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WEEK FIVE – RELEARNING LOVELINESS: This is a review of Geneen Roth’s Women, Food and God Online Retreat, which takes place over a 6-week period. Read the following for more information:
•    Introducing the Women, Food and God Online Retreat
•    WEEK ONE: Ending the War
•    WEEK TWO: Beyond What’s Broken
•    WEEK THREE: What Are You Really Hungry For?
•    WEEK FOUR: Finding Your Enough

Week Five Course Overview
•    Meditation in detail: Why? How? The three steps: Orienting, Grounding and Centering.
•    If we eat “what the body wants” then aren’t we depriving ourselves of junk food?
•    What about weighing ourselves?
•    How do I change a habit that’s so ingrained like using food to numb myself?
•    When is inquiry what I actually need to face my feelings? What if I think I need therapy?
•    More clarity on who and what you are being loyal to.
•    How do we treat ourselves with loveliness?
•    How do I balance focusing on the good stuff while examining my limiting beliefs?
•    This week’s practices / action steps.

Meditation
Meditation can sometimes seem tedious or boring, but what it does is help you become aware of the sensations of your body. Meditation teaches you to live within your body rather than allowing your mind to constantly flit away and ignore how you feel physically. Becoming in tune with our physical selves is paramount to learning how to treat our bodies well. Being with your physical self takes practice, but you’re rewarded when you’re able to notice sensations of fullness and hunger when it’s time to eat (or not to eat.)

Geneen explains that the progression of our weekly meditation is orienting, followed by grounding, and then centering.

Orienting
Look around the room. Look with child’s eyes, astonished at everything. Up down side to side. See where you’re located. Geneen says, “There’s a lot you’re missing when you’re seeing without looking. Take in an object and really look at.” She tells us to let ourselves have it. Take it into your body, in through your senses.

Grounding
Geneen has us become aware of the earth, the ground. Become aware, “that the earth supports you without your having to ask, continually, every moment of every day.” Be aware of your feet and what they are touching. Feel the points of contact between your body and the surface that supports it.

Become aware of your body. You’ve been running around all day. This is time for you. Geneen says that if you’re looking at Facebook or email, you’re putting out, not taking in. There’s stillness in taking in, in just being. Notice if this is hard.

Geneen isn’t asking you to deprive yourself of something you love, instead, she’s asking you to widen your experience of love. Multitasking isn’t love and it doesn’t give you more time for yourself. Geneen points out that the more technology we have, the less time we have.

Bring your attention again to the point of contact your body makes with the surface you sit on. Are you sitting alertly or slumped? Gently straighten so you’re awake and alive.

Geneen then asks that we bring our attention to the direct sensations in our bodies, starting with our feet and toes. She then asks us to move our attention like a flashlight beam up through our bodies. With each part, ask yourself what you feel. Pulsing, tingling, vibrating, hot, cold? Do you have any emotional reactions to any body parts? Just notice that.

Notice the impact this exercise has on you. Are you bored with your own company? Are you anxious, angry, calm, relaxed? Impatient? Do you think being aware of your body is irrelevant? Are you biding your time? Allow the reactions without jumping on them or becoming merged with them.

Centering
Notice your breath. Place your hands over your abdomen and feel the movement in your belly with each breath.

Geneen invokes the 80/20 rule. 80% of your focus is on your body, on the inside. 20% of your focus is outside, your awareness of the retreat. Stay with yourself. Nothing else is worth it. It’s more important to stay with yourself.

Questions From Participants

A participant points out that back when Geneen first began the process of learning to eat again after years of dieting, that she ate whatever she wanted, junk food and all. But the guidelines say to “Eat what the body wants, not the mind.” Are we skipping the part where we get to eat cookies and go nutso before we buckle down and eat for our bodies?
Geneen tells us that when she stopped dieting, she started eating what she hadn’t allowed herself to eat. When she told herself there were no strings attached and she could literally eat anything she wanted, she went straight to the foods that had been restricted and forbidden in her childhood.

She noticed that she went to those foods as if it would fix her childhood. She ate like those foods would give her a second childhood with June & Ward Cleaver as her parents. She knew she would never diet again, but for that time when she was indulging the whims of a child, she was bumping around in a sugar haze. Then she realized that those foods were no longer forbidden. And she didn’t want cookies – what she wanted was to feel welcome, deserved and adored. And cookies couldn’t give her that.

Geneen changed the guideline to say, “Eat what your body wants,” because she learned from her experience. After years of working with compulsive overeaters, she took the benefit of her experiences and refined the guidelines.

Geneen asks, “Will you be missing something if you deny yourself what your mind wants, or the forbidden foods?” She points out that the question implies “deprivation.” It implies that if I don’t eat forbidden foods, I won’t feel truly free. We mistakenly think, “I can eat what my body wants, but I will still be a crazed food monster wanting to eat everything in sight.” Geneen says it’s important to understand that NO FOOD IS FORBIDDEN. Know that, feel that.

You can’t pretend to be good and healthy and happy eating healthy food if there’s a pulsing, throbbing desire to eat cookies and sundaes. This approach is about being free, and doing what you need to do in order to be free. If that means eating forbidden foods, then good to know. It’s probably not important or necessary for everybody to do. A lot of people are already sick of torturing themselves with junk food and know that they feel terrible when they eat crap, and they don’t need to plow through forbidden foods for the sake of allowing the experience.

My thoughts — we’ve had the experience of eating “forbidden” foods. Ad nauseum. To be frank, allowing junk food to have its way with our bodies — that’s why many of us are already here, seeking Geneen’s counsel. So ask yourself why you’re still worrying about not getting to eat junk food, as if you’ve never done it before.

At the end of the day, Geneen says it’s your life, and your guideline. You are freeing yourself from obsession and there are no conditions. She’s talking real freedom. If you want chocolate, and it’s 10AM, you eat the chocolate. If every part of you wants it, you don’t look at your watch. You eat the chocolate. It’s freedom.

Geneen notes that if you’re eating with abandon for longer than a week or three, then you’re binging and using the guidelines to further your compulsive eating! So be mindful of that. Feel your body and if your body feels bad and you eat until it doesn’t feel good, then it’s time to check into your body and see what you’re feeling.

Geneen says that when starting out with this process, you might gain weight at the beginning. Not everybody does. But you might. If you eat via the mind with no regard for the body, the quantity and type of food, if you’re eating for something else you want, then sure, you might gain weight.

Geneen warns that if you decide you want forbidden foods and you gain weight, The Voice could pop up and say, “This doesn’t work. You’re a failure. You’ll never stop gaining.” This could send you back to the binge-diet cycle. To halt that line of thinking, instead say, “I’m gaining weight. Am I eating what my body wants?”

Geneen says that as she gets older, her body isn’t as resilient as it once was. She’s very careful now about what she eats so that she has energy. She doesn’t eat for quantity. She eats for taste, but not to make up for something.

She asks us to be mindful and to use inquiry. If we’re gaining weight, then we’re not following the guidelines. Instead, we’re following something that’s in the past. Your body is in the present and wants to feel good and alive. Geneen says to stop and ask what’s going on so you don’t go back to dieting and binging.

What about scales? What does Geneen think about weighing ourselves?
Geneen doesn’t believe in scales. “You’re asking a piece of lifeless junk, ‘Am I allowed to have a good day?’ You know whether you’re losing or gaining weight by your clothes. You don’t need numbers to tell you that. Throw out or give away your scales.”

I’m a weigher. I weigh myself every day. When I think about the numbers, even though my daily weigh in doesn’t impact me much — I often forget what the number was within 2 seconds of stepping off the scale — I know that I have preconceived notions of “good” weights and “bad” weights. I might think that I automatically look good when my weight falls below a certain number and that I don’t look good when my weight is above a certain number.

What’s interesting to me about this is that as we age, our muscle definition changes, our bodies change. So we’re attempting to use numbers to put a qualifier on something that’s shifting and changing each day of our lives.

I wonder what the number on the scale means to you? It’s probably not clinical. There is probably a judgment there of good and bad. There’s a possibility we’re casting aspersions on ourselves, the first thing in the morning, more often than not when we weigh in. Just a thought, if you’re a scale junky like me.

I’m not saying I am going to immediately break myself of this compulsion, but I will be reflective of why I intend to maintain the habit and what exactly I’m getting out of it. I’m clearly clinging to something.

I bolt to the kitchen before I know how I’m feeling. How do I go from not wanting to be with myself to being with myself? How do I change when the habit of leaving is so well developed that I can’t help bolting?
How do we change? Slowly. Bit by bit. By not bolting once. By staying with yourself one time. Do inquiry or be curious about what makes you want to bolt. Is it bolt-worthy?

What you bolted about will still be there after eating, and now you feel bad about eating. So we eat more to avoid the sadness, failure or judgment that comes from overeating. It’s an endless cycle of suffering.

Geneen says we begin to change by having the desire to change. Ask yourself, what do you want your life to be? How do you want to live your days? How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. You have a choice moment to moment.

We’re all ingrained with the fight or flight instinct that shows itself when we’re under duress. The problem when it comes to emotions is that fleeing them is maladaptive. We act like we can’t feel feelings. Turn it around by seeing what you want in a big way from life and keep it close on a daily basis.

I know what I want is to live a life of joy, ease and comfort. That’s not to be confused with a life of laziness — quite the contrary. As Geneen says, it takes effort to be effortless, and that’s what Swell Easy Living is all about.

I want to wake up in the morning and look around my beautifully curated bedroom, step on a carpet free of dirty laundry, and make my family a wholesome, satisfying breakfast. I want to go to work at my job and feel focused and refreshed. I want to come home at night and spend loving, peaceful hours with my family over dinner in a warm and comforting environment.

In a big way, I already have these things. But it’s easy to fall into the trap of procrastination and neglect so that things don’t operate like they should. We often think we’re escaping our responsibilities when we check out, but what we’re really doing is making our lives harder and then we don’t want to check back in.

When we eat to escape, it’s a moment of life left behind. It’s a lost opportunity to be with yourself and to see what’s there when you’re with your feelings and to see what’s beyond the feelings. If you allow yourself to feel sadness, then the sadness may turn into a soft sweet feeling in your chest. When you feel your impatience, that feeling might become bigness or strength, but you won’t know if you keep running away.

Geneen says take baby steps with this at first. Don’t go way past your comfort zone. Go to the edge and be with your emotions once a week or once a day instead of bolting. See what happens when you don’t bolt and you stick around instead.

What about when you’re afraid of facing feelings without food? When do we need therapy?
Geneen gives examples of garden-variety, every day feelings like boredom, sadness, rejection, discomfort. These emotions come up regularly for everybody. Usually when you’re feeling these things, your mind is telling you things that are not true.

You’re working on a story you tell yourself when you invoke these emotions. And then you think, “If I let myself feel this, then this would happen.” We don’t realize we’re telling stories. Sometimes if we’re feeling tired, we’re just tired. Instead we’ll give it meaning, like how put upon we are, or that we might have a life threatening illness. We tell stories when we feel simple sensations.

It’s helpful to be able to tell the difference sooner and sooner when you tell yourself stories about feelings. Catch yourself, like when you catch The Voice – sometimes you’re already at the mercy of the story and the melodrama. Sometimes you’re knee-deep in the story and you don’t know it. But the more you question those stories and the more you’re willing to feel sensations and discomfort as it arises, then the more we can separate out the sensation and the story, which diminishes the need to bolt and eat about it.

On the other hand, with trauma, with abuse, with pre-verbal, early, big abuse, then Geneen recommends a therapist. If you’re dealing with trauma or abuse, see a licensed therapist who can be with you as you parse through the feelings, memories and beliefs that arise related to those situations.

While Geneen believes in therapy, she also believes in knowing when you’ve had enough therapy. You can get addicted to fixing yourself and seeing yourself as broken and it becomes a way of life.

Inquiry, the process of being with direct sensations, takes practice and support. Being with trauma and abuse takes a different kind of support with a good therapist.

Can you please clarify last week’s concept of what and who we’re being loyal to?
We’re loyal to ways of being in the world that we learned early in relation to the people we depended on for love. We needed love to survive. Children are loyal to those who love them, even a tiny bit.

These ideas of how we need to behave in order to be loved could be sparked from impressions we were given based on punishment or reward, whether intentional, implied or imagined.

Geneen provides some examples of ideas we get into our heads when we’re little, such as:

• I need to take myself down so I don’t threaten anyone around me.
• Being powerful equals being abandoned.
• It’s better to be liked than to be envied.

So the upshot is that you want to be liked and loved, and in order to achieve this, you want to be the same as everybody around you, not different or separate. You get comfort and safety in being the same rather than standing out.

One perception I have that began to really trouble me from my mid-teens to mid-twenties was:

“If you’re too confident in yourself or sure of yourself, then people won’t like you. They will think you’re cocky and they will reject you and try to cut you down.”

It’s hard enough to remain confident during those turbulent years … what a bad time to be afraid to be confident, thinking people wouldn’t like me if I were! [And also, what a crock!]

Ask your parents, and they will disagree with your version and your assessment of these unspoken rules. They might have never even said or meant these things, but we create stories based on what we perceived regardless, and then we behave accordingly in ways we think will gain us love and acceptance.

The truth is, when you abide by these old ways, you’re being loyal to an idea that’s based on the past – not the current moment. Many times we act as if we’d be abandoned if we were happy!

You become afraid you’ll lose love if you’re different or you have more than anyone else. Many people have a fear of success because then they would feel like they are a threat to people if they were successful. Some unconsciously think, “If you keep yourself small, then you’re not a threat and therefore more likable.”

If you don’t question these beliefs, then you act automatically in ways that shut you down. The only way you know to be happy is to be miserable, and it only feels like happiness because you’re not threatening anybody.

How do we change and how do we treat ourselves with loveliness? How do you re-teach yourself if you’ve forgotten it or aren’t paying attention to it?
First, you must question the belief that you aren’t lovely. Question the belief that you’re damaged or that you’re a failure.

You are lovely, so question the beliefs you have that tell you otherwise. We’re all born lovely, but learn to distort ourselves to survive. You’re born as lovely, and in true nature, you are loveliness. Examine the beliefs that obstruct that view of yourself, and then you see you.

Our beliefs destroy our “in-touchness” with who we are, and inquiry works to help us regain touch with ourselves. With inquiry, you question your beliefs that keep you from yourself so you are revealed.

Realizing that you believe “I’m damaged” opens the door for you. This is not intellectual or something you figure out with your mind. When your mind stops, your being can be. Your mind doesn’t work in this domain of feeling the direct experience of our emotions. This is beyond the mind: the realm of being, essence, true nature. Our memories, beliefs, and identity, which are found in our mind, obstruct our view to ourselves.

When you see that you believe you’re damaged, you can stop protecting, pretending and defending yourself against that belief, stop making up for it and compensating for it without questioning the belief. When you stop trying to compensate, you can become interested and curious that you believe you’re damaged.

Question where you heard such a thing. Name the belief, and then become curious and see what sticks to the belief “like Velcro” … what are the feelings, associations, memories or things people said that made me think that? To be with it and process it takes commitment. What else is there to do, pretend you don’t have the belief, and then keep trying to compensate for it?

You can use a buddy, a coach, a shrink or a partner to help you look at what keeps you from knowing yourself.

The second step to treating ourselves with loveliness, the step beyond noticing the limiting beliefs and obstacles, is to focus on loveliness itself.
This is where astonishment, amazement, and living “as if” comes in. Be aware of the wonderful things you already have in life. Examine the goodness and loveliness that are here now. Right now in this moment, we each have at least 10 lovely things and lovely ways about us and around us in our world now that we don’t focus on.

What you pay attention to grows. If you focus on the negative, then guess what: you keep seeing more negative.

So re-teaching loveliness is a two part process: 1) discovering the beliefs that are the obstacles to our true nature, and 2) immersing ourselves in the goodness and the loveliness that’s here already.

Awareness itself is miraculous. That awareness, clarity and stillness is indestructible and makes all of this possible. But we rarely even notice our awareness, which is inherent goodness.

I want permission to feel this happy feeling as an underlying current in my life. The teachings you gave about “The Voice” and “To who and what am I being loyal to” helped with that. But I also noticed this universal law: What you pay attention to grows. How do I balance focusing on the good stuff while examining my limiting beliefs?
There’s a balance between: A) the need to focus on the good stuff, and B) the need to pay attention to the snags, beliefs, obstacles and energy drainers and ways you make yourself small and take away the goodness. Unless you’re already 100% enlightened, then some of your attention needs to go towards your mistaken thinking. Most of us spend a lot of time believing what’s not true about who we are and what we need and don’t need. So you have to pay attention to that when you feel small or bad or caught in an old pattern. We can’t only look at the loveliness all the time.

However, if it’s enough for you to notice the patterns and not get involved in the content because you’ve already worked through a particular pattern hundreds of times — you’ve explored it, felt through it, and you really know it’s not true — then when it comes up, it’s enough to simply notice the pattern and consciously focus on something else. So then go ahead and focus on the positive instead. Focus on something this is true and good, and ditch the old beliefs.

Geneen says she believed for many years that success equals abandonment. Every time she would write something she loved, she would feel fear. Since she has already explored that fear, and she has explored her and family’s relationship to success, now she knows the content of that pattern, where it comes from, and she knows it’s not true.

So if it comes up again, she already knows it and can shove it aside. It’s already been explored, and there’s no need to rehash it. There’s nothing new to learn. It’s just an LP that needs to play to the end and so Geneen can tune it out and tune her mind to something lovely. She can change the channel to something truer than success equals abandonment.

She could focus on her dog and playing with her dog to get her energy up. She could read an inspirational book or say something positive to herself.

The time positive thinking doesn’t work is when you fill yourself with positive sentences that you don’t believe. So you have to already not believe that bad pattern in order to just notice the pattern without getting sucked into the content.

It’s a wonderful and important thing to focus on loveliness every day. But there’s a balance between focusing on the obstacles and focusing on the loveliness. You need to focus on the obstacles when you get caught or when you hear The Voice; you need to notice that so you can disengage. And THEN you’re able to really focus on the loveliness.

This Week’s Practices:
Loveliness Practice
The Loveliness Practice, the Astonishment Practice and the Living “As If” Practice are all oriented towards same thing: — immersion in what you already have, in the goodness that surrounds you, is you and is abundant in your life.

When you wake up in morning and a few minutes before you go to sleep at night, become aware of the loveliness. Choose three “lovelinesses” you have in your life, right then, right there. Think about three each time you wake and go to sleep. It can be as simple as laying in bed and thinking about how the sheets feel good. You can reflect on the day and think of three good things.

It’s a way of focusing on and laying down new wiring in your brain, because what you pay attention to does grow.

Eating Guideline: Eat until you are satisfied. Stop when your body has had enough.
Notice the correlation between noticing the loveliness in your life and having enough food. Those two things are correlated. When you feel like you don’t have enough or can’t get enough of the good stuff or the loveliness, then there’s a turning to food to get that.

If you have a body and ears and a yearning to understand yourself, then you have loveliness in your life. Notice that and notice how that correlates with stopping when your body has had enough. In order to stop when you’ve had enough, then you need to actually pay attention to the food and to the eating. If you’re distracted, then it’s going to be hard to tell.

Being aware of your “enough” is a function of being both physically present and emotionally, psychologically and spiritually present. It’s not just a quantity, it’s a quality of presence. And that’s the same quality that you use when you get touched when you notice the loveliness.

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Read the following for more information:

•    Introducing the Women, Food and God Online Retreat
•    WEEK ONE: Ending the War
•    WEEK TWO: Beyond What’s Broken
•    WEEK THREE: What Are You Really Hungry For?
•    WEEK FOUR: Finding Your Enough

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I have my notes on the last two WFG lectures, so those posts will go up … when I feel human. Hopefully soon.

I also organized my closet and would like to share what fun that was.

There are other swell, easy, living posts coming. Just not this minute while I’m struggling to keep up the day job and getting home ready for baby at the same time that I would like to stab myself in the eye so that I feel pain that’s unrelated to my sinuses and this cough.

Carry on, and come back soon. I have to get better soon, right? RIGHT?!!

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Remember how I was going to organize my closet because we have a painter coming? [And also a baby is coming in 6 weeks, and it's about darn time I started nesting!] Well, we got bumped ahead on the painter’s schedule, and so this week I had to jump to it and get on the job in earnest.

I had been on the fence about organizing my closet little by little, or by yanking everything out at once. In my delicate condition, it was easier for me to do it both ways:

• The first step for me is to shop the rack and cull items I want to get rid of, without yanking everything out. That’s what this post is about.

• The next step (for the next post) is to pull out what’s left so I can organize it by season and by item.

Use a Time Limit on the Declutter Job
I took a timer and set it for 15 minutes so that I could complete the declutter part of the job in increments. It only took me two 15-minute sessions on different days to edit my closet, which was totally doable, even though I’m tired, slow and easily distracted these days.

Using a timer will help you move a little faster, and it will prevent the job from becoming huge and highly unpleasant. You will be surprised at how many items you’ll be able to survey and dump or keep in 15 minutes. And if you’re having fun after the 15 minutes is up, then keep going.

Getting Started: Closet Editing Basics
If you weed everything out of the closet that no longer belongs there, then there are simply fewer items to contend with when we hit the organizing phase.

Have a box, bag or laundry basket on hand you can toss items into. When your vessel is full, put the clothes in your car so that you get them out of the house and one step closer to the donation box.

Your first step to organizing your closet is to declutter.
The more rigorous you are with your closet editing, the easier it will be to get dressed in the mornings. Having fewer choices in our closet is an underrated blessing. Owning just a few outfits that are flattering and comfortable will beat a whole closet full of grimace-inducing options every day of the week.

Pull out the items that:
a) don’t fit or are uncomfortable.

b) are out of style, stained, worn out, ratty, or need repairs.

c) you fondle yet cringe instead of wearing, no matter what the reason. If that’s the dress you wore when Jimmy dumped you, I don’t care how fabulous it makes you look. If seeing it makes you feel bad, then get it out of the house.

d) don’t represent the person you want to showcase to the world.

Don’t Keep Stuff That Makes You Feel Bad
A note about letter ‘c’ – if a piece of stuff makes you feel bad in any way, then it doesn’t deserve room in your home.

Sometimes we have negative associations with an item. Maybe we wore it to a funeral, it’s what we had on when we got mugged or received a piece of very bad news, or we were wearing it when we got into a nasty fight with a loved one. If you see that item and it triggers a bad memory, then please get it out of your house.

Or maybe it’s not that obvious. A piece or pieces could represent a not-so-great time in your life for any reason. You may not have a particular memory associated with a garment, but you might look at it and feel a wave of guilt, loneliness or sadness.

Perhaps an item was a gift, and you feel guilty that you don’t appreciate and wear it. Remember that it’s only stuff, and that you appreciate the sentiment that the gift represents. I’m sure the giver didn’t mean to torture you with it, so stop torturing yourself, and let it go!

Life is too short to keep material belongings that don’t make us feel good. What will make you feel good is freeing up those items to go to a good home where they will be loved, used and appreciated.

Only Keep Things That Make You Feel Good
On that note, let’s talk about letter ‘d’. If you feel less-than-great and you don’t feel as if you’re putting your best foot forward in that garment, then ditch it. It doesn’t matter what the occasion – there are t-shirts you might wear to the grocery store or the gym; some t-shirts make you feel cute and fabulous, and some make you run down the soup aisle in hopes you don’t see anyone you know. If you don’t want to be seen it, then why the heck do you wear it?

The funny thing is that sometimes the outfits that make us look the best are the ones that we wear the least. Maybe we’re saving them for a special occasion or we think wearing a certain flashy piece calls attention to ourselves. Give yourself that gift. If you look great in it, wear it!

Hiding or saving a special outfit robs you of enjoyment. Are you afraid people will notice you wear it too much? They won’t. It’s okay to have a small, but fabulous wardrobe. Why bother keeping acres of clothes when just a handful of well-made pieces that make you feel beautiful will do.  So wear those fabulous pieces out now and get a lot of use out of them.

Otherwise, it’s the equivalent of keeping a museum-like “sitting room” so that only company can use it. Take the proverbial plastic off your sofa, and use the nice items while you’re alive to enjoy them.

This isn’t your last chance to look good – there will be other outfits that make you feel great after you wear this one to death. So stop saving it, and wear it. And get rid of all those second-rate items that you’re wearing instead of the ones you should be wearing.

Ditch the Mediocre
This is probably the hardest category to weed out, because it could go either way. There’s no breeze blowing your meter towards keep or dump. So how do you know when a mediocre item needs to go? When you know you need to make room, you know you have too many clothes, and you look at a piece that makes you shrug when you see it and go, “Eh.”

When you’ve got too much stuff, then your reaction to an item doesn’t need to be a dramatic “love” or “hate” when choosing to keep it or dump it. Something is mediocre if you feel vaguely shlubby or just okay when you wear that item, but you keep it around because you can’t find anything particularly wrong with it.

Get rid of anything that makes your boobs look saggy or your butt look big or that doesn’t flatter your thighs or your middle. Maybe the color is better suited for The Grinch or the bedazzling makes you feel like a Florida grandma at the dog races. (Apologies to dog-race attending Florida grandmas.) If you don’t feel good in it, for the love, toss it or give it away.

Don’t be mean to yourself, and don’t over think it. If you don’t feel great in it, or you do feel at all unappetizing when you wear it, then kiss it good bye. If you’re not sure, get rid of it. Someone else will appreciate having it once you donate it.

Onwards and Upwards
Once you get rid of the mediocre stuff, the stuff that makes you feel bad, and the stuff that doesn’t make you feel great, then you give yourself the time, space and the room to wear and appreciate those items that you really do love. Stop saving the good stuff for a rainy day and start wearing it!

Next we’ll talk about organizing what’s left in our closets, and I will hopefully have some groovy “after” photos to show off.

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Read the following for more information:
•    Introducing the Women, Food and God Online Retreat
•    WEEK ONE: Ending the War
•    WEEK TWO: Beyond What’s Broken
•    WEEK THREE: What Are You Really Hungry For?

Week Four Course Overview
•    It’s the fourth week and I haven’t lost weight. What if this doesn’t work, just like everything else I’ve tried?
•    Who and what are you being loyal to when you overeat? Think of your conditioning, your history, and the voices you’ve internalized.
•    What about exercise?
•    What you’re hungry for and finding your enough.
•    Inquiry and coming home to ourselves.
•    How do we begin inquiry and get in touch with ourselves?
•    This week’s practices / action steps.

Meditation
Geneen helps us become present by having us practice orienting: looking around the room and staring up and down and side to side like a baby. We can focus on and study an object that maybe we’ve seen a million times before but never really took the time to notice. We can feel the contact our body makes with the chair, with whatever is supporting us. By doing this, you ground yourself, ground your body in the here and now, in the moment.

As hard as it may be, Geneen encourages you to be interested in your body, how it feels. She tells you to hang out with yourself, but don’t judge. Be open. She stresses that we transform through inquiry, not through judgment. We make it hard through judgment and shame, but things get easier when we stop trying to fix and start being curious.

This week, Geneen introduces the concept that when you lose that connection with your body and you spend time instead in your head with that flood of thoughts, judgments and beliefs, you are left feeling homeless and wanting.

Questions: Geneen takes some time to address questions and apprehensions that have arisen amongst the participants in the past week.

I don’t want to give up, but it’s not working and I’m not following practices. It’s the fourth week and I haven’t lost weight. What if this doesn’t work, just like everything else I’ve tried?
Geneen puts everything into perspective. So it’s been four weeks. How does that stack up against the years upon years that you’ve been dieting and shaming yourself and building well-grooved patterns and habits around eating mindlessly followed by depriving yourself?

Insight and “aha” moments aren’t enough. We need to take action with intention and mindfulness, as opposed to habitual unconsciousness. When you commit to an action, you go against your unconscious tendencies.

This question reminds me of a chapter in the book This Year I Will… when Author M.J. Ryan points out that learning happens in three stages. The first stage, POST HOC, is when you realize after the fact that you screwed up. “Oh wait, I just ate that bag of Cheez-its when I wasn’t hungry. What’s going on with me?” We finally realize that we didn’t follow the practice Eat When You’re Hungry once we’re licking salt out of the bottom of the bag.

Before we started this retreat, we wouldn’t have even realized what exactly we did wrong. We would have gone into shame mode, which doesn’t fit into the practices. And even if we do go into shame mode, we are now aware that it’s not productive. So if you’re in the POST HOC phase, don’t beat yourself up! You’re learning!

The second stage of learning, AD HOC, is when you are aware that you shouldn’t do something and you do it anyway. Maybe the eating of the Cheez-its happens when you’re fully aware that you aren’t hungry and you choose to eat them anyway, full-well-knowing before you even dip your hand into the bag that you aren’t following the practice.

The third stage of learning, PRE HOC, is when you’re doing it – it’s like riding a bike, and you have more successes than failures. This is the stage that Geneen is stressing to us we need to move towards; we need to take action in order to progress to this stage. If you don’t get on the bike, you’re never going to learn how to ride it. So get on the bike. You’re gonna fall off. No big whoop.

Ryan says, “Recognizing you’ve blown it is progress! … There’s always a phase in creating forward motion when all you notice is how hard it is and how little you’ve moved forward. … The trick is to learn from the experience without judging yourself…”

Ryan recommends learning what would help you out next time, like maybe placing a visible reminder so we won’t be mindless about our mistakes.

Geneen says that when your actions are aligned with your heart’s desire, then there’s a daily remembrance that you’re acting on your own behalf, out of love for yourself. When you love a child, you tell them they’re going to be sick if they eat candy all day. Treat yourself with that same loving care.

For dinner tonight, I ate whole wheat spaghetti and turkey meatballs. One bowl, because I knew I would feel ill otherwise. One small cereal bowl, even though there was just a little bit of pasta left over begging to be finished off.

So I wrapped up the rest and took it to work for lunch today. In the past, I would have known I was going to feel ill afterwards, yet I would have eaten too much anyway. I might not be wholly devoted to my practices at this stage, but I am absolutely making progress.

Geneen reiterates that there will be times that we do eat when we’re not hungry. Use that experience to notice what’s coming up when you’re doing that – is it boredom, sadness, anger, fear?

When you’re conscious about eating sitting down when you’re hungry and stopping when you’ve had enough, your whole relationship with food will change. Geneen says that act of eating mindfully will open up a whole can of worms. What happens when we stop using food to drug ourselves is that the whole NON-food-related side of your life comes forward – and we’re practicing being with that.

So take heart, little campers! We’re learning!

I’m faithful to being messed up and not feeling my fear. I don’t take responsibility for myself.
Geneen says that when we’re kids, we learn ways of being that are usually kind of messed up. We’re raised by humans who have their own skews and perceptions, and so from our human parents, we learn distortions – the messed-up-ed-ness – that we’re faithful to in order to survive and be loved.

There is a “mother” that got installed inside you. This “mother” came from bits and pieces of your actual mom outside, combined with a lot of your own versions of how you perceive her and your own interpretations added and subtracted.

Through doing this work and becoming conscious about food, our messed-up-ed-ness comes up when we realize that we are the child who is less powerful, or a failure, or who won’t get it together. We’re loyal to that learned messed-up-ed-ness because of the love and belonging it earned us. Most of us would rather not be disloyal to our “mothers” because we need that love to survive.

THAT is worthy of questioning. Who are you being loyal to when you are being loyal to the “mother” and loyal to the messed-up-ed-ness?

In my family when I was growing up, I had two grandparents who were very slim. They were capable of being a bit Judgey McJudge Pants with their children and grandchildren who were not on the fit side of the fence. My mom and her mother, both beautiful and curvaceous women, could be victims of the slim camp at times.

I happened to be an athletic kid. I loved swimming competitively from a young age through high school, and I tried other sports over the years like soccer, softball and tennis. I was no bean pole, but I suppose I was fit. It’s hard for me to admit that even now, because it feels disloyal to my mother. My real mother didn’t tell me to “choose sides” or anything like that, so this would be my inner “mother” talking.

When my mom would entertain and cook lavish meals for guests, I would feel as if I were being disloyal to her unless I ate with abandon to show how much I love her, all of her, just the way she is, and her efforts to feed us with her love. To reject her advances with food, in my mind, would be putting myself at risk of being unloved, at siding with the critical and thin family members. I wonder if I still keep myself a bit fleshy to prove that I’m not one of “them.”

Geneen says that when we change, we feel disloyal to that version of ourselves – to the “mother” and to the messed-up-ed-ness that we think we need in order to be loved.

Who and what are you being loyal to when you overeat? Think of your conditioning, your history, and the voices you’ve internalized.

Realize that when you’re loyal to the messed-up-ed-ness, that’s the kid talking. Have compassion for her, but realize that buying into coddling your “mother” is not far from feeling like a victim. Nobody else can do it or fix it for you now.

From the adult place, realize that only you can do the hard work for you. Here’s a map of the territory, but you need to walk the territory. Your body, your heart, and your intention needs to do the work.

So again — Who and what are you being loyal to when you overeat? Think of your conditioning, your history, and the voices you’ve internalized. Do it, do it! Get on the bike!

Where does exercise, physical movement, come into play?
Just like with food, it’s time to drop the guilt and shame shtick when it comes to exercise. Just because you read that you’re supposed to do cardio for this many minutes per week, and strength training this many times, blah blah blah. If you didn’t know all that, then how do you think your body wants to move, and what would feel good to your body?

If you think you hate exercise, then you need to try a few things and take your mind out of the equation. You’re going to make time for some movement for your sweet body, for yourself. Give yourself some options and see what your body likes to do.

Bodies like to move, they need to. Geneen encourages us to pay attention to the kind of movement that would feel best to your body. Walking? Swimming? Jumping rope? Hiking? What is it that would feel good? Almost every kid, even the bookworm, likes to move and to be outside. Movement is something for us to discover again.

Listen to the natural impulses of your body. The body knows what it needs and wants. It wants:

• Rest
• Contact
• Food
• Movement

When you sense your body wanting one of those things, then give it to your body!

Geneen knows when she’s been working all day or she’s stressed, she needs to get outside and move to give her body relief. Her mind would say, “Take a bath, read a book, get on the internet.” But her body loves to move, so she doesn’t get engaged with her mind, and then it becomes effortless. She says it takes effort to be effortless. Listen to the body over and over, and you will build movement into your day.

What You’re Hungry for and Finding Your Enough
We each possess a soul, a spirit; we possess a true nature or an essence.

However, instead we believe we are made up of our thoughts and feelings, our past and conditioning, our history and our bodies. We don’t realize that we’ve lost track of who we are, of that true nature. And so we feel homelessness. We feel separated from ourselves.

When you feel separated from yourself, you feel empty and wounded. You have that feeling like you can’t get enough when you aren’t connected to who you really are.

We incorrectly identify with our personality, our ego, whether we are smart, pretty, thin, kind, lovable, and what we do for other people. We identify with who we take ourselves to be. When things aren’t unfolding in our lives or we feel stuck, it’s because our beliefs, attitudes and patterns of reaction are in our way.

We don’t question what’s presenting itself to us in that moment: the barriers, the attitudes, the patterns. Instead of focusing on the space between the thoughts, we take ourselves to be the thoughts, and because we don’t question them, we just think it’s the truth.

What we’re longing for is to have ourselves. What we’re hungry for is our own essence and true nature.

Inquiry and Coming Home to Ourselves
Inquiry allows us to question our deeply held beliefs. Inquiry allows us to question what we think is unquestionable. Inquiry allows us to question what we have decided is the truth, the way things are, who we are, and the way life is.

We need a way to question all those things and come home to ourselves. When we do that, we’re able to notice what’s standing in the way between us and who we take ourselves to be. We uncover the wisdom and vastness of who we are, that space of just being.

Until we reconnect with ourselves, we will never get enough from the outside. No matter what external riches we have, who loves us or what we accomplish, we will always feel lonely as long as we remain disconnected from ourselves.

Food is the doorway to inquiry and discovering our true nature. When we give ourselves time to hang out with ourselves, to simply be in our bodies, we get to know ourselves.

This sounds great and all, but how do we actually connect with that part?
The short answer: Inquiry.

And now for the long answer.

When you’re wrapped up in a thought, blaming yourself or someone else, feeling puffed up and huffy over something or collapsed inward and down, then you’re believing something that’s not true. You’re turning to old thoughts and patterns. It’s time to reconnect with yourself via inquiry, and here’s how.

Inquiry steps and basics:

1. Come back into your body. Ask, “What am I feeling right now?” Remember – the answer is found in YOUR BODY, not your head. If you’re feeling sad, bored or lonely, what does that feel like in your body?
2. Ask yourself a litany of sensation questions. Where is the feeling in my body? How does it affect me? Is it familiar? How old do I feel right now? Does the feeling have a shape, sensation, temperature, color? What happens as I feel the sensations directly in my body?
3. Be in touch with what effect your asking all these questions has on your experience. As you ask the questions, it will impact you in the moment. The fact that you’re asking means that you already separated from the total merge with the feeling itself. You are allowing yourself to begin coming home to yourself.

Things That Aren’t Going to Help Inquiry; Things That Interfere With the Direct Experience of Being in the Body
Inquiry involves openness without a purpose. It’s the inquiry itself you pursue in order to come home to yourself and be yourself. The below will interfere with that connection.

1. The Voice. Until you disengage, you believe you are what The Voice says. The Voice says you are your personality, your conditioning, your ego, attitudes and memories. When you believe that, you don’t believe you have true nature or essence.

2. Having an Agenda. When we do inquiry, we can’t be trying to get something, fix something, go somewhere or accomplish a goal. The purpose of inquiry is to answer the longing in your heart and to know yourself before you die. It won’t give you the thing you thought you wanted in the external world. It’s to answer something inside you.

3. Comparative Judgment. In inquiry, you can’t compare how you’re feeling with what you want to be feeling or with how someone else feels. You can’t compare how you’re feeling now to past experience. This is figuring out feeling in the mind, not the body, which means we lose the connection to our experience.

4. Pain Avoidance. If you think discomfort is to be avoided, then that prevents inquiry. We can’t have a fear of pain when we practice inquiry. We need to drop the painful mental stories, which certainly helps. But we need to feel what the body is feeling.

How Do You Get in Touch With Yourself? How Do You begin Inquiry?
You start wherever you are. Food is a great doorway. If you eat when you’re not hungry, if you eat while you’re standing, if you did tonight’s meditation while typing or eating, then be curious. Ask what’s going on.

Start where you are and become curious about that. If you’re all huffy about something, you’re believing something that’s not true. So start there.

Your direct experience right now is the closest thing to true nature that you have. Your life is the one you need to be having. It’s the link to you. Be curious and question your experience right now. It’s how you start.

This Week’s Practices / Action Steps
Although she likes the term “practices” because we need to practice them to become good at them, this week Geneen is calling them “action steps” because we need to take action. Nothing is going to happen if we keep having aha’s and not translating them into what we need to do.

Without further ado:
1. Eat what your body wants.
What your body wants is different from what you think you want. What your body wants has nothing to do with guilt, what somebody else is eating, or what you didn’t let yourself eat two weeks ago.

Eating what your body wants means be in the present moment and ask what your body wants now. Does your body want something hot, cold, smooth, crunchy, salty, something with protein or fat, or something lighter?

If you’re thinking in quantities, like, “I want two pizzas – or a whole carton of ice cream,” that’s not in the present moment. You body can answer with a description, but not with a quantity or an amount because your body only feels in the present moment.

That said, once you’ve had three bites, then you need to keep asking your body, “And what do you want now?” While you’re eating, keep checking in with your present-focused body. You will get satisfied mid-bite. Moment to moment, check in so you know when you’ve had enough.

2. Notice what you are loyal to.
Who are you loyal to? When you engage in those repetitive patterns, or when you find yourself retelling old stories, ask, “How old am I right now? Who am I being loyal to right now?”

Let’s go kiddos! Get on your bikes and start riding!

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Read the following for more information:
• Introducing the Women, Food and God Online Retreat
• WEEK ONE: Ending the War
• WEEK TWO: Beyond What’s Broken
• WEEK THREE: What Are You Really Hungry For?

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Read the following for more information:
•    Introducing the Women, Food and God Online Retreat
•    WEEK ONE: Ending the War
•    WEEK TWO: Beyond What’s Broken

Week Three Course Overview
•    You have to work the practices to “get” the lessons. A whole world of insight opens when you practice Eat When You’re Hungry.
•    How do I know what to eat when I’m hungry?
•    How do I eat when I’m hungry within the constraints of my schedule?
•    How do I eat when I’m hungry when I have food restrictions?
•    The definition of inquiry and what inquiry is not. How to begin inquiry.
•    Drop Your Agenda; Question Your Assumptions
•    More Ways to Deal With The Voice

Meditation
When Geneen begins the meditation this week, I again find myself looking for something else to do. This week, I really fool myself because I’m convinced it’s highly necessary work that needs to be done immediately. Yeah, at 9PM.

When Geneen says, “Notice how much pull there is to not be right here. How aggravated you get to be asked to be present, to be with yourself.” Those words bring me back into the moment.

Within the meditation as Geneen asks us to notice the sensations in our bodies, she mentions two body parts that people are usually unhappy with – thighs and belly.

She asks us to place one palm on the navel, the other palm on top. “Feel movement, your breath, just notice the preciousness of this breath, this life. Allowing yourself to arrive right here right now.”

It’s a gentle reminder that we can notice and feel our body parts for what they are — living, feeling parts of ourselves — without judging them.

Participant Questions About the Guideline “Eat When You’re Hungry”
Geneen kicks things off by telling us that we have to do the practices to learn this work. She says that if you did last week’s practice of actually eating when you’re hungry, you would have gotten a glimpse of what you’re actually hungry for that isn’t food.

Jump right in at any time to begin only eating when you’re hungry, and a world opens up. When you only eat when you’re hungry, you stop dampening your heart’s desires and drowning them with food; you discover what you want besides food.

I got a glimpse that I’m hungry for neatness, organization, a sense of well-being in my home. It’s easy to procrastinate by eating when I’m tired and bored and don’t want to clean up. But when I resisted that urge to eat, I saw that what I really wanted was the mess to go away. My home is neater today for it, and I finally began cleaning out my closet yesterday. I’ve been putting off that project for months.

I wonder what else I can accomplish when I don’t use food as a procrastination tool.

Geneen is firm that each action step, every practice she gives us, relates to all that we’re doing, so you can find out your hidden needs in just one of the practices.

I’m Confused About What to Eat When I’m Hungry
Geneen says it’s natural that a lot of us are confused about what’s right and wrong in the realm of food considering our lifetimes of dieting.

The first step in learning what to eat is tuning into the body. Remember that if you think you want junk food, then that’s what your mind wants, not your body. Your body doesn’t want to be fed loads of grease and sugar, because too much junk food makes your body feel bad.

Tuning into your body means using the direct experience, feeling the sensations and the feedback that your body gives you. See what happens when you eat certain things. Do you feel fueled and energetic? Do you feel sick or tired? See how your body feels when you eat certain foods and you’ll discover what it is that your body wants.

If you think you want something sweet to cap off a meal, and you are truly and honestly unsure whether it’s your mind or body talking, then try a small eating experiment. See what happens. Maybe you try eating a little something sweet and see how it makes your body feel. Conversely, you can try not eating something sweet and then see how that makes your body feel.

Experiment and stay tuned into your body to learn what your body wants and how it reacts to different foods. For most of us, this is going to be a learning process after spending so much time ignoring what our bodies need to feel nourished. Take the time and attention to tune into your body to learn about its needs.

Geneen refers to the way a kid eats, before he discovers sugar. He gravitates towards foods like broccoli, fruit and sweet potatoes. Before we were inundated by commercialized food and our taste buds were polluted by advertisements, what did your body want?

How to Eat When You’re Hungry Within the Confines of Your Schedule
In today’s world, not many of us are able to have access to the food we want, whenever we want it. We might start working at certain times and only get breaks at specific times. Since we all need to respect the reality our routines bring us, we need to make the guidelines our own. Figure out, realistically, how the guidelines can work within the constraints of your day-to-day existence.

If you aren’t hungry now but you won’t have the chance to eat later, then you have to use honesty combined with problem solving and figure that out, whether it means eating something small now, or bringing something portable with you that you know will nourish you later.

For example, if you aren’t hungry at 8am but you know you won’t be able to eat for hours on end, and within that timeframe you are going to become ravenous and light-headed, then you have to acknowledge that reality and take care of yourself. The guidelines are not iron clad rules meant to constrain your behavior. They are meant to help you evaluate situations honestly and do the right thing for yourself.

If you’re only given a meal break when you aren’t hungry, then just eat a little bit at break time to sustain you, and then have a snack when you’re actually hungry. Use the guidelines to help you best take care of yourself while listening to your body.

Learn Your Signs of Hunger
Working with the eating guidelines means understanding your body and giving your body what it needs as fuel when it needs it. To do this, you need to know the signs of being hungry for you. Not everyone gets a rumbley tummy as their first sign of hunger. Some of us get spacey, cranky or headaches.

Track your own hunger and know your beginning hunger signs, and then decide when to eat. If you think of the 10-point hunger scale, 10 being stuffed and 0 being starving, then maybe you want to eat something when you’re a 2 or 4 on the hunger scale. If you wait until 0, you are in famine-I’m-going-to-die mode and it’s extremely difficult to make wise decisions about food in that state. Geneen doesn’t recommend getting that hungry.

Food Restrictions
Many of us are diabetics, have celiac disease, are lactose intolerant, have food allergies or other restrictions surrounding what they may eat. (Or if you’re like me, then just looking at sugar puts you into sleepy time mode.) It’s easy to fall into a mindset of deprivation when you think “I can’t have…”

But there are different ways you can look at it. You can think how the deprivation comes when you eat the foods that make your body sick. When you eat these restricted foods, then you deprive yourself of feeling well.

You can flip the scenario to think “Either way, there is a chance for me to have what I want: I can feel well. Or if there’s an instance where I really want to eat the food, then once in a blue moon, I can go for it.” Then you have the best of both worlds. You can feel well in your day-to-day life without telling yourself you can’t have the food as long as you live.

Geneen, who is gluten intolerant, had baklava when she was in Greece. She made a conscious choice; she knew wouldn’t feel good, but she went with her eyes open rather than feeling like a victim.

Lots of people, either verbally or mentally, do a lot of whining around food, “I don’t get to eat what I really want!” However, the big question is, what do you want more than you want that food?? What do you want most of all?

The Voice Can Crush Your Dreams
The Voice makes it extremely tough to discern what you are really hungry for. The Voice can influence our beliefs, and it’s our beliefs that often prevent us from putting into practice what we cherish. It’s your beliefs, often driven by The Voice, that keep you from asking for and receiving what you’re really hungry for.

For more information about The Voice, read: WEEK TWO: Beyond What’s Broken

Most of us are blended with The Voice, meaning we haven’t yet picked it out as a separate entity; you might experience it as you talking to yourself. When we feel confused about what’s good for us and we feel afraid we’ll fail, we’re often being influenced by The Voice.

The thought of learning to play piano, traveling to China or going on a bike ride can cause nervous anticipation or excitement. The Voice can jump in and tell us we can’t do it, which quells our excitement. When we feel deadened to these new possibilities, it makes it hard to figure out what we’re really hungry for.

More Ways to Deal With The Voice
When you notice The Voice talking you out of your efforts, here are some tactics for handling it.

• See The Voice small and powerless like a mouse and put it in a jar with a lid on it.
• Picture a volume knob and turn down the volume on The Voice so you can’t hear it.
• You can change the channel so you tune out to whatever The Voice was saying.

Do whatever you need to do to make sure you separate yourself from it.

What if I Think I Need to Lose Weight Before I Practice the Guidelines?
Geneen addresses the instance of what happens when someone feels anxiety or desperation about her health and feels she needs to lose weight first before trying to practice the eating guidelines.

Unfortunately, Geneen has seen many come back to her later heavier than they were when she first saw them. She says it takes discernment and honesty to see where you’re coming from when you ask a question like that. It’s new and unfamiliar and scary to trust yourself to ask what you’re hungry for and what you want.

The Voice berates you and says you don’t know when you’re hungry. There’s often a thrill or a fear when we start this process. We often think we should go on a diet and then come back and do this later. Geneen says it’s a common theme.

However, Geneen says if you truly feel that your weight is imminently life threatening, then you need to go inside and be very honest about what’s going on when you’re in a place that’s so precarious physically. What goes on when you overeat? What are your thoughts, beliefs and feelings? What is food giving you and doing for you?

Geneen would never say don’t see a doctor – it’s crucial we work with health practioners in regards to our health. Of course if your doctor feels and you feel that your life is in danger, then that needs to be addressed.

Geneen says the caveat is if you don’t stick to the doctor’s program, you could feel like a failure and rebel. And even if you do stick to the program and lose the weight, but you don’t reach the issues that are putting the weight on, then you will turn to food once again. So the best way is to be with what’s going on at the same time that you protect your health and your life so you can be here on earth to look at your beliefs. Looking at your beliefs is important regardless of what you decide.

What is Inquiry?
Inquiry is the practice where the rubber meets the road in terms of discovering our beliefs. Inquiry allows you to be curious about what you really believe, and what you feel as a result of what you believe.

We think we’re not supposed to let ourselves feel; we’re afraid of pain. That’s why inquiry is a practice like learning the violin. We won’t be good at it at first. Inquiry allows you to question the beliefs on which you’re building your life, your sense of self and the feelings that come from that.

Geneen says that most beliefs are unconscious, and she gives us a list of examples:

• Other people are special.
• Life is hard.
• I always get the short end of the stick.
• I’m smarter than everyone else, and why can’t they see that?
• If they really saw me, they would love me.
• I’ll always be separated from what I need and want in life.
• Life sucks.
• I’m not good enough.
• I’ll never get it right.

Remember from last week: beliefs lead to feelings, which lead to actions.

We can feel these beliefs weaving through our days from when we wake up in the morning until we go to bed at night. We’re loyal to these beliefs unconsciously. We act out a combination of beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and how we see ourselves. We don’t question what we believe about ourselves and our lives, because we take it to be true.

Inquiry is the process of questioning what we believe is truth. Inquiry has us explore the fundamentals of who we think we are, what we have, what we’re supposed to be, how we define success and failure, how we react, and the feelings we have.

To inquire, you have to want to know what you don’t know – you have to be curious.

We need to question our resistance to the way things are and to what we’re feeling. Often when we’re sad, we want to push it away. In inquiry, what do you do when you feel sad? Be curious about it!

We’ve long since buried our curiosity. Think how your curiosity was treated when you were a child. Maybe people got annoyed with all the questions you asked. Maybe you were ignored. So as you get older, you stop caring why. You just want it to be different, and you’re no longer curious. It’s time to revive that curiosity and start wondering and feeling again.

The Opposite of Inquiry
Feeling like a victim is the opposite of inquiry: “Someone wronged me and someone else has to make it better.” This stance takes yourself out of the equation of your own life. It makes you powerless to facilitate your own circumstances.

Conversely, inquiry puts you at the center of your own life. No matter what’s going on, you can be curious about it and understand what’s happening.

We often internalize and repeat what’s said to us: “So and so was mean to me.” That’s the victim mentality, and whatever was said to us is in the past. Now in the present, no one else has the means to shrivel us or make us small, to make you feel that bad, unless you believe it yourself. Your feelings are your own. Inquiry is ability to question those beliefs and feelings.

How Do You Practice Inquiry?
When you ignore your body and eat what your mind wants instead, or you eat and make yourself feel bad – that’s a doorway, an opening, a chance to know yourself better. It opens the door to the inquiry process. If you feel sad, then inquiry is being willing to be curious about your sadness as if it’s the very first time you’re feeling it.

Inquiry means you will go ahead and feel the sadness and explore it rather than struggling to suppress it. To practice inquiry, you aren’t repressing emotions (judging, being cranky) nor are you acting them out (stomping, sulking, shouting, etc.) To do inquiry, you will be with the direct feelings of the sadness. Be in your body physically in order to explore it.

To really explore an emotion:

1. You can’t have an agenda or preferences as to the end result. Don’t analyze the emotion. Don’t try to figure it out. You can’t think, “Okay, I’ll feel the sadness now so I can feel happy afterwards.”
2. Drop any and all judgments about what you’re feeling. Judgments are The Voice chiming in. Disengage from The Voice, because it will tell you you’re going to mess up.
3. Ask yourself where you feel the emotion in your body. What is the sensation like? Describe it in physical terms.

Be curious and open. You can do this alone, you can do it as a written exercise or with a buddy. Any way you do it, be kind to yourself.

Geneen gives the example of being out with friends and becoming a bit sullen and cranky. She realized she was pushing herself down in the group. She was having responses to people, but she didn’t want to say them. The crankiness was a result of judging and pushing herself away.

When you sense an emotion, ask yourself kindly, what’s going on? Where do you feel the emotion? Your chest, your stomach, your head? This is the sensation location. Ask what is the sensation? Is it burning, pulsing, tingling, aching?

If you notice that you’re angry, become curious about it. Where do I feel it? Name the body part. What does it feel like? Wind? A Hammer? What color is it? It is red, blue or grey? Is it like a pounding or a floating sensation?

The feelings that come when you don’t use food — if you don’t push the feelings away — the feelings have something to tell you. If you notice, “I don’t like what’s going on.” Then ask, “What does it feel like?

Start by wanting to know. Begin within your body and the sensation. Don’t involve your mind. Your mind has a story about the emotion, and a story can be clouded by beliefs and The Voice. Shake the story, and just focus on the body.

What Does Inquiry Do?
Geneen tells the story of a woman who eats at loneliness. The woman would often eat and read by herself. She had the belief or the story that people who live alone at her age are losers, and eating kept her from feeling like a loser. Geneen posed the question, who told her she was a loser?

Sometimes we tell ourselves stories about the pain, which can intensify our ideas of what emotions are like. We say things to ourselves like, “This means I’m unlovable, I’m a loser.” Ask yourself, “Is that true?” Question your assumptions. Be curious about who told you that. Question the beliefs that keep you from being yourself and having your life.

Inquiry deconstructs the self by questioning the assumptions that come up and the reasons we use food. We think if we feel our sadness, it will rip us apart. Sadness doesn’t actually feel like that, and inquiry helps us figure that out. When we discover that sadness isn’t what we think it is, but sadness might be calmness or clear space, when you feel into it, you feel more alive. What if, to you, sadness feels like openness? It might, or might not, but we wouldn’t know unless we allow ourselves to feel it.

Drop Your Agenda; Question Your Assumptions
When we practice inquiry, we must learn to be in the process in the moment, and stop trying to fix things. In inquiry, you are in touch with essence itself and with what’s true, just the physical sensations in our bodies, without stories or agendas. There’s nothing to do afterwards. What happens next happens naturally and spontaneously, and you become open to the truth.

Inquiry starts by wanting to know the truth. If you have an agenda instead, then you want to know what to do, as if there’s some place better to get to. What we really want to do with inquiry is to simply be with what your deepest truth is in that moment.

Compulsive eating attempts to avoid what’s there because we make the assumption that the truth, our emotions, will destroy us. And sometimes our emotions do hurt. Sometimes there is huge grief to be felt. So then the answer is to get support and allow yourself to feel it. But if you eat to avoid the grief, then you actually wind up with a double portion of grief. The grief is still there, and you heap the problem of eating on top of it.

Geneen has worked with parents who have lost their children, people who have experienced loss beyond all loss. These people can be with their pain and feel it. Yes, it’s staggering grief, but they live through it. Through inquiry, you learn that allowing yourself to feel your emotions won’t destroy you. Emotions ebb and flow. They come and go, moment to moment. No situations are unbearable or unworkable.

This Week’s Practices
1) Third Eating Guideline: Eat without distractions.
Distractions include radio, TV, reading material, intense or anxiety-producing conversations or music.

2) Inquiry: start developing your curiosity.
Start being curious when you’ve done something you told yourself you’re not going to do. Ask, “What was that about?” Be curious and be kind to yourself. Don’t think you know the answers.

Intend to follow through on these two practices and see what happens. If you don’t follow them, then be curious why.

Past Week’s Practices
Intend to do these on a daily basis for the rest of your life.

Eat When You’re Hungry
Don’t eat when you aren’t hungry, eat when you are hungry and stop eating when you’ve had enough. Be willing to be uncomfortable and know there are times you won’t feel like refraining from eating. If there are times that you decide to eat even though you’re not hungry, be curious and notice what happens.

Be Astonished
Each day, notice what you already have — not what’s wrong or what needs to be changed. Think about the abundance that’s in your world already.

Living “as if”
Live as if you’re worth your own time, love and attention. Live like you like yourself. Live like you like your body.

Eat sitting down in a calm environment. This does not include the car.
Eat as if you’re worth your time and attention. You wouldn’t eat standing up, in the car, or tasting the food on your way from the stove to the table. You wouldn’t eat a meal in hiding before everyone else sits down so that you’re full when they get there.

One More Practice From Me
Be aware of and disengage from The Voice to help all of your practices become easier.

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Read the following for more information:
•    Introducing the Women, Food and God Online Retreat
•    WEEK ONE: Ending the War
•    WEEK TWO: Beyond What’s Broken

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Read the following for more information:

• Introducing the Women, Food and God Online Retreat
• Ending the War: Review of Women Food and God Online Retreat Week One

Week Two Course Overview
We covered a lot this week! Here are some bulleted main points from the lecture:

• Geneen elaborates on how you can trust yourself and your hunger to eat the right foods in the right amounts and at the right times.

• When we follow the guideline “Eat when you’re hungry,” we can start turning towards living the life that we want instead of dulling our emotions with food.

• Learn about what makes you tick when you examine your actions and trace them back to your beliefs.

• You are innately whole and good, but your critical inner voice makes you doubt your inner compass, your capabilities and your greatness. This critical inner voice, a.k.a. The Voice, shames you and keeps you small.

• First, you must distinguish when you hear that voice. Second, you must interrupt The Voice with even greater wrath and force than it uses towards you. When you extricate yourself from its nearly ongoing communiqués, you allow for your transformation to living the life you want.

The Meditation
Geneen walked us through another meditation where we were to inhabit our bodies and be aware of our surroundings. She explained that this is a tough practice to conquer, and we’ll do it each week.

Even though we might feel bored, frustrated or impatient while she takes us through the slow-paced, non-critical tour of our bodies, our appendages and torsos, there’s a good reason for doing it.

Geneen says that most of us don’t spend our time where we are. We dwell on the past or worry about the future, always letting our minds wander and rarely focusing on what it’s like to be in our bodies. The problem is, we’re missing out on the here and now and we’re out of touch with our physical selves. We can engage in the present moment by spending time in our bodies.

Geneen says that taking this time for ourselves might seem like a luxury, but she considers it a necessity to be able to be where we are now. And this is important: Hunger and fullness signals come from the body, so we need to learn how to be there to listen to it.

She said that if we are checking out during our guided body tour, to notice that. I felt like,

“Well, I have an excuse because I’m seven months pregnant and inherently uncomfortable. If I let myself feel my body, the way my back aches, I’ll want to get out of this chair and not sit through the whole session.”

I was guilty of having my Facebook page open, and felt caught red-handed when Geneen asked, “Is your Facebook page open?” She didn’t yell at me though. She simply said, “Notice that.”

Then it occurred to me that just about everybody on the call probably had an excuse or thought process as to why they didn’t need to fully listen. And the weird thing was that when I did tune into my body, shift my position and rub my back, the pain went away and I became very relaxed.

The big lesson Geneen points out is that we need to notice just how darn difficult it is to pay attention to ourselves. She says there’s a guideline called, “Eat without distractions,” and if it’s hard to pay attention to yourself now, then it will be hard to eat without distractions. So that’s why we’re practicing paying attention to ourselves now, and each week of the retreat.

Reinforcement of the Guideline: Eat When You’re Hungry
Geneen went over some common themes that have arisen among participants as they engaged in last week’s practice, “Eat when you’re hungry.” She says it’s likely that, previously, a lot of us had been eating according to a plan or a schedule or what we think we should eat, ignoring hunger cues.

If we’re not hungry when we wake up in the morning, then it doesn’t matter what the experts say about eating breakfast. Maybe you’re not hungry for an hour or two after you wake up. So then wait until you become hungry to eat! The same idea holds about lunchtime. If you aren’t hungry, then who is to say you need to eat at that moment? Wait until your body is asking for food.

I remember when I was young and thin and naturally ate intuitively. I had a coffee with cream for breakfast at around 10AM, and then lunch was a hot entrée from the work cafeteria, usually a balanced meal of meat, vegetables and starch. It was very rare that I ate a huge dinner and felt uncomfortably full at bedtime. I only ate what I needed, and I stopped eating when I was satisfied. I simply didn’t think that much about food.

I remember in those days hearing all those studies about how only fat people don’t eat breakfast. But I was completely disinterested in food in the morning and I certainly wasn’t fat. I shrugged my shoulders and ate what I wanted, when I wanted. It worked for me.

At some point over the years, after reading this study or that study, I started eating five times a day, including a big breakfast. Now I eat breakfast out of habit and it’s not based on hunger. I eat too much at dinner, mindlessly and in front of the TV. I no longer eat intuitively, and it seems like a huge struggle to stay in shape.

Geneen says that if this week you ditched that plan or schedule and ate when you were hungry, then it’s likely that you were faced with the realization that you need much less food than you thought you do. Perhaps you didn’t get as hungry as often as you thought you would.

I certainly had some breakthroughs in my eating habits by paying attention to hunger cues, and also asking myself “What do I want to eat?” instead of relying on the old stand-bys. If I want a veggie stirfry with shrimp and mango for lunch, then that’s what I’ll have. I no longer think, “Oh that’s too much trouble,” or “No, that’s not what I planned to eat.”

I’m eating healthier foods, more fruits and vegetables and a greater variety of food. I’ve been eating a smaller breakfast and feeling more energetic without having a big feast sitting in my belly. And I only woke up in the night with heartburn once this week, which as the pregnant ladies know, is a big victory.

Why Eat When You’re Hungry? Why Not Follow a Plan or Schedule?
If you aren’t even hungry to begin with when you start eating, then you won’t know when to stop eating. Geneen says that if we eat when we aren’t hungry, then we’re totally out of synch with what our body wants; we won’t know what to eat or when to stop. On the other hand, if we eat when we’re hungry, then we know to stop eating when we’re no longer hungry.

Geneen explains that there’s a big difference between mouth hunger and body hunger. Mouth hunger is in your head. You might see a certain food and decide you want it, whether you need it or not. She says if you’ve been on a diet, then you might be convinced that your body wants food you’re not “supposed” to have while dieting, or food you don’t eat without guilt. Geneen says that’s deciding with your mind, and has nothing to do with your body.

Instead, body hunger is connected with what will nourish the body. Geneen says your body wants to feel good, energetic and vital; your body wants to move with ease. It takes discernment to figure out what your body really wants. [Hint: probably not sugar.]

What Should You Turn to When You Aren’t Hungry?
Geneen says, “Once you begin following that guideline [Eat when you’re hungry] a lot comes up.” When you trust your hunger and listen to your body, then you stop using food to push away emotions, feelings and issues.

Geneen says you might be bored, lonely, sad or afraid you won’t like your own company. There might be that feeling of, “Okay, I don’t need food, SO NOW WHAT?!” You might have doubts that not eating is the right thing to do according to the diet experts.

The good news is that these uncomfortable feelings are the doorway to your new life! When you’re feeling uncomfortable, ask yourself how you want to live. What do you want your life to be like? See what’s most important to you.

Once you decide what you want out of your life, you need to keep re-deciding on a daily basis. We need to re-decide every day that we’re only going to eat when we’re hungry. At least in the beginning while we’re getting used to it, it’s going to be scary. We’re going to have not-so-nice emotions and we’re going to want to go back to old patterns. However, we need to re-decide every day how we want to live our lives.

This brings to my mind that famous Zig Ziglar quote: “People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.”

Every day, we need to decide that we’re going to get out there and live the life we want. Over time, it will get easier as we gain new habits and ways of being.

Learn About Yourself
Geneen offers us another opportunity to learn about ourselves. She says that being in tune with our hunger and eating will show us the beliefs that we have, both in our approach to food and other areas of our lives.

She says a belief is a thought you take to be true, and a thought you’ve had repeatedly is a belief. Thoughts lead to feelings, and then feelings lead to behaviors. Thus, thoughts and beliefs drive actions.

When we want to change our actions, we should discover the thoughts and beliefs that are driving them. We often don’t question our beliefs because we think they’re facts, but it’s time now to dig them up and face them and be curious and open about your beliefs.

What Are Your Beliefs?
Explore why you can’t eat a meal by yourself while you take the time to pay attention to your body and the sensations you’re feeling. Maybe you believe you can’t take the time to eat a meal by yourself because it’s self indulgent and you need to give to others, and not yourself, to be loved.

We all have our reasons. Maybe you have a fear that it’s not okay for you to take time for yourself. If you rush with food — whether it’s at the fridge, at your desk, standing up, or in the car — that’s a signal that you won’t take time for yourself.

Maybe when you’re eating alone, you’re bored, lonely, irritated, frustrated or angry, and you don’t want to pay attention to your body.

Maybe you think you always need to be learning, taking in, understanding, achieving, fixing, accomplishing and you think it’s not okay to slow down.

This is definitely my problem! I eat the majority of my meals at my desk at work in front of my computer. Come to think of it, this morning I ate my breakfast in front of my computer, and I do that just about every day. The only meal I don’t eat in front a computer is dinner, and I do that in front of the TV. DOH!

Part of the problem might be my eating “schedule.” I plan to eat 3 meals, plus 2 snacks each day. I feel like if I took the time out to eat each of those meals carefully, I wouldn’t get anything done. And so I plan them ahead of time, and then eat them while multitasking. But if I eat only when I’m hungry, then I probably won’t eat as many meals in a day. This will free up the time for me to enjoy each of my meals like they’re special occasions on which I can concentrate.

Geneen says we all have a web of beliefs, feelings and actions. Our outward behavior is an expression of those beliefs. How we handle food can help trace the path back to what we believe.

So if I think about WHY I eat while multitasking, it might be because my belief that drives my actions is that if I’m seen as an underachiever or a slacker, then I’m a disgrace. I need to perform and succeed to be a worthy, loveable person. If I’m not superlative, then I should be punished and rejected.

Think about how you eat and why you don’t concentrate fully on mealtime. Explore what beliefs you might have about yourself that fuels those behaviors.

Unbrokeness
Geneen says we were born whole. She says children come into the world with a sense of fineness with the way they are. “They’re not self reflective. They don’t know that they know they’re fine.” As children, we all had a sense that we’re fine. There was an “unbrokeness” about ourselves. This is the biggest part of ourselves, and it’s been with us since birth.

She says that by the time we’re four or five years old, we’ve learned that some ways of being are acceptable and some are not. Some ways we express ourselves are loved, while others get rejected. Some behaviors are greeted with huge approval, some statements and expressions are met with anger, judgment, shaming or disapproval.

So we construct our identities and our self images based on what we discover is loveable and what’s not loveable. By the time we’re four or five, we have an ego, a sense of ourselves that’s aware of what it takes to be loved and what will lead to rejection and disapproval.

The Voice
We all have The Voice: this is the internalized parent, the inner critic, the super ego, the piece of your personality that is watching, assessing, judging, and deeming what’s right and wrong.

We learn The Voice from a collection of authority voices and cultural mores, including our parents, that tell us what to do. In the early years, The Voice is a protective measure and it helps us to learn to fit into our culture and society.

The Voice was a necessary part of learning how to grow up and how to embrace socially accepted behavior. It kept us from putting our hands on a hot stove. It probably helps us to look our best when going for a job interview and to avoid slurping our soup on a hot date. Sounds like a good thing to have around, right? RIGHT?!

Well, not always.

Why The Voice Isn’t Cool
The problem now as an adult with The Voice is that it won’t let you be in touch with the part of you that’s not broken. You have a hard time finding those moments of ease, joy and happiness with that Voice nattering on, wearing its Judgey McJudge Pants.

For example, you might be on the beach, smelling the salt air, hearing the waves and feeling the sand beneath your feet. You’re hanging out with yourself, feeling happy and free, just being you and feeling like all is right in your world. That’s a moment of unbrokeness. But then The Voice tells you that your giant ass is casting a shadow on the sun bathers sitting behind you. Not cool, Voice. Not cool!

The point is that The Voice can be overly harsh, nasty and judging. It can make you feel small and weak and unable to accomplish your goals.

As we grow up and experience life and become adults, we have something that’s better than The Voice. We have ourselves, our own clarity and what’s never been broken. We have our own inner compasses.

The Voice likes to convince us that our inner compass is broken, that we don’t know what’s best for ourselves and doles out a hearty portion of self-doubt.

We Must Deal With The Voice
That’s why it’s important to address The Voice — so we can be in touch with what isn’t broken and what’s utterly fine and loveable about ourselves. In order to really know ourselves, to be open, curious, and allowing ourselves to explore our feelings about food, in order to feel it’s ok to be ourselves and to live the life we know we’re meant to live, we must deal with The Voice.

The Voice tends to keep us from changing, from being, doing or saying anything that will upset the status quo. Right now, let’s call the status quo our conflicted relationship with food. Changing that relationship upsets The Voice.

When you try to change, The Voice comes in and stuns you. When you challenge yourself, The Voice can tell you that you aren’t capable. It cautions that you’re going to fail and it shakes your confidence. It cuts you off at the knees so you don’t have far to fall. It cuts you off before someone else can so you’ll be “safe” and powerless to undertake new changes and adventures.

When you’re listening to The Voice, you often feel small, weak, shamed, paralyzed, needy or desperate. You think you’re never going to get it right. You think you need an answer immediately and you rely on The Voice, which might tell you to go back on a diet, because you’re never going to get it right by yourself.

If we let it, The Voice will stop all transformation. It will tell you that you’re wrong and you don’t know what you’re doing. It clouds the objective truth with moral judgment that can be oppressive and discouraging.

First Step: Name The Voice
Unless we begin naming The Voice for what it is, we’ll never change. Changes become impossible and transformation is doomed until we recognize and disengage that part of ourselves that says, “Don’t try, what’s the matter with you? Who do you think you are?”

Geneen asks us to consider five recent judgments The Voice might have thrown our way. Think about the judgments you had when you looked in the mirror and ate your meals. The Voice can strike at any time, and is usually more frequent that you can imagine. Think about the last 15 minutes or the last hour.

Here are some judgments I noticed:

1) Why am I eating noodles and ice cream for dinner? Is that really what I should be eating?

2) I won’t be able to put the words together to write a good summary of tonight’s retreat. Last week was a fluke, and I won’t possibly write as well this week.

3) I can’t type fast enough to take good notes of what Geneen is saying and I’ll miss the point.

4) My belly is going to be so out of shape once I have this baby. (Ouch, really, THE VOICE? Lay off, man!)

I stopped looking for judgments after that last doozy. Geneen warns that the voice is vicious. Yowza!

So to elaborate on the first step, we need to separate out The Voice from who we really are. We’re so identified with it, that we don’t realize there’s a “me” and an “it.” When we’re blended with it, we don’t get that it’s possible to separate from The Voice. We feel ashamed and like we can’t change and we can’t do it right, but that’s just The Voice talking.

Name it. Recognize it. Be aware of its existence. Whenever there is a good / bad / right / wrong, The Voice is present and directing your experience.

When you become aware of The Voice, you’ll see how compelling it is. If we tell it to shut up, then how will we know what to eat and what to do? We might think, “I need that voice! It knows what’s right and wrong.” We’ve been identified with The Voice for so long we can’t imagine the freedom and clarity and unbrokeness we would have without it, because we keep being commandeered by The Voice.

The Voice is tricky. Sometimes it seems like we’re simply asking, “What if I never get there?” But that’s just another way The Voice has of saying we can’t get there. The Voice is speaking to you and you’re asking the question from the small place of, “I can’t do it.”

If we believe The Voice, then there’s no chance at change.

Second Step: Disengage From The Voice
We wouldn’t let anyone in the world talk to us like The Voice does. We’re carrying on that ongoing conversation with such meanness, such vitriol. It’s crucial that we learn to stop it, and disengaging comes when you stop it from speaking to you.

Separate from it and tell The Voice to get lost. Tell it to stop. Here a few tactics.

Remember that The Voice is powerful and nasty, so you don’t need to be polite or gentle with it. You can shout at it, seethe at it, and tell it where to go. Address your voice the way it needs to be addressed; come at it with more force than it comes at you.

You can say something as simple as, “Go away! You are not my friend!” Or you can hurl obscenities at it at top volume. Roll your eyes at it and say, “There you go again,” or you can just ignore it. But whatever you do, you need to disarm it and shove it out of the way.

Disengaging from The Voice is a practice, and it’s not something you get immediately and completely. The Voice will continue to sneak up on you in your lifetime, but you’ll catch it sooner and disengage successfully if you keep working at it.

Carve a New Path
Our brains are plastic and it’s possible to change and create new pathways, habits and ways of being. However, changing requires discomfort. It’s easy to fall back into old patterns and habits, because we’ve already carved those paths and our brains automatically follow those grooves without thinking. Building new pathways requires commitment and effort.

This is why we need to decide anew each day that we’re going to carve a new path and ask our brains to help us do the work. If it sounds exhausting to take this on every day, remember that harboring old habits is exhausting in its own way. So either way you’re exhausted, and you might as well put your energy towards adapting to your positive new life.

So we need to create a new path and the beginning of creating a new path requires a willingness to tolerate discomfort. That’s why it’s important to remind ourselves why we keep doing our practices and asking what you want your life to be about. You’ve got to want your life back more than you want to be comfortable in any given moment.

Soon, this new way of living becomes habitual and effortless so that when you find yourself wanting to eat and you’re not hungry, you’ll ask yourself, “What’s going on? What am I feeling? Why am I thinking about turning to food for a reason other than hunger?”

Stay with yourself and notice how it feels to want to eat when you’re not hungry. This is how food allows us to get to know ourselves and what we really want.

This Week’s Practices
1)      Living “as if”
Live as if you’re worth your own time, love and attention. Live like you like yourself. Live like you like your body.

This is a direct, day-to-day experience. Ask yourself, “How would I get up in the morning? How would I walk? How would I eat if I were living as if I liked myself and knew I was worth my own attention? What would I do?”

2)         Follow the Second Eating guideline:
Eat sitting down in a calm environment. This does not include the car.
Eat as if you’re worth your time and attention. You wouldn’t eat standing up, in the car, or tasting the food on your way from the stove to the table. You wouldn’t eat a meal in hiding before everyone else sits down so that you’re full when they get there.

Both of this week’s practices are related to The Voice. When we live like we like ourselves, The Voice will squawk and make itself known. To follow this week’s practices will require you to be aware of naming and disengaging from The Voice throughout the week.

Geneen says to remember that living close to yourself and the center of your own life is your birthright.

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WEEK ONE, ENDING THE WAR: This is a review of Geneen Roth’s Women, Food and God Online Retreat, which takes place over a 6-week period.

Fore more information, read:

• Introducing the Women, Food and God Online Retreat
• Beyond What’s Broken: Review of Women Food and God Online Retreat Week Two

Week One Course Overview
Geneen defines overeating as: Eating without regard for the body’s need for food. Eating when you’re not hungry.

That’s obviously something we all do. How many times have you had dessert when you aren’t hungry? Or filled up on appetizers, and then ate dinner anyway?

Geneen’s main point for this week is that intuitive eating is the way to go. Eat when you’re hungry. Don’t eat when you’re not. Sounds simple, right? Wait, there’s more.

The Meditation
Geneen had us do a meditation where we were to pay attention to the sensations of our bodies. She instructed us to “Feel your body, the support, what’s your body touching.” I immediately felt annoyed and anxious. I half listed to the meditation while I surfed the internet.

Then, within the meditation, Geneen explained that we’re prone to overeating because we’re unaware of our bodies. Geneen said that even though our bodies are the place we experience everything, we spend most of our time in our heads. Ironically, much of this above-the-neck time is spent judging ourselves from the neck down!

I realized the point of the meditation was because Geneen knows most people are out of touch with their bodies and don’t want to feel them, which is why so many people are overweight. When people pay attention to how they feel, they don’t consistently overeat unhealthy food. Point taken.

Four Principles
These principles all battle common misunderstandings and false beliefs. We tend to think that dieting will be our salvation, that we need to punish ourselves to get results, that we’re wrong and bad for overeating, and that we shouldn’t have to feel pain. These are incorrect ways of thinking. Geneen says:

Diets don’t work.
Geneen says that diets don’t work because they’re based on fear, deprivation, judgment and self-loathing, among other bad feelings. You may think you need to diet because you have the false belief that if you trust your appetite, then you’d “devour the universe.” The diet might work for a while, but you’ll eventually rebel from the constraint and blow the diet.

We don’t change from self-hatred or shame.
You don’t change because you hate yourself into it. “We think if we loathe ourselves enough, hate, shame, and punish enough, that we’ll become happy, loving people.” We can get the ball rolling on change by being curious about ourselves, but we need to drop the hate shtick.

We turn to food for good reasons.
This one is hard to get my head around. Geneen says that we turn to food because we believe, in the moment, that it’s somehow helping. We believe that based on the choices we have, overeating is something to do. And then the self-loathing kicks in. I’m on board with the self-loathing part, because I know I have other choices besides overeating.

Pain is part of life.
The most beautiful, rich and successful Hollywood movie star has pain in her life. It’s part of the human condition, and it’s okay to feel it. A lot of people are afraid to feel pain and turn to food to avoid it. But we’re going to feel pain anyway, whether we overeat or not. So ditch the sandwich and be with your pain, and then it will go away.

Use Your Relationship With Food to Discover How You Live
Now, I have to admit that when I read the book, I felt kind of, “eh” about this concept. What the heck does my relationship with food have to do with the rest of my life? I could see some parallels (I guess) but I didn’t really take the time to think it through and notice.

Last night when Geneen went on to say, and I’m half-quoting, half para-phrasing her here: The way we do anything is the way we do everything. The way you eat reflects the way you live.

A light bulb blazed in my head. I suddenly realized that my main beliefs about life – how I work, how I play, and how I eat – goes something like this:

There’s so much to do and so little time. There’s not enough time to do everything I want. I will find a way to make everything I do “productive” and useful and purposeful to use the short time I have well.

Even the way I eat (when I’m being “good”) – via planning and charts and shopping lists – is meant to maximize my nutrition intake, my convenience, my sense of frugality. And when I’m being “bad” I might think that I need to experience the bounty of the planet before I kick the bucket. I’m in Italy? I better eat gelato every single day for breakfast, because I’ll never be able to do that again! It amazed me to realize that this “productive” rule, this seize-the-day thinking permeates my life. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and I had an inkling that I live that way, but had never applied it to my relationship with food or realized how all-encompassing that feeling is.

Geneen says that once we have these realizations about how we approach life, we should question these beliefs. Oftentimes when we’re younger, we’re given instructions or we incorrectly infer commands on how we should behave. To dig deeper, what often gets jammed into those directives is the sense of, “Who I am isn’t good enough.” Or, “If I show myself, I’ll get punished.” These beliefs show up in our relationship with food. So it’s up to us now to realize that only we know what’s best for us, and as adults, it’s time to rearrange our thinking.

For those of you playing at home, take a minute for yourself. Draw a connection between how you eat and how you live. Do you see any parallels? How do these concepts work for you, and how might they hurt?

Ending the War: A Doorway
When Geneen talks about “ending the war,” she’s referring to the way we struggle with food and our bodies, the way we obsess and punish, that cycle of deprivation followed by overeating, followed by self-loathing and back to deprivation. She says that to break that cycle, we need to drop the struggle and stop trying to fix it.

To end the war, she says we should be curious about our relationship with food and ask what our relationship with food can teach us. When we’re interested in understanding our relationship with food, then food becomes the doorway to getting to know ourselves. She said when we look at how we eat, the amount, when we eat and what we eat, we can use it as a guide to learn more about ourselves and the center of our own life.

Right about here, I had another “Aha” moment:

Both in life & food, I am a planner. I am mercilessly ambitious. My goals are forceful and unyielding. Then in the moments that I veer from my plans, I sometimes scold myself for it. The end result is that I’m often overpromising to myself, over committing and setting myself up to miss my goals. I meet them part way – which is admirable since the bar is set so high – but there are times when I’m unreasonably disappointed in myself when I don’t conquer the world. I’m afraid if I set reasonable goals, I won’t be as successful.

[Maybe what would happen if I set reasonable goals is that I won’t be so hard on myself, and I won’t be as stressed out. Maybe. Just a thought.]

We Overeat When We Don’t Want to Feel
Geneen says that we gain weight because we don’t listen to ourselves. We binge when we don’t want to feel. We turn to food to medicate, because it’s a way to change the channel when you don’t want to listen to what’s happening.

Here I had another realization:

I tend to overeat at night, when I’m tired after a long day at work. At that point, I want to shrug off the yoke of responsibility and tune out after pressuring myself all day. I rarely plan ahead what I’m going to have for dinner.

But in life in general, I often spend time planning so far ahead for everything except what actually matters: the next step in my day. I will often plan out projects by the hour weeks in advance, not accounting for the unexpected. And I ignore the time that’s immediately in front of me, the very next thing I will do. Instead, my head is all the way down the road to the result that would come from all this future planning. The Next Step seems so middling even though it’s actually what matters the most.

Holy crap. Get out of my head, Geneen!

Kids at home: what are you avoiding when you overeat?

How Do You Want to Live?
Geneen asks, “How do we want to live, what do we want our lives to be marked by? Do we want, ‘She was thin,’ marked on our graves?’” (Um, maybe?) “We lose weight knowing it’s not going to do what we want it to do.”

Essentially, we can’t take our bodies with us. You’d think we can, with all the obsessive energy we spend on them. And of course, we need them now to feel good and to function, but once we’re dead, all that time spent hating our guts was just a waste of time.

So Geneen asks, “HOW DO YOU WANT TO LIVE? It knocks at the door of our hearts – the longing for change, for the life we know is possible that we’re not quite living. To have that life, to be fully yourself, we have to ask ourselves, ‘What do I want my life to be? How do I want my days to be defined?’ … I want that life I know is possible.”

Discomfort: My Favorite Part
I’m not a masochist, but this part of the lecture was refreshing to me. Geneen basically said that living the life you want isn’t magic. It’s hard work. It’s uncomfortable. I find that comforting, because I know she’s not blowing smoke up our butts.

Geneen goes on to say that living the life we want, “requires a degree of willingness to tolerate discomfort…. Learning how to do anything new requires discomfort. You gotta to be willing to be uncomfortable. That’s a prerequisite.”

She makes it clear though that we’re not exchanging a life of comfort for discomfort, because – wait for it — YOU ARE ALREADY UNCOMFORTABLE! Gee, how’s that for a revelation. So she’s basically saying we can be uncomfortable with the status quo, or we can be uncomfortable pursuing the life we want, so we might as well go for it. Learning what our body wants and stopping once we’ve had enough are new skills that require effort, and yes, being uncomfortable, until we get the hang of them.

Next, Geneen states my motto: “It takes effort to be effortless.” Sounds like the whole concept of Swell Easy Living. For life to be easy and swell, there are things we need to do.  So let’s get crackin’.

This Week’s Practices
Geneen gave us two practices for the week.

1) Follow the first of her eating guidelines: Eat When You’re Hungry

That’s it. Don’t eat when you aren’t hungry, eat when you are hungry and stop eating when you’ve had enough. Do just that much, and follow through on it.

Easier said then done, because sometimes we eat to fill emptiness or loneliness or boredom (or whatever.) Geneen wants us to ask ourselves, “What’s so bad or scary about the emptiness? What does it feel like?” Sometimes we feel the beginning of a feeling and we think, “RUH ROH!” We want to avoid that discomfort. Be willing to be uncomfortable and know there are times you won’t feel like refraining from eating. Do it anyway.

If there are times that you decide to eat even though you’re not hungry, Geneen says to be curious and notice what happens, but she warns that insight alone won’t lead to change; it’s our actions that make a difference. Change happens in baby steps so to take on a practice like, “Eat when you’re hungry,” start out doing it once a day. If it feels like too much, then do it every other day. But you need to start somewhere.

Geneen instructs to check into your body when you wake up, and again before you eat. Since the aim of this guideline is to eat only when hungry, you need to learn what hunger feels like to you and rate it on scale of 1 – 10. A one means you’re hungry, 10 is stuffed and 5 is comfortable; 4 or below you’re hungry, 5 or above you’re not.

Geneen cautions that mouth hunger does NOT mean body hunger. Your mouth can salivate and still want food when we’re full. She says to focus on the belly and abdomen area and notice if it’s growling, feels empty or spacey. Really determine what it feels like (not what your head wants it to feel like) and rate your hunger on the scale of 1 – 10.

2) Be Astonished
Each day, notice what you already have — not what’s wrong or what needs to be changed. Think about the abundance that’s in your world already.

Geneen says that the retreat is a two-part process. We have to address the part that’s keeping us from being ourselves and having the life we want. We also have to notice what we already have and ways we already are who we want to be. We can’t only focus on the obstacles. We also need to appreciate where we already are and what we’ve got. For every day you wake up, notice what you already have.

I’m going to mark my “to do” items in my calendar right now, although I am refraining from making myself a Hunger Scale Chart. Baby steps.

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For more information, read:

• WEEK ONE, ENDING THE WAR: a review of the first installment of Geneen Roth’s 6-week Women, Food and God Online Retreat.
• WEEK TWO, BEYOND WHAT’S BROKEN: a review of the second installment.

The Problem
A lot of people, I daresay most Americans and a growing number around the globe, have a problem with overeating. Personally, I have that very typical issue of being all-business during the workweek, followed by trashing all my hard work with dieting helter-skelter on the weekends and any time we eat out.

Most women (and more men than will admit it) battle over losing and gaining the same poundage year after year. Geneen Roth, author of Women, Food and God claims, and I don’t disagree, that this Sisyphean task is a distraction from feelings we don’t feel like feeling.

She says there are areas of our lives and corners of our brain that we want to be distracted from, and the cycle of dieting and overeating is a good escape. By the way, she says “dieting” could also be compulsive spending, alcoholism, or any number of behaviors and addictions that people take on to divert themselves.

The Solution?
Since I think the issue of overeating is a hugely important one for so many of us, I can’t quite let go of Geneen Roth and her highly-praised book. My main criticism of the book is that it’s all very floaty and pretty language, but once I put that book down and walk away, I’m going to keep behaving the way I’ve been behaving.

I watched Geneen on Oprah last week, hoping to catch another shred of information or a new concept that would help me grab onto her instruction in a more concrete way, but her appearance did nothing but make me even more curious about how her teachings work for people. I did some googling following the show, and I discovered that Geneen is holding a six-week online seminar to help us “end the war with food,” and to “eat when we’re hungry and to stop when we’re not.” From Geneen Roth’s web site:

In this “Women Food and God” Online-Retreat, you have a unique opportunity to study with and be inspired by Geneen Roth LIVE in the comfort of your home. And even if you can’t attend one or more of the live sessions, you’ll have unrestricted access to listen to the recordings of this transformational Online-Retreat whenever you want.

Since my complaint about the book was that it’s too hard to put into practice by myself, I think that this “online retreat” might address that issue and help put what I’ve learned from the book into existence in my every day eating habits. The retreat runs from May 25, 2010 until June 29th, and takes place for an hour each week followed by 30 minutes of Q&A.

So What Do You Get Out of This?
Each week, I will give a short summary of that week’s teaching, let you know what I’m learning and what challenges I experience. I would love for you to read along with my journey, and you might get a few tips or tricks from my weekly reviews.

An easy way to get alerted to a posting is to subscribe to email updates in the top-right box below my photo. I promise NO SPAM EVER. Just post notifications, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Do It With Me!
To take it one step further, I think it would be über-cool if you would come to the party and join her seminar and we can discuss here what you’ve learned as well. Since so many of us have goals and challenges related to fitness and eating, invite your friends, sisters and mothers that share the same goals and concerns. [There's a 2-for-1 registration discount, so you have a good reason to invite a buddy.] Maybe we can all put overeating behind us.

I will invite you to share what you learn on your own blogs or in the comments, which could help us develop more well-rounded coverage of the retreat by sharing our expertise and experiences. Or just lurk and read, it’s your choice. 

Read WEEK ONE, ENDING THE WAR: a review of the first installment of Geneen Roth’s 6-week Women, Food and God Online Retreat.

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(I kid.)

First of all, let me start by saying that anyone, including yours truly (gasp!), can qualify as a difficult person when we don’t see eye to eye. Of course there are the chronically difficult, and those people are a real hoot. My husband may think I’m chronically difficult, because he chronically has to live with me and he can’t go home to his spouse and complain about this wacko broad because I am both his spouse and that wacko broad. So we’re using a loosey-goosey definition for the word difficult today.

As the cliché goes: we can’t change other people, we can only change ourselves. I hate that cliché because we can change the other guy, or at the very least we can change how we think about the other guy and how we react to him, which is almost as good as actually changing him.

Here are my ways to resolve a conflict with an irritating buffoon.

1. Accept People the Way They Are: Don’t roll your eyes and shut your browser. I’m not saying to let the moron trample you because you are just going to let it all happen. I’m talking about a subtle mind shift that will help you feel less annoyed. And you’ll learn a little bit about yourself in the process.

Zen Master Mary Jaksch at Goodlife Zen says that when you take issue with somebody and you find yourself wishing that this person were different, what you’re often actually wishing is that this frustrating individual was more like yourself.

Try it with me for a second. If there’s someone whose behavior is pissing you off, do you find yourself wishing that she would act the same way you would act?

If you give her the space to be herself and accept that she has different perspectives and agendas than you do, it helps you be more empathetic about what makes her tick. Different ideas make her feel good, and maybe her family raised her with different values and behaviors than your family raised you. She also has different experiences and different anecdotal evidence about the way the world works.

To get a better idea of how to grasp the other person’s perspective, here’s an example of how empathizing with my husband’s mindset helped me to untwist my knickers.

A Story About Relaxation and Conflict
For relaxation, my husband Steve prefers lounging in front of the TV for some escapism, while what works for me is entirely different. When I’m sitting still, I tend towards overthinking and brooding, which is definitely counter to relaxation. This often results in obsessive listmaking and checkboxes, which will cause my husband to smirk. What relaxes me? The opposite of what relaxes Steve. I want to move my body, preferably outside. Any form of physical activity helps clear my mind, makes me feel liberated, and the stress melts away. I’m happiest outside in the sunshine or at the gym if the weather doesn’t cooperate.

Of course everyone needs to veg out sometimes; we can’t physically run ourselves ragged forever, and I do enjoy my TV time to allow my body to rest in the evening. However, I get antsy when I sit in front of the TV for too long, especially during a nice weekend day. It makes me anxious, I wonder what I could be accomplishing and I often feel like I’m WASTING MY LIFE. Nothing gets me thinking about death and mortality more than thinking about the hours of my existence I’ve spent zoned out in front of the TV and what else I could have done with that time. Not very relaxing, no.

Our Conflict Over Leisure Time
I’m ashamed to admit that, because of my own notions about relaxation, sometimes I can make it hard for Steve to chill out. Part of it comes with, I think, a wholesome agenda: I’ll wish that he’ll come out and play with me so I can enjoy his company while I’m out getting physical. I love spending time with him, and what’s better than spending time with the man I love doing stuff I love doing. And if we’re active together, we’ll have a long, happy and healthy marriage and family life, right? Right?!

However, my asking can turn into cajoling, which then can escalate to frustration and aggravation when he proves to be immoveable. He says he doesn’t want to come out and play with me, because right now he’s relaxing! He says he will go exercise on his own time. Having lost the battle, I’ll stomp out of the house by myself. Then I’ll go relax and have a grand old time, albeit bittersweet without my husband, while he decompresses alone in the equivalent of a man cave – on the couch without me.

Get to the Source of the Conflict (Hint: It’s in Your Head)
So what’s the true conflict here? Is it simply the difference between Steve’s way of relaxing and mine? Not really. The conflict is that I have a particular perspective about the best way to spend free time. I think, “I’m improving my physical health by being less sedentary, so there.”

Nine times out of ten when you have a conflict on your hands, it’s because you feel that your perspective is superior. Just take a minute to get into the other person’s head and determine why their perspective is also valuable.

Looking at the issue from the other guy’s perspective is hard to do, especially when we want to be right and, by extension, have things our way. In my case, we’re talking about relaxation here. Steve uses a couch. That’s a perfectly valid method of relaxation. Understanding that Steve actually is relaxing and not thinking about death and feeling guilty helps me get why he needs to do it his way. He doesn’t collapse the acts of exercise and relaxation into the same activity like I do. And I admire his ability to relax. Let’s face it, he’s better at it than I am.

Putting yourself in the other guy’s shoes could help you get to the root of your concern. Maybe my true anxiety is that I don’t want to be my husband’s caretaker some day. I want us both to be able-bodied individuals in our old age for max enjoyment of this one, short life we get. That’s a very different issue than my wanting to enjoy Steve’s company while I take a hike, and it’s a concern that’s resolved by Steve’s exercise routine.

2. Don’t Get Defensive, Communicate
Tina Su over at Think Simple has some great ideas for dealing with difficult people. She says our natural instinct when dealing difficult people is to attack back in order to defend ourselves, but reacting harshly can escalate the scenario into nasty territory, and rarely solves the issue.

Sometimes we think we’re in conflict with someone and they don’t even know it! How many times do we think in our heads about how that person is wronging us, or we think that they disagree with us or that they are wrong about something based on some comment they made. We stew and we fester and we build up a case in our minds as to why they are wrong and we are right.

The Dirty Kitchen Story
My husband and I share the household chores, and one of my jobs is to keep the kitchen neat and clean. Alas, I’m not the neatest person in the universe. In fact, if you look at where I fall on the neat-to-slob continuum, I fall squarely in the slob camp. That said, I work hard to fight my natural tendencies. Sometimes (like when I’m tired and pregnant) I fail more than I succeed, but my efforts keep me far away from any TV show with the word “hoarder” in the title.

There was a time when I was neither pregnant nor tired and just plain didn’t keep the kitchen as well as I could have. I never had a good rhythm of keeping the dishwasher empty and ready for dirty dishes. So dishes would pile up in the sink. When the dishwasher actually was empty and Steve would throw his dirties in the sink anyway, I would feel frustrated that he was making my job harder. Because I sometimes start emptying a clean dishwasher and then get distracted partway through the job, from his perspective, how the heck is he supposed to know that a dishwasher that’s half-full is clean or dirty? So he just stopped checking the dishwasher altogether and began using the sink entirely.

So the conflict in this case would be Steve wondering why in the heck his wife can’t do something as simple as keep a kitchen neat in a two-person household. (I don’t know, babe, I don’t know. I blame it on our freakishly tiny dishwasher.)

Communicate Your Frustration
Steve is an infinitely patient person, but after a while, even he had to say something. He began to show hints of annoyance and I got the hint. When I realized how much this issue was bugging him, I made more of an effort to correct myself.

I discovered that half the battle of a clean kitchen is keeping the dishwasher empty so it’s always ready for dirty dishes. My rules were:
1. Leave the sink spotless so no one is tempted to put dishes in it.
2. Run the dishwasher every morning so that I can empty it and have it ready for dinner dishes and pans every night.
3. Clean up immediately after dinner; load and run the dishwasher and clean out the sink so that the kitchen would be fresh for breakfast in the morning.

Steve noticed and appreciated that I was trying to make it better, and his praise reinforced my good behaviors. Plus the more I kept the kitchen clean, the more he pitched in to help. It was easy to put dishes in the dishwasher, because it was usually empty. No surprises or wondering why the dishwasher was half full and whether it was clean or dirty.

Appreciate What Communication Can Do
This dishwasher story could have had an entirely different end. If Steve never let on how annoyed he was, I could never have bothered to figure out that our dishwasher needs to be run morning and night to keep our kitchen out of the weeds. He could have spent the next 70 years wondering what in the hell is wrong with his wife.

Of course the saga continues, as what is currently wrong with his wife is that her back and legs start aching within two hours of getting out of bed in the morning. But at least we know this is a temporary setback in our efforts towards a clean kitchen and I will once again return to good wife status when I regain use of myself as something other than home to our beautiful, parasitic baby. (Baby, if you’re reading this, you’ve been born and I’m only referring to the part when you were in utero, okay? We’re cool now.)

The point is, unless we open up a dialogue with the person who is bothering us, it’s impossible to know how they really feel about the issue, and especially how they feel about it in relation to your opinion. Before he said something, Steve might have thought that I didn’t give a flying crap about a clean kitchen. I did care; I just wasn’t giving the issue the attention it deserved until he said something about it.

If you offer your thoughts, you will often be surprised that you’re on the same page and that a solution is within reach. So to sum up, 1) Change your mindset: accept your opponent by practicing empathy, and 2) Communicate: express your own perspective to make some progress.

What’s your favorite way to resolve a conflict? What has worked well for you in the past? I’ll meet you in the comments!

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If you’re like me, you would rather watch infomercials with a pot of mac and cheese in your lap than organize your closet. If you think you’re not like me, don’t judge. I bet you’ve engaged in a guilty pleasure at the same time your closet wasn’t exactly looking like a boutique showcase, like the time you lip synched a Britney Spears song in the mirror. I saw you do it. That said, it’s time for me to get up off the couch and organize my closet.

We’re planning to get the master bedroom painted because it’s currently what I call an immobilizing and oppressive (what the husband calls “good for sleeping”) REDUM maroon that extends into our closet and our bathroom. Plus our future baby’s room is painted clown car orange, which at least we both agree needs to go in favor of a more soothing shade. We can’t fail, since any color would be more soothing. I’m sure there are studies out there that say what awful things colors like this do to a fragile mental state, and so I’m hoping this paint job will save me from a scathing case of postpartum depression.

We’re going to have to pull everything out so the painter can access the walls, and I’m not keen on wasting an opportunity like this one. No sirree, I’m not going to put every stitch of crap back in the closets again, and that’s the reason I’m doing a post now about closet organization.

Add to my situation the fact that I’m almost 6-months pregnant, so I’m looking at a whole helluva lotta clothing that I can’t wear now and will probably not want to wear by the time my inflatables return to their upright and locked position. Some of my wardrobe is kind of beat up. Some of it makes sense in New York City and now that I don’t live there anymore, it makes me look like I forgot to take my medication. All of this means I need to weed out my clothes.

So do it with me. Organize your closet so that I have some company. Go a step further and take before and after photos and send them to me. Let me know if you don’t want your photos used on the site and I will keep them private. But personally I plan on showing my befores and afters for you to enjoy. Nothing more satisfying than freak-to-neat before and after shots. Are you with me?

An important note before we get down to business: most of the time when we want to organize something, whether it’s a whole room or just a drawer, we have to be cognizant of the fact that we probably have too much stuff and we’re tempted to just rearrange our stuff to make it look pretty. What we really want to do, most of the time, is actually declutter before we organize. That way we’re shuffling less crap around and it’s easier to keep it neat.

Decluttering and organization guru Peter Walsh says the first thing to do when embarking on a decluttering mission is to visualize what you want your life to look like, room by room of your home. I am visualizing having a personal assistant and stylist who will organize my closet for me so that I can look like a rock star every day with no effort. I’m pretty sure that’s not what he means. He’s probably asking me to visualize which clothes will help me look less douchey so that I’ll let go of some crap.

I think even before visualizing what we want, it helps to figure out what we currently have that’s not working. A popular conundrum is to have a closet full of clothes, but nothing to wear. I know that’s my problem. If you’re looking inside your closet each morning and pulling from the same five frayed outfits even though it’s overflowing with clothes, it’s time to toss what you won’t wear, and go “shopping” in your closet for stuff maybe you should start wearing.

Let’s take Walsh’s advice and visualize for a second. What can our closets do for us? They can set the stage for our whole day by making our wardrobe accessible in a sane and easy, maybe even fabulous, manner. What style of clothes do you enjoy wearing? What styles make us feel bad about ourselves? Skinny jeans anyone? Perhaps you want it to be easy to get dressed in the morning and look like a professional, sassy, take-charge, creative adult who owns more than two pairs of pants.

So after we’ve decided what dreams we want our closets to fulfill, the next step to organizing our closets is to decide how we will tackle the project. Do we pull everything out at once and complete the task in one day? Or do we take out a clothing category per day — meaning, today we could take all the tops and shirts out of our closet and try them on one by one and start sorting. Once that category is complete, we move onto the next clothing type a different day, such as pants, followed by accessories another day, followed by shoes, etc. So to review, our options are to do a complete dump of the closet onto the bed and bedroom floor and paw through the chaos, or do we take baby steps and stretch the task out to multiple days.

The plusses of pulling it all out at once are:
1.    We rip off the band-aid and get it over with and
2.    If we have a top that only makes sense with a particular bottom and a certain pair of shoes, then we know from the get-go whether all three of those things fit, are comfortable and look good together. And if one of the items no longer works and renders the other two obsolete, then we can toss out the whole lot.

On the other hand, who wants to spend a whole Saturday cleaning out our closet? That sounds exhausting and boring. The reason it’s a mess to begin with is probably because we haven’t had the time or wherewithal to schedule such a herculean task all at once. Maybe day-by-day makes closet reorganization more palatable and easy. Or maybe it drags it out and robs us of instant gratification.

So that’s all we’re going to do for today: We’re going to visualize what we want out of our closet. And you’re going to decide whether you want to do it all at once, or in digestible chunks, little by little.  I’m still on the fence, but I’ll let you know what I decide in our next installment of closet organization.

Next, Make Closet Organization Easy: Declutter Your Closet First

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