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ingredients is filled with wisdom, and exists to teach us, guide us, and deliver vital information that will support us in becoming the person we most desire to be.
    T h e R e c i p e C a l l e d D e b b i e F o r d Inside the painful, dramatic story of me I found the perfect recipe to create the Debbie I longed to be. My list of ingredients began with being the youngest of three children, with a brother and sister who were not exactly excited to meet me. Mixed into my recipe was a desperate need to be liked and accepted, and an extremely sensitive emotional system. Add to that a noisy internal dialogue that constantly battered me, letting me know how unwanted and unlovable I was. Stir in thirteen years of drug abuse so I could learn the depths of my own darkness and develop 26
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    a profound relationship with powerlessness. Blend in a little self-loathing and a massive dose of neurosis. Mix in a large amount of self-determination so I would be driven to devote five years of my life to searching for the answers to some of life’s most difficult questions. Add in twenty-five years’ experience in making everything and everyone wrong—God wrong, the Universe wrong, my parents wrong—so that I would know with certainty that I had the power to make myself miserable for the rest of my life.
    Finally, add a pinch of arrogance and a belief that I knew it all and you have the perfect recipe to motivate me to find the answers to how I could love and accept all parts of myself.
    It took me many years to see that my mission to “fix” myself was an endless and thankless task, a bottomless pit leading me nowhere.
    I truly believed I would feel better once I got rid of the parts of my recipe I didn’t like. But struggling unsuccessfully against the unwanted parts of me led me to discover that I didn’t need to get rid of anything. Instead, I needed to integrate and embrace everything.
    I realized that in order to be the “me” I always desired, I would need every ingredient that had gone into my batter. I would need every experience of weakness and strength, fear and courage, success and failure. As long as I kept trying to stick my hand in the batter and rip out certain unwanted ingredients—my trauma, my weakness, my self-doubt—I would remain an uncooked lump of potential. But if I integrated all my ingredients, mixed them up, and appreciated the unique contribution they made, I would finally be able to recognize that I had all the makings of the perfect me. I had spent years trying to become someone other than myself, so the realization that all I had to do was stop trying to be something 27
    T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w I wasn’t was totally enlightening. I came to understand that in order to make the perfect cake you sometimes need a little salt, and that when you overcompensate for your batter’s bitterness by adding heaps of sugar, your cake becomes indigestible.
    Each of us comes into this world with a particular mission, as if a recipe for our highest fulfillment were written within our souls. This recipe is different for each of us; there are no two recipes that are exactly the same. To discover the recipe called you, you must distinguish what lies within your batter.
    My recipe required me to wait thirty-eight years to find the perfect man to spend my life with. Then it called for me to give birth to my most favorite person in the entire Universe only to watch my marriage fall apart in front of me. The next ingredient was an unexpected divorce that kicked up all the trauma and pain from my own parents’ divorce. The overwhelming fear that I couldn’t make it on my own added some nice flavor so that I could muster up the courage and the strength to write my first book, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers . All those traumas—those ingredients—gave me the willingness and wisdom to dig down deep into my soul and produce that book.
    In a million years I would never have