by Adelaide Bry
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 a
dmit 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.
Doing chairs meant arranging 250 chairs in an exact, prescribed order. So exact must the alignment into rows and sections be that the first time around we redid it four times until we got it right. "Right" meant that a piece of string pulled taut from one end of a row to the other never curved.
My involvement with chairs over the two weekends was relentless. I aligned them, rearranged them, took them away, brought them back. A fellow volunteer dubbed the total experience "the chair training." Around the third or fourth time I did chairs, I had a realization.
Contemporary man, with all his senses intact, often acts as though he were deaf, dumb, and blind. Because there are too many messages being beamed at him -- and too many of them are painful -- he has chosen to be half alive instead of fully alive. He dreams and worries about the future. He frets about or retreats to the past. He rarely gives his total self to the here and now of the present.
For me, the intense focus on the now in my volunteer experience was at first unpleasant, unfulfilling, unproductive, un-just-about-everything. When I committed myself to it, it was satisfying. Doing chairs, I really got that the only thing that matters is the moment. You cannot be involved only in good moments and not be involved in those moments you don't like. Feeling alive is experiencing every moment -- pleasant and unpleasant
I was reminded of a classic Zen aphorism. If what one does before the Tao ("the Way") is to chop wood and drink water, then what does one do after the Tao? The answer: chop wood and drink water.
It was around this time that I found myself really enjoying my work. I eagerly accepted my reassignment from chairs to bathrooms. What truths could I discover, I wondered, in a search for the shortest route from the training room to the toilets?
This enthusiasm, however, waxed and waned. There were times when I felt a grimness about it all. Except when we were instructed to smile in the role of "greeter," we were to remain poker-faced. When I remarked on this to my supervisor, he said, simply, "The purpose of assisting is to assist. Do what you're doing now. Do your humor at humor time."
About midway through the first weekend, I became concerned that I might never get into the room, which had been my primary goal in volunteering. I complained to the person to whom I was responsible. He eye-balled me for a moment and then said, kindly, "And you may never get in the room."
Because I generally make my needs known "up-front," I'm accustomed to getting my way in most things. I also don't accept "no" easily. Somehow, this time was different. I accepted what he said. No rebellion, no demands, no complaints. Instead, I took responsibility for my intention to be in the training room. And, of course, it happened.
A few weeks later, when I visited est headquarters in San Francisco, I spoke with volunteers who had worked directly with or around Werner. I wondered how much more or less rigorous his expectations were in comparison to those of my own supervisors.
A young woman who had volunteered to clean the San Francisco town house where Werner has his office told me that she had been instructed in detail about how to do the job. "I had to clean under each object, such as those on a coffee table, and then replace it precisely where I found it, not a half-inch away." (All housekeeping functions are now performed by paid personnel.)
The person assigned to clean toilets at headquarters that day reported that there was one, and only one, est way to do the job. He shared that he had been astonished to discover how much thought and effort could go into cleaning toilets the est way: i.e., completely.
And one of the est office staff confessed that Werner can become very loud when a job isn't completed. "I quake, but I know he loves me. Does that sound really crazy? That's the way it is and so you go about your job the way Werner wants the job done."
Several est workers proudly told me that est graduates were in great demand on the California job market. A number of businesses, in fact, were reported to be hi
ring only est-ers.
Subsequently I met the manager of a charming restaurant on Fisherman's Wharf who told me that most of his staff were est people and that, whenever an old-timer left, he would be replaced by an est-er regardless of whether or not he or she had ever done that kind of work before.
His reason, this conscientious and able man told me, was that est grads "don't stand around waiting for someone else to do their work, or to be told what needs to be done. They don't whine and complain that anything is too much for them or that a particular job is beyond their job description. They do their jobs well and cheerfully."
Incredible! It occurred to me that if Werner actualized his proposal to train millions, it might have a dramatic effect on everyone's job performance.
Being an est volunteer made me very conscious of what making and breaking agreements in the est sense was all about. In a society where "rules are made to be broken," it was refreshing -- if at times disconcerting -- to experience est's insistence on fullfilling agreements.