Top 100 Geneen Roth Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “We are using the food as a doorway to understanding the rest of our lives.”

— Geneen Roth

52. “We eat the way we eat because we are afraid to feel what we feel.”

— Geneen Roth

53. “No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can’t stand it any longer, we binge.”

— Geneen Roth

54. “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.”

— Geneen Roth

55. “Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it’s about knowing who you are. It’s about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you believe you can’t have it.”

— Geneen Roth

56. “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”

— Geneen Roth

57. “I live between fearing doom and wishing for it.”

— Geneen Roth

58. “Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake.”

— Geneen Roth

59. “I believe in love. And beauty. I believe that every single person has something they find beautiful and that they truly love. The smell of their child’s hair, the silence of a forest, their lover’s crooked grin. Their country, their religion, their family. And I believe that if you follow this love all the way to its end, if you start with the thing you find most beautiful and trace it’s perfume back to its essence, you will perceive an intangible presence, a swath of stillness that allows the thing you love to be visible like the openness of the sky reveals the presence of the moon.”

— Geneen Roth

60. “I do believe that there are frozen places in ourselves – undigested pockets of pain – that need to be recognized and welcomed, so that we can contact that which has never been hurt or wounded or hungry.”

— Geneen Roth

61. “Healing is about being awake. Being broken and whole at the same time.”

— Geneen Roth

62. “You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won’t discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself.”

— Geneen Roth

63. “Your relationship to food, no matter how conflicted, is the doorway to freedom.”

— Geneen Roth

64. “To discover what you really believe, pay attention to the way you act – and to what you do when things don’t go the way you think they should. Pay attention to what you value. Pay attention to how and on what you spend your time. Your money. And pay attention to the way you eat.”

— Geneen Roth

65. “You cannot spend your life wanting to be someone else, snipping off pieces of yourself you don’t like, and suddenly expect, upon reaching a goal, to be confident, self-accepting, rooted like an oak tree in your being.”

— Geneen Roth

66. “You are not your past, not your habits, not your compulsions. When you get to know who you are, anything becomes possible.”

— Geneen Roth

67. “Ask yourself what you love. Without fear of consequences, without force or shame or guilt. What motivates you to be kind, to take care of your body, your spirit, others, the earth? Trust the longing, trust the love that can be translated into action without the threat of punishment. Trust that you will not destroy what matters most. Give yourself that much.”

— Geneen Roth

68. “The problem isn’t that we have bodies; the problem is that we’re not living in them.”

— Geneen Roth

69. “Chocolate, I am sure, is the concrete manifestation of love.”

— Geneen Roth

70. “Love includes vulnerability, surrender, self-valuing, steadiness, and a willingness to face – rather than run from – the worst of ourselves.”

— Geneen Roth

71. “If you try to lose weight by shaming, depriving and fearing yourself, you will end up shamed, deprived, and afraid. Kindness comes first. Always.”

— Geneen Roth

72. “Meditation develops the capacity to question your mind. Without it, you are at the mercy of every thought, every desire, every wave of emotion.”

— Geneen Roth

73. “The relentless attempts to be thin take you further and further away from what could actually end your suffering: getting back in touch with who you really are. Your true nature. Your essence.”

— Geneen Roth

74. “Your body is the piece of the universe you’ve been given; as long as you have a pulse, it presents you with an ongoing shower of immediate sensate experiences.”

— Geneen Roth

75. “Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake. A way to discover what you love. A practice to return yourself to your body when the mind medleys threaten to usurp your sanity.”

— Geneen Roth

76. “When you don’t want to be where you are, you create suffering for yourself. Change happens through acceptance, kindness and relaxation – not resistance, not warfare, not fights.”

— Geneen Roth

77. “It’s not about food. It’s never about food. And it’s not even about feelings. It’s about what’s below them. What’s in between them. What’s beyond them”.”

— Geneen Roth

78. “Change, if it is to be long lasting, must occur on the unseen levels first.”

— Geneen Roth

79. “You can be aware of your past without being it.”

— Geneen Roth

80. “The purpose of a spiritual path or religion is to provide a precise and believable way into what seems unbelievable.”

— Geneen Roth

81. “If you decided to reteach yourself your own loveliness today, what would you do? How would you speak to yourself? Can you allow yourself that much?”

— Geneen Roth

82. “Awareness, not deprivation, informs what you eat. Presence, not shame, changes how you see yourself and what you rely on.”

— Geneen Roth

83. “Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds – our stories of loneliness, rejection, grief – that we don’t realize they are in the past. They can’t hurt us anymore.”

— Geneen Roth

84. “We are strong where we were broken.”

— Geneen Roth

85. “Be fully present for five minutes every day.”

— Geneen Roth

86. “Every good enough mother teaches her child that no matter how bad it seems- no matter how many rejections or scraped knees or broken bones there are- it is going to be okay. Maybe not the way we wanted or hoped it would be, but still okay. A good parent returns a child to the place where she can trust that although she might be bitter or hateful for a moment, it’s not the end of the world. There is love here. There is light and quiet here. There is peace.”

— Geneen Roth

87. “Just because we form an opinion about ourselves, or anyone else, doesn’t mean it is true.”

— Geneen Roth

88. “If there are any cages in this marriage, it is I who have built them. And I who hold the key to their locks.”

— Geneen Roth

89. “But staying with the emptiness – entering it, welcoming it, using it to get to know ourselves better, being able to distinguish the stories we tell ourselves about it from the actual feeling itself – that’s radical.”

— Geneen Roth

90. “Separate the desire to be thin from the desire to be cherished.”

— Geneen Roth

91. “You are lovable, you are loving; your choices about food will reflect that, if you give yourself a chance.”

— Geneen Roth

92. “Imagine not being frightened by any feeling. Imagine knowing that nothing will destroy you. That you are beyond any feeling, an state. Bigger than. Vaster than. That there is no reason to use drugs because anything a drug could do would pale in comparison to knowing who you are. To what you can understand, live, be, just by being with that presents itself to you in the form of the feelings you have...”

— Geneen Roth

93. “Stephen Levine, a Buddhist teacher, says that hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. Being one place and wanting to be somewhere else. Being constantly agitated – another word for nonaccepting – about the inevitable. Being in a relationship with someone and refusing to surrender to the love because you don’t want to give yourself to something you will eventually lose.”

— Geneen Roth

94. “The relentless attempts to be thin take you further and further away from what could actually end your suffering:.”

— Geneen Roth

95. “After you’ve looked at normal women’s bodies, look at yourself in the mirror. Stand there for at least three minutes, once a week, for six weeks. Every time you notice a stretch mark, a sag, a wrinkle, say to yourself, “This is what living looks like. This is what loving looks like.” And you will be telling the truth.”

— Geneen Roth

96. “At its core, hatred is the desire to annihilate that which is causing us pain, in the misguided belief that if we could only incinerate what seems to be causing the pain, we would finally be at peace. All feuds, all wars, all acts of revenge are built on this principle, including our inner war with food and weight.”

— Geneen Roth

97. “The problem with fantasy is the greatest benefit of fantasy: it prevents us from living in the present moment. But the present now is different from the present then.”

— Geneen Roth

98. “You miss the life that happens in the middle zone – between now and what you think your life should be like. And when you miss those moments because you’d rather be doing something else, you are missing your own life. Those moments are gone. You will never get them back.”

— Geneen Roth

99. “Imagine what you could do... if you stopped turning your energy against yourself and use it instead to question what you’ve been hypnotized into believing about the size of your body. And to speak up for matters to you and your children.”

— Geneen Roth

100. “I’d spent years saving for a future that was never coming to protect myself from a past that had already happened.”

— Geneen Roth