Sharing Life Lessons

by Beverly Keel

Naomi Judd is living the good life. But Judd, 58, quickly insists that it has little to do with the fame and fortune that came with being half of the country duo The Judds, who won numerous awards and sold 20 million albums after launching their singing career in 1983.

In fact, she says it was during the dark times—when she was a 20-something single mother of two mired in poverty, and later, when doctors told her that she was suffering from the fatal liver disease hepatitis C—that she developed a keen understanding about what’s important in life.

It was in the midst of her battle against hepatitis C, which doctors say is now in remission, that she found her true calling: using her own life story, complete with a multitude of mistakes, to help others. Refusing to accept the death sentence that doctors had given her, she began conducting research into health, healing and medicine by meeting with the nation’s leading doctors and professors.

Now she’s eager to share what she’s learned on her decade-long sojourn of self-discovery in her new book, Naomi’s Breakthrough Guide: 20 Choices to Transform Your Life. The book, which is equal parts autobiography, hometown common sense, and cutting-edge scientific studies, offers 20 affirmations that provide guidance and encouragement to people looking to improve their lives.

“Health, happiness, success, all the good stuff in life are choices,” she says. “All of them are completely under our control. We can’t control the way circumstances happen, but we can always control our reaction.

“This is life-changing stuff,” she says. “It’s far more enduring and exciting than buying a membership at the gym. That may come later. This is about addressing your core issues in life because nothing will change until you change the way you’re thinking. You can fall for the latest diet trend, you can get plastic surgery, or take up some new relationship, but you’re just spinning your wheels.”

As she’s traveled the world and met world leaders, famous athletes, and movie and rock stars, Judd says she’s learned that everybody is searching for the same thing: peace of mind.

“Peace of mind isn’t the absence of problems; peace of mind comes from your ability to deal with them,” she says. “The more we understand ourselves and what’s standing in the way of our being as happy and healthy as we can, and the more eager we become to risk following our dreams and offering our gifts to others, the more worthy we feel, the more we choose peace of mind.”

Life is multiple-choice

Judd hasn’t always felt worthy.

The daughter of a gas station owner in Ashland, Ky. (pop. 21,981), Judd developed a very active imagination at an early age and dreamed of becoming a star. But those fantasies were thwarted when she got pregnant with daughter Wynonna at age 17. She married and the couple moved to Los Angeles and had daughter Ashley, but the marriage fell apart and they divorced in 1972.

She began living a gypsy lifestyle and at age 22 found herself standing in line for food stamps and welfare checks and taking her sick children to the doctor on the city bus. When she left an unhealthy relationship, her ex-boyfriend broke into her house and beat her up. “I felt trapped and overwhelmed by my dire physical circumstances,” she says. “No money, no education, no contacts, no emotional support.” But as she looked into the mirror, she realized, “I’d done it all to myself.

“Day by day, through the years, I kept choosing this dead-end path,” she adds. “My desperate situation that night was a culmination of all the small and large inappropriate choices I’d been making. In a flash, I had a profound breakthrough: life is a series of multiple-choice questions. I saw clearly that it is through our choices that our lives take shape.”

She suddenly realized that she didn’t like the discrepancy between how she was raised and how she was raising her daughters. No longer intrigued by the superficial Hollywood lifestyle, she wanted her daughters to know their heritage and be close to her family. “When something bad happens to you, it doesn’t mean you are bad,” she says. “You can reverse the curse.”

In the early 1970s she moved back to rural Kentucky and earned a nursing degree while working as a waitress after the girls went to bed. And in her few moments of downtime, she resumed her dream of someday making a living as an entertainer.

While doing the dishes one evening, she predicted to her girls that she would someday write a No. 1 song. “They erupted in fits of laughter,” she recalls.

Annoyed, Judd then vowed to also win a Grammy for Songwriter of the Year. “At the time, it did seem ludicrous,” she admits. “Wy, Ash and I were still living in poverty. I was worried that our old car, dubbed Hunka Junk, wasn’t going to last much longer. I didn’t have medical coverage or a credit card. At 36, I felt I didn’t have much to show for my life. But I still refused to allow anything to stop me from believing I could become all I wanted to be.”

The next year, Judd, who had subsequently moved her family to Franklin, Tenn. (pop. 41,842), signed a deal with RCA Records, which reaffirmed her philosophy that “you become whatever you think about all day.” Indeed, she later won that Grammy.

Mirror of truth

Judd soon realized that the money, while nice, didn’t make her happy. “I personally made a choice a long time ago not to participate in the rampant materialism,” she says. She and her husband, Larry Strickland, live in a two-bedroom home on a farm that adjoins those of her two daughters in Leiper’s Fork, Tenn. She drives a 9-year-old car, doesn’t own a cell phone and has never sent an e-mail; her office is her kitchen table. Flannel sheets and fine linens are her greatest indulgence.

Judd says in order to find peace of mind, you must tune out life’s background noise and just listen to yourself. She recommends beginning the day with 20 minutes of solitude before taking on the busy world. “I was shocked to discover that 85 percent of all illnesses are stress-related,” she says. “In fact, the World Health Organization proclaimed stress as the number one global epidemic.”

For instance, she was recently in New York with Ashley, who is starring in Broadway’s Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. Ashley came home feeling exhausted after rehearsals, but immediately began checking her e-mail and making a to-do list, “which got her jacked up again. I couldn’t resist addressing the stress issue with her,” Judd says. “I said, ‘Sweet Pea, have you ever heard the term winding down?’ It’s all choices.

“If we’ll slow down and simplify our lives and start paying attention to our intuition, we will get clarity on what we value,” she says. “I decided that my faith, my family and friends, medicine, education and doing self-discovery gave me the most peace and joy in life.”

To find true peace of mind, Judd says you must look in the “mirror of truth” and examine what makes you happy, as opposed to what society tells you that you should desire. She recommends becoming a detective in your own life and getting to know your family tree. “It will explain why you are the way you are,” she says.

Beverly Keel is American Profile’s entertainment editor.

first appeared: 2/8/2004