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We are, by our very human nature, limited in what we can know or do or control or change.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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Step One is, paradoxically, both a crushing end and a beginning.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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What a child knows about transformation is very little. What an adult knows, I think, is even less. Because a child at least remembers that transformation is possible.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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Self-knowledge is the foundation of a practical spirituality, a spirituality that ripples outward from the self into the world.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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39bb870
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Am I ultimately alone? How many of us have asked that question--drunk or sober--when we've wondered if there was a God or when we've decided that there was none? And the universe reels around us, more vast than we could begin to comprehend and more apparently empty. But it's only when we overlook the fairly obvious fact that we are human beings on a planet packed with human beings that we can entertain the fairly self-indulgent idea that we..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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perhaps our purpose is, for the time being, to be human, to live on this earth and in this human community, to receive something from it, and to give something back.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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warned me that the tenuous balance that exists in my brain is easily set off kilter, but like everything else he said,
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Marya Hornbacher |
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comprehending little and caring less.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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So rather than running from doubt, shutting down our spirits and hearts, or reaching for quick certainty, we can use doubt as a spiritual practice. We can wait. We wait for our tangled emotions to unknot themselves; we wait for our troubled or angry or grieving spirits to let their sorrow go. We wait for the humility to recognize our limitations and our lack of control, for this humility will bring us peace while we wait. We wait for answer..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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Waiting through doubt teaches us enormous spiritual strength. It gives us the strength to go on--through struggle, through joy, through recovery, through our daily lives--even though we do not know how to name or describe a power or powers greater than ourselves. And the paradox is this: to accept this not-knowing--to accept doubt, a lack of certainty--is to accept the very nature of life as it is. In accepting doubt, unanswered questions, ..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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If a woman stands in a kitchen rubbing her eyes and pouring coffee with no one there to see her, does she exist? I
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Marya Hornbacher |
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That which stirs within, slows or quickens, goes deep or dies out. When I speak of spirit, I am not speaking of something related to or given by a force outside ourselves. I am speaking of the force that is ourselves. The experience of living in this world, bound by a body, space, and time, woven into the fabric of human history, human connection and human life. This is the force that feels, and thinks and gives us consciousness at all. It ..
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athiesm
self-help
spirituality
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Marya Hornbacher |
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It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny. It is a blow to your parents, at whom you are pissed.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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c70c02b
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I cannot help but think that, had I lived in a culture where "thinness" was not regarded as a strange state of grace, I might have sought out another means of attaining that grace,"
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Marya Hornbacher |
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There is no right," she says. "There's the best you can do. And that's fine. That's normal."
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Marya Hornbacher |
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We put an extraordinary amount of effort into how we appear, or wish to appear, trying frantically to construct a sense of self out of how we are seen from without. But who are we from within? What makes us who we are? If we stop for a moment and think, Of what do I consist? what is the answer we hear?
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Marya Hornbacher |
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The spiritual self is the deepest, most integrated aspect of who we are.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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For all its God language, the Twelve Step program isn't actually an attempt at religious conversion. Really, it just tries to bring us to a place of new spiritual understanding that allows us to live differently in this world.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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E cosi passai attraverso lo specchio, passai nel mondo a rovescio, dove il su e giu e il cibo e ingordigia, dove le pareti sono rivestite di specchi convessi, dove la morte e onorevole e la carne debole. Andarci e facilissimo. Piu difficile trovare la via del ritorno. Rivedo la mia vita come si guarda un brutto film d'azione, seduti sull'orlo della sedia gridando: <
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Marya Hornbacher |
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So what are the spiritual principles that we want guiding us as we interact with others? I can think of a few that are, to me, indispensable: Love, agape, the Greek word that means love of all. Generosity: giving all that we have, giving from the bottomless spiritual well. Empathy: another kind of giving, a giving of the open heart. Honesty: a way of giving the true self. Acceptance: giving people the freedom to be who they are. These are o..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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The reward is entrance to the "world of the Spirit," which is to say, entrance to this world, a place at this table, in this human life. I am not much concerned about the existence of a hereafter, a "next" life--this life is what I have, this is where I live, and I believe that my spiritual growth depends upon the work I do here and now. That work amounts to seeing this world clearly, moving through it gently, and learning to love it well."
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Marya Hornbacher |
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It has been argued that food and eating have replaced sex as our foremost cultural taboo.7 To some extent I agree with this but would point out that the taboo is not against food, or sex, or flesh, but against a loss of control.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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4d01d13
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Sitting out there on the porch, I laughed. How funny--to think of us turning our clocks this way and that, importantly telling the sun when to rise and when to set, when we would prefer it to be light and when dark.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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They are solid, real. I am an object, useful but hollow. The absence of thought fills me up.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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comprehending little and caring less.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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The lesson of daily spiritual practice is not a complicated one and requires no special equipment; we are simply learning to love. That, at the end of the day, is where a spiritual practice takes us: out into the world, living in and loving this world of the spirit, here and now.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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aded056
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Steps Six and Seven are often brushed off, especially by the nonbeliever, because they seem to assume a direct relationship with a personal God. But they really are essential, and reconceptualizing them in a way that allows us to reach their spiritual core--the development of a clear moral self--is crucially important to those of us working the Steps in sobriety.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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My most salient memories
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Marya Hornbacher |
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My mother insulted me, I insulted her, Jeanne, the stepgrandmother, insulted everything in a skirt, and my grandfather just kept right on drinking. We picked at our food, competing for who could eat the least. When
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Marya Hornbacher |
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3673305
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It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of deadly contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength. A wish to prove that you need nothing, that you have no human hungers, which turns on itself and becomes a searing need for the hunger itself.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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for the purposes of my own spirituality, it is far more useful to recognize the limitations of my knowledge; to humble myself, not before a deity, but simply to be humble; to surrender, again, not to a God but simply to surrender; and to accept. Not accept certain facts; but simply to train myself in the practice of acceptance.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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It's my secret, my saviour. It's reliable. It saves me from the unpredictable mind, where the thoughts are a cesspool, swirling, eddying with rip tide. When I starve, the sinking, pressing, black sadness lifts off me and I feel weightless, empty, light. No racing thoughts, no need to move, no reasons to hide in the dark. When I throw up, I purge all the fears, paranoia, the thoughts. The eating disorder gives me comfort. I couldn't let it g..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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The physical food transubstantiates in our minds into something more ethereal, of human and emotional nurturance, a sense that our hungers are being sated. Even if you are just stuffing handfuls of fries into your mouth on a binge, you still feel that some emptiness, if briefly, is being filled.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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d7e03b0
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The side of me that feared fire and longed for ice, that cringed at noise and hungered for silence, that shied from touch and desired to numb itself into nothing.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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we have few words for spiritual beyond those that refer back to a God. But not believing in a God is not opposed to a belief in an aspect of the self that can be called spiritual. The latter is experienced, and defined, very personally, and is different for each individual.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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9d77b39
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Call it the feeling of love that connects us. Call it the creative force that drives us to transform. Call it our energy. Call it our capacity to give. Call it grace, or even divinity, something that allows for those things to exist within us as individuals and between us each time we connect.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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I had a love affair with books, with the characters and their worlds. Books kept me company
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Marya Hornbacher |
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It is easy to write off childlike faith in the universe and childlike wonder at the world as simply a lack of knowledge about "how life really is." Well, how is life, really? Do we know--we who have been denying life, life's beauty and its true challenges, for such a long time? Or did we know better as children, when the whole world seemed to be filled with meaning and possibility, both good and bad?"
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Marya Hornbacher |
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3a3e81c
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I do doubt she ever felt so cluttered and noisy and jangled that she put her boot through the ice. As soon as I did it, I could just hear her saying in alarm, "Well. My stars!" But there are days I do feel that way, and I am beginning to know that it is because I hold on. I fight. I resist. It doesn't even matter what I resist; there is simply something in me that tends to resist things as they are. I have been fighting since I was very sma..
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Marya Hornbacher |