This Messy Magnificent Life Quotes

“Do what you have to do. Make doing what you have to do a priority for your life, because if you don't, you leave yourself behind.
You do not have to prostrate yourself at the feet of shame for one more minute or keep begging for 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 heart, but most of all, we need the unrepeatable essence of you.
Come back.”
― Geneen Roth, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“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, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“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, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“There isn't a someday. There never was. No one has ever been to the future that you keep putting your life on hold for. All we ever have is now.”
― Geneen Roth, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“The most challenging part of respecting our bodies and healing compulsive eating is the conscious decision to question what keeps us bound and silenced. Until we can sit in our own skin and fully occupy the physical space we’ve been given, we will be apologetic about our bodies. And even when we lose weight because we stuck to a diet, we will remain frightened of ourselves because we know that it’s the diet that’s keeping us thin, not our own capacity to stay true to what we know or want. On diets, we are still relying on the big powerful other to know what’s best and to save us. And whether it’s a good daddy or a good diet that rescues us, we remain victims and food our perpetrator.”
― Geneen Roth, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“There isn’t a someday. There never was. No one has ever been to the future that you keep putting your life on hold for. All we ever have is now. And if you continually put your life on hold for what your life will be like tomorrow, or the next year, or when you finally lose the weight, you won’t recognize that you already have what you want because you will have spent years training yourself to want, not have.”
― Geneen Roth, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“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, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“There was always the next person, the next hope. A future in which I could dream myself whole without taking full responsibility for that wholeness, in the same way that many of us pin our hopes on the next diet, and the next after that.
As long as we keep hoping someone is coming, we keep waiting. As long as we believe the answer is out there, we don't have to turn around and discover it now.”
― Geneen Roth, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“A wild joy follows when you realize you've been caught and are now free, when you fling open the prison door, walk outside, and gulp air and light for the first time in hours or days or weeks.
You sense who you were and what you knew before you defined things as good or bad, fat or thin, right or wrong. Before you became what you needed to be to be loved, you know the holiness of trees and water and rocks. You knew the adults were a bit mad, but you loved them anyway. You had no doubt, not one, about who you were; you had wings, and now, you have them again.”
― Geneen Roth, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“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, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“When we’re convinced we have to earn joy, we don’t notice the ten thousand places in which it is already waiting, asking, waving for our attention.”
― Geneen Roth, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“We are always whirling in the trance of deficiency in which we equate being alone with loneliness, restraint with deprivation, being silent with being empty. I get seduced by the promise of adding yet another ornament to the tree of myself and forget to pay attention to the heavenly invisibles.”
― Geneen Roth, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“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, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“let me remember to pay attention to the ordinary, not just to the extraordinary.”
― Geneen Roth, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“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.”
― Geneen Roth, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“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. Since that uniqueness needs a vehicle of expression, and since the vehicle we've been given is our body, we do what we can to keep the channel open. When you stuff or starve it, your body shuts down. It can not reveal its purpose or creativity or wisdom to you. Its uncomfortable to walk around in a body that is uncomfortable. Its hard to let innate brilliance or power express itself when you are schlepping around twenty or fifty extra pounds. Not Impossible, just more difficult. And since there is already so much inherent difficulty in being alive, why not make life easier on yourself?”
― Geneen Roth, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“Everyone who has lost weight knows this, but we keep forgetting it when we gain weight so that we can once again look forward to an imaginary happy future. Also, participating in the cycle of judging and shaming ourselves followed by feeling accomplished and elated gives us something to do and talk about, a way to pass the time. There’s nothing wrong with this pattern; it’s how our minds work. We intuitively understand that we want something we cannot see or touch, but we don’t know how to name or access it. And so we fall back into believing that being thinner will right everything that is wrong. The only problem is that it’s based on a lie.”
― Geneen Roth, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide