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Barb Schmidt watches as her books roll down the line

at HCI Printing and Publishing in Deerfield Beach.

Photos provided

Barb Schmidt introduced her book, The Practice, during an event at Florida Atlantic University last month.

INSET BELOW: Cover of 'The Practice'

By Mary Jane Fine

    Like so many little girls whose role models were Cinderella and Princess Grace, Barb Schmidt grew up believing that happily-ever-after was a birthright. Would fairy tales lie? Would movies? Of course not.
    So why, then, at the ripe old age of 18, was she still searching, searching for the elusive happiness that seemed always beyond her reach?
    There were reasons; there always are.
    “As a child, I grew up in a very dysfunctional home,” she says. “I was the oldest of five. Both my mother and my father were alcoholics. I felt disconnected, unhappy, alone … on the outside, looking in.”
    Looking at television, too, lots of it, as a way of passing the hours. And she was attending the Catholic Church to which her family was devoted.
    In high school, she worked four jobs, including her favorite, at a local McDonald’s. The fast food became a fast salve for her misery. She ate the fish sandwiches. She ate the french fries. She ate the hash browns. She ate and ate.
    But maintaining her trim size — 5-foot-6, 125 pounds — was no problem. After eating, she’d duck into the ladies room and vomit.
    “I was very secretive then. I’d go into one of the cubicles and throw up.” She got so good at it, so fast, that no one ever caught her at it.
    A decade passed before she realized that her unhealthy behavior — “I didn’t eat a meal that I didn’t throw up” — was a disease: bulimia.
    More years passed before she could look back, collect her thoughts and write a book about her path from there to here, about ending her binge-purge addiction, about learning to navigate beyond unhappiness, about finding a mooring that offered both physical and spiritual health.
    The Practice: Simple Tools for Managing Stress, Finding Inner Peace, and Uncovering Happiness had its official launch last month at Florida Atlantic University’s Libby and Harry Dodson Auditorium in the Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing.
    In the preface of The Practice, Schmidt recalls how, on an October morning in 1984, she read a newspaper article about the death, a year earlier, of Karen Carpenter, one of her favorite singers, from anorexia.
    Schmidt had stayed home from work that day, something she rarely did, and immersed herself in the paper. The story about the anniversary of Carpenter’s death, the reason for it, hit her hard: an eating disorder, a dangerous one. And on the other side of the printed page was an ad for a center that treated anorexia and bulimia.
    “This voice just clicked within me,” she says. “It said, ‘You need help. You need to go and get help.’ ”
    The very next day, her then-husband, Mickey — she’d married at 19 — drove her across the state, from their Coral Springs home to the treatment center in Naples. She stayed six weeks. Group therapy. A 12-step program. Inspirational reading. Spiritual instruction. And, yes, recovery.
    “By the end of my stay,” Schmidt writes, “I had an incredible desire to live a more spiritual, more meaningful life.”
    She had accomplished much by then, but those six weeks had led her to view her successes as the wrong ones.
    “According to society’s measurements, I had achieved all the external things I could possibly want: six (McDonald’s) franchises, a handsome husband, a social life, money, and an attractive appearance. However … I did not feel happy. Most of the time, I felt incomplete.”
    The path to feeling “complete” had begun in Naples. The birth of her daughter, Michelle, in November 1985, extended that path. “I instantly felt more patient and more loving,” she writes.
    Her spiritual search continued. She read inspirational books — M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled and Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love — and went on spiritual retreats.

During a retreat in Pura Vida in March, Schmidt meditated regularly.
Photos provided

When the Dalai Lama came to FAU in 2010, Schmidt met him.

    The push-pull puzzle of her Catholic childhood — “Should I be a nun or be rich and famous?” — snapped into clear focus. There needn’t be an either/or, she told herself. She needn’t listen to, as she says, “that little Catholic voice about going to hell.” She could have material things. She didn’t have to “go live in a cave.” She could enjoy a balanced life.
    Balance came in a number of ways. She and her first husband divorced. He later introduced her to Dick Schmidt, whom she married in 1992. By then, she’d sold her McDonald’s franchises and immersed herself in yoga and meditation, spiritual retreats and religious studies. More years passed. She felt the completion she’d sought, the happiness. The next step was to share with others some of what she had learned.
   And share she did. In 1988, just a few years after her recovery, Schmidt co-founded Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities of South Florida. In 2001, she and Dick hosted a holiday party and asked guests to each bring a toy for a needy child. That request resulted in 600-plus toys, and those toys, over time, resulted in the Spirit of Giving Network, a non profit collaborative group, a forum for sharing information and resources to help children and families in South Palm Beach County. And there was more. The Schmidts and the Schmidt Foundation, already supporters of FAU’s Peace Studies Program, in 2005 helped launch a community-outreach series that has evolved into Barb Schmidt’s non profit Peaceful Mind, Peaceful Life, which is “dedicated to funding speakers, teachers and projects that spread peace and love throughout the world.”
    “I’d been on a 30-year search,” she says. “I’m always a student, but now I’ve become my own teacher.”
    And the teacher of others. She began giving workshops, giving back what she’d been given. The Practice was a natural outcome. Undaunted by the plethora of self-help books and spiritual advice in bookstores, Schmidt wrote her own.
    “I felt like I needed to tell my story,” says Schmidt, who now lives in Boca Raton. “I felt I could connect in a very simple, direct way. We never take time to sit with ourselves for just a minute, to let thoughts come and go. Every day, you can connect with that spark inside, to know how capable you are, not at the mercy of the world.”
    Her book presents what she calls “a set of practical tools that can be used throughout the day to guide us along our life’s path … a compilation of the great Truths taught by authentic teachers and masters throughout the centuries from various religious and spiritual traditions.”
    Meditation. Mantras. Readings. Reflection. The daily routine she titled “the practice” because, as she notes in the book, quoting the late modern dancer Martha Graham, “Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire.”
    Schmidt’s desire is to share her experience and her path to fulfillment with her readers, to help them achieve what a friend told her, not long ago: “Your life is like Mission: Impossible, to go from where you were to where you are today.”

The Practice: Simple Tools for Managing Stress, Finding Inner Peace, and Uncovering Happiness (Health Communications, $12.95) is available in bookstores and on Amazon.com and other sites.