Supermodel Carre Otis finds the greatest gift of all. (Cover Story).(heroin recovery)(Brief Article)

Carre Otis was living in Paris when she got the break that would make her a supermodel. Just 18, she appeared on the cover of the influential fashion magazine Elle. Soon after that, Otis posed in her size-2 Calvin Klein jeans for a famous series of "biker babe" ads. Next came a sexy page in the Pirelli calendar, and eventually spreads in Sports Illustrated's swimsuit edition. The young girl born in San Francisco had realized her dream--yet she was addicted to heroin and alcohol by age 23. Though beautiful, she hadn't found her true beauty.

Her troubles with drugs actually had begun a few years earlier. That's why, when Otis was 15, her parents sent her to the John Woolman School in Nevada City, Calif. She instantly liked the outdoor-oriented school--her parents had always taken the family backpacking and hiking--and for the first time she became interested in a healthy lifestyle. "We were really living off the land," she says. "It was a community of earthbound people making herbal tinctures, growing our own organic gardens, chopping wood. Students made most of the decisions. It was a huge influence on me."

But, as Otis says, "I've always really gone along with the flow of the environment I'm in. The fashion world isn't an environment where health is necessarily encouraged. When I got into modeling and had success right away, the addictions I'd had when I was younger returned." Her life as a model and actress was tumultuous. To keep thin, she stayed on the drugs and booze--"drinking my calories," she calls it. Then there was an abusive two-year marriage to actor Mickey Rourke, whom she'd met while making Wild Orchid.

Her low point came when she finally admitted that "heroin had knocked me on my ass." Otis was 28 by then. "The life I'd been living had wreaked havoc on my body. I decided to really start taking care of myself." She drew strength from her time at the Woolman School, which "gave me this amazing connection to health and nutrition and a way to work my way back to them." She also completed her first Buddhist retreat at this time. "That planted another seed. No matter what the detour was on my path, Buddhism gave me a place to come home to." There were 12-step-type programs she turned to as well.

Her labor of learning self-love required her to reject old ideas about herself. "I used to measure how I felt based on what size jean I wore, how skinny I was. Now I see myself in terms of health. Can I get through my run in the morning? Can I ...