iMeditate Guided Practice Audio Series

How you live your life is reflected in your relationship to food, says counselor and bestselling author Geneen Roth. When you turn to food for anything other than giving your body what it wants and needs, it is a symptom that something is going on with you other than hunger—an emotion is being felt, a longing of the heart is being expressed, but neither are being addressed. When we take the time to examine our relationship to food, including the ways we use it to express our spiritual hunger, we enter the path to freedom, reveals Geneen.

Do you eat only in response to true physical hunger? Doing so is essential to transforming your relationship with food. In order to eat in this way, you must first learn to tell in fact if you are hungry, and what kind of “food” it is that will satisfy you. Much of the time, we eat due to the feeling of an emotional emptiness and the perception of a lack of love in our lives. On some level we know that food will not meet these needs, yet we eat anyway.

On this guided practice session, Geneen Roth teaches you a powerful exercise for exploring the feeling qualities of your hunger. By making direct and intimate contact with various parts of your body, you will come to know if you are truly hungry—be it physically or emotionally. When you can tune into your body in this way, you will respond naturally to “emotional” hunger in ways that are healthier than turning to food.

Note: Excerpted from When Food Is Food and Love Is Love.

Geneen Roth has been writing and teaching about hunger, pleasure, deprivation, and healing in all aspects of life for almost three decades. Her work explores the question of what we are truly hungry for when we turn to food, or shopping, or any activity designed to comfort our hearts. Roth’s bestselling books include When Food is Love, Feeding the Hungry Heart, Breaking Free From Emotional Eating, and The Craggy Hole in My Heart and the Cat Who Fixed It. She founded the Breaking Free Workshops in 1979, and has since worked with hundreds of thousands of people in her retreats and workshops. Her television appearances include The Oprah Winfrey Show, 20/20, and Good Morning America.