Before Tom Pedulla found the Eightfold Path, he had to admit that he was lost.

It took the better part of a lifetime, because he didn’t look lost at all. As the eldest of four children born to Italian-American parents, he was expected to succeed, and he did. He graduated from Harvard College. He started a lucrative career in advertising. What happened next — over the next 50 years — is the subject of his memoir, which he completed at the Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop last year.

It’s almost poetic that “Waking Up is Hard to Do” begins with the story of an early ad campaign with the slogan “Take it to the Limit.” The author wrote the tagline for a prominent computer company’s TV commercial, which compelled Don Henley to sign on and rerecord the famed Eagles’ song.

As Pedulla watched the big-budget shoot unfold in the middle of New York City, he was sure his parents would approve. “There was a lot of pressure on me to be someone they could be really proud of,” he explains. But he knew the commercial would only run a few times during a coming golf tournament. The lavish spending felt wasteful, disgusting even.

On a break, he took a walk down Fifth Avenue and wandered into a spiritual bookstore. That’s when he found (and purchased) his new compass, Ram Dass’ “Journey of Awakening: A Meditator’s Guidebook.” The shoot resumed, the commercial aired; but Pedulla started attending to his intuition.

With the help of a therapist, he reexamined his values. It took a decade, but he left the ad business. Therapy and meditation had transformed his life, and he wanted to help others in the same way. He obtained his master’s degree at Simmons University’s Graduate School of Social Work in 2001 and opened a private practice in 2003.

The drastic career change was the original premise of the book, which “had been rattling around the back of my mind for years” and came to fruition when he retired in 2021. With a draft completed, he was accepted into the 10-month manuscript program at the Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop, based in Northampton, where he was encouraged to dig deeper.

“I could see all the conditioning that I had growing up and how difficult it was to get in touch with my own heart,” he admits. On the page, it was clear that the search for meaningful work and romantic love were intertwined: He met his second wife, also a social worker, at a meditation retreat. The memoir’s lengthy subtitle, “How a long lost, former altar boy found his way home on the Buddha’s Eightfold Path” was worth every word.

“It took me a long time to grow up, to figure out who I was and what I wanted, to figure out what love really means,” Pedulla says. And though the awakening is ongoing, the path is finally clear.

Tom Pedulla will sign copies of his memoir at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center on Wednesday, May 29. Purchase the book here.

Melissa Karen Sances lives in Easthampton, where she’s working on her own memoir. Reach her at melissaksances@gmail.com.

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