Geneen Roth On "How To Disengage From The Voice"

It doesn’t just take one book to make it last. Or, one time of hearing the message. It takes a lifelong commitment to learning about and caring for ourselves. Every moment of every day requires more and more consciousness and curiosity to not just get the message, but to live the message.

What is the message: That it’s truly important to listen to our feelings, to be conscious of The Voice (self-critic), to understand its origin and to question whether we believe what it says. If we don’t, we’ll continue to try to fix, rather than understand and be kind to, ourselves. We’ll continue to strive for perfection rather than settle into acceptance.

Geneen Roth, the author of Women, Food, And God, writes and teaches about using food as a gateway to foster a closer relationship with our true selves. Regardless of your drug of choice – food, shopping, TV or even spirituality (many of mine) – we try to numb ourselves from who we really are, from our feelings and experiences.

And while numbing ourselves from self-criticism, due to our lack of unattainable perfection, we don’t see our wholeness – beauty, strengths, failures, flaws, etc. We ignore the very thing that can help us disengage from The Voice, often because we think it’s too unbearable to face our imperfect selves with our imperfect feelings day after day.

As Geneen suggests, in addition to the original feelings or problems we want to avoid, we create a new set of issues by over-eating, impulse shopping or watching too much TV, which we can then obsess over fixing.

And what happens after a lifetime of trying to fix ourselves, when in our souls we know there is nothing to be fixed? Geneen suggests…rebellion. It’s why we fail every diet, every resolution, every attempt to fix the surface issue we have created to façade our deeper pain.

Exit stage: Feelings and Compassion. Enter stage: The Voice. The Voice – our supergo – has been strengthened by all the insane criticism we have begun to believe over the years.

The Voice isn’t even who we are. It’s an amalgam of the critics we have encountered throughout our lives. It’s society’s rules. It’s someone else’s sh#$, really. Well, I guess it’s ours now for as long as we believe it.

The Voice can permeate our every fiber. It becomes so loud and so prominent that we begin to mistake it as our true selves. What’s the point of even talking about The Voice? The sooner we learn how to disengage from it, the closer we get to our true nature. And begin to cultivate wholeness vs. perfection.

Once we actually allow our feelings to unfold and to move through the pain, we’d know that there is nothing to fix or change. No surface problems to create or obsess over. There is only “inquiry” – understanding our pain, unraveling its roots, accepting what we feel, etc.

Here, Geneen talks about how to begin to disengage from The Voice on Oprah.com…

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Q&A

Is this an experience you relate to in any part of your life? Thoughts, questions, comments? I’d love to hear how this article landed for you.

Cultivating Compassion

The person and message that inspired my last two blog posts about cultivating wholeness is Geneen Roth, the author of Women, Food, And God. She recently appeared on The Oprah Show and also published an article in O Magazine, "It's Not About The Weight," to discuss the messages in her book.

She suggests that our relationship to food is a gateway to our relationship with ourselves. We use food, alcohol, shopping, even spirituality, whatever your drug of choice may be, to numb ourselves from the pain we experience. We treat ourselves and our hurt like projects that need to be fixed or changed, looking to diets and such to transform us into our ideal weight, our ideal selves.

For me, this relates to anything in my life that I think needs changing or fixing, whether it pertains to my body, my mind, my emotions or my spirit. When I don't allow myself to fully feel or experience, I turn outside myself to feel good about myself. Quite inefficient, I might add.

Here are a few excerpts from Geneen Roth's O Magazine article, "It's Not About The Weight" which I found particularly helpful and healing, and am hoping that you might too...

"Can you imagine how your life would have been different if each time you were feeling sad or angry as a kid, an adult said to you, "Come here, sweetheart, tell me all about it"? If when you were overcome with grief at your best friend's rejection, someone said to you, "Oh, darling, tell me more. Tell me where you feel those feelings. Tell me how your belly feels, your chest. I want to know every little thing. I'm here to listen to you, hold you, be with you."

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.

The path from obsession to feelings to presence is not about healing our "wounded children" or feeling every bit of rage or grief we never felt so that we can be successful, thin, and happy. We are not trying to put ourselves together. We are taking who we think we are apart. We feel the feelings not so that we can blame our parents for not saying, "Oh, darling," not so that we can express our anger to everyone we've never confronted, but because unmet feelings obscure our ability to know ourselves. As long as we take ourselves to be the child who was hurt by an unconscious parent, we will never grow up. We will never know who we actually are. We will keep looking for the parent who never showed up and forget to see that the one who is looking is no longer a child. 

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. Inquiry—the feel-what-you-feel part—allows you to relate to your feelings instead of retreat from them. 

Most of all, remember that inquiry is not about discovering answers to puzzling problems but a direct and experiential revelation process. It's fueled by love. It's like taking a dive into the secret of existence itself; it is full of surprises, twists, side trips. You engage in it because you want to penetrate the unknown, comprehend the incomprehensible. Because when you evoke curiosity and openness with a lack of judgment, you align yourself with beauty and delight and love—for their own sake. You become the benevolence of God in action.

The bottom line: Addiction isn't love, it's suffering The bottom line, whether you weigh 340 pounds or 150 pounds, is that when you eat when you are not hungry, you are using food as a drug, grappling with boredom or illness or loss or grief or emptiness or loneliness or rejection. Food is only the middleman, the means to the end. Of altering your emotions. Of making yourself numb. Of creating a secondary problem when the original problem becomes too uncomfortable. Of dying slowly rather than coming to terms with your messy, magnificent, and very, very short—even at a hundred years—life. The means to these ends happens to be food, but it could be alcohol, it could be work, it could be sex, it could be cocaine. Surfing the Internet. Talking on the phone.

Diets are the result of your belief that you have to atone for being yourself to be worthy of existing. Until the belief is understood and questioned, no amount of weight loss will touch the part of you that is convinced it is damaged. It will make sense to you that hatred leads to love and that torture leads to peace because you will be operating on the conviction that you must starve or deprive or punish the badness out of you. You won't keep extra weight off, because being at your natural weight does not match your convictions about the way life unfolds. But once the belief and the subsequent decisions are questioned, diets and being uncomfortable in your body lose their seductive allure. Only kindness makes sense. Anything else is excruciating. You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved."

Decluttering Yourself To Boost Your Happiness

Last year I worked with a coach (Lora Banks) because I was feeling pretty down on just about…well, everything. Fast forward 9 months later and I’ve done a complete 180 on my life experience and outlook.

What brought me to this new place was decluttering myself just like I declutter spaces. The reason I love to organize surroundings is because a clean, well-organized space helps set people up for success. If you feel organized, you’re not bothered with the worry and anxiety that a cluttered environment offers. And, if you create a routine around it, you know and trust that you can quickly declutter when things get out of whack.

The same goes for your insides. Organizing, or resetting, your energy, helps set you up for success. If your energy feels right, you feel more calm, clear-headed and minimize the worry and overwhelm we all feel in life. And if you create a system for assuring your energy is well maintained – exercise regularly, get enough sleep, meditate, reflect, write in your gratitude journal, etc. (whatever works for you) – you live with more trust and knowing.

Courtesy of Wonderland on Flickr

You begin to see all experiences – “good” and “bad” – as opportunities for learning. You feel more grateful and content with your life. You have more clarity around what you want. You feel more present, living with a lot less fear and worry about the past or the future. You are aware of the conditions, or "arrival fallacy," you assign to your happiness. Ultimately, you just feel a lot better a lot more of the time. And when you don’t, you know there is something to learn and are open and willing to grow.

Here’s how you too can scratch the surface to boosting your own happiness:

1. Your Happiness Is Your Priority

Write down your top five goals. What do you crave more of that would up your happiness level? What is most important in your life right now? Then, prioritize your goals. This can be tough to do if you need help really listening to your inner voice, so ask yourself what the essence is of what you want – freedom, security, inspiration, connection? You may find that many of your goals lead to the same underlying needs.

During our first coaching call, Lora helped me prioritize my top five goals. Eventually, what received top priority was “appreciate and leverage my strengths.” The essence of what I really wanted was to feel better, appreciate myself more and live with more purpose. Assuring my energy (physical, emotional, mental, spiritual) was in the right place was most important because when this is in order, I’d feel better. Nothing else I wanted would be appreciated if I didn't feel good in general. And everything I wanted was to ultimately feel good anyway.

2. Your Happiness Is Your Job

Treat your happiness like you would any other job – with persistence and dedication. In Add More ~ing To Your Life, Gabrielle Bernstein mentions that we tend to loosen up on our rituals once we begin to feel better. Once we’ve shed the few extra pounds, we think, “Maybe I don’t have to work out everyday anymore.” The ego will find ways to hijack your wellbeing just as things are getting good.

So when things get good, she suggests we work harder. Just like you need to exercise regularly to build your physical muscles, she notes that you need to build your mental and emotional muscles. Treat your happiness like your job, as you would any other aspect of your life that is top priority. 

Courtesy of moriza on Flickr

3. Your Happiness Requires A Routine

To treat your happiness like a job, create a daily routine around your goals. This was the second thing Lora helped me establish. I created 10 daily habits that align with and help further my goals, which have evolved along with my goals.

For example, I meditate each morning, give thanks, journal and read. This helps me cement my intentions for the day – to focus on the wonderful things in my life, use my current emotions to help guide me, live more in the present and do what I love and what fills me up (to read and write). I also do my Most Important / Inspired Tasks first each day to assure my top work priorities have been completed, helping me grow my career, another important aspect in my life.

Look at your prioritized list of goals, hopefully with "Happiness" at the top. What are actions you can take each day that match your goals? Some things may be quick and easy, others may take more time. The more you do them, the more you'll experience the positive impact and the more non-negotiable your daily routine becomes.

4. Your Happiness Loves Tools

What helps establish routines and rituals that you’ll continue are tools that help you enjoy the process or actual act of the routine. If you love doing it, you’ll stick to it. So, make it easy on yourself by getting the help of loves ones and loved tools.

For me, it’s reading and writing. These tools help me feel like me, so I do them each day, each morning and throughout the day whenever I can. I also tap into friends and family for genuine connection. What and whom do you love that would help make your routines stick?

Final Take

Your Happiness is most important to you and to everyone and everything around you. It effects how you view your life, your work and your loved ones. The happier you are, the more content you feel. And no one and no thing in your life can sustain the added pressure of filling up your cup.

Treat it like your job, just as you would your hobbies or your career. If it’s important, do a little bit each day to feed and nurture it.

And, continue to evaluate your goals. The more you feel connected to wanting happiness or anything else in life that you crave, the more you’ll establish an inspired routine, carry it out and feel committed to your goals, and to your happiness.

Effectively Implementing Intentions

Identifying and setting intentions is one thing, but how the heck do we implement them? And, how are these different from resolutions? Here’s an example of how I began to implement a couple of my 2010 intentions, one of which is to tone down my inner perfectionist.

Of course, she needs some monitoring in all aspects of my life. In this case, I’m focusing on how to get a handle on her when it comes to a second intention, which is to feel and look healthier.

By identifying the problem, imagining the outcome, creating an authentic ritual, being mindful and refining my actions, I’m hoping I’ll finally crack the code to progress!

Identify The Block

My inner perfectionist is alive and active with just about everything I do – trying to lose weight, writing an email to someone, cooking, etc. I find that my first instinct is to not want to do anything unless I can do it perfectly, which of course will never happen.

But my problem isn’t just that it’s on overdrive. It’s that I nurture this behavior, often mindlessly. I perpetuate this thinking by trying to fix my weaknesses rather than play to my strengths. When I focus on fixing my flaws rather than strengthening my true self, I create a negative story about myself since I rarely reach the disingenuous standard I’ve set. 

For example, I got in the habit of going on my treadmill if and only if I could walk at a specific intensity for at least 30 minutes. I wasn’t encouraging myself to get on the treadmill unless I could hold myself to this standard.

By setting it up as a high standard, I turned myself off from wanting to exercise. I’m not very competitive with myself, so this approach rarely works for me. So I stopped exercising altogether for at least a month. Counterintuitive much?

Focus On The Intention

For so long, I’ve been creating and attempting to achieve these arbitrary standards – walking at least X minutes per day, losing X pounds by X date, etc. Since I often end up giving up, clearly these goals aren’t motivating or working for me. Instead, I end up feeling worse and reinforce the “I’m not enough” story.

This time, I’m focusing on what it is that I truly want, which is to feel and look healthier. This feels doable. This feels inspiring. I took the focus away from what I’m not doing enough of, away from perpetuating the fixing mentality, and put it back onto my original intention which I feel more connected to.

Courtesy of visualpanic on Flickr

Create An Authentic, Inspiring Ritual

I start out by paying attention to what behaviors come naturally to me, relative to my intention. I often experiment with a few until one or two feel the most authentic – something that comes naturally, I’m willing to do and that feels right.

By choosing authentic and inspired rituals related to my intentions, I’m able to feel more connected to them. The more connected I feel, the more I'll do the ritual. As the ritual becomes more ingrained, the more likely my intention will become a reality.

When it comes to my health, I know that I like walking outdoors and on the treadmill. I know that I can commit to doing this every day if I allow myself flexibility with the time and intensity. So, one of my rituals is to exercise daily, regardless of whether it’s for 5 or 60 minutes.

All it took was my first treadmill walk last week. I immediately felt better than I’ve felt in a month. This one success was what I needed to cement the memory of feeling good and to keep me going. 

Be Mindful

When I feel stuck - my intentions occasionally shift back to standards, my rituals no longer feel effective, etc. – I practice mindfulness. I check in with myself – how I feel and what I’m doing – to identify what is and isn’t working so that I can refine my ritual and get unstuck.

I’m learning to leave room for growth. Obviously I won’t always know the perfect solution to everything. But, allowing myself to take small, imperfect steps will exercise my inner imperfectionist (and tone down my inner perfectionist) and slowly guide me closer and closer to the right place, allowing myself to redefine what “perfect” means.

By remaining open to how I will implement my intentions, I leave room for growth and evolution. Refining my ritual helps keep it authentic and relevant, and keeps me connected.

Setting Meaningful Intentions

As I mentioned in Annual Lobotomy, setting intentions is something I do daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. While every day can feel like a fresh start, there’s something special and exciting about determining my intentions for the year.

With the downtime toward the end of the year, I slow down. There’s also a more relaxed energy since the world has slowed down. Businesses shut down, priorities shift, people all of a sudden have the time to do what has been piling up for a year.

Feeling clear-headed, it’s much easier to reflect on my past experiences. And when the New Year arrives I feel like a new person who has shed her old skin. I’m ready to let go of what didn’t work so well and do more of what does work for me. I’m ready to shed old, negative stories and replace them with more truthful, positive views of myself. 

This process doesn’t happen in just a day for me. Because I tend to have more time, I take several weeks to observe myself. I do a combination of writing, observing, experimenting. Here’s a more in-depth look at what my process looks like (than Annual Lobotomy), in case you haven’t yet had a chance to determine what you want your 2010 to look like.

Two Types Of Changes

Some of what surfaces are easy fixes, like doing a few things to minimize email. And some are bigger, more internal changes that require me to take small steps to change a negative story I have playing in my head.

Listening And Observing

To identify where I’d like to focus my energy in 2010, I slowed down and listened to myself. This means listening to the dialogue inside your head and observing your actions. What are you saying to yourself (e.g., about your career, relationships, friendships, money, family, raising kids, etc.)? How do you feel about your life, or something as simple as how your day is going?

Is your dialogue negative – are you feeling uncomfortable, frustrated, annoyed, etc.? Whenever I grew impatient with something – like checking more email than I’d like - I knew it would go on my list of not so helpful habits.

Sometimes the pain I felt was deeper. I thought about the ways in which I fight my natural ways. I thought about how I’d like to appreciate myself more and play to my strengths more. I dug deep when I judged myself to get to the root of why I have internalized such a negative view of myself. I explored the pain and the incidents that nurtured my negative story, or misbeliefs. I also got more clear on what triggered my negative dialogue - what I was doing and when.

Of course, all our thoughts aren’t self-bashing. When is your dialogue positive? I paid much closer attention to what makes me really happy. I love to write, so when I didn’t write and share as much in December, I was pretty bummed. Now I know that I don’t want to do less of something that makes me so happy and true to myself. When I write, I feel genuine and tend to talk to myself with more kindness and compassion.

By uncovering what is adding to your list of frustrations and also to your list of happy-makers, you can begin to better understand your habits and thoughts. Once you understand your habits and thoughts, you can experiment with small changes to shift them when needed.

Experimenting

Experimenting is all about taking small steps to begin to shift your habits and your negative story to a more truthful one that will better serve you and your new intentions. 

With annoyances like putting more than can realistically do on my to-do list or schedule, I began to make small changes to free myself of the conflict I experienced. So, I thought of ways that I could give myself less busy work, book less appointments in a week and minimize my email.

The internal changes seem tougher to make, like thinking I’m lazy because I like to sleep in or thinking I’m not competent enough, but they’re doable.

To shift my self-view of my competence, I thought about the moments in which I do feel smart and resourceful, like when I’m writing. So, I decided to write more because it makes me feel smart, authentic and empowered. I’m hoping the more I do things that I love to do, the more I’ll begin to change this story. 

Courtesy of Muffet on Flickr

Embracing

This year, instead of focusing on the endless list of things I’d like to “fix” about myself, I’m going to train myself like we train our dog. Just like we're learning to replace his bad habits with good ones, I’m going to learn to replace my habits and stories that I’m not so crazy about with ones that are more helpful to me. I'm going to rewrite my stories so I can embrace, rather than belittle, me.

For example, instead of telling myself I should talk to myself with more compassion, I’ve been creating more situations that naturally make me feel good and minimizing doing sh#$ that makes me feel bad. This way I’m not forcing anything. My internal dialogue is naturally improving and I’m feeling better about myself. 

I’m focusing on doing more of what works for me, rather than less of what doesn’t. By focusing on what I do well and just doing it, I’m beginning to appreciate my strengths more. As I increasingly validate myself, my misbeliefs slowly dissipate.

Of course this process I go through requires constant mindfulness throughout the year. Doing this over the course of a few weeks won’t change me permanently. But, it certainly gives me stronger and happier legs to walk with during my journey.