Authors: Adelaide Bry
est (3 page)
est
because someone
they knew had been through it, had raved about it, and had become living
proof that it "worked." A few had read one of several provocative
magazine articles about
est
. Many were aware that some famous
entertainers were among its graduates: John Denver had written songs
praising
est
; Valerie Harper had thanked Werner on TV; and Yoko
Ono, George Maharis, Polly Bergen, Joanne Woodward, Cloris Leachman,
Jerry Rubin, and Roy Scheider, as well as four of the Fifth Dimension,
were also said to be alumni. (
est
keeps the names of its graduates
confidential; many graduates, however, speak publicly about their
participation in
est
.)
Clearly,
est
was enjoying a smashing success. Wherever I went in
New York and San Francisco, I heard remarkable stories from graduates
who were effortlessly changing their lives: making decisions to leave
or remain in marriages, resuming relationships with aging parents they
had avoided for years, getting out of ruts, getting into better jobs
and better relationships, losing weight without trying -- continually
affirming how much better they were feeling about money, sex, and/or God.
At the same time, a lot of people, weary of the proliferation of all
the mind-expanding movements of the last fifteen years, were dismissing
est
as just one more in a long string of self-helps. The others
didn't work for them, and they doubted that
est
could either.
However, for the same reasons that thousands of others were being drawn
to
est
, I was also curious about it. In addition to the personal
benefits that seemed likely, I had a professional interest in finding
out what the
est
game was all about. As a psychotherapist who
encountered among my patients many of the problems that people were being
"cured" of through
est
, I wanted to know how the difficult task of
changing human beings was being accomplished so quickly and, apparently,
so effectively. If
est
was really doing what everyone said it was
doing, and doing it in a span of sixty hours, then it was accomplishing
what no person and no one system in Western psychology had yet been
able to do. After the training, I saw that
est
is not "change"
but transformation, and emphasizes accepting yourself as you really are.
I was awed by the notion that a simple, quick, relatively inexpensive
system (my own psychoanalysis had cost more than $15,000) could help
vast numbers of people to transform their lives. I was further impressed
with the fact that two professional colleagues of mine were sending
their patients to
est
, claiming that it speeded up the therapy
process. In fact,
est
asks on its application form if the applicant
is currently in treatment and, if so, if he's "winning" or "losing"
in therapy. If he feels he's losing (that the therapy isn't working),
est
recommends that he doesn't take the training. In any event,
est
requires people to inform their therapist.
Despite its glowing references, I still embarked on my
est
experience behind a mask of skepticism.
Just before I began the training a friend chided me about this latest in
a long string of self-improvement ventures. He confided that my forays
had become a joke to our mutual friends. I was hurt and angered by what
he told me. But then my memory flashed to myself as a young girl --
self-assured on the outside, miserable on the inside, split for so many
years by torment -- and I knew that the only reason I was still alive
was that I had refused to capitulate to the terror, pain, and confusion
that had ruled much of my life. I would continue my search.
I would take the training. But I would reserve judgment -- and attempt
to maintain a journalist's detachment.
The adventure began one rainy March evening in New York, where I attended
my first
est
guest seminar, held in a large commercial hotel.
(I subsequently attended other guest seminars to take additional notes
for this book. The description that follows is a composite of those
experiences.) I was barely through the revolving doors when I met my
first
est
representative. She wore an
est
badge and what
looked to me like the vacant, mindless smile I had come to associate
with Hare-Krishna-type spiritual disciples. Good God, I thought, what
inanities am I getting into this time? In spite of myself, I followed
her directions to the seminar, assisted along the short route by other
smiling volunteers.
A more prosaic setting for enlightenment would be hard to find. In one of
those anonymous hotel ballrooms usually rented for testimonial dinners
and political fund-raisers, I joined some 2,000 others, who all looked
surprisingly familiar. They were the kind of people I might run into
in my local supermarket, or have to dinner, or take an adult-education
class with. The majority looked overwhelmingly straight, as if they had
just come from an office or a kitchen, leaving behind a sheepskin in
the attic and a couple of cars in the garage.
Many of them had come to the guest seminar at the behest of a friend
who had graduated; graduates are encouraged (actually, urged) to bring
friends, relatives, and acquaintances to these events. (An
est
mailer I received recently says, in part, "When people choose to take
the training, they do so out of their experience of you. Who you are
and where you come from inspires people." This is followed by a pitch
"to share a Special Guest Seminar with your friends.")
Waiting for the seminar to begin, I perused a booklet describing the
est
training. It began with a statement of purpose: ". . .
to transform your ability to experience living so that the situations you
have been trying to change or have been putting up with clear up just in
the process of life itself."
I especially connected with the word "trying"; it had characterized
my life. I had been
trying
to get rid of a despised temper,
trying
to get out or stay out of depressions,
trying
to be a single parent raising my children with love and wisdom, and
trying
to get thin or stay thin, depending on the year. At this
point, not needing to try seemed beautiful -- but impossible.
I eavesdropped on conversations around me, listening for hope, anxiety,
expectations, annoyance. They were all there.
One woman told another that, after
est
, a long-married couple
they both knew were talking for the first time in years.
An elderly man confessed that his nephew had sent him. "He said my kids
might even come to see me once in a while. They live in New York but they
hate to visit us. That was enough. That's why I'm here."
From another direction, I heard someone say that he was tired of hating
himself. "I've spent thirty years doing it and it's time to stop."
Familiar refrains, I thought. Equally familiar was the fact that, like
most Americans, they were looking for solutions in quick cures. Aspirin,
ten-day diets, speed-reading, courses that promise short-cuts to success
-- and now enlightenment in two weekends.
I felt irritable, put-upon, unreceptive. My tape recorder had been
temporarily confiscated at the door. I thought that the confiscators
were being arbitrary and authoritarian. I was assured that there was
a good reason for it, but I suspected paranoia behind the soap-opera
smiles. I dug into my handbag for notebook and pen, sorry I had come,
anxious to get it over with.
The room quieted when the seminar leaders arrived. Wearing the
by-now-familiar beatific smiles, Stewart Esposito and Marcia Martin
introduced themselves. They were young and attractive, as were almost
all the
est
volunteers and staff I was to meet.
Marcia began. "The purpose of the training is to transform your ability
to experience. We have found the result of that transformed way of
experiencing is an expanded experience of aliveness. Our definition
of aliveness at
est
is love, health, happiness, and full
self-expression." I had no quarrel with that. I settled in for a sermon,
giving only part of my attention to the toothsome twosome.
Before long they had my complete attention. Quickly moving from the
general to the particular, they took turns describing their experiences
and the
est
experience. if it was less than high drama, it was
nevertheless interesting.
Stewart, like Werner, was formerly a management consultant. He had decided
to take the training reluctantly. His justification was that he could take
what he learned from it to create his own training system. Despite his
initial attitude, he began to see changes in his life after attending
just a guest seminar.
Before
est
, he told us, his business ran him. After
est
,
the reverse was true. He had also lost forty pounds and improved his
relationship with his kids.
"When I went to high school," he told us, "I thought I would be happy
when I graduated. Then I thought I would be happy after college. Then I
thought I would be happy after I got a really good job. I was always 'one
day in the future.' Meanwhile, the nourishment, the completeness, of life
was missing. I was always waiting for one more thing to make me happy."
For a long time, the "one more thing" was love, Stewart confessed. He then
launched into a skit he called the rituals of love. The audience tittered
when he was a minute or so into it; it sounded familiar. By the time he
hit the finale, they were into a full chortle. I wondered how many of them
realized that the joke was on them. His tale went something like this:
"We all need someone to love and someone to love us," he said. "So we
behave in such a way that we finally get someone to say 'I love you.'
That feels great. It fills our need, but it isn't enough because it is
only a symbol of the experience -- and the experience is really what we
are after. And when it isn't enough, we know what the solution is. The
solution is always more. More symbols.
"So then we act in a way that gets them to say again, 'I love you.'
But soon that is not enough either and again we know what the solution is.
The solution is
more
.
"So we say, you tell me you love me but you don't act like it. And finally
when we get them to act like it,
that
is not enough either. We
figure we have the wrong person and we get somebody else and go through
the whole series again.
"You see that, while it is true that you and I need someone to love and
someone to love us, gratifying a need does not produce satisfaction. It
does not make us feel whole and complete. Where love is concerned, it
is only the experience of loving and being loved that is satisfying,
and that allows us to be whole and complete.
"The purpose of the training," he explained, "is to allow you to experience
that part of you that experiences satisfaction so that whether the symbols
'I love you' are there or not, the experience of being loved, and loving,
is. The training allows people an opportunity to come from satisfaction,
rather than trying to get to it."
Marcia moved center stage to bring Stewart's words back to the experiential.
"I want to share with you one of the biggest expansions in my life,"
she announced softly. The room became silent as she lowered her voice
to a stage whisper. "I was able to let go of needing someone." Her
words hung in the air. "I found out I can be happy," she explained,
"if I never see 'him' again. I am the source of my own happiness."
It was now Marcia's turn to share what she "got" from
est
.
Among other things, before she took the training, she had been "in love
with loving" a man. She wanted him to do the training with her,
but he felt that aliveness should be given free in San Francisco's
Golden Gate Park. She talked about it constantly and still he wouldn't
go with her. Finally she stopped insisting, at which point he decided
that he would like to do the training. "We still fight," she shared,
"but we fight responsibly now. And," she added, "my relationship with
my mother works too."
At a later guest seminar, I heard seminar leader Monique's story. Although
she was happy before
est
(I heard none of the
est
leaders
admit to ever having been unhappy), after the training she was able to
let her straightened blond hair go naturally curly; she got a substantial
raise (unsolicited) in her airline job; and she was now able to communicate
to large groups of people, something she could never do before.
Entertained and warmed-up by these stories of happy transformations,
the audience was then ready for the nitty-gritty of
est
.
The cost of an
est
training is $250 (up $50 from a year ago).
In answer to questions about why the fee is so high, the answer was simply
"That's what it costs." In return for this sum, payable in advance,
a trainee meets with about 249 other trainees in a hotel ballroom for
approximately sixty hours of training over two consecutive weekends. Yes,
the guests were told, it's true that you may not go to the bathroom or
smoke or eat until the trainer says so. No, you don't have to do anything
in the training that you don't choose to.
The question remained: What, exactly, is the training? And how does it
work? In answer, Stewart gave a brief run-down about belief systems (see
Chapter 3) and a general, day-by-day agenda. Like most of the audience,
I still didn't know what it was all about by the time the seminar
was over. I consoled myself with material from one of the
est
brochures:
noted what Stewart was saying and tried to accept that it was relevant,
and that it was as much information as I was going to get.
because someone
they knew had been through it, had raved about it, and had become living
proof that it "worked." A few had read one of several provocative
magazine articles about
est
. Many were aware that some famous
entertainers were among its graduates: John Denver had written songs
praising
est
; Valerie Harper had thanked Werner on TV; and Yoko
Ono, George Maharis, Polly Bergen, Joanne Woodward, Cloris Leachman,
Jerry Rubin, and Roy Scheider, as well as four of the Fifth Dimension,
were also said to be alumni. (
est
keeps the names of its graduates
confidential; many graduates, however, speak publicly about their
participation in
est
.)
Clearly,
est
was enjoying a smashing success. Wherever I went in
New York and San Francisco, I heard remarkable stories from graduates
who were effortlessly changing their lives: making decisions to leave
or remain in marriages, resuming relationships with aging parents they
had avoided for years, getting out of ruts, getting into better jobs
and better relationships, losing weight without trying -- continually
affirming how much better they were feeling about money, sex, and/or God.
At the same time, a lot of people, weary of the proliferation of all
the mind-expanding movements of the last fifteen years, were dismissing
est
as just one more in a long string of self-helps. The others
didn't work for them, and they doubted that
est
could either.
However, for the same reasons that thousands of others were being drawn
to
est
, I was also curious about it. In addition to the personal
benefits that seemed likely, I had a professional interest in finding
out what the
est
game was all about. As a psychotherapist who
encountered among my patients many of the problems that people were being
"cured" of through
est
, I wanted to know how the difficult task of
changing human beings was being accomplished so quickly and, apparently,
so effectively. If
est
was really doing what everyone said it was
doing, and doing it in a span of sixty hours, then it was accomplishing
what no person and no one system in Western psychology had yet been
able to do. After the training, I saw that
est
is not "change"
but transformation, and emphasizes accepting yourself as you really are.
I was awed by the notion that a simple, quick, relatively inexpensive
system (my own psychoanalysis had cost more than $15,000) could help
vast numbers of people to transform their lives. I was further impressed
with the fact that two professional colleagues of mine were sending
their patients to
est
, claiming that it speeded up the therapy
process. In fact,
est
asks on its application form if the applicant
is currently in treatment and, if so, if he's "winning" or "losing"
in therapy. If he feels he's losing (that the therapy isn't working),
est
recommends that he doesn't take the training. In any event,
est
requires people to inform their therapist.
Despite its glowing references, I still embarked on my
est
experience behind a mask of skepticism.
Just before I began the training a friend chided me about this latest in
a long string of self-improvement ventures. He confided that my forays
had become a joke to our mutual friends. I was hurt and angered by what
he told me. But then my memory flashed to myself as a young girl --
self-assured on the outside, miserable on the inside, split for so many
years by torment -- and I knew that the only reason I was still alive
was that I had refused to capitulate to the terror, pain, and confusion
that had ruled much of my life. I would continue my search.
I would take the training. But I would reserve judgment -- and attempt
to maintain a journalist's detachment.
The adventure began one rainy March evening in New York, where I attended
my first
est
guest seminar, held in a large commercial hotel.
(I subsequently attended other guest seminars to take additional notes
for this book. The description that follows is a composite of those
experiences.) I was barely through the revolving doors when I met my
first
est
representative. She wore an
est
badge and what
looked to me like the vacant, mindless smile I had come to associate
with Hare-Krishna-type spiritual disciples. Good God, I thought, what
inanities am I getting into this time? In spite of myself, I followed
her directions to the seminar, assisted along the short route by other
smiling volunteers.
A more prosaic setting for enlightenment would be hard to find. In one of
those anonymous hotel ballrooms usually rented for testimonial dinners
and political fund-raisers, I joined some 2,000 others, who all looked
surprisingly familiar. They were the kind of people I might run into
in my local supermarket, or have to dinner, or take an adult-education
class with. The majority looked overwhelmingly straight, as if they had
just come from an office or a kitchen, leaving behind a sheepskin in
the attic and a couple of cars in the garage.
Many of them had come to the guest seminar at the behest of a friend
who had graduated; graduates are encouraged (actually, urged) to bring
friends, relatives, and acquaintances to these events. (An
est
mailer I received recently says, in part, "When people choose to take
the training, they do so out of their experience of you. Who you are
and where you come from inspires people." This is followed by a pitch
"to share a Special Guest Seminar with your friends.")
Waiting for the seminar to begin, I perused a booklet describing the
est
training. It began with a statement of purpose: ". . .
to transform your ability to experience living so that the situations you
have been trying to change or have been putting up with clear up just in
the process of life itself."
I especially connected with the word "trying"; it had characterized
my life. I had been
trying
to get rid of a despised temper,
trying
to get out or stay out of depressions,
trying
to be a single parent raising my children with love and wisdom, and
trying
to get thin or stay thin, depending on the year. At this
point, not needing to try seemed beautiful -- but impossible.
I eavesdropped on conversations around me, listening for hope, anxiety,
expectations, annoyance. They were all there.
One woman told another that, after
est
, a long-married couple
they both knew were talking for the first time in years.
An elderly man confessed that his nephew had sent him. "He said my kids
might even come to see me once in a while. They live in New York but they
hate to visit us. That was enough. That's why I'm here."
From another direction, I heard someone say that he was tired of hating
himself. "I've spent thirty years doing it and it's time to stop."
Familiar refrains, I thought. Equally familiar was the fact that, like
most Americans, they were looking for solutions in quick cures. Aspirin,
ten-day diets, speed-reading, courses that promise short-cuts to success
-- and now enlightenment in two weekends.
I felt irritable, put-upon, unreceptive. My tape recorder had been
temporarily confiscated at the door. I thought that the confiscators
were being arbitrary and authoritarian. I was assured that there was
a good reason for it, but I suspected paranoia behind the soap-opera
smiles. I dug into my handbag for notebook and pen, sorry I had come,
anxious to get it over with.
The room quieted when the seminar leaders arrived. Wearing the
by-now-familiar beatific smiles, Stewart Esposito and Marcia Martin
introduced themselves. They were young and attractive, as were almost
all the
est
volunteers and staff I was to meet.
Marcia began. "The purpose of the training is to transform your ability
to experience. We have found the result of that transformed way of
experiencing is an expanded experience of aliveness. Our definition
of aliveness at
est
is love, health, happiness, and full
self-expression." I had no quarrel with that. I settled in for a sermon,
giving only part of my attention to the toothsome twosome.
Before long they had my complete attention. Quickly moving from the
general to the particular, they took turns describing their experiences
and the
est
experience. if it was less than high drama, it was
nevertheless interesting.
Stewart, like Werner, was formerly a management consultant. He had decided
to take the training reluctantly. His justification was that he could take
what he learned from it to create his own training system. Despite his
initial attitude, he began to see changes in his life after attending
just a guest seminar.
Before
est
, he told us, his business ran him. After
est
,
the reverse was true. He had also lost forty pounds and improved his
relationship with his kids.
"When I went to high school," he told us, "I thought I would be happy
when I graduated. Then I thought I would be happy after college. Then I
thought I would be happy after I got a really good job. I was always 'one
day in the future.' Meanwhile, the nourishment, the completeness, of life
was missing. I was always waiting for one more thing to make me happy."
For a long time, the "one more thing" was love, Stewart confessed. He then
launched into a skit he called the rituals of love. The audience tittered
when he was a minute or so into it; it sounded familiar. By the time he
hit the finale, they were into a full chortle. I wondered how many of them
realized that the joke was on them. His tale went something like this:
"We all need someone to love and someone to love us," he said. "So we
behave in such a way that we finally get someone to say 'I love you.'
That feels great. It fills our need, but it isn't enough because it is
only a symbol of the experience -- and the experience is really what we
are after. And when it isn't enough, we know what the solution is. The
solution is always more. More symbols.
"So then we act in a way that gets them to say again, 'I love you.'
But soon that is not enough either and again we know what the solution is.
The solution is
more
.
"So we say, you tell me you love me but you don't act like it. And finally
when we get them to act like it,
that
is not enough either. We
figure we have the wrong person and we get somebody else and go through
the whole series again.
"You see that, while it is true that you and I need someone to love and
someone to love us, gratifying a need does not produce satisfaction. It
does not make us feel whole and complete. Where love is concerned, it
is only the experience of loving and being loved that is satisfying,
and that allows us to be whole and complete.
"The purpose of the training," he explained, "is to allow you to experience
that part of you that experiences satisfaction so that whether the symbols
'I love you' are there or not, the experience of being loved, and loving,
is. The training allows people an opportunity to come from satisfaction,
rather than trying to get to it."
Marcia moved center stage to bring Stewart's words back to the experiential.
"I want to share with you one of the biggest expansions in my life,"
she announced softly. The room became silent as she lowered her voice
to a stage whisper. "I was able to let go of needing someone." Her
words hung in the air. "I found out I can be happy," she explained,
"if I never see 'him' again. I am the source of my own happiness."
It was now Marcia's turn to share what she "got" from
est
.
Among other things, before she took the training, she had been "in love
with loving" a man. She wanted him to do the training with her,
but he felt that aliveness should be given free in San Francisco's
Golden Gate Park. She talked about it constantly and still he wouldn't
go with her. Finally she stopped insisting, at which point he decided
that he would like to do the training. "We still fight," she shared,
"but we fight responsibly now. And," she added, "my relationship with
my mother works too."
At a later guest seminar, I heard seminar leader Monique's story. Although
she was happy before
est
(I heard none of the
est
leaders
admit to ever having been unhappy), after the training she was able to
let her straightened blond hair go naturally curly; she got a substantial
raise (unsolicited) in her airline job; and she was now able to communicate
to large groups of people, something she could never do before.
Entertained and warmed-up by these stories of happy transformations,
the audience was then ready for the nitty-gritty of
est
.
The cost of an
est
training is $250 (up $50 from a year ago).
In answer to questions about why the fee is so high, the answer was simply
"That's what it costs." In return for this sum, payable in advance,
a trainee meets with about 249 other trainees in a hotel ballroom for
approximately sixty hours of training over two consecutive weekends. Yes,
the guests were told, it's true that you may not go to the bathroom or
smoke or eat until the trainer says so. No, you don't have to do anything
in the training that you don't choose to.
The question remained: What, exactly, is the training? And how does it
work? In answer, Stewart gave a brief run-down about belief systems (see
Chapter 3) and a general, day-by-day agenda. Like most of the audience,
I still didn't know what it was all about by the time the seminar
was over. I consoled myself with material from one of the
est
brochures:
Having someone tell you what it is like to parachuteI was able to accept this after the training. For the moment, I dutifully
out of an airplane is not the same as experiencing
jumping out of an airplane yourself. est is a
uniquely personal experience. And, as such, it has meaning
only to the person who is experiencing it. After you take
the training, you probably won't know how it works,
you will only know that it works.
noted what Stewart was saying and tried to accept that it was relevant,
and that it was as much information as I was going to get.
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