Lost and Found: One Woman's Story of Losing Her Money and Finding Her Life Paperback – April 3, 2012

Little did I know how much reading Geneen's newest book would impact me and how I live my life. When I read Lost and Found the first time, it didn't quite sink in...that could have been my first clue. OMG, how I noticed something huge had just happened was how I was seeing what I was doing for work and with work and because of how I worked. This of course is so closely connected with what I do for money. Now I am reading the book outloud to my spouse and doing inquiry each day into what comes up. I have already made some huge changes in how I chose to use my energy in work. No more expending all the energy I have doing things I don't really want to do. What was I thinking?Geneen, I have one more book for you. Write about our relationship with illness and pain. I work with people in pain and it's the same darn thing. It's really not about the injury. The injury is the easy part. It's how we see ourselves when we are injured or sick. You know. You had all those years after you had shingles and then after your near fatal accident. It's a whole nother arena for exploration. Pain and illness is yet another portal. You have such a gift with words and clarity to get this message out. Include both men and women. People, Pain and Illness...see, you'll have to even do the title.Thank you for helping me change my life. You were able to help me see why I've been sitting on a cushion for 20 years! Doing inquiry has blown the lid off this underworld of concepts and believes that have driven me all these years. What an amazing exploration to just be curious and "see" what drives the me/mine. WOW!

Yesterday, on the flight from Detroit to San Francisco, I read Geneen Roth's new book - Lost and Found - Unexpected Revelations About Food and Money. The book is an eye-opening exploration of how the past and our unconscious attitudes about money can wreak havoc in our lives.Geneen pulls no punches in the book. From "grovelling for dollars" to "Madoff rage" to the "specter of homelessness," Lost and Found is a candid revelation about what Geneen learned by losing her life's savings in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi Scheme. The book gives us insight into Geneen Roth's open-ended inquiry into her relationship with money, her unconscious attitudes toward money, her life habits around money, and how she has begun to free herself from it all through awareness & inquiry.It takes a lot of courage to reveal so many personal and intimate details as Geneen has in her book. The gift of it for the reader is that we can connect with her and her experience in a real way. Lost and Found isn't a dispassionate treatise on the effects and insights of falling victim to one of the greatest con men of all time, nor is it a tale of "woe is me." Lost and Found is more a journey of revelation from a person responding to a "wake up call" from reality.We are fortunate to have a person like Geneen Roth who can show us the beauty and power of bringing awareness and inquiry into all of our life.

I like this book for the examination of the overlap of mindless spending (and investing as a type of spending) and overeating. Similar concepts have been brought up by Peter Walsh in his books "It's All Too Much" and "Does This Clutter Make Me Look Fat?". I think Roth does a better job with this fuller examination of the unstated reasons for out of control behavior. I think this book has lessons for people beyond the stated food and money, it could help with many types of overindulgence.The book shares many of her patterns of behavior and the shows how they sprang from core beliefs that were not right. It took a lot of courage to admit that she thought her husband was responsible to provide the necessities of their life, and her money was for play. She tells us how she conveniently "forgot" to bring he wallet when they went shopping at Costco, so he would have to pay. She works through many examples of this kind of thinking, where it came from, and how she addressed it. She makes it clear that she is still a work in progress.I think this book is needed for many people, but I think Roth generalizes Her feelings to the general population. She has a left of center political approach which will dampen her message for some people. She does not even consider that moral people can differ from her values. Roth writes from a Buddhist perspective and refers to many Buddhist writers and their works, so it helps if the reader understands some of the beliefs beforehand.I think this would be a great book for a book club, it is a good read. I wish there were a study guide with discussion questions. If people were able to tolerate the discomfort these subjects bring, the discussions could be enlightening.

In July 2007, it began to dawn on me that I had issues with money so I prayed for guidance. Shortly thereafter, I had a series of losses, two family members and four friends died, my business was slowing with the economy and right in the middle of it all, one of my clients swindled me out of $30,000. Yikes! Since then, I have worked on understanding my relationships and it is amazing how intertwined our relationship with money is. I found the book Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations about Food and Money to articulate some of my issues with money and it gave me several new perspectives. For the first time, I understood I was not alone in being swindled, and all the complicated feelings that go with it, including those disquieting ah ha moments when you see how your own behavior and beliefs contributed to the situation. This book is a must read for those on a journey to develop deeper understanding of themselves and their relationships to money...food... and the other things we get hooked into. At the end of the day, we see that things never really mattered and Ms. Roth has a knack for shining the light on the truth.