January | 2017 | Geneen Roth
New Thoughts
Published January 23, 2017

It’s a day after the inauguration …

and even those of us who are marching in different cities in the country are wondering what now. Some are angry, some are frightened, some are despairing, some are joyous. In times like these, I hold fast to what I know is true because it’s been true always and will still be true long after today, next year, five years from now.

I know that blaming someone, anyone hurts.

I know that what Gandhi said — “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” — is true.

I know that clarity and calm, that fierce kindness and a willingness to question myself deeply opens my heart.

I know that fear makes a lousy bedfellow and that when I am afraid, I treat people around me with much less grace than they deserve. I also know that I make terrible decisions when I am afraid.

I know that until I own in myself the very same qualities I accuse
someone else of having, I am not done.

I know that I believe what Martin Luther King Jr. said: I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

And I know these are challenging times, and they test us to stay true to what we know, to translate what we know into action, and to hold fast to the light in and around us.

Published January 23, 2017

I don’t like crowds …

I don’t like crowds or marching around in the dark or being wet, but being at the Women’s March in San Francisco (which was taking place in the rain, in a crowd of 100,000 people and half in the dark, since it started at 3 and ended after the sun went down) was spectacularly life-giving.

First, it was the kindness that was spread around like butter on toast. My friends and I took the ferry to the march and the whole boat was filled with women, children and men in knitted pink pussy caps with feathers coming out of the ears. But it was the men who were willing to look so silly to make a point (we stand with the women) that kept making me laugh.

And it was the sheer size of the crowd, the physicality of so many people who felt so strongly about showing up that they too were happy to be mushed around in the crowd in the rain in the dark.

It was the five-year-old girl who held a sign that said, “I may be small but I’m fierce.” And the other sign that made me laugh: “I didn’t come out of your rib, you came out of my vagina.”

And this is just the beginning of what was exhilarating and for which I don’t yet have many words.

**Attached is a picture from our retreat manager, Judy Ross, who was one of the hundreds of thousands in Washington marching with the most important women in her life -- and their message? Kindness is the Answer.

Published January 11, 2017

I’m guessing that most of you have seen …

I’m guessing that most of you have seen the speech Meryl Streep gave on Sunday night at the Golden Globes. It was quite extraordinary, not only because it is always moving when someone speaks up for what she holds dear, but also because of what she said. And if you’ll give me some leeway here, I am going to relate it immediately to what we all know about our inner lives: when we bully ourselves, when we shame ourselves, when we make fun of ourselves, it never turns out well. The part that gets shamed feels like curling up into a heap of ashes and from that place, change becomes impossible. True change happens in an atmosphere of openness and curiosity.

We’ve all been hearing that what is outside is also inside (sometimes we hear it as: what is above is also below) and I keep coming back to that.

Over and over, in my own life. It’s so humbling to keep taking what I see outside and bringing it back to the inside. When I wake up everyday, I can hear that shaming voice knocking at the door—and it takes an effort to bring myself back to some kind of clarity. To keep reminding myself that the only result of bullying myself in any way (“You have to!” “Why didn’t you?” “How could you!” “You blew it and now it’s too late.”) is that I walk around feeling incapable and ashamed. And if it doesn’t work on the inside, it’s never going to work on the outside in the world we see around us.

Change starts here, with me, with us, resolving to pay attention to that bully voice as we talk to ourselves and to stop it in its tracks. To speak up for what we hold dear—our vulnerable selves—and not to allow anyone to ever speak to us that way.
Published January 2, 2017

It’s the new year …

It’s the new year (and may joy and contentment abound in it) and time for many to make resolutions…Ahh, those resolutions, particularly those that are about losing weight. Or maybe I should say “Oy, those resolutions…”

My experience of years of making resolutions about food, weight and my body was somewhat disastrous. (See photo I’ve attached. This is me at my fattest. Forgive the lack of clarity in it, I wouldn’t let anyone take my picture and a friend snapped this without me knowing it) The resolutions worked for a week or two, maybe even a month, and then they stopped working. They felt too hard, too unrealistic.

Here's what I've learned: If a resolution or a goal is against something, if you’re trying to whip yourself into shape because you believe that you are hopeless or not trustworthy around food, then it’s likely to fail. Being against something in yourself is being at war with yourself. It’s saying to yourself: The only way to win is to vanquish my enemy tendencies, to force myself into a particular shape and/or way of being. Being against yourself precipitates the the part of you that rebels when you try to force yourself into anything. When you tell yourself you’re hopeless or fat or bad. No one wants to hear those kinds of things. They are not helpful or supportive of true change.

But being FOR yourself is a whole different story. Being FOR your vitality, your well-being, your energy allows you to move towards something rather than away from it.

The thing I didn’t write in the Carrie Fisher-Debbie Reynolds post from a few days ago, was that Carrie Fisher said, after George Lucas asked her to lose 35 pounds for the Star Wars movie was “They didn’t hire me. They hired me minus 35 pounds.” And of the diet that Carrie Fisher followed to lose that weight, her mother said, “She worked her body off for one year to not have a body.”

In the end, it always gets down to what you want most and how that is reflected in what you eat. If what you want is to be thin at any cost now—or in the year 2017—then chances are you will do what almost all of us have done many times before. Work against yourself. Try to deprive and force yourself into “not having a body.” You will have what you’ve already had (a thinner body from dieting) that will probably last ten minutes because fighting yourself doesn’t work. It never has. It never will.

Ask yourself what you want. How you want to live. How you want to spend TODAY. Not next week or three days from now. And extend that to what you eat because what you put in your body affects how you live. That’s the biggest reason to pay attention to what you eat: because you want to be here on earth as much as you can while you are here and food is part of that.

So: What foods depress you? What foods zap your energy? What foods give you a stomachache? You can’t live fully when your energy is being zapped daily. At the end of your life, you can’t take your thinner thighs with you but you can feel the satisfaction of not having missed your life because your energy was lethargic and you couldn’t really be there for your child’s laugh. Move towards what you sense is possible: allow your one-of-a-kind fabulousness to manifest, here in the only vehicle you’ve been given: your body.