Authors: Adelaide Bry
est (8 page)
Stewart continued to hammer away at us. Most of us don't enjoy any degree
of aliveness, he pronounced, because we are content to stay at a level of
existence where we neither experience nor participate in life. In fact,
a lot of us "go unconscious" a lot of the time.
"I tune out while I'm driving," a young woman shared. "Last week I went off
the road and narrowly missed a major accident. I woke up and jammed on the
brakes in front of a giant elm tree."
"When you are responsible," Stewart thundered, "you find out you just
didn't happen to be lying there on the tracks when the train passed
through. You are the asshole who put yourself there."
The theme of responsibility prevaded every aspect of the training. In
fact, if I were to sum up in a few words what I got from the training
data it would be that we are each the cause of our own experience and
responsible for everything that happens in our experience.
"I know that your agreement with everyone you know is that life is tough,"
he went on, "and that you have to be cool to survive. I want you to get
that that doesn't work.
"It also doesn't work to wave the traffic on the freeway in the opposite
direction to the way it's going. The traffic doesn't give a damn about you
and neither does life. You have to be responsible for the way it is rather
than stuck in the way you want it. You set it up this way. Now dig it.
"However it is for you, that's the way you've set it up and no amount
of resistance will change that. Now you have a choice. You can keep
resisting. Or you can choose it. You can bitch about it. Or you can
take responsibility for it. If you are willing to acknowledge that you
are cause in the matter, then you can be responsible for it instead of
having it run you."
It was powerful stuff and I had a hard time staying with it. I had spent
half a lifetime blaming the dissatisfaction of my life on a sad, angry
father who had worked his way through Harvard and then went nowhere;
on a sad, angry mother who learned to read Greek and Latin at Smith
and then spent the rest of her life in a flowered housedress, eating
to drown her misery; on an ex-husband who was compulsive, guilt-ridden,
and who
tried
but couldn't give me what I wanted; and on bosses
and shrinks who never quite lived up to my expectations.
I had begun to see my own responsibility in all this some years before I
took the training, but the
est
experience deepened my experience
of being the cause of my life. It also became clearer how I manufactured
both my problems and my pleasures.
The irony was that I had never had a problem taking credit for the joys
and successes of my life: an early career as a magazine writer,
followed by a wonderful stint writing and broadcasting a radio program,
followed by a successful public relations career, followed by a return
to college in my middle years to study psychology and, subsequently,
by my becoming a psycho-therapist. Through the past several years, my
children have brought me incredible joy in their sanity and ability to
function well. My daughter is now at Harvard Business School and my son
at the University of Colorado Law School.
It was too painful for me to accept that I, not anyone else, had caused
the anguish and despair that had marked so much of my life. While the
trainer kept hammering at this theme, and I complained to myself and
anyone who would listen to me (outside the training room) about the
interminable repetitiveness, eventually my resistance gave way and I
got
it. I got that I had total responsibility for my life -- all
of it, the happiness and the sorrow. It was -- and continues to be --
an incredible revelation.
The dinner break late in the evening was a mad dash for a toilet and then
some lukewarm soup and chow mein at a nearby Chinese restaurant. I was
dizzy, as were the three trainees who had spontaneously become my dinner
companions. Strangely enough, I was also not hungry. After visualizing
delicacies of every variety throughout the day, I could eat barely half
of what was on my plate. I noticed when we were ready to leave that a
lot of the plates were still half-full. Either becoming enlightened was
stilling our appetites or discovering we were assholes had made us too
nauseous to eat.
We swapped stories about what had brought us to
est
. The one
I liked best came from an intense young man who earlier had openly
acknowledged that he was homosexual. "It started when I ran into an old
friend on the street one day," he told us. "He looked marvelous, sort of
blissful So I said to him, 'What are you on these days?' He'd been into
every drug imaginable. And be answered, 'I'm on
est
these days.'
I hadn't heard of that one so, naturally, I asked him if he had any for
me. Whatever it was, I wanted it. Let me tell you" -- he chuckled --
"I freaked out when I heard it wasn't something you smoke or eat!"
The rest of Saturday night for me was one long headache. Around midnight
the complaints became louder and more frequent. In response, the trainer
finally asked people to raise their hands if they had any kind of ache
or pain. Over half the hands in the room went up. He picked one trainee
to come up front for a demonstration.
What followed was a rather incredible exercise in taking responsibility
for your own experience of your body. Based on the notion we'd already
looked at in relation to our life situations, which is that resistance
only makes things continue, the technique we were now shown was a way for
us to go deeper into our pain, to experience it totally. Miraculously,
the pain disappeared. The technique assists you to experience the pain
fully -- for example, a backache or headache, by experiencing very
specifically its color, size, shape, and how much liquid it would hold
if it were a container. For me it has become an invaluable tool in both
my life and my practice. (Although
est
tells people with medical
problems to see a physician, several trainees told me that they had
gotten rid of medical problems during the training.)
We were finally released to return to beds and bathrooms in the wee hours
of the morning. Tucked into our psyches were a couple of other throwaway
techniques to blow our belief systems. One that I found incredibly
effective was to tell myself just before sleep to wake up on time alive,
alert, and refreshed. The next morning, on four hours of sleep, I felt
terrific.
When I had hauled my exhausted body out of the hotel that first night,
I had felt that I wanted to get as far away from
est
as I could.
I had a backache; I was tired; I was bored; I was also, surprisingly,
anxious. I resented everything and everyone connected with
est
,
and especially the trainer for holding a mirror up to my act and not
letting me forget my agreements. Was more of the same all I was going
to get for my $250? I had a sinking feeling that the whole thing was
an enormous fraud. I finally fell asleep more curious than furious. The
next morning, though I felt better, I was soon outdoing Lewis Carroll's
White Queen; I had 5,000 impossible thoughts before breakfast. And,
again, I went off to "transform" my life.
Having taken the time for a second cup of coffee, I arrived at the training
a few minutes after nine. My greeting was a stern reminder that I was late.
"Who is responsible for your having broken your agreement?" the training
assistant asked, as he stood, arms folded, in front of the door into
the training. I was, I told him, and dutifully recited out loud,
"I acknowledge that I broke my agreement."
One woman among the latecomers refused to take responsibility for her
lateness. She argued and cajoled but, of course, got no sympathy and
no agreement with her position. All she got, over and over, was the
question, "Are you willing to take responsibility for breaking your
agreement?" Eventually she realized that her whole life had been based
on breaking agreements and refusing to acknowledge that she had. Sobbing
as though her heart had broken, she finally capitulated and was allowed
into the room.
I was impressed, again, at how each element of the training was directly
related to the way each of us leads his life. Even people's excuses for
not
taking the training were the same excuses that kept their
lives from working.
The second training day began with sharing. A man in his mid-forties
dressed, anachronistically, in a gray suit, white shirt, and blue tie,
got that he had become a college professor so that he could put everyone
down the way he felt they had put him down. "I simply had to prove I
was right and they -- my parents, everybody -- were wrong. Now I know
I'm a phony. I don't really know anything."
A woman got up to confess that she had once been raped. She had been
out with a man she had picked up at a bar. At the end of the evening,
she invited him back to her apartment. It was there be raped her.
Stewart prodded and questioned her mercilessly. She finally got that
her identity had become "rape victim." She had made it the primary
event in her life, and had talked about it to anyone who would listen,
endlessly. And she got that playing "rape victim" wasn't a winning game.
A sophisticated-looking businessman took the microphone to announce
that he thought the training was a rip-off. "I don't think you people
know what you're doing," he said, "and unless things change soon I'm
not going to stay here much longer." "Thank you," Stewart responded.
"I acknowledge I heard you." The man remained standing as though waiting
for something more and finally sat down only after he was asked to surrender
the microphone to a volunteer.
Stewart's responses were becoming predictably familiar, but I never got
a sense that they were by rote. When he said, "Thank you. I got it,"
that meant he didn't agree or disagree with the trainee; he had just
listened carefully to the communication and let the trainee know that
the communication had been received.
A young schoolteacher admitted, haltingly, that he wished he could love
someone but he couldn't. By now the trainees were beginning to see the
rackets people run. A loud groan ran through the room.
The trainer launched into a diatribe about love. "I know what love is to
you jerks," he barked. "I don't call you on your bullshit and you don't
call me on mine. We don't talk about love to assholes who don't know
who they are. When you know who you are, then we will talk about love."
I snapped to attention. How many times, I thought, had I believed I was
in love only to find that when the going got rough I wanted out. My idea
of love was lots of terrific sex and a civilized, undemanding friendship.
"Not being able to love is your racket," bellowed the trainer. "If you
want to know who you
were
, keep up your old patterns. If you want
to know who you
are
, give up your old patterns."
The training "genius" then stood up. I've heard that there's one in
every training -- a sophisticated, bright, well-read intellectual who
has usually done both therapy and some of the Eastern disciplines and
is still seeking the way. "I know all this data you're putting out,"
he announced. The trainer told him he was "possibly the biggest asshole
in the whole room." If he knew so much, Stewart wanted to know, how come
he didn't act that way? "What are you hiding? What is happening to you
right now?"
Trembling, suddenly not so sure of himself, he shared that he felt he was
superior to other people, that his interest and knowledge set him apart.
I spoke to him later because I was interested in what he had been into
and how he felt about
est
. "There was nothing wrong in my search,"
he told me. "It was my attachment to being special on the path that upset
me here. The trainer was giving out this special stuff to everyone. I didn't
like
not
being different."
An overweight computer programmer shared that he had been in therapy
for ten years and that now, for the first time, he felt that he didn't
need it anymore. He had clung, he said, to the fact that his mother was
a horrible mother, a hang-up that had destroyed every relationship he'd
ever had with a woman. "I'm going to call my therapist tomorrow and tell
him good-bye," he announced. "I don't need him, because I'm not clinging
to that belief anymore."
I shared only once. A Gestalt therapist tried to provoke the trainer into
an argument. He declaimed interminably about how
est
was wrong
telling us we were causing all our experiences. Stewart let him talk on
and on, and then finally asked him to sit down. He refused. Stewart told
him that if he wouldn't sit down, he would have to call a policeman. The
confused psychologist still wouldn't budge. Eventually he gave up and
turned in his microphone.
I was both ashamed and angry. I stood up to say that all therapists were
not like the one who had just spoken. The trainer asked me if I knew what
I was doing. I did, I told him. I admitted that I love to make a fuss
and blow off my anger by getting angry at something I "believe" in. It
was a beautiful opportunity for me. I could put another person down,
get sympathy from the rest of the group and unleash some of my excess
anger. I had a good time. And I knew, also, that I was running my racket.
The day droned on. It was exquisitely boring. It was like the meditation
called in Zen "just sitting."
And
"just sitting" may release
hidden inner volcanos. Dr. Charles Tart, psychologist, author of
Altered States of Consciousness
, and Professor at the University
of California at Davis, often refers in his lectures to this kind of
situation as being the precedent to a disruptive patterning that must
necessarily precede a transformation of consciousness.
Late Sunday evening we finally got to one of the major events of the
training, the Truth Process. The day before we had been told to pick an
"item," something that had been bothering us: a problem, a feeling,
a situation we weren't handling. I picked my anger at my friend and
lover of the past eight years. I periodically became uncontrollably
angry at him; although I understood all the "reasons," knowing them
hadn't changed anything.
of aliveness, he pronounced, because we are content to stay at a level of
existence where we neither experience nor participate in life. In fact,
a lot of us "go unconscious" a lot of the time.
"I tune out while I'm driving," a young woman shared. "Last week I went off
the road and narrowly missed a major accident. I woke up and jammed on the
brakes in front of a giant elm tree."
"When you are responsible," Stewart thundered, "you find out you just
didn't happen to be lying there on the tracks when the train passed
through. You are the asshole who put yourself there."
The theme of responsibility prevaded every aspect of the training. In
fact, if I were to sum up in a few words what I got from the training
data it would be that we are each the cause of our own experience and
responsible for everything that happens in our experience.
"I know that your agreement with everyone you know is that life is tough,"
he went on, "and that you have to be cool to survive. I want you to get
that that doesn't work.
"It also doesn't work to wave the traffic on the freeway in the opposite
direction to the way it's going. The traffic doesn't give a damn about you
and neither does life. You have to be responsible for the way it is rather
than stuck in the way you want it. You set it up this way. Now dig it.
"However it is for you, that's the way you've set it up and no amount
of resistance will change that. Now you have a choice. You can keep
resisting. Or you can choose it. You can bitch about it. Or you can
take responsibility for it. If you are willing to acknowledge that you
are cause in the matter, then you can be responsible for it instead of
having it run you."
It was powerful stuff and I had a hard time staying with it. I had spent
half a lifetime blaming the dissatisfaction of my life on a sad, angry
father who had worked his way through Harvard and then went nowhere;
on a sad, angry mother who learned to read Greek and Latin at Smith
and then spent the rest of her life in a flowered housedress, eating
to drown her misery; on an ex-husband who was compulsive, guilt-ridden,
and who
tried
but couldn't give me what I wanted; and on bosses
and shrinks who never quite lived up to my expectations.
I had begun to see my own responsibility in all this some years before I
took the training, but the
est
experience deepened my experience
of being the cause of my life. It also became clearer how I manufactured
both my problems and my pleasures.
The irony was that I had never had a problem taking credit for the joys
and successes of my life: an early career as a magazine writer,
followed by a wonderful stint writing and broadcasting a radio program,
followed by a successful public relations career, followed by a return
to college in my middle years to study psychology and, subsequently,
by my becoming a psycho-therapist. Through the past several years, my
children have brought me incredible joy in their sanity and ability to
function well. My daughter is now at Harvard Business School and my son
at the University of Colorado Law School.
It was too painful for me to accept that I, not anyone else, had caused
the anguish and despair that had marked so much of my life. While the
trainer kept hammering at this theme, and I complained to myself and
anyone who would listen to me (outside the training room) about the
interminable repetitiveness, eventually my resistance gave way and I
got
it. I got that I had total responsibility for my life -- all
of it, the happiness and the sorrow. It was -- and continues to be --
an incredible revelation.
The dinner break late in the evening was a mad dash for a toilet and then
some lukewarm soup and chow mein at a nearby Chinese restaurant. I was
dizzy, as were the three trainees who had spontaneously become my dinner
companions. Strangely enough, I was also not hungry. After visualizing
delicacies of every variety throughout the day, I could eat barely half
of what was on my plate. I noticed when we were ready to leave that a
lot of the plates were still half-full. Either becoming enlightened was
stilling our appetites or discovering we were assholes had made us too
nauseous to eat.
We swapped stories about what had brought us to
est
. The one
I liked best came from an intense young man who earlier had openly
acknowledged that he was homosexual. "It started when I ran into an old
friend on the street one day," he told us. "He looked marvelous, sort of
blissful So I said to him, 'What are you on these days?' He'd been into
every drug imaginable. And be answered, 'I'm on
est
these days.'
I hadn't heard of that one so, naturally, I asked him if he had any for
me. Whatever it was, I wanted it. Let me tell you" -- he chuckled --
"I freaked out when I heard it wasn't something you smoke or eat!"
The rest of Saturday night for me was one long headache. Around midnight
the complaints became louder and more frequent. In response, the trainer
finally asked people to raise their hands if they had any kind of ache
or pain. Over half the hands in the room went up. He picked one trainee
to come up front for a demonstration.
What followed was a rather incredible exercise in taking responsibility
for your own experience of your body. Based on the notion we'd already
looked at in relation to our life situations, which is that resistance
only makes things continue, the technique we were now shown was a way for
us to go deeper into our pain, to experience it totally. Miraculously,
the pain disappeared. The technique assists you to experience the pain
fully -- for example, a backache or headache, by experiencing very
specifically its color, size, shape, and how much liquid it would hold
if it were a container. For me it has become an invaluable tool in both
my life and my practice. (Although
est
tells people with medical
problems to see a physician, several trainees told me that they had
gotten rid of medical problems during the training.)
We were finally released to return to beds and bathrooms in the wee hours
of the morning. Tucked into our psyches were a couple of other throwaway
techniques to blow our belief systems. One that I found incredibly
effective was to tell myself just before sleep to wake up on time alive,
alert, and refreshed. The next morning, on four hours of sleep, I felt
terrific.
When I had hauled my exhausted body out of the hotel that first night,
I had felt that I wanted to get as far away from
est
as I could.
I had a backache; I was tired; I was bored; I was also, surprisingly,
anxious. I resented everything and everyone connected with
est
,
and especially the trainer for holding a mirror up to my act and not
letting me forget my agreements. Was more of the same all I was going
to get for my $250? I had a sinking feeling that the whole thing was
an enormous fraud. I finally fell asleep more curious than furious. The
next morning, though I felt better, I was soon outdoing Lewis Carroll's
White Queen; I had 5,000 impossible thoughts before breakfast. And,
again, I went off to "transform" my life.
Having taken the time for a second cup of coffee, I arrived at the training
a few minutes after nine. My greeting was a stern reminder that I was late.
"Who is responsible for your having broken your agreement?" the training
assistant asked, as he stood, arms folded, in front of the door into
the training. I was, I told him, and dutifully recited out loud,
"I acknowledge that I broke my agreement."
One woman among the latecomers refused to take responsibility for her
lateness. She argued and cajoled but, of course, got no sympathy and
no agreement with her position. All she got, over and over, was the
question, "Are you willing to take responsibility for breaking your
agreement?" Eventually she realized that her whole life had been based
on breaking agreements and refusing to acknowledge that she had. Sobbing
as though her heart had broken, she finally capitulated and was allowed
into the room.
I was impressed, again, at how each element of the training was directly
related to the way each of us leads his life. Even people's excuses for
not
taking the training were the same excuses that kept their
lives from working.
The second training day began with sharing. A man in his mid-forties
dressed, anachronistically, in a gray suit, white shirt, and blue tie,
got that he had become a college professor so that he could put everyone
down the way he felt they had put him down. "I simply had to prove I
was right and they -- my parents, everybody -- were wrong. Now I know
I'm a phony. I don't really know anything."
A woman got up to confess that she had once been raped. She had been
out with a man she had picked up at a bar. At the end of the evening,
she invited him back to her apartment. It was there be raped her.
Stewart prodded and questioned her mercilessly. She finally got that
her identity had become "rape victim." She had made it the primary
event in her life, and had talked about it to anyone who would listen,
endlessly. And she got that playing "rape victim" wasn't a winning game.
A sophisticated-looking businessman took the microphone to announce
that he thought the training was a rip-off. "I don't think you people
know what you're doing," he said, "and unless things change soon I'm
not going to stay here much longer." "Thank you," Stewart responded.
"I acknowledge I heard you." The man remained standing as though waiting
for something more and finally sat down only after he was asked to surrender
the microphone to a volunteer.
Stewart's responses were becoming predictably familiar, but I never got
a sense that they were by rote. When he said, "Thank you. I got it,"
that meant he didn't agree or disagree with the trainee; he had just
listened carefully to the communication and let the trainee know that
the communication had been received.
A young schoolteacher admitted, haltingly, that he wished he could love
someone but he couldn't. By now the trainees were beginning to see the
rackets people run. A loud groan ran through the room.
The trainer launched into a diatribe about love. "I know what love is to
you jerks," he barked. "I don't call you on your bullshit and you don't
call me on mine. We don't talk about love to assholes who don't know
who they are. When you know who you are, then we will talk about love."
I snapped to attention. How many times, I thought, had I believed I was
in love only to find that when the going got rough I wanted out. My idea
of love was lots of terrific sex and a civilized, undemanding friendship.
"Not being able to love is your racket," bellowed the trainer. "If you
want to know who you
were
, keep up your old patterns. If you want
to know who you
are
, give up your old patterns."
The training "genius" then stood up. I've heard that there's one in
every training -- a sophisticated, bright, well-read intellectual who
has usually done both therapy and some of the Eastern disciplines and
is still seeking the way. "I know all this data you're putting out,"
he announced. The trainer told him he was "possibly the biggest asshole
in the whole room." If he knew so much, Stewart wanted to know, how come
he didn't act that way? "What are you hiding? What is happening to you
right now?"
Trembling, suddenly not so sure of himself, he shared that he felt he was
superior to other people, that his interest and knowledge set him apart.
I spoke to him later because I was interested in what he had been into
and how he felt about
est
. "There was nothing wrong in my search,"
he told me. "It was my attachment to being special on the path that upset
me here. The trainer was giving out this special stuff to everyone. I didn't
like
not
being different."
An overweight computer programmer shared that he had been in therapy
for ten years and that now, for the first time, he felt that he didn't
need it anymore. He had clung, he said, to the fact that his mother was
a horrible mother, a hang-up that had destroyed every relationship he'd
ever had with a woman. "I'm going to call my therapist tomorrow and tell
him good-bye," he announced. "I don't need him, because I'm not clinging
to that belief anymore."
I shared only once. A Gestalt therapist tried to provoke the trainer into
an argument. He declaimed interminably about how
est
was wrong
telling us we were causing all our experiences. Stewart let him talk on
and on, and then finally asked him to sit down. He refused. Stewart told
him that if he wouldn't sit down, he would have to call a policeman. The
confused psychologist still wouldn't budge. Eventually he gave up and
turned in his microphone.
I was both ashamed and angry. I stood up to say that all therapists were
not like the one who had just spoken. The trainer asked me if I knew what
I was doing. I did, I told him. I admitted that I love to make a fuss
and blow off my anger by getting angry at something I "believe" in. It
was a beautiful opportunity for me. I could put another person down,
get sympathy from the rest of the group and unleash some of my excess
anger. I had a good time. And I knew, also, that I was running my racket.
The day droned on. It was exquisitely boring. It was like the meditation
called in Zen "just sitting."
And
"just sitting" may release
hidden inner volcanos. Dr. Charles Tart, psychologist, author of
Altered States of Consciousness
, and Professor at the University
of California at Davis, often refers in his lectures to this kind of
situation as being the precedent to a disruptive patterning that must
necessarily precede a transformation of consciousness.
Late Sunday evening we finally got to one of the major events of the
training, the Truth Process. The day before we had been told to pick an
"item," something that had been bothering us: a problem, a feeling,
a situation we weren't handling. I picked my anger at my friend and
lover of the past eight years. I periodically became uncontrollably
angry at him; although I understood all the "reasons," knowing them
hadn't changed anything.
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