Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything by Roth Geneen

Author:Roth, Geneen [Roth, Geneen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

When you inquire, you begin with whatever is happening now—from wanting to eat an entire pizza to wanting to crawl into bed and stay there for the next fifty years. You don’t assume that you know what you need to do or where you need to go. You become curious about feelings and sensations. You listen to your body. You stop bossing yourself around.

Any inquiry starts with wanting to know something you don’t know. If you think you already know what’s wrong and how to fix it, there’s no need to inquire. Wanting to know something you don’t know activates your curiosity; it elicits your openness. It evokes the part of you that is not a conglomeration of old beliefs, ideas, self-images, stories, identifications. The ground of your being that is already saturated with peace, clarity, compassion—the Niagara Falls part.

Inquiry is body based; it is not a mental process. You sense what it feels like to be inside your skin, your arms, your legs. You notice the sensation and you notice the location of the sensation. Sensation, location, sensation, location. If, for instance, you are feeling sad, you ask yourself where that feeling is located in your body. You notice a gray heap of ashes in your chest, and up pops the belief that “love exists for other people but not for me.” You become curious about that belief. How old were you when you first learned that? And what were your feelings at the time that never got noticed or felt or understood?

Sometimes when I ask students what they are feeling in their bodies, they have no idea. It’s been a couple of light-years since they felt anything in or about their bodies that wasn’t judgment or loathing. So it’s good to ask some questions that allow you to focus on the sensations themselves. You can ask yourself if the feeling has a shape, a temperature, a color. You can ask yourself how it affects you to feel this. And since no feeling is static, you keep noticing the changes that occur in your body as you ask yourself these questions.

If you get stuck, it’s usually because you’re having a reaction to a particular feeling—you don’t want to feel this way, you’d rather be happy right now, you don’t like people who feel like this—or you’re locked into comparing/judging mode.

About reactions: feelings are in the body, reactions are in the head; a reaction is the mental deduction of a feeling. (And beliefs are reactions that we’ve had so many times that we believe they are true.) In an attempt not to feel what is uncomfortable, the mind will often rant and ramble and tell us how awful it all is.

Here is some of what you may hear: This pain will never end. The sadness will overwhelm me. If I let myself feel it, I will not be able to function. Once you know that these kinds of reactions will come up, you can notice them and keep inquiring.

Be precise. “I feel a gray heap of ashes in my chest” rather than “I feel something odd and heavy.

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