CHAPTER 1

The Lesson of Hope

If despite a lifetime of diligence and hard work, you feel you arestill searching for something that remains just beyond yourgrasp, then you, my friend, may be stuck in the hamster wheelapproach to life. Hamster wheel people don't give up; they will dietrying to deliver the goods.

You may think you want a better job, more satisfyingrelationship, or healthier body. In reality, your restlessness isn'tabout your income, your relationships, or your looks. It's aboutfeeling incomplete.

As a life coach and Reiki master, I am in the business ofliberation. I help people escape the self-imposed prison of thehamster wheel. For many years, their stories were my story, andthey may be your story as well, but they don't have to be. There ishope for getting off the wheel and living a life you love. It all startswith embracing the amazing and liberating possibility that the loveof your life just might be you.

If you are like many others, you may doubt that falling inlove with yourself is even possible let alone powerful. I assure you,it is. To help you begin to accept that you too have the power toembrace this reality, I will share with you the short version of myown personal story of transformation. The story of what happenedin my own life when I finally fell in love with myself.

Mine is an all too common tale. Too many years on the wheelresulted in utter exhaustion and despair. I was the classic successfulType A overachiever. Sensible, driven, hardworking, and financiallysecure. Someone you could always count on to get the job done.

I began life in 1954 with a question mark over my head. Backthen, medicine could not assure the survival of an "Rh factor" baby.Some required many blood transfusions. I was one of the fortunatefew who needed just one.

Instead of perceiving my survival as a blessing and a gift,early on I concluded that I had to pack each day with output becauseI was, after all, operating on borrowed time and someone else'sblood. My response to a gift of grace was a lifelong marathon oftrying to prove myself worthy through productivity.

Prove myself I did! Along the way, I earned a full scholarshipto college and graduated summa cum laude in three years. Soundsgreat but at what price? Anorexic, ulcer ridden, and clinicallydepressed by age nineteen, I thought I had to re-earn my right to behere every day. To be worthy and safe, I had to control every aspectof my life, always pushing, always moving, always working, alwaysdoing. Looking back, I now realize that when I chose the followingcouplet from Sara Teasdale's poem "Dust" (1966) as the caption formy college yearbook picture, even at age twenty-one I already knewsomewhere deep in my soul that this way of living was a very slipperyslope. Sara writes,

    I almost gave my life long ago for a thing
    That has gone to dust now, stinging my eyes—
    It is strange how often a heart must be broken
    Before the years can make it wise.

Although I was usually a quick learner, it would require threemore decades of experience before I was finally compelled to act onthat inner wisdom. Meanwhile, the world kept right on rewardingmy perfectionism and incessant productivity. Fresh out of college, Igot a job in management consulting, making partner in my first firmat age thirty. Over the next thirty years, I served as a senior partnerin four of the world's largest and most prestigious global professionalservices firms.

I had some wonderful times in that career. I traveled allover the world, mentored young people, and knew the satisfactionof doing good work. But even the most committed and productiveindividuals can shift from frustration to a sense of futility whentheir values, passion, work, and lives become disconnected. Afterdecades of working nonstop with little attention to my personalhealth and welfare, my soul and my role had become increasinglyseparated, leaving me feeling disillusioned and betrayed by the verylife I'd created.

One of the problems with not taking care of our health isthat the effects of ignoring it are often slow to show up. We continueto juggle family responsibilities, work, and finances until we loseourselves, waking up one day fifty pounds heavier in body andsoul—no good to ourselves or anyone else. It's no surprise that duringthe final years of my consulting career, morbid obesity and profounddepression defeated me daily. This led me to conclude that my onlyhope of escaping the rat race that was slowly killing me was to get itover with once and for all. The great irony was that while I startedout feeling afraid I'd die if I didn't keep working all the time, I endedup...