Thursday, May 13, 2010

Try A Little Kindness



The key to a health-full life?  Kindness.  And love.

Yesterday, Oprah's guest was Geneen Roth, author of the book, Women, Food, and God.  Oprah says she'll never diet again after reading Geneen's book, and if we all lived what Geneen writes about -- self-kindness and self-love -- who would need to?

You see, food isn't just food; food is life.  In Geneen's book (excerpt from Amazon.com) she writes, "...our relationship to food is an exact microcosm of our relationship to life itself.  I believe we are walking, talking expressions of our deepest convictions; everything we believe about love, fear, transformation, and God is revealed in how, when and what we eat.  When we inhale Reese's peanut butter cups when we are not hungry, we are acting out an entire world of hope or hopelessness, of faith or doubt, of love or fear."

I haven't read Geneen's book yet, but there's a great excerpt from her book here on Oprah.com (with some specific points on how to let yourself feel what you're feeling).  And I love that she pulls a beautiful line from the incomparable poet Galway Kinnell: "sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness." Geneen writes, "Everything we do, I tell my students, is to reteach ourselves our loveliness."

Try a little kindness for yourself.  No matter how things are right now, good or bad, just accept them as they are and love yourself anyway or because of it.  Just love yourself.  No matter what.  Treat yourself with loving care.  You deserve it.  You are the most important person in the world; you're the only one of you we've got.  If you can truly love yourself, I guarantee a health-full life is yours.

Salud!

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