by Adelaide Bry
If some of what's in the pages ahead seems like non sequiturs, or, worse, crazy, I suggest that you check out your belief systems. If you can separate yourself from what you're used to thinking, then you will see the est language as simply an experimental way of putting words together and the est training as a way to lead you to an experience of yourself.
Jim
Jim, thirty-four, is an attractive and successful advertising executive who commutes between New York and Los Angeles. He was raised in Idaho, where both of his parents were schoolteachers.
I had thought I'd come a long way from Idaho. Until I took est.
I took the training after a close friend who was miserable most of his life went through it. Never had I seen such a drastic change in anyone in such a short time.
The point was that his problems were the same but the way he dealt with them was totally different. I hesitated about going, though, because it seemed too pat, too easy, a panacea, the kind of thing that I had always guarded myself against -- that some one person had all the answers. Fortunately I made up my mind to do it before I went to the guest seminar. The hard sell, the push, the broad grin, too much conviviality -- everything I detest about organized things -- were all there.
When I went into est, I saw that even though my life was generally on an even keel, in close personal relationships I was messed up. When I got too close, it didn't work. The easiest relationship for me was playing big brother -- give and give and give, hoping I might get. I used to say I was a perfect Pisces; I was hypersensitive to other people's feelings and I became whoever they wanted me to be. I was a mask. I'm so good at this sort of thing that I once sat through a friend's suicide attempt to prove to myself what a good guy I was.
During the training, I hated sitting still. But when we got to the Danger Process I began to open up. The tears kept rolling down while the trainer stood in front of me telling me to let it out, to experience it. He told the group, "Look at this big man and see how he is willing to expose himself." To me, what he was saying was that the football-hero façade that I had always carried with me was just junk.
Frankly I was relieved when the training was over. There was a lot of physical and emotional stress.
After the training, when friends would call for my usual dose of sympathy, I found that I could no longer be that remote, level-headed, astute advice-giver I had always been.
The week after the training, on a business trip, I found I could allow an angry client his space to be, which gave me a new freedom to define mine. I simply don't fall back on my old rote responses. I get less uptight around people who I feel want something from me. And, since I've stopped giving clients anything and everything they want, I get less pressure from them.
One night this week I had another realization from the seed planted in the training. I was late for a date -- my life is pretty pressured -- and rushing to pick her up I suddenly became aware of the tension pulsing through my body, the shallowness of my breathing, how my fists were clenched, how my body was hunched over the wheel of the car. I wouldn't have noticed it before and I certainly wouldn't have connected it with my feelings.
As soon as I started looking at it -- my posture, muscles, eyes -- it changed. By the time I got to my date's house, it was all gone. At another time I would have walked in and most likely picked a fight, or hated the evening.
My parents are special to me now, and I'm going to tell them that. I've come to realize that love expands your space. Now I can share with them; I can tell them about my fears and what's gone wrong in my life. They've known nothing important about me since I left home at eighteen.
A friend last night shared with me that he has a new record, new dope, new brandy; that's his way. I didn't respond in my old "Gee, that's wonderful" way. By the end of the evening we were really communicating -- not about "things." I don't proselytize about est. I don't especially like the clannishness of the volunteers, the recruiting, the mass hysteria of the guest seminars. I know there are a lot of people for whom est is a complete way of life. l don't support that. I don't recommend that people go. And it's changed my life.
4
The Training
"Follow the instructions and take what you get." -- est koan "Life's . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." -- William Shakespeare
All eyes were focused on the handsome young man standing at the back of the room. His face contorted, his eyes red, he pleaded to be allowed to go to the bathroom. The trainer simply stared at him until, after a while, the young man shut up and sat down. No one had physically barred his way. Nor had anyone told him that he couldn't leave. It was his choice to remain in the room.
About ten minutes later he raised his hand for a microphone. "I want you to know," he announced, "that I just peed in my pants." In a crisp, staccato voice, he added: "And it really doesn't matter." Two hundred and forty-nine people cheered and applauded.
It was at that moment that I knew I would make it through the training. And get it.
What follows is my experience of the est training based on my own personal experience and the experience of those who have shared with me.*
* Everyone who now takes the est training Is asked to sign an agreement not to divulge the material of the training, including, but not limited to, the names of the participants and their remarks. An est trainer clarified the nature of my commitment. I could share my experience of est, which is exactly what I had set out to do. I regard this book as an agreement kept, and its point of view is strictly my own. I would like to add here that my description of the training is a compilation of several experiences. I want to say also that a few of my est friends feel that knowing about the training in advance has a negative effect an the experience. I share that. And I disagree with It. A friend of mine who took it after a friend of his had given him a day-by-day rundown of what happens told me that on the first day of his own training he kept damning the informant for "spoiling the training for me. I knew what was coming next, and I felt gypped." By the end of the second day he got that he was spoiling his own experience. The training turned out to be an incredible breakthrough for him. I believe that knowing about the training can change your experience of it only If you choose to have your experience changed by it.
BEFORE
The training unofficially begins with the "pre-training," on Monday evening preceding the first weekend, which is recommended but not required. The pre-training, in effect, revs you up for the training. It presents the ground rules for the training, gets you used to some of what's to come, and leaves you eager for more. I loved it. I left it smiling -- and with homework. Neither of which, incidentally, prepared me for what I was to experience in the training itself.
The night of the pre-training I was back in a hotel ballroom again, tins one at the New York Statler Hilton. (In all of my est experience so far I must have been in more than two dozen hotel ballrooms, draped and carpeted in the usual shades of gold, crimson, or blue and lit by massive chandeliers. The new location for enlightenment, I mused.) Smiling faces led me from the lobby to the elevator to the ballroom, whereupon more smiling faces checked me in, tagged me, and directed me to sit "in the front-most, center-most chair."
While I smoked my last cigarette for the evening I looked over the group I would be holed up with for the next two weekends. They might have been an intermission crowd at a Lincoln Center ballet performance. Most were well-dressed in business clothes, and a few were carefully casual in fashionable jean outfits. All appeared to be serious, thoughtful, and intelligent. They ranged in age from late teens to (I later learned) mid-seventies. Some appeared nervous, some not, the rest so well masked that it was impossible to tell.
Right off, after we were all seated, the pre-training seminar leader (the trainer is there only for the weekends and the post-training) announced that whatever he would tell us was told to us because "it works." "Werner only uses what works," he explained. And, later, "Whatever is in the traini
ng is there because Werner found out that's what works."
This was to be the first of many times that I would hear someone quote Werner as though he were God. "Werner says . . ." is the final word at est, from the trainers down to the pre-trainers.
"Now," the leader continued, "I'll tell you who you will meet at est." I immediately had visions of a string of celebrities to come to add their testimonials to the dozens I had already heard.
The people we were going to meet, he said, were ourselves. First, we were told, we would see our social selves, the person each of us thinks he is. This is the self that's familiar and comfortable. And automatic. Its favorite line goes something like, "Don't call me on my act and I won't call you on yours." Next we would meet the person we're afraid to find out we are that "terrible" person we try to hide with our social selves -- what is hidden under the mask we label "personality." And finally -- he grinned -- we would meet who we really are. He looked us over, knowingly. In so doing, he acknowledged that we hadn't the vaguest idea of what he was talking about. But that we eventually would.
We then went on to the agreements, which are a critical part of the est experience. The agreements are not what we can and can't do throughout the training. Rather, they're what we agree we can and can't do throughout the training. There is no policing of the rules, nor is there punishment in the traditional sense of the word for breaking them. "Life works to the degree to which you keep your agreements," the leader told us.
The ground rules are read seriously from a loose-leaf binder. Always. Lest there be any question that this is serious business, we are told right away in a loud and stern voice that there would be no talking. All fidgeting stopped. All eyes were front center on the man we later dubbed among ourselves "the mortician." We listened to the words for the first time. It was like listening to a death sentence. What price enlightenment? I wondered as I took it all in.
For a start, we, as trainees, are to agree not to take alcohol, marijuana, sleeping pills, uppers, downers, or anything else that is not medication a doctor says we have to take. That includes tranquilizers and all the other prescription mood drugs. We may take coffee, tea, cigarettes. And birth-control pills. The last gets a laugh from everyone except the poker-faced leader.
We also agree not to have a timepiece in the training room; to go to the bathroom only at bathroom breaks; not to eat at any time other than the single meal break; to be there on time and stay until the trainer decides we've gotten what we need to get for that day. On and on. I notice that my shoulders are hunched, my hands clenched. We go on making agreements.
We will stay seated unless called on. We will not sit with anyone we knew before the training. We will not talk unless we're sharing, in which case we will talk into a microphone (which we're taught in detail how to use). We agree to wear our name tags at all times when we're in the room and always keep them visible (people with long hair are to pin them in the center of their chests). We agree not to move our chairs from their positions unless instructed to do so. . . .
Finally the leader said that if we wanted to get the training, all we needed to do was keep our soles in the room and follow instructions. He pointed to the bottom of his shoe in case any of us thought he meant something more esoteric.
I looked around at the people who were taking this in. The man on my left was a Park Avenue surgeon whose nephew, children, and wife had taken the training. Behind me was a well-known art director of a leading magazine. Another man, with whom I had a friend in common, was the producer of a national television news program. There was also a well-known actor, a woman president of an advertising agency, and a physicist -- to name just a few of the outwardly successful among us. We all sat there, ostensibly passive, until the entire list had been read. Then the hands shot up.
Most of the questions, not surprisingly, were about what went in and came out of the body. This corroborated the tube theory expounded in the guest seminars, which would be repeated during the training. Toileting got the most attention. "Not being able to go to the bathroom is unreasonable," one man complained. "Yes," came the matter-of-fact answer. "It's unreasonable. That's what the training is. Unreasonable. The opposite not of reason but of reasonableness."
Other questions dealt with food and physical comfort. A woman asked for, and was given, permission to bring a pillow to the training. On Saturday a number of people showed up clutching pillows in their arms. "Legitimatized security blankets," I thought.
Werner later told me that although the physical dis- comfort was a valuable aspect of the training, it was not essential and, since people got stuck on it, for many months now there have been shorter hours and more frequent breaks without any difference in results.
After the rules came the pitfalls, which were all the traps we would get ourselves into; while nothing can keep you from getting it, the pitfalls would be barriers to the growth process. At one time or another, I was to fall into each of them. At the moment, though, I was convinced I was beyond them. In fact, the more rigorous and unyielding the whole process sounded, the more I felt I could endure it. Those were the kinds of barriers I loved to hurdle. The barriers I was unprepared for, which would almost be my undoing, were the soft, pliable things: boredom, sleepiness, feelings that nothing was happening.
The evening moved through more data and a couple of exercises. One involved introducing ourselves. We were told that when most of us encounter somebody on the street we're more aware of what their shoes look like than their eyes. Everyone found that one funny. I was noticing that we laughed longest and loudest when we were most uncomfortable. Being made aware of our acts -- our fronts to the world -- produced the most discomfort of all.
By the time the pre-training evening session was over, I felt good about what was to come. I had laughed a lot. And nothing seemed beyond my considerable repertoire of responses to encounter/feeling/self-examination-type growth experiences. It was a lovely, if short-lived, delusion.
I noticed later on my way back to Philadelphia that my jaws ached and my shoulders and neck felt as if they had weights hanging from them. If I had thought earlier that it was going to be painless or that I could somehow remain detached, I now was forced to reconsider what I was getting myself into.
THE FIRST WEEKEND
Saturday dawned gray and merciless. I debated how much to eat and drink for breakfast, given that neither our bathroom nor our meal break might come until evening. I settled on two cups of coffee and made a note to stop in the ladies' room just before the training began. Then I dressed, in layers; I had heard that the training rooms are kept cold to keep people awake. (I found out later that this was not true; the training rooms are kept at a constant temperature of 70-73 degrees. The apparent changes in temperature are merely changes in people's experience.)
The hotel this time was the New York Sheraton. All I saw of it that morning were the gold-colored name tags graced with the est orchid leaves worn by volunteer greeters. Outside the training room I made my way past more name tags to find my own and get my bearings.
The previous Wednesday we had all been exhorted to make eye contact with people. You would hardly have known it by the performance that morning. Except for a dozen or so couples, everyone else had staked out an isolated hunk of carpeting as his or her turf, from which beneath lowered eyelids the quiet confusion was surveyed. Here and there people chatted distractedly. In a corner a young woman twisted a cord on her handbag and seemed about to cry. A toothless man in his middle years, who I later learned was an elevator operator, kept loosening and tightening his tie. The successful were indistinguishable from the less successful, with most people dressed in the weekend uniform of our time: blue jeans.
The doors to the training room opened at 7:30. We were reminded, again, to sit in "the front-most, center-most chair." Those of us who had disregarded instructions to leave our watches home now checked them at the door. The mood was somber. To break the heavy silence, I started a conversation with a good-looking man alon
gside me.
He had come to est, he told me, on the recommendation of a woman friend. The friend had been, like him, an advertising account executive. During the training, she got that she was frigid. She subsequently left her high-status and well-paying job to work full time producing pornographic films. I thought he was putting me on. He wasn't.
Promptly at 8:30 the doors were closed. What the trainer later called "the roller coaster ride" had begun.
After a re-reading of the ground rules by a training supervisor in the by-now-familiar humorless, no-nonsense style, the trainer -- the star -- arrived and strode purposefully to the platform at the front of the room.
He wasted no time in getting down to business. There were no introductions, no preliminaries, no niceties. He glowered at us and announced that we were all assholes. I knew it was coming but I flinched anyway. A woman in front of me began to shake.
"You are an asshole," he repeated loudly. "You are a machine. Your life doesn't work. You're an asshole because you pretend that it does." He paced from one end of the platform to the other, punctuating each staccato statement with a thrust of his arm.
The verbal flagellation continued. "You people are here today because all of your strategies, your smart-ass theories, and all the rest of your shit hasn't worked for you. In this training you're going to find out you've been acting like assholes. All of your fucking cleverness and self-deception have gotten you nowhere."