“There are many ways to deprive yourself:  You can deprive yourself of cookies or you can deprive yourself of feeling well after eating them.  You can deprive yourself of feeling your sadness or you can deprive yourself of the confidence and well-being that come from knowing you won’t be destroyed by feeling it.”  Geneen Roth

It really struck me that we are deprived one way or the other, and you get to decide what you want to deprive yourself of.

I love that there are two choices, which you can either feel good or not feel good. 

When I do yoga I feel good, that I am taking care of this body, moving it and stretching it, and making it stronger. I am depriving myself the opportunity to beat me up.

I have begun to also be aware of what I am putting in my body, most of the time.  When I eat whole foods, I deprive myself of feeling bad about myself.

Here is another section that caught my attention.

“My mother had spent years telling me I was selfish, and it was upon that nub of information that I built a monument of deficiency.  But as I widened the myopic gaze on I-me-mine, I saw my mother at age twenty-five with two small children, a loveless marriage and a desperate need to have a different life.  With the little information she had, and doing the best she could do, she called me selfish for wanting more that she could give.  And since I would have died for her, and since every child needs her parents to be right, I took myself to be the sum of her limitations.  I saw myself through the eyes of a lonely, depressed, troubled woman – and never questioned my loyalty to her vision.  And then there was my father who saw me as a ditzy dumb blonde. Add ditzy dumb blonde to “selfish, fat, and unlovable” and you have who I took myself to be for almost fifty years.

Psychologists and spiritual teachers alike call this learned version of our selves “ego” or “personality” or “false self”.  It’s false because your idea of yourself is based on who your mother took you to be, and her idea of herself was based on who her mother took her to be, which was based on who her mother took her to be, your idea of yourself – the person whose feelings get hurt, who takes offense at being criticized, who is webbed to her opinions and preferences or ideas- is based on those of someone who’s never met you.  Your self-image is refracted so many times – with learned inferences and memories and conditioning- that it is nothing more than a hall of mirrors.

Talk about a hoax.  You are not who you think you are.  Hardly anyone is.  Because although kids come into this world with an implicit understanding of who they are, they have no self-reflective consciousness.  They know who they are, but they don’t know that they know.  And the only way to find out is by seeing themselves in their parent’s eyes.  We become what and who are parents saw.  Figments of their imagination. 

Then, as my teacher Jeanne says, we spend our lives following instructions given to us ten or thirty or fifty years ago by people we wouldn’t ask for street directions from today.”  Geneen

In my experience my whole self was designed from my mother’s point of view and how my father treated me.

Here is more from Woman Food and God,  “The obsession will end when you love discovering your true nature more than you love being loyal to your mother or father.  The obsession will end because you care enough about yourself to stop damaging yourself with food.  Because you love yourself enough to stop hurting yourself.  Who doesn’t want to take care of what they love?

If you pay attention to when you are hungry, what your body wants, what you are eating, when you’ve had enough, you end the obsession because obsessions and awareness can’t co-exist.  When you pay attention to yourself, you notice the difference between being tired and being hungry.  Between being satisfied and being full.  Between wanting to scream and wanting to eat.

The more you pay attention, the more you fall in love with that which is not obsessed: that which is blazing itself through you.  The life force that animates your body.  Food becomes a way to sustain the blaze, and way of eating that keeps you depressed or spaced out or uncomfortable loses its appeal.  When that happens, you slowly realize that you are being lived by that which is God and you wouldn’t have it any other way.”  Geneen

I love how she writes this, for it is exactly true in my experience…. Once I had redefined myself, I then began to treat myself better to the point I love myself enough to take care of how I treat my body.