January | 2018 | Geneen Roth
New Thoughts
Published January 30, 2018

For the past few days, …

I’ve been recording the audio version of This Messy Magnificent Life. (I still like it. That’s a relief).

For those of you who wonder what recording a book looks like, here’s what happens: John and Jesse, the engineers and director start setting up half an hour before the recording. Then I sit down before a music stand with the pages of the book on it, and start reading. If there is the sound of a wind chime or a bird or, as it was the other day, of rain falling, we start again. Because we are doing it in my home instead of a studio, there is always the chance that Izzy will start barking. The other day, as she was curled up on her bed in the sun room (which is where we are recording), she yawned rather loudly and we had to start that sentence again. There's a photo here, too, of Koko the gorilla testing out the equipment.

It’s a lovely thing to do — recording the book. I get to read it all over again and notice the words that I chose, some of which I wish I hadn’t. But that is part of it, as well. It’s always part of it. Taking it all in and proceeding with what’s good and could use, um, a bit of a change that it is too late to change. Anyway, I’m loving the process and it’s quite lengthy. It took three hours to go through 74 pages. Somehow, in the middle of it, I suddenly developed a lisp so we had to record and record and record until my mouth and tongue decided that lisping might not have been the best thing to do then. As always, I am so looking forward to you reading the book.

Here are a few lines from TMML: For the longest time I clung to the conviction that scary thoughts are created by scary situations … I couldn’t tell the difference between my stories of a situation and the situation itself.

Published January 18, 2018

Matt had a conference in Hawaii last week, …

and I went along as the wife. (I love doing that. Fading into the background. Hardly opening my mouth except to say hello and support him). Well anyway, we landed in Oahu on the day of the nuclear alert. Our plane touched down a few hours after everyone found out it had been a mistake, but not before many people — sales people, waiters, gas station attendants, cashiers, mothers, fathers, kids — thought they would only be alive for a half hour after they got the first alert. As we walked off the plane, my phone was lighting up with texts from friends who had been here and were brought to their knees by the thought that everything changed in a second: Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.

Being, um, somewhat death obsessed, I started asking everyone we met — the person at the pharmacy at Target, the waiter at dinner, the front-desk person at our hotel — how they were, where they were, what they felt.

Their answers were of course stunning (and I am writing a longer story about this and will let you know when I’m finished with it and where to read it), but in the meantime, and as always, when something like this happens, it’s always a chance to take a long breath, and ask what we would do if we had half an hour to live … what would be unfinished, what we wished we would have said, if we have any regrets and in what area.

None of the people to whom I spoke woke up that morning thinking they were going to be hit by a nuclear missile. And while there is much to say about the political climate and how this exacerbates the already simmering fear, that is not what this post is about. It’s about our interior lives. It’s about how we live day to day, where our priorities are. And you. What about you, all of you lovelies?

Published January 17, 2018

So much happening these days. …

Floods and mudslides and bomb cyclones and false nuclear alerts. What a time to be alive. What a time to be in relationship to the fear and anxiety of living in and through these times.

I wanted to share the first few paragraphs from the introduction to my new book, THIS MESSY MAGNIFICENT LIFE (and wow, isn’t it true? That it’s both messy and magnificent), which will be out March 6. It’s a glimpse into what’s been on my mind since “Women Food and God” was published seven years ago.

“THIS MESSY MAGNIFICENT LIFE chronicles the shift from feeling as if we are secretly defective, helplessly and too often walking on the barbed wire of our thoughts, to waking up as the ever-present, always-sublime freedom from our incessantly restless minds, right in the middle of ordinary life.

Freedom from mental suffering is not a mystery, but a willingness to examine what keeps us from directly experiencing the peace and joy that are always accessible and forever unaffected by the passing show. If the drama and chaos in the outside world are expressions of the minds that create them, then naming and questioning the way we live in these minds, and on this earth, is the only way that true change can happen.”

 

Published January 12, 2018

I’ve heard …

(thank you, those of you who have let me know) that someone who calls herself an emotional eating expert is posting aggressively unkind Facebook ads about my work and that they are popping up on your pages.

I’m sorry to hear this and would like to take a moment to respond, not to her particularly, but to the notion that tearing someone else down will build us up. That being mean and aggressive is a winning strategy.

We’ve all tried that one. We’ve all blamed and fought and, from a lost or lonely or desperate place inside, cut other people to shreds. Or at least, I have. And when I wasn’t doing it explicitly, I was thinking about doing it. Blame was one of my favorite strategies and make no mistake: tearing someone else down is a way to blame. It’s a way not to take responsibility for our own feelings, our own decisions, our own actions.

It’s challenging not to go to war, either with ourselves or with someone else. It’s challenging to notice when the voice in our heads takes over and says, “War is the only option. Being unkind is the way to go. It’s my turn and I deserve to win, no matter the cost."

Everything—and this situation is no exception—is a chance to question where we stand.

Do I feel personally attacked? No.

Do I feel the need to write to her and call her out? No. (See below about taking action.)

Do I notice that the tactic she is using is familiar to me and that I’ve done it many times myself? Absolutely.

Can I find the place inside me that wants to go to war with myself? Fight with the parts of myself I think would be better vanquished? (That’s the war part. "Let’s destroy what we don’t agree with and what will be left will be only the good parts." How many times have I done that, starting with "let me lose weight and what will be left will be a happy, relaxed, thin person").
At least a million times…

Which doesn’t mean I don’t take action or speak up for myself. I do. Often. Although in this case, many people have already contacted Facebook about the aggressiveness. Also, the ad has not popped up on my page and I would need to be served the ad in order to report it.
The bottom line is that in any situation, I look and see what action I can take and if it feels in integrity, I take it.

And all along, I keep questioning what in me gets triggered and reactive, turning towards those feelings with as much kindness as I can muster. And I keep strengthening my resolve to untangle what’s left of the web of self-loathing and blame because the less and less I do it to and in myself, the less I do it with anyone around me.

It's working. Sanity and clarity are constant companions these days.
Published January 5, 2018

My favorite bowl broke the other day.

A friend was visiting, she crashed into something which crashed into the bowl and then it broke. After wanting to (but deciding that was not a good idea) to blame her for being such a klutz — blame is always my first line of defense and a perfect although ultimately unhelpful way to defuse any feelings of sadness or anger — I just sort of looked at the poor bowl. The bird was left intact but everything else was shattered. Three minutes before the crash, it was whole, intact, the bowl I knew and loved. And then suddenly, it was broken. Yeah, I could glue it back together. And yeah, I could use gold-tinted glue and have one of those items that are more valuable broken than whole because now it is veined in gold. But I decided not to do that, as I seem to be on a theme these days of letting myself feel, be, have what’s imperfect including uh, my own self. This imperfect broken-and-whole life.

Another friend (not the klutz) was diagnosed with adrenal cancer last week. It seemed that she was fine one day and then the next, dying of cancer. I know that’s not how it really is or was, but it seemed that way. And one of the things I thought when I heard was “when it’s over, it’s over. Although she may have more years, may do successful treatment, that part of her life that was gliding through with health and a sense of invulnerability is over.” And it happens so suddenly. You are bumping along in your life and then the life you thought you were having changes. Gets broken. Some parts of it are left intact but other parts are shattered. For my friend with cancer, the things that concerned her before the diagnosis — the conflicts with her daughter, her son-in-law, her other daughter — fell quickly away and what was left was treatments, which doctor to see, when to start, which tests to get. Her life. Facing death.

Years ago — and forgive me if you‘ve heard this — I went to a workshop with Stephen Levine during which he held up a teacup and said, “It’s already broken.” I remember thinking, “Wow. Can’t we have a good time here? Do we always have to think about death and brokenness? How about celebrating that it’s such a pretty purple teacup and it’s not broken yet…” But Stephen was, after all, a Buddhist teacher, and impermanence/death won the day. And given that the teacup-spiel was more than twenty years ago and I’m still talking about it, I’d say the message was memorable.

Both are true: knowing that the ultimate state of anything — a bird-bowl, a person, a relationship, a house — is broken (my friend who lost his house in the fires this summer was convinced, in the moment before the fire broke out, that his house was solid, a seemingly ever-lasting structure and then, whoosh, it was gone) and appreciating the beauty of its wholeness now.

Matt and I were talking about this at breakfast this morning, as at 2:39 am, an earthquake woke us both. Fast asleep and then bang. Shaking. Rumbling, eyes open and wow, an earthquake. Time to run under the triangle of safety? (Where exactly is that again? Or was that theory debunked and is the triangle dangerous?) And then it was over but not before the reminder that you think it’s solid — the bowl, the body, the earth — and in a second, it starts to shake. Over scrambled eggs, Matt said to me, “it’s all so temporary.”

The reason this is important is not so that when a possible (albeit incredibly nice) klutz approaches your favorite bowl, you move it out of the way (although that’s not a bad idea). Or worry that every time you have an ache or a pain you are dying of cancer (although given my teeny propensity toward hypochondria, I would understand if that is where your mind goes). It’s allowing the knowledge of “ultimate brokenness” into your awareness so that when the bird-bowl does break, you’ve already adored it in its wholeness (and then, if you want, glue it together with gold glue).

It’s that with each step, each breath (or as many as you are willing to be aware of), you appreciate the indestructible spirit of life itself and the inherent fragility of every form. It’s holding them both: the life force that can never be broken — when one form dies, the life force pops up somewhere else, even between cracks in the cement — and physical forms that can. There’s appreciating what can never be broken and not being afraid to love what can, does and will break. Because there’s always the matter of the human heart, which cannot help but break and love flagrantly and extravagantly in spite of, and because of it. Lucky us.