You are not your past, not your habits, not your compulsions. When you get to know who you are, anything becomes possible.
You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. Treat yourself with outrageous kindness beginning today.
You can’t be stuck if you’re not trying to get anywhere. Which, to me, means that when you stop fighting with the way things are, magic happens. You relax, open, and any action you take comes from alignment with what’s true.
No act of love is ever wasted.
We are using the food as a doorway to understanding the rest of our lives.
If LOVE could talk to you about your relationship with food, what would it say?
The purpose of healing is to live while you are alive instead of dying while you are alive. Healing is about being broken and whole at the same time.
Awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage.
Compulsive eating is only the symptom; believing that you are not worth your own love is the problem. Go for the love. You will never be sorry.
Ask yourself if you are in this for the long run-if it’s only your weight you want to change or if you are willing to use your eating patterns as a portal to the inner universe. And if the answer is the latter, then there is no end to what you can learn, be, understand, become.
Imagine not being frightened by any feeling. Imagine knowing that nothing will destroy you. That you are beyond any feeling, and 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.
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.
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...
And if you worry that not finishing the food on your plate is a slap in the face of all the hungry people everywhere, you are not living in reality. The truth is that you either throw the food out or you throw it in, but either way it turns to waste. World hunger will not be solved by finishing the garlic mashed potatoes on your plate.
When we give up dieting, we take back something we were often too young to know we had given away: our own voice. Our ability to make decisions about what to eat and when. Our belief in ourselves. Our right to decide what goes into our mouths. Unlike the diets that appear monthly in magazines or the thermal pants that sweat off pounds, unlike a lover or a friend or a car, your body is reliable. It doesn’t go away, get lost, stolen. If you will listen, it will speak.
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.
I’d spent years saving for a future that was never coming to protect myself from a past that had already happened.
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.
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.
The relentless attempts to be thin take you further and further away from what could actually end your suffering:.