Lost and Found
Unexpected Revelations About Food and Money
LOST AND FOUND is a dazzling, provocative and in fact radical template for liberating ourselves from old patterns, and transforming how we feel and behave about the precious resources that should, and ultimately can, sustain and support our lives. If it seems impossible to read a funny, brilliant, irresistible book about money that you can't put down, turn to the first page of Lost and Found.
A note to my readers
When my husband and I lost thirty years of our life's savings a few years ago, I was devastated. One of the first things I did was to use what I'd been teaching for years—a particular way of working with my mind and heart—to bring myself back to myself. I needed to find out what was on the other side of not only my loss, but any loss. What I found was so much greater than what I'd lost, and that was how and why I started writing LOST AND FOUND .
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Within a few weeks after hearing about the loss, I began getting very interested in the relationship with money, and almost immediately saw that it had everything—and I mean everything—in common with the relationship with food. If, as Zen teacher Cheri Huber says, the way we do anything is the way we do everything, then it followed that the way I thought about and spent money was exactly the same as the way I (once) thought about and ate food. This, believe me, was not exactly a comforting revelation.
I'd never really considered that I had a distorted relationship with money because I had enough to eat, pay rent, have health insurance, buy chocolate. Since my relationship with money did not even begin to approach the extremes of my relationship with food, I thought that money and me were fine. I knew I was somewhat anxious about it, and I knew I perpetually feared that I was not going to have enough, but since I wasn't in credit card debt, and wasn't acting out my feelings about money in any kind of obvious way, I figured that all was fine.
But what I found out after I lost my money was staggering. If I could put big neon lights around the word "staggering," if I could do cartwheels when I say it, if I could get across how stunned, and yet how illuminated I felt when I began exploring my relationship with money, I would do that now. I hardly have the words to tell you what it was like to see the exact same patterns with money as I'd once had with food. I splurged the way I once binged, and budgeted the way I once dieted. I lied about the money I had in the same way that I once lied about how much I ate. I rationalized buying sweaters on sale in the same way that I once rationalized eating broken cookies (because when the cookies break the calories break).
Then, when I began talking to other people about their relationships with money, it became almost instantly obvious that talking about and exploring the world of money is more taboo than food ever was. Most people seemed as if they'd rather talk about the intimate details of their sex lives than talk to me about money. Most people didn't even realize the burden, the anxieties and the shame they were carrying about their relationships with money—and how that was affecting everything they did, said, felt. And so I became increasingly more fascinated with the financial arena because I saw that it wasn't about the amount we have, it was about what we tell ourselves about money. Just like with food, it wasn't about anything, not anything, out there. It was always, and is always, about our own stories and the suffering we endure when we believe what's not true.
As I began exploring my relationship with money, I learned more things about my relationship with food (which, of course, was another staggering thing, since I thought I'd gone all the way with food). And what I learned with food applied to money, and the very same tools I'd developed to deal with food helped me with money.
It's a different life now with me and money—not because of the amount of money I have, but because my whole relationship to it has changed. I no longer feel as if I am groping around in financial darkness; I no longer get a headache anytime someone starts talking to me about money. I am in an ongoing exploration about the whole question of enough. Remember that old adage, "You can never be too thin or too rich"? It's not true.
I wrote LOST AND FOUND because I wanted you to know what I discovered. I wanted you to be able to have the knowledge and the tools to not only come out of the darkness with money, no matter how much you have or don't have, but to turn the light on inside your own mind, your own heart. Money, like food, is something you touch, think about, and deal with every single day, and so its effect on your well-being is profound. And because of its presence in our lives, it, like food, is both an expression of our beliefs about worth, joy and enough and a doorway to the heart of your heart—and what you are truly worth.
I can't wait to hear what you find when you read LOST AND FOUND. I want to know what you discover about your own value. I want to know what you understand about having and being enough that you didn't know before. Write to me on Facebook. Come see me at one of the LOST AND FOUND events. Together we will find what can never be lost: the bright center of your very own life.
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CRITICAL PRAISE FOR LOST AND FOUND
Kirkus Reviews on LOST AND FOUND
"A timely portrait of one woman's devastating loss and subsequent rise from the ashes of the Bernie Madoff scandal.
Roth (Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything, 2011, etc.) invites us into the socially uncomfortable discussion of money with ease and aplomb, despite her status as a self-proclaimed shirker of fiscal responsibility. Faced with financial ruin after losing her entire life savings to Madoff, the author delves into the often-illusory world of finances, the determination of "metric worth, both in the community and with one another...[as]...our collection of new, shiny things," and the opportunity to alter one's sense of what is "enough." She weaves between the humorous, as in the chapter entitled "Hyperventilating at Target," and the painful-"by the time I was eleven, I stopped longing for my father's attention and love...and learned how to use them." Roth relates her extensive experience as a self-help food guru to money with such ease that even the fiscal novice will understand just how uncomplicated the world of money can be-and how important it is to understand it. The author presents a literary one-stop-shop of financial responsibility, social awareness, eating disorders, sexism, spirituality and, above all, happiness.
An engaging exploration of the often intimidating world of personal finance."
Publisher's Weekly on LOST AND FOUND
"Roth builds on her life's work of demystifying her food obsession in offering a provocative and penetrating examination of personal relationships to money. Losing her entire life's savings in the Madoff collapse catalyzes a painful but priceless insight: unconscious relationships with money are akin to relationships with food. As someone who "makes a career out of suffering," as her brother chides, Roth turns within to make sense of this wake-up call, exposing subterranean beliefs and the hidden conditioning that has framed her "financial haze." In doing so, Roth teaches by example the transformative power of awareness. With compassion and humor she dismantles unconscious compulsions that bespeak an inner poverty, dissipating what she calls the "trance of deficiency" that hijacks financial relationships and self-worth. Fans familiar with the heart and wisdom that infuses Roth's candid writing style and makes her books memorable won't be disappointed. (Mar.)
More about LOST AND FOUND
"A compelling, gorgeously written, searing, funny, and utterly inspiring
book. You won't be able to put Lost and Found down and when you've
finished it, your relationship with money will never be the same."
– Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money
"Lost and Found offers a wake-up call on a topic that causes so much
psychological and spiritual pain and stress. Geneen Roth shows us how awareness of our money behavior can liberate our wisdom, happiness, and well-being. Read it, and you'll also understand how to make wiser money decisions." – Spencer Sherman, MBA, CFP, author of The Cure for Money Madness
"Dazzling insights and eloquent wisdom from one of the truly
sophisticated minds of our time." – David Krueger, MD, author of The
Secret Language of Money
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