This Messy Magnificent Life

A Field Guide

               

About the Author

New York Times best-selling educator Geneen Roth teaches writing workshops about personal growth and speaks nationally, including on 20/20 and the Today Show.

Summary

Daily Life Is Full of Beauty

You don’t need to keep thinking something is wrong with you. Be comfortable with who you are, as you are. Let yourself feel all that you feel, but without having to act on every feeling. Reflect on your emotions without accepting the worry, loneliness and lack of self-esteem they sometimes breed. Living with a constant sense of having to be better is a form of suffering. Daily life is full of beauty. Relinquish the dramatic narratives of the past and "drop the me" so you can turn to the “peace and quiet joy” that are always present.

Issues with Food Aren’t About Food

Many people believe their problems will disappear if they lose five, 15 or 50 pounds. But after every diet, even when they do lose weight, pain and difficulties remain. Food isn’t the problem. Avoiding pain is the basis of any addiction. As long as the root pain remains, so will addiction to food, money, sex, alcohol or anything else. Addictive behavior and its ramifications destroy you but also serve you by distracting you from real pain. These behaviors provide a problem – something to focus on that isn’t the larger issue hiding behind whatever the addictions conceal.

“Stop trying to be the self you imagine you would be if you were smarter, prettier, thinner, kinder, more accomplished than you are.”

Dieting doesn’t make your pain disappear, or the weight-loss industry wouldn’t make $60 billion a year. Your sense of emptiness inside is real. To stop eating when you’re full is to recognize an ending, a void in your life. Eating to fill that silence doesn’t work. Instead, listen to it. When you’re at the table, take a moment to notice the silences between eating and not eating.

“There isn’t a someday. There never was. No one has ever been to the future that you keep putting your life on hold for.”

People often want more, even of something they don’t really want, to avoid having nothing. Get comfortable with the emptiness that you’ve been avoiding. You will learn more about a sadness you don’t understand and discover how more food can never satisfy the longing that remains. Identify the longing and address it.

Establish Boundaries

Food issues often arise when women worry about how others will touch, desire or use their bodies. Food acts as a means of numbing confusing, intrusive physical experiences. The Red String Project can teach you about your personal boundaries. Find a length of string and sit down. Make a circle around your body with the string. How close is too close?

“Drop the war. End the Me Project. Stop trying to get rid of, improve, resist or otherwise fix yourself.”

Many people don’t know their borders, so they let other people invade their physical and psychic space. Not everyone believes in “energetic boundaries,” but everyone knows when someone stands too close or senses it when someone is invading their “personal space.” Worldly and capable people – homemakers, CEOs, therapists, lawyers and artists – fall apart when they finally learn it’s okay to limit how others approach them. For many people, women in particular, a childhood of inappropriate touching or poking creates confusion about what’s acceptable for other people to do to their bodies. In November 2016, 27 million women responded to a call on Twitter to share stories of sexual assault. For some, it happened at home. For others, it was their only source of love. Their stories presented continuing pain and distress.

“Attention is everything. Without it, all else is a temporary fix and no long-lasting change is possible.”

Recognize that the situation that abused you is over and no longer has power over you. That doesn’t mean you’ll stop feeling emotions about what happened. Knowing that it no longer has power won’t necessarily provide lasting peace. A the moment when someone touched your body without your desire or consent, a set of ideas and beliefs attached themselves to you and to that moment. Learning to untangle those ideas and beliefs will help you regain the power you lost. Recognize that you are an adult who has the right to choose how close someone gets to you.

Cultivate Attention and Noticing

Where does your attention go? If you see the world through the lens of all that you don’t have, then you only see what you’re missing. Many people associate something lacking with loneliness or scarcity. But having more or enough doesn’t bring satisfaction. That comes from how you attend to the world around you. If you lost all your savings, you might be grateful for things you don’t think to notice now, like sunshine or your favorite mug.

“When a woman’s energy is tied up in judging her body, it ties up her power as well.”

In moments of crisis, panicky thoughts draw you into your own private hell. Instead, focus on your breath. Consider how many things you thought were wrong before the crisis. Your thoughts are a product of your attention, and where you put this attention is how you will experience the world. Give yourself one minute, five times a day, whenever you want, to notice the world around you. Rather than the constant stream of thoughts in your head, observe where you live, work and breathe. Several times a day, notice a single full breath, from your first intake of air all the way to the final moment of exhaling.

“We’re not sure what the sadness is about or why we feel inconsolable, but we’re sure the solution is to take more, have more, eat more.”

These practices will help you become more aware. They cultivate a “puppy mind,” a mind that delights in the world. Change where you focus your attention so that your attempts to overcome addictions, behaviors and pain can provide more than temporary solutions.

Your Ghost Selves

Everyone carries around former selves. These “ghost children” live in stories of the past that continue into the present. They tend to arise in response to a trigger, and they feel very familiar. They come with frequently told stories about abandonment, loss and failure that years of repetition turn into your most authentic truths. Ghost children’s appearances and their stories spur many people’s addictive patterns. Voices of ghost children are often debilitating. Addictive behavior exists to drown them out.

“Stop believing your thoughts. You are not your beliefs, opinions, emotions or thoughts.”

Though it may seem painful or scary, listen to the stories that your ghost children tell. They exist because some moment in your history was too traumatic for you to experience at that time. Each of your ghost children remains frozen in time. Fear of ghost children gives power to that moment when you were a frightened child. Listening allows the beliefs surrounding that story – ideas about how worthless or incompetent or unlovable you might be – to dissolve. Inviting a ghost child to join you will introduce unpleasant feelings. But they will soon bring tenderness for the little person whose fear now has a place to rest. The monsters will fade as you understand the complexities and confusions of the situation. You will experience the present without the shadows of the past.

Triggers as Teachers

Triggers happen in an instant and send you flying through a story an inner voice is telling. Triggers differ for everybody. They come from “your history and vulnerabilities.” You believe your feelings are an accurate assessment of who you are, and you get lost in self-reproach, blame and victimhood. Many people have an inner bully who narrates all the things they did wrong to wind up in a negative current situation. Listening to that, they start to live in an imaginary place where things are different. The actual present is a pale comparison to their fantasies. Most people believe what the bully voice says because it seems to provide instructions on how to never feel bad again.

“Power is not a function of what we do, say or achieve if it is not also connected to how we live in our physical selves.”

Noticing when triggers happen diminishes their power. Certain physical sensations provide clues to triggering: feeling small, having a hollow chest, being drained of emotions, or feeling paralyzed and indecisive. The suffering that this voice engenders is not who you are. That voice is a prison.

Don’t believe it. Don’t go into the fantasy of another reality. Stay present to recognize what a trigger does to you, and you can open the prison door.

Blaming

The memory of pains you accrued in childhood linger into adulthood. Identifying how adults hurt you or did not protect you is part of acknowledging the pain and confusion that created the ghost children, the triggers and the prison cell. The problem extends when blaming continues. To recognize not only that you are in a prison, but what makes you choose to live in one, is to break out and be truly free.

“There are many ways of truth telling, but the best way I know is to ask questions and be relentlessly honest in answering them.”

Being disappointed in others and blaming them for behaving completely in their own character but other than you wish is a prison cell of your own making. The question becomes why you insist on expecting people to be other than they are. Blaming them for behaving as they always do makes no sense. Only your thoughts create your prison. List the people in your life whom you blame for the pain and suffering you experience. Write what they did to you, what you thought they should have done and how you feel about them. Ask how you participated in the situation. Recognize if your actions facilitated their behavior in some way. This honest assessment will help you stop living as a victim.

Complaining

Complaining about a situation never helps. To complain is “like eating rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.” Complaining makes you avoid the present by reliving a past moment and comparing it to a fantasy situation. Complaining is a common form of communication. Overcoming it takes effort. For many people, conversation becomes an exchange of complaints. Learn how not to share your misery or frustration. Avoiding complaining is hard in the beginning, but it quickly becomes worthwhile as you begin to notice other things. You will have novel life experiences to share and complaints will fade as your means of engagement with the world.

Living in the Present or for the Future

The advantage of therapy is giving your challenges to someone else to help you fix them. But, you don’t need to wait for a therapist, a knight in shining armor or anyone else to save you. You save yourself every day. That doesn’t mean therapy isn’t important or helpful. Therapy teaches many people that “no” or “I don’t want to” are acceptable messages to say to others. These are important lessons. Therapy won’t produce a magic moment when all your problems disappear. You will likely always have voices telling you what’s wrong and pains that plagued you when you were younger. Therapy won’t make them go away. But it can teach you how to deal with them day to day.

“It’s time to be your own authority.”

Is life going to be better in the future, or is it pretty good right now? Waiting for life to improve, for the fairy dust to settle and turn everything magically better, means not looking at today and realizing how good it is. Many people have already done a lot of work on themselves, and yet they wait for everything to be perfect, for all their problems to disappear. But what if okay is okay? Some days, when you feel really good, bad things might happen – like experiencing rejection, making mistakes or disappointing others. These events aren’t all of who you are. You and your situation might not be perfect, but it’s good enough.

“What’s Not Wrong”

The monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh asked students at his Buddhist farm, Plum Village Center in France, to raise their hands if they were not suffering from a toothache. Everyone did. The experience of “not-a-toothache” is worth recognizing and celebrating. He proposed his students celebrate their lack of toothaches and consider all their other toothache-free moments in life. Day to day, problems loom large. Unfortunately, that means you can easily forget all that’s good or painless. Ask, “What’s not wrong in your life?” five times a day. Spend 10 seconds on it each time, and realize how much good is around you that you might ignore.

“Let me remember to pay attention to the ordinary, not just to the extraordinary.”

Be careful about making life rules for yourself, even about good things you want to cultivate. Rules start to feel like obligations, and you will feel compelled to break them. That fuels and repeats a cycle of shame and punishment. Let ideas be present in the moment. You can use them as possible touchstones for later use – or not.

Beauty

If you have trouble sleeping, don’t berate yourself over the hours lost. Instead, create a ritual, like stepping outside and opening your arms to the stillness of the stars. Beauty is present in how you see the world. Today’s culture associates beauty with youth, but that positions beauty as something “to be seen” and not as an act of seeing. View the world beautifully. Where wonder and delight exist, so does beauty. If it takes the form of, say, a bright blue vest completely unsuitable for your work or home life — but that makes your heart swell — then let that blue vest provide the enchantment your life deserves.