No Situation Is Unworkable

    —
December 3, 2013

No Situation Is Unworkable

Geneen Roth — December 3, 2013

Tami Simon speaks with Geneen Roth, author of the bestseller Feeding the Hungry Heart and the Sounds True audio learning course When Food Is Food & Love Is Love. They discuss the spiritual lessons which resulted from Geneen’s financial losses with disgraced investment advisor Bernie Madoff, and how this experience caused her to re-examine many of her long-held beliefs about money, loss, and the preciousness of this moment. (69 minutes)

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Geneen Roth is a writer and teacher whose work focuses on using addiction as a path to the inner universe. She has written bestselling books and is a frequent guest on national radio and television shows, including 20/20 and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Her newest book is Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything.

Author photo © Maureen Nemeth

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Just One Question | Geneen Roth: How Do I Work With My...

There’s the pain of a hard thing happening, and then there’s the voice that shows up afterward to tell you it was your fault. Geneen Roth says those two are not the same — and confusing them is what keeps people stuck for years.

Geneen is the bestselling author of Feeding the Hungry Heart and Women Food and God, and a longtime teacher on how our relationships with food, money, and self-worth run on the same wiring. When she spoke with Tami in 2009, she had just lost thirty years of savings to Bernie Madoff, and the inner critic that followed was loud.

What makes her answer land is how practical it gets. She doesn’t tell you to be nicer to yourself. She describes a sequence — notice, name, and if that isn’t enough, say the cruelty out loud until you can hear what it actually sounds like. This one crossed our desk from the very first Insights at the Edge ever recorded, and we knew we had to bring it back.

In this episode:

  • The difference between devastation, which is honest, and the raging voice, which Geneen says has no value at all
  • Why you can’t investigate what went wrong while the critic is running — shame collapses the space where truth could show up
  • The practice of writing or speaking the voice in “you” terms, so there’s finally a you and an I instead of just one merged verdict
  • Why Geneen never found the “fight back hard” approach useful, and what she does instead

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Geneen Roth. Listen to the full episode, “No Situation is Unworkable”

No Situation Is Unworkable

Tami Simon speaks with Geneen Roth, author of the bestseller Feeding the Hungry Heart and the Sounds True audio learning course When Food Is Food & Love Is Love. They discuss the spiritual lessons which resulted from Geneen’s financial losses with disgraced investment advisor Bernie Madoff, and how this experience caused her to re-examine many of her long-held beliefs about money, loss, and the preciousness of this moment. (69 minutes)

Geneen Roth: No Situation Is Unworkable


Tami Simon speaks with Geneen Roth, author of the best-seller Feeding the Hungry Heart and the Sounds True audio learning course When Food Is Food and Love Is Love. We discuss the spiritual lessons which resulted from Geneen’s financial losses with disgraced investment advisor Bernie Madoff, and how this experience caused her to re-examine many of her long-held beliefs about money, loss, and the preciousness of this moment. (67 minutes)

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