by Geneen Roth
Outside is in, upside is down, the vastness in the sky and the space between my ribs, in my chest, and inside every cell is hollow and full, nothing and everything.
In the middle of the night, with the very first step, I feel as if I am snorkeling in the night sky, gliding around the stars, letting the consummate darkness penetrate my fevered mind. I can’t believe that this “underneath” has been waiting for me all along, and if not exactly terrified of it, I’ve been highly suspicious of its secrets and vast mystery.
An owl hoots; the sound ricochets against the trees, between my thoughts. A mockingbird sings and the notes feel as if they are rising from my sternum. The wind chimes—the ones that, according to the salesperson from whom we bought them, have been tuned to “Amazing Grace”—rustle against each other like tiny monastery bells. As my eyes adjust to the dark I start walking, which feels like swimming.
Outside is in, upside is down, the vastness in the sky and the space between my ribs, in my chest, and inside every cell is hollow and full, nothing and everything. I open my arms as wide as I can, as if I can scoop the stars like liquid manna into my throat, chest, legs. Once, twice, three times, the arms open, scoop, take in the stars and the darkness that makes them visible while the trees, noble and immense, bear witness to this exchange of liquid light. Drenched in stillness now, my body moves back to the house, swims down the hallway, moves into bed, and dissolves like the space inside an anemone when it closes. Like the deathless beauty of no me, no you, no world.
You do not have to prostrate yourself at the feet of shame for one more minute or keep begging forgiveness for being yourself.
EPILOGUE
* * *
Stop Waiting to Be Ready
Stop trying to be the self you imagine you would be if you were smarter, prettier, thinner, kinder, more accomplished than you are. You’ve already done that. If it didn’t work the first thousand times, it’s not going to work now. Or ever.
So you’re still selfish.
So you’re still struggling with food and your weight.
So you’re still crazy in the middle of the night . . . and sometimes in broad daylight. So is ninety-nine percent of the population.
I’m not saying to act on these feelings. I’m not advocating indulgence or collapse or despair. I’m saying it’s time to stand in your own two shoes. It’s time to be your own authority. You’ve given yourself away to programs, methods, big daddies for too long. Come back. As Glinda said to Dorothy: you’ve always had the power.
If you’re feeling selfish, don’t push it away. Don’t pretend you’re nicer than you feel. Turn toward the selfishness, not away from it. Let yourself feel like the most selfish person in the universe—without acting on it. Notice how it changes when you let it be there, feel it, accept it. And begin to pay attention to the noticer instead of what is noticed.
If you’re eating past fullness, stop. And if you don’t stop, fine—but ask yourself what’s going on. Notice what you feel, what arises inside you.
Accept responsibility for your actions. You’re not a child. You don’t need to be regulated by an external authority, most particularly a diet.
If you don’t love your work, if you feel like a failure, if you’re struggling to pay your bills, if you feel unlovable or worthless or crazy in the middle of the night, take a breath. Then take another. If you have cancer, if you are dying, pay attention. Listen. Look. Breathe.
You’ve got a body and that body responds to what you put into it. Listen to it. If sugar makes you feel depressed, stop eating it, even if it’s on your eating plan. And rather than focus on how deprived you feel, ask yourself who it is that feels deprived. She’s probably five or eight or twelve. Are you?
Climb out of your mind and back into your body, even if it feels uncomfortable. Turn toward the feeling not away from it. Treat yourself the way you would treat a small child who is lost—because that part of you is.
Take yourself in. Ask the questions no one ever asked you. Keep going until you know the answer and you know who’s asking. Until you realize—it’s not far away—that the essence of you, like the sky, was always here. You just happened to get distracted by the local weather for a few decades.
Do whatever you have to do (you already know what it is)—move your body or unwind the trauma that’s in your nervous system. Leave—or begin—that relationship. Make doing what you have to do a priority for your life, because if you don’t, you leave yourself behind. And at your last breath, which will come sooner than you think, you will have missed showing up for this messy magnificent life.
You do not have to prostrate yourself at the feet of shame for one more minute or keep begging forgiveness for being yourself.
We need you.
We need you to stop waiting to be ready. To stop waiting to act until you become the self you imagine you would be if only you were different than you are.
We need your radical truth-telling, your willingness to speak from your Montana-wide heart, but most of all, we need the unrepeatable essence of you.
Come back. Now.
Use your eyes and see something—anything at all—as if you have just landed on planet earth.
LAST WORDS
* * *
Touchstones for Breaking the Trance
When I finished writing This Messy Magnificent Life, I realized I’d been using (and teaching) a set of seven nonlinear, nonsequential touchstones that I discovered and refined during six years of writing the book. Instead of adding them to your to-do list, sigh, use them to break the trance of everyday discontent, anxiety, and lack.
If you turn any touchstone into a rule, it quickly becomes an instrument of shame and punishment. After that—well you know what comes after that: rebellion, shame, and a series of what-the-hell’s: I knew I couldn’t do this. I’m worthless. I might as well eat potato chips and drink tequila. Be fierce about not going there.
Stand in your own two shoes.
Come out of your mind and into your body. Feel your feet on the floor, your hands at your side, your breath in your belly. Use your ears and listen to sounds. Use your eyes and see something—anything at all—as if you have just landed on planet earth. And breathe. If you’re still powering through by gritting your teeth and holding in your stomach, take a breath. A long one. Repeat often.
Disengage from the crazy aunt in the attic (aka the bully, the judge, the inner parent).
Everyone’s got one and s/he is not your friend. She wants to keep you small by protecting you from being disloyal to what once brought you love. Until you understand that she is wrong and that she is not you, true change is not possible.
Be kind to the ghost children.
Ghost children are parts of yourself based on memories, earlier impressions, and associations. They are frozen in time and see all of the present through memories of past painful experiences. Shower them with curiosity and tenderness. Watch them melt.
Stop believing your thoughts.
You are not your beliefs, opinions, emotions, or thoughts. Know the difference between what happens and your thoughts and interpretations of what happens. Between an actual experience and your reaction to it. Most of our thoughts, beliefs, and opinions are rigid, reactive, and wildly out of touch with our present situation. They can also lead to unnecessary anxiety, stress, and perceiving others as enemies that need to be vanquished.
Drop the war.
End the Me Project. Stop trying to get rid of, improve, resist, or otherwise fix yourself. With kindness, turn toward—not away from—what you believe you have to get rid of. In that turn, you will discover that demons become angels and the scary snakes of your life become harmless strands of rope.
Ask yourself “What’s not wrong?”
Do this five times a day for ten seconds at a time. You will be stunned at what happens when you see that it’s almost always your mind, not the situation, that makes you miserable.
Pay attention to what remains.
; When you are not possessed by your thoughts and stop taking yourself to be what happens to you, the background becomes foreground, what was up is down, and the noticer rather than the noticed is revealed. It’s better than chocolate. Better than sex. Better than the perfect pair of boots. It’s what you wanted from getting those things, multiplied by a quadrillion.
In Grateful Acknowledgment
I can’t imagine this book (or my life) without the people whom it is my kiss-the-ground good fortune to know:
Peter Guzzardi for editorial class and grace beyond measure; Celeste Fine for being and giving what I didn’t realize I needed; Anne Lamott for friendship, words, and unremitting generosity; Scott Edelstein for brilliance in the eleventh hour; Stewart Emery for being craft’s (and my) fervent champion; Sarah Passick for chutzpah; Barbara Graham for consistent and oh so wise counsel; Susan Moldow, Nan Graham, and Roz Lippel for seeing the vision and insisting on it; Catherine Ingram for meeting me in the time-space warp; Barbara Renshaw for twelve life-changing years; Jeanne Rosenblum for pink love enduring; Kim Rosen for lushness and language and insight; Jace Schinderman for a lifetime of staying the course; Lauren Matthews for rapture and magnificence; Joan Emery, Alice Josephs, and Stephen Josephs for caring so deeply so many times; Kirtana for morning song; Allison Post for sweetheart healing; Sallyanne McCartin for perspective, kindness, and wicked humor; Katie Monaghan and the Scribner team for their unflagging support; Sufi for enduring guidance; John Mini for Taoist magic; Luanne Lansing for lavishing support; Robert Werner for body fluency; Claire Zammit, Katie Hendricks, and Arielle Ford for cheerleading of the spirit; my retreat students for their bright flames; Judy Ross for being so good at so much; Jane Armytage, Menno de Lange, and Doriena Wolff for being the team of dreams; Richard Wiggs for a lifetime of steadfast kindness; Ruth Wiggs for sass, style, and clear seeing; Howard Roth, for his ever-generous Snoball heart and humor in spite of it all. And Matt Weinstein for being the light inside the dark. Of everything.
Turn the page for an excerpt from Geneen Roth’s powerful book
WOMEN FOOD AND GOD: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything
“A hugely important work, a life-changer, one that will free untold women from the tyranny of fear and hopelessness around their bodies.”—Anne Lamott, author of Hallelujah Anyway
AVAILABLE NOW FROM SCRIBNER
PROLOGUE
The World on Our Plates
Eighty hungry women are sitting in a circle with bowls of cold tomato vegetable soup; they are glowering at me, furious. It is lunchtime on the third day of the retreat. During these daily eating meditations each woman approaches the buffet table, lines up to be served, takes her seat in the circle, and waits until we all sit down to eat. The process is agonizingly slow—fifteen minutes or so—especially if food is your drug of choice.
Although the retreat is going well and many people here have had life-changing insights, at this moment no one cares. They don’t care about stunning breakthroughs or having ninety pounds to lose or whether God exists. They want to be left alone with their food, period. They want me to take my fancy ideas about the link between spirituality and compulsive eating and go away. It is one thing to be conscious about food in the meditation hall, and another to be sitting in the dining room, refraining from taking even one bite until the entire group has been served. Also, I’ve asked that silence be observed, so there are no frissons of laughter or chatty how-are-yous to distract attention from hunger or lack of it, since not everyone is hungry.
The retreat is based on a philosophy I’ve developed over the past thirty years: that our relationship to food is an exact microcosm of our relationship to life itself. I believe we are walking, talking expressions of our deepest convictions; everything we believe about love, fear, transformation and God is revealed in how, when and what we eat. When we inhale Reese’s peanut butter cups when we are not hungry, we are acting out an entire world of hope or hopelessness, of faith or doubt, of love or fear. If we are interested in finding out what we actually believe—not what we think, not what we say, but what our souls are convinced is the bottom-line truth about life and afterlife—we need go no further than the food on our plates. God is not just in the details; God is also in the muffins, the fried sweet potatoes and the tomato vegetable soup. God—however we define him or her—is on our plates.
Which is why eighty women and I are sitting in a circle with cold vegetable soup. I look around the room. Photographs of flowers—intricate close-ups of a red dahlia, the golden edges of a white rose—are hung on the wall. A bouquet of peach gladiolas is splayed so extravagantly on a side table that it looks as if it is prancing at the prom in its finery. Then I begin noticing the faces of my students. Marjorie, a psychologist in her fifties, is playing with her spoon and doesn’t meet my eyes. A twenty-year-old gymnast named Patricia is wearing black tights and a lemon-colored tank top. Her tiny body sits like an origami bird on her cushion—delicate, perfectly erect. On her plate is a handful of sprouts and a fistful of salad, that’s all. I look to my right and see Anna, a surgeon from Mexico City, biting one of her lips and tapping her fork on the plate impatiently. There are three pieces of bread with thick slabs of butter on her plate, a bit of salad, no soup, no vegetables. Her food says, “Fuck you, Geneen, I don’t have to play this ridiculous game. Watch me binge the second I get the chance.” I nod at her as if to say, “Yup, I understand how hard it is to slow down.” I take a quick glance around the rest of the room, at faces, at plates. The air is thick with resistance to this eating meditation, and since I am the one who makes the rules, I am also the one at whom the fury is directed. Getting between people and their food is like standing in front of a speeding train; the act of being stopped in compulsive behavior is not exactly met with good cheer.
“Anyone want to say anything before we begin?” I ask.
Silence.
“Then, blessings on our food and all that made it possible. The rain, the sun, the people who grew it, brought it here, served it here,” I say.
I can hear Amanda, who is sitting to my right, taking a deep breath at the sound of the prayer. Across the room Zoe nods her head, as if to say, “Oh, right. The earth, the sun, the rain. Glad they’re there.” But not everyone is grateful to take one more second to do anything but eat. Louisa in her bright red running suit sighs and grunts an almost indiscernible “Oh for God’s sakes. Can we puh-leese get on with this?!” She looks as if she is ready to kill me. Humanely, of course, and only with the slightest bit of suffering, but still.
“Now, take some time and notice what you put on your plate,” I say. “Notice if you were hungry when you chose the food. If you weren’t physically hungry, was there another kind of hunger present?
“And looking at your plates, decide what you want to eat first and take a few bites. Notice how the food feels in your mouth. If it tastes like you thought it would taste. If it does what you thought it would do.”
Three, four minutes pass amid the symphony of eating sounds: rustling, chewing, swallowing, clinking. I notice that Izzy, a six-foot-two willowy woman from France, is looking out the window and seems to have forgotten that we are eating. But most people are holding the plates up to their mouths so they can get the bites in faster.
Laurie, a thirty-five-year-old CEO of a Boston mortgage company, raises her hand. “I am not hungry, but I want to be. I want to eat anyway.”
“Why is that?” I ask.
“Because it looks good and it’s here, right now. It’s the best comfort in town. What’s wrong with wanting comfort from food?”
“Not a thing,” I say. “Food is good and comfort is good. Except that when you are not hungry and you want comfort, food is only a temporary palliative; why not address the discomfort directly?”
“It’s too hard to address things directly, too painful, and there isn’t any end to it. And if it’s going to be endlessly painful, then at least I have food,” she answers.
“So you figure that the best you
can get out of life is cold vegetable soup?”
When she talks again, her voice is quivering. “It’s the only true comfort I have, and I am not going to deprive myself of it.” A tear jogs down her right cheek, hovers on her top lip. Heads nod in assent. A wave of murmurs passes around the circle.
Laurie says, “This thing we do here—waiting in silence until everyone gets their food—reminds me of what it was like to eat dinner in our family. My mother was drinking, my father was furious and no one was talking. It was horrible.”
“What were you feeling during those times?” I ask.
“Lonely, miserable, like I was born into the wrong family. I wanted to escape but there was no place to go; I felt trapped. And this feels the same way. Like all of you are crazy and I am trapped here, with a bunch of loonies.”
More head nods. More murmurs. A woman from Australia looks at me defiantly, her black waist-length hair brushing the edge of the soup bowl. I imagine she is thinking that Laurie is right and can she get a ride to the airport in fifteen minutes.
But right here, right now, in the center of this wound—I’ve been abandoned and betrayed by who and what really matters and what I’ve got left is food—is where the link between food and God exists. It marks the moment when we gave up on ourselves, on change, on life. It marks the place where we are afraid. It marks the feelings we won’t allow ourselves to feel, and in so doing, keeps our lives constricted and dry and stale. In that isolated place, it is a short step to the conclusion that God—where goodness and healing and love exist—abandoned us, betrayed us or is a supernatural version of our parents. Our practice at the retreats of working through this despair is not one of exerting will or conjuring up faith, but being curious, gentle and engaged with the cynicism, the hopelessness, the anger.
