A Conversation With Geneen Roth

Your latest book, Lost and Found. This is a very interesting challenge that came into your life not that long ago. The challenge was mercifully provided by one of your, or perhaps your most important spiritual teacher, whose name is Bhagavan Bernie Madoff. And he mercifully took away from you 30 years of savings, all their life savings, to help you experience the essence of who you are.

Yes.

However, you did not immediately experience the essence of who you are.

I'd say that was an understatement.

And you describe it in the book. It starts, and that's wonderful. I believe it's chapter one or two beginning. The incredible amount of the reaction and the fear that comes when you lose all your life's savings. And you describe what it did to your state of consciousness, wonderfully explained and illustrated. I don't know if you want to talk briefly about it. And then something happened.

Yes. For those of you, those few of you who might not know who Bernie Madoff is, he ran a Ponzi scheme and actually all over the world and ended up stealing $65 billion of people's money. And as my husband is very fond of saying when he tells his stories, and not all of it is mine. So we had our. We did have our life savings in there. And we got a phone call, or I got a phone call one day my husband was away. We believed it was very safe. A friend of ours was friends with Bernie Madoff, whose father was friends with Bernie Madoff. And anybody could put in our particular fund, anybody could put anywhere from $600 or $1,000 to whatever amount you had in this fund. And we just kept on putting all of our money in there because our friend had been in it for 30 years. And also, as my husband says, that, you know, you start believing in gravity when every time you throw a ball up in the air, it comes down every time for 30 years. So we absolutely believed it was safe. And then it wasn't. And then we got the phone call saying it was gone. And I was shocked and in terror. I think first I was shocked and then hysterical, and then in terror. And then I called a couple of very dear friends and teachers who I would say, we've lost all our money. And this was very soon after the phone call. And two of them said to me, lost your money, but nothing of any value is gone. And I said in that moment to both of them, now is not the time to be spiritual. I was convinced, you know, like, don't give me that. We lost our money. What are we going to do? We're going to be homeless, we're going to be out on the street and what are we going to eat? And it was such a panic. And I started very soon realizing that it was going to be unbearable to live inside my mind that I could not, absolutely could not live inside the mind that was telling me, what did you do? I can't believe you did that. What's the matter with you? How come you didn't diversify? Even a 4 year old knows to diversify. And I started blaming, of course, everybody, and then myself. And the ranting and the raving was so intense that I understood pretty immediately within a day that unless I brought myself back to what I had, not what I had lost, to what I could find instead of the money, that I couldn't what was already here, which is that animating aliveness or that indwelling aliveness that I've heard you speak of, unless I could bring myself back moment to moment to moment, every single time my mind wandered, then I was going to be lost. I was going to be living in abject terror. Sam.