est
graduates
make long-time friendships among fellow trainees. (I've also heard from
women friends that it's a terrific place to meet eligible men.)
The kind of enthusiasm
est
graduates share at a post-training
is exemplified by singer John Denver's dedication on his
Back
Home Again
album. "My purpose in performing is to communicate the
joy I experience in living," he's written on the inside jacket. "It
is the aliveness already within you that my music is intended to
reach. Participating in
est
has created an amazing amount of
space for joy and aliveness in my life. It pleases me to share
est
with you."
My own post-training, if not as lyrical, was equally eulogistic.
An elderly man who had experienced tremendous withholding through most
of the training and cried his eyes out on the final day (I cried along
with him) shared that he had been in this world for over seventy years
and had only just now begun to live. Because he was living with his full
being, he told us, he no longer feared death.
A woman in her mid-thirties who bad looked mousy and frightened when
she began the training now looked beautiful and radiant. "I want to
share that my asthma, which I've had since I was ten years old, has
simply disappeared." Other shared remissions, sounding like Lourdes
cures, included two migraine headaches, bladder weakness, and a chronic
lower-back pain.
"I want to share that my husband and I have stopped arguing for the
first time in three years," a stunning young woman told us. "He can't
understand it and neither can I."
The trainer responded by telling her to "just experience it. You don't
have to do anything else."
An eighteen-year-old girl shared that she had had a visionary experience
since the training. A businessman said he managed better. A textile designer
said her designs were more creative.
One by one, over a couple of hours, people spoke about changes big
and little that had taken place in their lives. Many had cleared up
misunderstandings, others had cleaned their houses, others had resolved
money situations, and others found themselves getting up on time and
starting their days with enthusiasm. A few were meditating better,
some gave up jobs or began new ones, and some reported communicating
with parents or children for the first time in their lives.
There were unhappy experiences as well. An actress told us that she had
been "scared shitless." She was having constant headaches and felt more
confused than ever. "I don't know why I chose this when it hurts so much.
I don't know where I am." The trainer advised her to stay with it.
"You see," he explained, "if all you got was nothing, just experience that.
That's all there is."
A young man announced that the day after the training he had been fired
from his job. "I experienced how guilty my boss felt and I said,
comforting him, that it was really O.K. That night, after I phoned a few
people to tell them and told everyone not to feel sorry for me, that I
was responsible for it, I went out for a drink and helped a friend in
trouble. I feel great," he added.
One woman lethargically told us that she had been deeply depressed.
"Experience your barrier of depression," she was told. "Just be there
with it."
Valerie Harper, star of the TV series
Rhoda
and four-time Emmy
Award winner, shared her experience with the
New Age Journal
(September, 1975). After taking
est
, she told them, "almost all
the effort has gone out of my life. I used to be in constant tension --
I would struggle, strain and sweat to make things happen. Since I took the
training, I've suddenly seen all the tension and the working-at-things,
and I'm giving it up!" She reported that experience of her work had been
transformed, that although she still got angry and impatient, she no
longer was at the mercy of her emotions, and that all her relationships
have changed. "I used to be really resistant to becoming a star --
I never accepted my fame. Now I'm beginning to enjoy it."
In order to give everyone the chance in the post-training to share
what they got, two minutes were allotted for each of us to talk with
his neighbor. A handsome, well-dressed rancher from Wyoming told me
that this had been his first consciousness trip of any kind. He wasn't
searching for anything, he said, but his business hadn't been doing so
well, and since he had to be in New York for something else, he decided
to take the training.
"I'm more clear now that I'm the boss," he said, "and what I say goes.
I've been pussyfooting with a particular guy and it just doesn't work.
Otherwise" -- he shrugged -- "I don't know. I'll just go with it and see
what happens.
est
says that what happens as a result of the training depends
entirely upon the individual. There are no guarantees,
est
tells
you. You take what you get.
About two months after my training I was at San Francisco's St. Francis
Hotel and found myself in an elevator that was all glass on one side.
I had been in glass elevators before, and they had always sent me into a
panic. I would close my eyes and of course miss the spectacular view.
This time when I felt the surge of panic in my stomach, I experienced
it fully, and then observed it disappear instantly. I opened my eyes to
enjoy the magnificent view of the San Francisco hills against a golden
sunset. I had stood my ground and won.
In many ways the
est
training has intensified my awareness that
I run my own show, whatever I choose it to be. I do that by being in
my life right now instead of yesterday, last month, when I was five,
when I'll be sixty-five. Life is only what it is. Not the way it used
to be or ought to be or might be.
My favorite Werner aphorism sums it up beautifully: "If God told you
exactly what it was you were to do, you would be happy doing it no matter
what it was. What you're doing is what God wants you to do. Be happy."
Margot
Margot, thirty-eight, Is an Intensely alive,
divorced mother of two. She is an editor
and writer.
I decided to take the
est
training because I thought it would be
a hot subject for a magazine piece. I wouldn't admit to myself that I
really was Interested in the training for myself.
I went into it feeling pretty armored against it. I had done a lot of
therapy -- group, encounter, Individual, bioenergetics, primal -- after
I was divorced, and finally gave it up because I felt I was reinforcing
the unhealthy, dependent part of me. I liked the idea that
est
rejected people they described as "losing" in therapy. I was tired of
being a loser.
I found the training agonizing. In fact, I hated it. I cried a lot and
got in touch with a lot of stuff I had never experienced before. Even so,
when I finished it I was disappointed. I don't know what I had expected
but I wasn't willing to "take what I got."
The most powerful thing that happened to me during the training was that
I completed [ended] two Incomplete relationships that were messing up
the rest of my life.
In one of the processes my ex-husband and his bride-to-be came into my
center and we had an incredible talk about their wedding and what it
meant to them and me. It was very beautiful and very real. Afterward
I was able to accept their marriage and give up all the negative stuff
I had invested in it. I really wished them well. And I got that I was
doing with my life exactly what I wanted to be doing and especially that
I was not currently in a relationship out of choice. I still had things to
clean up in my life before I could have the kind of relationship I wanted.
In another process I finally ended a relationship that had actually ended
more than two years before. A part of me was still clinging to the hope
that we could get back together. I had loved him. And I had rejected
him. Now I saw that holding on to this illusion kept me from moving on.
After the training I felt smug that it hadn't turned my life around, as
it had promised to do. I was damned if I would be just like all the other
thousands who came out of
est
singing its praises and attributing
to it all kinds of miraculous breakthroughs. Whatever might happen to
me, I told myself, would just be more of the same -- a few new openings,
a few new interesting experiences, another baby step closer to wholeness.
Despite my resistance, though, my life became very intense after the
training. Two weeks later I had an incredible gut re-experience of my
father and myself when I was a little girl. I suddenly knew that he
had really loved me. Because he's often disconnected from his feelings,
I have chosen to see him as incapable of love. In fact, since my teens I
had totally rejected his love. From that I saw that I ultimately rejected
every man who had ever loved or been loved by me. I cried from the depths
of my soul.
Some terrific stuff is also happening with my kids. They're taking a
lot more responsibility for what goes on in their lives and dumping
on me a lot less, which of course gives me space to dump on them a lot
less, which is letting us all feel a lot more love for each other. My
ten-year-old son got into trouble In school the other day and then came
home and told me that he had created it. Because I've been very wrapped
up in a project the last couple of weeks, my eight-year-old daughter
announced last night that, instead of waiting for me to be finished,
she was going to take responsibility for making her own birthday party.
I don't like to give
est
credit for any of this. I distrust Werner
and other things about the organization. But I have to admit that it works.
Or at least It's working for me.
5
Volunteering and Vomit Bags
"The purpose of assisting is to assist."
-- Werner Erhard
I stood on the aisle with a pile of vomit bags in my arms. I had no idea
what time it was; it could have been anywhere from late afternoon to
midnight. My legs ached. My head was pounding. What I wanted more than
anything else was to be prone with a cold drink at my fingertips and
surrounded by the sweet smell of home.
Instead, I had been standing in the same place for twenty minutes,
my eyes scanning the couple of dozen trainees assigned to me, watching
for someone's hand to shoot into the air signaling that he wanted to
vomit. So far I had had three takers. As I waited for more, I concluded
that the consciousness movement had erupted, literally and figuratively.
I was a volunteer at an
est
training. I had decided to volunteer
for the two weekends because I wanted to see what it was like from the
other side.
The
est
volunteer experience is regarded by
est
as a
microcosm of life on the "outside." I wanted to know first-hand what
that meant. When I had inquired about assisting a few weeks earlier, an
est
assistant had told me, "Everything you will do will give you an
opportunity to see where you are coming from, what your machine is up to."
The rhythm of the volunteer day began at 6:30 a.m. to allow enough time
to set up for the trainees arriving a couple of hours later. My first
assignment was to go out for coffee: two with, one without, one with
sugar on the side. I was just short of devastated. I had hoped to be
in the "big" room, observing and participating in the training, being
important. But after the coffee errand other things were to have priority.
My next task was to arrange the name tags. They had to be ten in a
vertical row, not touching, in perfect parallel columns. I was already
aware of
est
's policy regarding name tags; everyone wore them at
all times. Now I was to become aware of
est
's meticulous attention
to detail. The instructions for each chore were exact, delivered with
the precision one would expect from an excellent instruction manual. I
was expected to carry out the chore with the same precision.
From name tags I went to tablecloths. My assignment was to cover
several long, rectangular tables with tablecloths. My instructions:
each tablecloth was to be pinned with a square corner (fortunately I had
learned how in girl scout camp) and should almost but not quite touch
the floor. Another mindless task. While I went through the motions I
eavesdropped on a conversation a few feet away. A mistake.
I looked up to see the person supervising the assistants standing
alongside me. Confronting me with the directness characteristic of
est
-ers (a graduate can be known by his direct eye contact),
he kindly but firmly instructed me to do the tablecloth over. "It touches
the floor," he explained with a solemnity that from someone else would
have indicated a critical error in a major undertaking. But there was
no cruelty, no satisfaction, no judgment in his statement. It simply was.
I redid the tablecloth with my full attention. My square corners were
perfect and the cloth hung to precisely the right length. I had completed
the job, which in
est
terms meant I had finished it with nothing
left out of the experience and I could move on to something else.
I had an unexpected but interesting reaction to all of this. When I stood
away from the table to observe my efforts, I felt satisfaction. Not anger,
as I might have expected for having had to do the job over, but pleasure
in a job completed and well done.
In completing this task, I got an important aspect of the
est
business. The attention to detail that had so irritated me was, in fact,
a significant factor in
est
's success. Werner had brought from his
management-training days his experience that little things done correctly
make big things work better. I was beginning to accept that. Which made
my next assignment only slightly more palatable.
From tablecloths I graduated to chairs, one of the more important but
also one of the most inane of the volunteer responsibilities. These
jobs were all described as "supporting the space," that is, creating
an efficient and comfortable environment so the trainees can give their
undivided attention to the training.