August | 2017 | Geneen Roth

Published August 29, 2017

I’m thinking about the people in Texas ….

who are fleeing for their lives. Who, just two days ago, were bumping along living as usual and suddenly, everything changes. On Brene Brown’s Facebook page, she took a photograph of her front yard, which is flooded with water. I’m donating to the Red Cross today.

(Join me. Here’s the link: https://www.redcross.org/donate/hurricane-harvey)

I’m also thinking about the terrifying spate of news we keep receiving day after day, about nuclear weapons and the destruction of public lands; it’s horrifying that there are baby-
men in charge of governments.

And I’m thinking how important it is to be in daily, if not hourly, touch with what is life-giving, with what matters, with what we can actually control—which is the energy we transmit to every living being we touch. Because they go on to touch others, not just physically touch, but in a glance, a word, a gesture. Light is contagious. So is fear.

We just finished a retreat intensive weekend, and here’s what gives me hope. Here is why I am rock-solid grounded in what’s good and what’s holy. In talking about the people who came to the weekend, I am talking about all of us.

We come from all over the country and from Canada and from Mexico because they know that a certain kind of freedom from mental anguish (which then translates into action, which then
affects our spouses, children, colleagues) is possible but that it takes the willingness to look deeply. It takes the willingness to stop letting what’s most familiar run our lives. The rants of what’s wrong and how we can’t believe that after all these years, we are still fat or selfish or struggling for success.

We are so used to being at war with ourselves. We are so used to battling with what we consider wrong or bad or flawed or damaged that it never occurs to us that we are in a constant state of war—one side of ourselves pitted against another side of ourselves. This war-like stance, this sense that if only we could vanquish our enemy, whether it’s the size of our thighs or the ways we procrastinate or our tendencies to be selfish or unkind—encourages more war.

If you want to know how we got into this mess we’re in out there, look inside your own mind. Look at how unkind you are to parts of yourself that are struggling. Look at how mean you are to your sweet body, which has been so loyal to you over the years. Look at what happens when something doesn’t go your way. Look at how attached you are to your opinions and beliefs and your willingness to fight to the death for something that won’t matter in two weeks. (I’m saying “you” here but believe me, every single thing I write, I see in myself. And it’s not a pretty picture).

Over the weekend, one woman talked about how much she wanted to stay thin and was unwilling to listen to her body, which kept wanting more food. She couldn’t starve herself anymore, but she felt as if eating more and gaining weight were the equivalent of agreeing to die. And I understood that. Any time we challenge old beliefs—if for instance, the way we felt we could be loved was by being thin—it feels like dying. It feels like something in us, something tenacious and life-clinging, will die if we look deeply.

But it’s only a belief, and it’s in our minds, and it has nothing to do, not at this point, with anything in the present moment. As we worked together, she saw the truth of this, but it was still hard. Old beliefs have been around for so long, and are so entrenched by now in our brains (and by our cultures) that we just don’t want to let them go. We’d rather stay at war with
ourselves than take the risk of dying into the unknown.

And we can’t force it. Forcing ourselves to face down part of ourselves and talk ourselves out of what’s there, what’s true, is creating more war. This is a gentle process and sometimes, it’s
uncomfortable—but it’s not forceful or shaming.

In person after person this weekend, I saw the longing to end the war within, and as we worked, one by one, and people put down the weapons of self-hatred and blame and judgment, I felt inspired by the courage I saw. When you end the war inside you, it becomes impossible to war with people around you. You grow up. You stop believing in war. You stop being a bully to yourself, to your children, to your partners. You radiate benevolence and non-violence. You become living peace. And one by one, the world changes because you do.

Published August 26, 2017

When Tami Simon asked me to contribute …

to The Dharma of Dogs book, the answer was an immediate yes. I mean, really. (Of course, if she had wanted to publish a book called The Magic of Blanche, after my fabulous boy-cat-named-Blanche whose portrait hangs over my fireplace, I would also have agreed immediately. But since I’d already written a book about him—The Craggy Hole in My Heart and The Cat Who Fixed It—I wanted to give Izzy a little time on the page as well).

So, in addition to tales of Izzy (or is it tails?), The Dharma of Dogs is a warm, loving book (replete with fabulous photographs) of stories about dogs as “our best friends and spiritual teachers” with essays by Eckhart Tolle, Adyashanti, Pam Houston, Mark Nepo and many others including moi. The love expressed in it breaks your heart and opens it at the same time, just like those four-legged beings do. And so: what about you? How are you touched by fur on four legs?

Published August 23, 2017

Yes, it was thrilling to see day turn to night. …

And yes, the spectacle of the moon covering the sun was, as natural phenomena go, pretty magical. And all those people celebrating and being happy to be outside and watch the sun, moon and stars instead of being inside glued to the next round of distressing news.

But…

The contrast of day turning to night and the vision of the sun being covered over by the moon, little by little until there is only the corona of light left is nothing compared to the sun of our own selves. For every moment of every day of our lives, that sun, that light has been in the back ground; it’s what makes seeing anything—a rose, a cat, a lamp, a face—possible. Without that background, you couldn’t perceive anything at all. Pretty darn magical. Now if only we could remember that sun, always there, instead of getting pulled into the dark thoughts on any old day.

Published August 19, 2017

I’m guessing many of you know that Sam Shepard, …

the playwright and actor, died recently—and perhaps you know that Patti Smith, the singer and writer was his good friend. (She tells the story in her book, Just Kids). Anyway, Patti wrote a sort of prose-song to Sam after his death, and when I read it, it got me thinking about friendship.

About her friendship with Sam she said, “We didn’t have to talk then [when Sam was diagnosed with ALS}, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation. We knew each other for such a long time. Our ways could not be defined or dismissed with a few words describing a careless youth. We were friends; good or bad, we were just ourselves. The passing of time did nothing but strengthen that.”

I started thinking about the friends I have and what they mean to me. How the connection is life-giving. It is as if we are constantly singing the songs of ourselves to each other in so many ways. When one of us forgets, the other sings a chorus and reminds us. Such a beautiful way of being together.

Published August 10, 2017

I’m finishing the last few chapters ….

of my new book (about which I will write more soon).

In the meantime, we are on the title search. I don’t excel at this part of the book process: to wit, Feeding the Hungry Heart was called Is There Life After Chocolate? until a month before its publication—and it only got changed (and thank goodness it did!) because my beloved editor, Peg Parkinson, called and said that the Chocolate title diminished the subject matter of the book. She suggested Feeding the Hungry Heart because I’d written those words in the introduction.

Onto the next books: When Food is Love got its title because a brilliant person at an Omega workshop suggested it.

The Craggy Hole in My Heart (about my cat and my father) was a title that my publisher suggested; I didn’t love it—I didn’t even like it very much--but no one, including me, could come up with anything better. I wanted to call it Bernard (my father’s name) and Mister Blanche (my cat’s name), but my publisher told me that my idea sounded like Running into a Brick Wall. (Despite its current title, that book remains my sweetheart book; it’s the shortest book I’ve written and it’s about love, so even thinking about it makes me happy).

Women Food and God was the only title I came up with myself, and many people didn’t like it. When my agent and I went around to different publishers with the proposal for that book, we kept hearing that we needed to change the title. One publisher in particular told me that Oprah would never have a book on her show with that title. She wrote me a long, fervent letter telling me why. I’ve kept that letter as a symbol of how positive someone can be about being right when they are dead wrong. I love that.

Back here at the title conundrum, I’ve had about five different titles for this book, which I have been working on for many years. Cookies and Consciousness was a contender for awhile but I never loved that. Mostly Magnificent was another possibility. There have been so many different titles for it over the years that I can’t even remember what they were. One part of the book is about using the doorway of our food/obsession as a doorway into the sweet freedom that waits through and beyond it. The other parts, most of the book, are about what it’s like to be in a human body dealing with everyday things like comparative judgment, illness, envy, worthlessness, insomnia, self-hatred—and about using those as doorways as well. (I really will tell you more about it, once I have a title…)

So I’m open to ideas, of course, but most of all, I wanted to tell you that, like anything, the process of putting a book together has so many moving, unseen parts. It comes together word by word, layer by layer and somehow ends up as a thing we call a book. Magic!

Published August 5, 2017

The most radical thing I ever did …

was not to live in India, write a book when people told me I couldn’t, or tell Robert Oxford that he was wrong when he called me fat. It wasn’t even that I stopped dieting when I was sixty pounds over my natural weight. The most radical thing I ever did was believe that I could be my own authority about my body. Yes, food was how my extreme lack of trust and self-loathing expressed itself but it was never about food. It was never about eat this or don’t eat that. It was about a radical willingness to say, “Yep, I hear you. I hear that you think I’m a bit mad, and my weight seems to back that up. But there is something in me that isn’t mad and I’m willing to take a chance here and see if I can listen to that.” It was terrifying.

When I stopped dieting, it was not because I didn’t like Weight Watchers (which I had been on) or that being a vegetarian or a vegan or a macrobiotic person was unilaterally wrong, it was that I was tired of being told that others knew best, even if that other was Jean Nidetch or Robert Atkins. I had grown up believing that I was damaged at the core, and it made sense to me that whatever I wanted had to be damaged as well—and that I couldn’t trust it. I couldn’t trust my own guidance. It was as if I felt I had a monster inside me that once on the loose, would destroy everything in sight and so I needed to keep her caged.

After I wrote my first book, Feeding the Hungry Heart (in 1982), I was certain I was going to become a poet or a novelist. I felt as if I had said everything there was to say about food in that book and it was time to move on. But then I realized what an incredible doorway food provided into every aspect of my beliefs and feelings and who I took to be myself, so I kept using it because it was (still is) a metaphor for everything. Or, as Zen teacher Cheri Humber says, how you do anything is how you do everything. Also, by that time, I’d started small groups in my living room and I’d fallen in love with the work itself and the women who showed up week after week.

Thirty-five years later, I’m still fascinated with what enthralled me at the beginning: moving from giving ourselves up over and over to diets, programs and people we think know best to turning towards ourselves…because what I’ve found over the last few decades is that avoiding what we know is a deep and unconscious pattern. It’s what we consider normal. It’s not just about food. It’s not just about work or love or money. That basic mistrust of our own wisdom is a part of the air we breathe. We have gotten so used to the search for answers out there that we forget to turn around and look in here. It’s the easiest hardest thing there is to do.