Getting Started with Geneen

Welcome

Welcome to our website — and most especially to using your relationship with food as a doorway to immense peace and unshakeable joy (and really, who doesn’t want those?). There is no right way to begin; it’s all about you, your needs, and where you find yourself at this moment. You can start by immersion in a retreat — six days of community, 24/7 support — or you can start by reading one of my books in your favorite chair next to the window that looks out on that maple tree.

Read Women Food and God and Lost and Found

After I’d been teaching retreats for ten years, I wrote Women Food and God  about the practices and experiences, the possibilities, and the profound openings that are the fabric of working with the relationship with food. It is a seminal book about what happens when you stop fighting with your relationship with food and begin using it as a vehicle for transformation beyond your wildest dreams. I wrote Lost and Found  when we lost thirty years of our life savings in a Ponzi scheme and discovered the real meanings of scarcity, never feeling as if I had or was enough, and what “true enough” really is. In going through the shock and shame and subsequent openings of that loss, I saw how inextricably linked my relationship with money was with my relationship with food. Those discoveries were dazzling to me, and have affected every single day of my personal and teaching life since then. Lost and Found  is, at its core, about the fundamental human dilemma of looking for The Next More with food, money, sweaters … and the possibility of discovering it here, now.

Come to a Retreat

Ahh, the retreats. In Women Food and God, I wrote that “we don’t want to eat hot fudge sundaes as much as we want our lives to be hot fudge sundaes.” The retreats are the hot fudge sundaes of what I do. It’s hard to describe how utterly personal and yet transcendent they are. How deep, and how your life-is-never-the-same after coming. A retreat gives you the direct experience of what you always knew was possible but never quite experienced for long enough. You might have gotten a glimpse. But six days of immersion in just the right amount of contact, silence, support and loving awareness changes your brain, your cells, your experience of being alive. You can never go back to not knowing what’s possible after you have the ongoing experience of what you’ve longed for. And because we offer so many kinds of ongoing support — monthly calls with me, small weekends in between the retreats, morning meditation calls, individual sessions — you don’t have to.

Take the Online Course

Being a luddite in the technology realm, I didn’t realize the possibilities of engaging a step-by-step course on your computer or mobile device. But after being so enlivened by these courses and watching what happened to participants, I have officially entered the 21st century. Part One of the Women Food and God Online Course offers a broad overview of the process itself, working with the Inner Critic, reteaching yourself your own loveliness and truly ending the battle with food. Part Two goes into exquisite detail on the eating-food side of things or what I call, the If Love Could Speak (to you about food) Guidelines. So many people get confused when they hear me talk about not dieting because they equate not dieting with bingeing. Part Two makes it clear that what you eat matters — and that it is possible not to be frightened or mean to yourself as ease and aliveness with food become your day-to-day reality.

The Journey Continues

Until we take our last breath, we are always in the process of arriving here in our bodies, on this earth. It seems to me that living is, in some huge way, about becoming who we always were and are. About inhabiting the promise of ourselves that we sense but can’t quite put into words. So much of our work here is realizing that we don’t need to be entranced by beliefs and ways of being and eating that no longer serve us. Returning to our true hearts is the journey of a lifetime — and it is my great privilege and honor when you join me.