Open-Secrets

Tag: bernie madoff

  • Geneen Roth – Lost & Found

    Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations About Food and Money

    Geneen Roth Lost and FoundGeneen Roth’s new book will be released on March 22. I pre-ordered mine on Amazon yesterday. You may recall that Geneen was one of Bernie Madoff’s victims, but instead of playing the victim role, Geneen took a serious look at her situation, what got her there and did what she always does – started looking into the depths of her psyche and behavior to understand herself better.

    As she was exploring her patterns an beliefs, she managed to release her best selling book to date: Women,Food & God. The book took off like a rocket, hopefully helping her to reverse some of her financial misfortune.

    I’ve been looking forward to her new book ever since she told me she was writing it about a year ago. Here’s what the publisher says about Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations About Food and Money:

    When Geneen Roth and her husband lost their life savings, Roth joined the millions of Americans dealing with financial turbulence, uncertainty, and abrupt reversals in their expectations. The resulting shock was the catalyst for her to explore, in workshops and in her own life, how women’s habits and behaviors around money-as with food-can lead to exactly the situations they most want to avoid. Roth identified her own unconscious choices-binge shopping followed by periods of budgetary self-deprivation, “treating” herself in ways that ultimately failed to sustain, and using money as a substitute for love-among others. As she examined the deep sources of these habits, she faced the hard truth about where her “self-protective” financial decisions had led. As in all her books, Roth relates her personal experience with irreverent humor and hard- won wisdom. Here, she offers provocative and radical strategies for transforming how we feel and behave about the resources that should, and ultimately can, sustain and support our lives.

    I think Geneen Roth is taking her work and writing to a whole new level.

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  • Survivor: Berkeley California

    Survival Instinct Explored in Berkeley, CA

    survival_instinctThis past weekend, I attended A.H. Almaas’ winter retreat in Berkeley. The retreat focused on the survival instinct and most agreed it was a timely presentation.

    Two years ago we worked on the social instinct and last year we explored the sexual instinct. Almass explores the instinctual drives in relationship to the Enlightenment Drive – the dynamic quality of the soul that impels it toward awareness of its true nature and freedom from limitation and the past.

    The way we’re approaching the question of instincts and their drives is not a question of being free from them, it is a question of freeing them to be what they can be, and evolve and develop in a way that can become part of our realization, support for our realization. – A.H. Almaas

    Almaas sees nothing wrong with the survival drive or the other instinctual drives. They are natural components of animal existence and evolution. The challenge for human beings, who have the capacity to muck up the natural functioning of the drives, is how to help the drive do its job most effectively.

    Our capacity for reflective consciousness brings with it the capacity for projection and distortion of  what is really happening. The past gets projected onto the present situation and, the drive which can’t tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined, kicks into gear with its fight or flight response.

    The current economic situation is raising a lot of safety and security concerns in people. Recessions, property, money and wealth are really not the types of dangers our instinctual drives evolved to engage. We’re hardwired to respond to actual immediate physical threat, not the imagined consequences of Bernie Madoff ripping us off or the consequences of job loss or a dwindling 401K.

    We have become so identified with our possessions, that we connect them very strongly to our survival. Survival now has a strong connection to money – and it’s partly true, but mostly not. A downgrade in lifestyle or having to eat beans instead of beef is not about survival. It’s about comfort, preference and self-image. The self-image is what becomes threatened – and – since the hard wiring can’t tell the difference between the body and the self-image, fear, anxiety, worry and even terror result.

    The direct connection to money is something we all need to explore – what it is, what does it stand for, what it means personally, how to work with it and relate to it.  This holds true for all of our possessions. This type of exploration will help to reveal the distortions that are interfering with the free functioning of the drives and thus the potential of the consciousness aligning them with the drive for enlightenment.

    A very interesting three days.

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