As a speaker and author most of Geneen Roth's career has focused on spirituality and women's relationships with with food. She discovered that in her own life overeating and dieting were manifestations of her spiritual instability and her discomfort in her own skin.
Interestingly, just as her career as a speaker was really taking off, Geneen was hit with a huge financial blow. All of her life savings were lost as the Bernie Madoff scandal came to light and she found herself with massive debt and only $5000 in the bank.
Now, at this point I must admit I wasn't really feeling any sympathy or connection with the author. When I have $5000 in the bank I feel pretty flush, so you have to understand its all a matter of perspective. This great loss lead to a great gain in self-awareness, which is the primary focus of this book. Roth realized that she had been maintaining a dis-functional relationship with money that paralleled her feelings about food. Guilt and secrecy surrounded both topics and her planned obsolescence had led her to crisis.
She began to ask her students and friends about their money and found that for many of them money was a black hole of uncertainty and a topic to be avoided at all costs. A healthy in and out relationship of needs and wants with no assigned emotional value was virtually unheard of in her discussions.
Geneen realized that finances and food, for many women, are parallel categories of disfunction. The taboo and competition that surround both topics leads us to hide the problems from each other, allowing the cycle to continue. Open and honest discussion can break down those barriers and we can learn to support each other as we heal spiritually, physically and financially.
As Geneen Roth says;
"But it's not too late. It's possible to understand money as an expression of our life's energy and to use it to support life rather than to destroy it.
It's possible to redefine what making a profit actually means and recognize that as long as one person wins and another person loses, no one wins.
It's possible to understand what happens to our money and to use it to reflect what we value most instead of turning it over to questionable characters and complicated investments.
It's possible to find what was never lost to begin with - our ability to feel, give, receive, know, question, learn, change- and to allow that to be the wellspring of our worth. When we spend as much time investing in our inner lives as we do in getting and having more, how we live on this earth and inside our bodies will change. "
