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.
Being exaltingly thin was, of course, the foundation for the visibility, the man, the adornments of this life-to-be; it was the prerequisite that made the rest of the dream possible. And since no matter how thin I got, I was frightened that I could wake up tomorrow and be fat again, the rest of the dream was forever ten or twenty pounds away.
It's not life in the present moment that is intolerable; the pain we are avoiding has already happened. We are living in reverse.
Hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are.
Bingeing is such an emotionally frenetic activity that no other concerns can exist in the same space. It is a hell that people who are food-sensitive are familiar with; and, because it is known, it is therefore not so terrifying as some of the problems that are outside our control. Problems like divorce, illness, death.
Most of our suffering comes from resisting what is already here, particularly our feelings. All any feeling wants is to be welcomed, touched, allowed. It wants attention. It wants kindness. If you treated your feelings with as much love as you treated your dog or your cat or your child, you'd feel as if you were living in heaven every day of your sweet life.
Awareness, not deprivation, informs what you eat. Presence, not shame, changes how you see yourself and what you rely on.
How you eat is how you live.
Chocolate. . . is not something you can take or leave, something you like only moderately. You dont like chocolate. You dont even love chocolate. Chocolate is something you have an affair with.
Love includes vulnerability, surrender, self-valuing, steadiness, and a willingness to face - rather than run from - the worst of ourselves.
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.
The way we do anything is the way we do everything. The way we eat is the way we live.
It's important to focus on the good in life and appreciate it.
The real work of this life is not what we do every day from 9-5. . . The real work is to be passionate, be holy, be wild, be irreverent, to laugh and cry until you awaken the sleeping spirits, until the ground of your being cleaves and the universe comes flooding in.
The big horrible thing isn't the plane crash or the earthquake or the diagnosis. When those things occur, we act, we know what to do. We live or we die. Hell is what we do in the meantime. It is the ways we starve our souls as we prepare for the future that never comes as planned. The true disaster is living the life in your mind and missing the one in front of you.
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.
If you try to lose weight by shaming, depriving and fearing yourself, you will end up shamed, deprived, and afraid. Kindness comes first. Always.
If there are any cages in this marriage, it is I who have built them. And I who hold the key to their locks.
People come and go, pain comes and goes. But so does joy. And if our hearts are closed because we don't want to suffer, they won't be open enough to recognize the joy as it flies by.
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.