia which is binging and purging is another way of depriving yourself).
Geneen Roth
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Once you discover freedom, you want to capture it, never let it go.
Geneen Roth
#63. 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
#64. If you think your job is to fix what is broken, you keep finding more broken places to mend.
Geneen Roth
#65. We always want to change the channel in our minds because we don't like what's going on. It's uncomfortable.
Geneen Roth
#66. Chocolate, I am sure, is the concrete manifestation of love.
Geneen Roth
#67. 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
#68. 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?
Geneen Roth
#69. You can be aware of your past without being it.
Geneen Roth
#70. Most of us spend our lives protecting ourselves from losses that have already happened.
Geneen Roth
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. What you pay attention to grows. Pay attention to your loveliness, your magnificent self. Begin now.
Geneen Roth
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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.
Geneen Roth
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. It's not life in the present moment that is intolerable; the pain we are avoiding has already happened. We are living in reverse.
Geneen Roth
#82. If LOVE could talk to you about your relationship with food, what would it say?
Geneen Roth
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. You are lovable, you are loving; your choices about food will reflect that, if you give yourself a chance.
Geneen Roth
#87. The problem isn't that we have bodies; the problem is that we're not living in them.
Geneen Roth
#88. It's important to focus on the good in life and appreciate it.
Geneen Roth
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. Its not so much that we believe what we see, but that we see what we believe
Geneen Roth
#92. 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.
Geneen Roth
#94. 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
#95. Awareness is learning to keep yourself company
Geneen Roth
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