All any feeling wants is to be welcomed with tenderness. It wants room to unfold. It wants to relax and tell its story. It wants to dissolve like a thousand writhing snakes that with a flick of kindness become harmless strands of rope.
You are lovable, you are loving; your choices about food will reflect that, if you give yourself a chance.
If you think your job is to fix what is broken, you keep finding more broken places to mend.
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.
The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Your relationship with food is an exact mirror of your feelings about love, fear, anger, meaning and transformation.
Just because we live in an insane culture doesn’t mean we have to be insane too.
When you believe in yourself more than you believe in food, you will stop using food as if it were your only chance at not falling apart. When the shape of your body no longer matches the shape of your beliefs, the weight disappears. And yes, it really is that simple.
Its not so much that we believe what we see, but that we see what we believe.
I tell my retreat students that they need to remember two things: to eat what they want when they’re hungry and to feel what they feel when they’re not.
If you want to eat when you’re not hungry, you’re hungry for something else.
We eat the way we live.
Be fully present for five minutes every day.
We are strong where we were broken.
The way we do anything is the way we do everything. The way we eat is the way we live.
Chocolate, I am sure, is the concrete manifestation of love.
Awareness is a way you keep yourself company. When you are aware you are being compulsive, you are no longer locked in the behavior. You have a choice to stop. That choice – and therefore awareness itself – is freedom.
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?
If there are any cages in this marriage, it is I who have built them. And I who hold the key to their locks.
The process is the goal.
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.