A Little Manifesto for You'ns
I wrote this back in April but have edited it over and over since then., and only just now re-posted it. It may appear to be off - topic and uncharacteristic of me, but I needed to do it. If you are interested in Horse Racing this won't satisfy you, but If you know me, maybe you will find it at worst interesting and at best, enlightening - about who I am anyway.
April 9, 2009
Getting Back on Track After a Brief Sabbatical
Readers may have noticed my absence of late, so I will bring you up to speed. I left town to visit a friend in Utah and attend her husband’s transformational seminar titled The Fenix Event. But like many experiences, it’s difficult to keep one’s head clear after leaving the event without the support of the environment in which it takes place.
I guess this is why it’s a tough sell – the “self-improvement” seminar – sounds either selfish or needy. And at times I feel mildly persecuted for being the type (whatever that is, and surely it cannot be qualified) of person who does those kinds of things. Why this would be compared unfavorably to other types of education I don’t understand. When you need to improve your plumbing you get a plumber, right? If you want to wire a bandstand you get a skilled technician. If you want some guidance in life, you get a guide. Even if your guide is free of charge- say, your uncle or your neighbor, who cares? It just happens to be that I find my best guidance in human potential seminars.
As far as neediness goes, who doesn’t need a life coach? Who the hell knows how to do life before they’ve already done it? You don’t learn anything without either making mistakes or taking the guidance of better-informed wisdom than your own. And as far as selfishness goes, why would human potential seminars be considered more selfish than climbing the corporate ladder, open-wheel racing, being a movie star or engaging in extreme ironing?
I’ve reached a significant passage in my life; for what I am now up to, I don’t expect to find coaches in the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia. I need time and money to be able to contribute to the world I love, so I am often working on my own business to create it.
What Follows is an Explanation of Who I am:
Sad to word it as though I feel that I need explaining, but I know when I proof this for the final time I’ll be saying to myself “this sounds like she’s insecure and believes that she needs to explain herself.” But of course I’m insecure! Still, I’m not so insecure that I wouldn’t admit it. I’m actually a step above whatever insecure bastard needs to point out my insecurities.
What I am passionate about is transformational technology. I don’t care whose it is. When I sought it in the horse business it was Monte Foreman horse handling. When I sought it for my own use it was the est Training. When I look toward the future, I see the value of applying it everywhere. And learning the technology and using it are essential to moving our world forward in step with other technology. It’s my passion – it means the most to me – transformational technology - - and creating language that moves people and things.
Taking a Stand:
Nobody knows what I’m up to because I never take any kind of stand. I don’t use the language publicly for fear of being ostracized, especially when I make mistakes (no way around making mistakes). I have to do this here in my blog to identify myself. Since I’m not able to speak it (articulate it) yet, I’m doing it in writing, for the purpose of moving myself forward.
This manifesto should open space for me. If you know me, and you read this, and you decide I’m a nut job or too dangerous to associate with, then get out of my road. You’ll be doing both of us a favor.
I’m OFF!
As they say before the starter hits the button, “tie on” (because the gate is about to open and you will shortly be paying me company at full pace). Everyone who knows me is about to get schooled on my internal world.
Why Human Potential Seminars and Life Coaching Beats a Vacation
The general influence of the human potential movement of the 70s, and in particular (from my perspective) the est Training is as pervasive in our culture as is that of the computer and digital technology. It is the human-advancing counterpart to the age of intelligent machines.
I can’t continue without using words now ubiquitous to our common culture that sprung from the est Training and its effect on our consciousness. To assist your comprehension of both my vocabulary and the thrust of my post here, a good analogy would be; new vocabulary generated by the computer age that has in its own way transformed our culture; expressions I will use as I write here first found use (and were ostracized) as “est jargon” but now are commonly understood.
There’s a point here; at one time est graduates couldn’t use these expressions without alienating everybody else. People thought we were all in a cult and needed brainwashing (the seventies and eighties). Enough time has passed however, for the whole world to forget who and what was behind these words, so they are now acceptable to use.
For example, “getting it”; what does that mean? It used to be that you could understand ‘getting it’ only if you were in the est cult. And if you could actually ‘get it’ (or if you said you could) about anything then you probably were in a cult.
25 Years later, people say “I got it” or “if you could really just sort of…”get it”…that (blah blah, whatever) people don’t mind entertaining the possibilities that ‘getting it’ might offer them. It seems to me that once Werner Erhard (the “Leader” of the “Cult”) was out of the equation, it was safe to “get’ things. What a joke! Maybe we’ve started out “brainwashed”.
If you had taken the Training back in the late 70s or early in its heyday, and then simply stayed close to WernerErhard’s work by way of friends or Landmark Education, you know that the vocabulary (I maybe should say language, instead) we use every day traces directly back to the est Training. And all of this vocabulary is screaming back at us here in the 21st century, and we’re wandering around with only the vaguest of recognition that we had so much to do with it.
You don’t have to like it, or him, but it’s true; people said it was all too strange back then; but now you don’t need to explain yourself when you say; “I really got it*…” It’s the language of transformation; Werner’s Transformational seminars were the human and social counterpart to the age of machines and technology. So what about all the “cults”? Consider that they were the R&D needed to produce at least one technology that would fit into the culture that artificial intelligence will take us to in the material world.
Edison didn’t make a light bulb in one day.
*or “the shift happened for me when..” “teachers need to empower their students” “somehow her art resonated with me”… “PEPSI….Transform your summer!” “Integrity; it’s what we’re all about!”
Out of the Box
The Training allowed for re-contextualizing literally any experience. That’s essentially what is meant by “thinking out-of-the-box,” so that one can, if one desires, reinvent any element of one’s life; move it forward; free oneself from a self-destructive pattern. I remember reading in the est brochure that:
“The purpose of the Training is to transform your ability to experience living so that the situations that you have been putting up with or trying to change clear up just in the process of life itself.”
That statement alone led me to choose to spend my $300 on it in 1980 (the price has remained stable through the life of the program, and you can still get it for not much more than that!). Who wouldn’t want a tool that internalizes one’s ability to remove any barrier to being completely satisfied at any and every moment of life and in any area of life?
What I mean by that is the sense of being engaged in every day as if it were new, instead of anticipating the stifling feeling of just getting along and making it through, or realizing in middle age that we not only don’t do the things we used to, but we don’t want to and we really don’t want to do anything (which is why many people die when they retire - from jobs they thought they needed to retire from).
I know you can do this without a program. And that’s what you are saying if you disagree with me. So go ahead and do it your way. I’ll do it mine.
How I would describe transforming your ability to experience life is this (although it won’t appear to be rocket science): Say you are physically unappealing – ugly, at best. This fact takes a personal toll on you, because it dictates the course of your life; it owns every choice you make and colors every thought you have. It affects your mood and personality and you find it impossible to make friends or have a good time and you don't know if you even want friends or not because you don't have a choice about it. As you’ve aged you quit venturing out except to get groceries so you wind up weighing 400 lbs.
For all practical purposes your life is over; you’ve lost your alive-ness.
This is my example of a situation you put up with, may have tried to change, and are really stuck in.
But if some people are abhorrently ugly yet still astonishingly alive, creative, curious, animated and attractive inside their ugly skin, why are you not one of them? And how come even when you try to change your outlook, it won’t change?
Don’t focus on the issue of ugly I am relating here; focus on whatever your issues are. Your kid won’t clean his/ her room; you can’t deal with large crowds; you never have enough money; you have so far failed to attain the level of your potential at whatever it is, __________?? (fill in your own blank).
How would it be to transform your ability to experience that whole sector of your life – so that you could start anew? How could you “be new”?(get along with your kid; enjoy public activities; have enough money; achieve what you so far have not? If not overnight, then, at the very least, open the door; accelerate the process? To the best of my ability to describe it, the result of the Training
is the ability to be beyond any set of circumstances. The cost is that you have to give up the excuses you use for convenience because they stop you when it’s not.
Over the two weekends, you get to shed (let go of) much of your knowledge about who you know yourself to be. But not by remembering everything from your past, although memories certainly come up, but by recognizing key choices you have made and the mechanism by which those choices have become subconscious dictators of your present choices.
That’s what keeps you from being new or feeling alive, at any (or every) moment of your life. It’s what keeps you from creating anything other than a new version of the same thing you always create; in your conversations, your behavior and your actions, and stifles whatever vision you have for you.
These are the kinds of things that, not only do you not even notice, but that your friends try hard to ignore. It's as if there's a "silent conspiracy" to avoid bringing that aspect of your personality up.
If one of these unattractive elements of your personality is accidentally exposed, it has a paralyzing effect on you. Exposure is the stuff that "interventions" are made of; the things that you thought nobody noticed about you…and then...as if you were returning from the bathroom and discovered you had forgotten to shut the door!
That was one of the big bonuses of the est Training. You were exposed to the things you felt unsafe addressing about yourself - in a room full of 200 or 300 people, all of whom are simultaneously doing the same thing. You and your group collectively witness something nobody has ever seen before; that we are all fundamentally the same, no matter how we deny to others, or lie to ourselves about what's real.
The good measure is doing this it in a room full of other people, because then it’s a done deal. There's no denying that all the convoluted rationalizations we come up with for our eccentricities are bankrupt. And there’s no reversing the absolute reality that there isn’t a human on the planet who isn’t in the same boat (their convoluted rationalizations are equally bankrupt) For me, that was the single greatest equalizer ever rendered in action, and was permanently burned to the Hard Drive of my experience.
You experience what the human experience is, and you see that there are actually levers you can pull that accelerate the process of discovering whatever has you stuck in unsatisfactory conditions of life. Suddenly all of who you know yourself to be becomes much smaller – like a screwdriver or a table saw. You see through yourself just as your friends see through you, and you drop your bullshit like it's a hot potato!
Let me qualify that as; your unworkable bullshit; the workable bullshit is something you can choose freely to keep or not, depending on its usefulness. From then on you never forget that all you have to do is tell yourself the truth and sooner or later, you will shift any barrier you have in your life to whatever fulfillment you thought you were missing, or you will choose your unfulfilled condition of life as fulfilled; and either way it works for you to return you to the passion you have for simply being in your life (its like feeling like a kid again).
Of course it’s not a miracle, and of course it has less and less apparent influence over time, for two reasons; the first is that when you return to the world as you know it, you ave also returned to the world as it knows you. All your friends allow interact with you in the same way they always have; your environment looks the same, and so on, so the effect is one of pulling you back into the unconscious state that you have spent most of your life managing yourself with.
Back to the Point:
So now, if we go back to regarding the situations that you were trying to change or just putting up with that I began this digression on, what you discover is an opportunity to intercept whatever automatic behavior isn’t working for you and begin to replace it. Simply put, whenever you are not on auto-pilot, you can return to the space that childhood innocence bestowed on you; the space of creation and self-expression that is the feeling of aliveness and wonder that we all desire and wish we were in every day!
When you first leave that seminar, or any transformational seminar, your mind gets very quiet for a while. Things look simpler, and you free up a lot of stuck-ness you were experiencing. Mostly what happens is, you go home to your really cool friends who give you such a dose of bullshit (the silent conspiracy I referred to before) that you have to be a pretty amazing person not to buy right back into it for fear of losing all of them.
From there it’s a short stretch for them to pin you back into your same old crap so that they can run their rackets on you and you won’t try to help them out of their excuses of convenience. If they had been where you had been and seen what you had seen, they would fear their conspiracy more than they would fear your revolt.
And so on goes the culture of mediocrity.
But because the est Training was experiential in nature, it sticks. It was an experience that becomes the tool in the same way that – once you have learned to fly a plane or ride a horse, you never forget. It never leaves you. So in that sense it has the power to accelerate your ability to make satisfying choices and changes in your life.
It helps that you do it in a concentrated two–weekend format. It keeps you from getting so far away from the first 40 hours (80 if your group is really resistant) that the next 40 has to be wasted on “review”.
Transformational Technology is Not a Belief System
Back to my “ugly person” example, as seen through your ability to recontextualize it; it’s more like a math equation. While you may be unattractive to others by default, you have also learned from your experiences (of what it feels like to be unattractive to others), to be (behave) unattractive. You realize that just because people called you (named you) ugly doesn’t mean you have to ‘be’ ugly. So you stop wearing your “sweatpants”, and if you like pretty dresses and makeup you dress up pretty-like and put your big lipstick smile on. You can choose to wear “ugly” like a pin you put on, not one that has been put on you.
Or, you might realize that although you thought you hated socializing because other people were mean to you, that’s really not the case. Your shrink told you it was; but what’s really true for you is that you don’t enjoy socializing with people who you hope will make you appear prettier than you are. You never were broken and you don’t need fixing. So you find people with similar interests and you suddenly have less trouble appearing pretty. Because you show up when you show up, instead of someone pretending not to be ugly showing up in your space.
Or you don’t. But if you don’t, you still know that you can, and you know how.
Your body might never look different; but your being would. You would have the space to actively choose to be alive again, instead of being the label of ugly that our culture has pinned on you. That’s recontextualizing.
It’s not believing in some new advice or religion (a “belief system); it’s not about knowing (because we all know) – it’s about “being”. It’s about experiencing being the creator of your life again, instead of a victim of it, by letting go of emotional baggage you have. It’s about not simply accepting yourself and the contents of your life grudgingly, but like choosing who you already are as if it were a great gift.
And I’m not saying belief and faith are bad or don’t work. But you live only once so if you can accelerate the rate at which your powers of belief or faith can benefit you, then it’s worth the time and beats a vacation by miles -- and money.
And that’s aliveness. It’s not about stuff that we don’t already know. But it is about being able to identify consciously those things which are healthy for you and toss the things that drag your energy down and make you sick – both figuratively and literally.
“The Sage is sick of sickness;
Therefore he is not sick.” ------- Lao Tzu
And Finally Back to the Other, Original Point
Don’t forget where I am going- I’m actually comparing vacations and Transformational seminars.
As I mentioned, in the years since the 1970s (when doing human potential seminars was considered very selfish, or needy, or brainwashed, and was nonetheless very popular) it has become common knowledge that while your brain has the capacity to do many things, it’s also a limiting factor that not only dictates your increasing fear of risk in life but ultimately your experience.
But back then, this was amazing; to have your hands on a lever so powerful was better than all the Disney Park adventures you could ever have! It was close to having your hands on a magic wand! We knew it worked even though we didn’t know why! But my friends thought I was nuts because I went for it.
What would you rather have; a week of sunshine on the beach or a permanent door to freedom? I should say opening to freedom… And I mean a permanent opening to return to being you before your reticular activation system took over and ran you on automatic like it does most of the time, like a brainwashed automaton. A lever to pioneering new neural pathways out of the rut that eventually limits you to eating, sleeping, and peeing (not my words) and waiting to die.
And if you say to yourself (or to me) I’m already free! What do you mean, freedom? Then I would have to reply that you are not free from running on automatic – that is a neurological function, so don’t give me crap. In fact if that was your immediate knee-jerk response, you just proved it to yourself. Worse, you might not even understand what I mean.
Truthfully, you’d still be automatic most of the time, but you’ll have the power of choice far more than you would otherwise. I know I am, but I also know I’m far more able to be “present” when I need to be -- my non-automatic present.
Nobody doesn’t want to be 10% more satisfied in life than they are now -- that is, if they think they need a vacation. Besides, what else are you doing while you’re here, if you don’t even have some little thing you’re working on and you only get two weeks vacation a year. I’d spend that two weeks doing something that makes the other fifty worth living.
WWJD?
And what about the larger, global issues I mentioned before-you are free to speak and free to vote, and free to give your life to whatever you see fit. Would there be anything you might be putting up with or trying to change that, by virtue of your Being, you might value clearing up in the process of life itself?
If you buy what I’ve been saying here, you can’t say you are only human. All humans are only human. What about you? You’re in the flesh, but you aren’t the flesh, so what is your extraordinary Being up to?
To quote the now famous human Being Susan Boyle: “And that’s just one side of me!” Would you like to be human or would you like to be Being?
What’s the Truth?
We say youth is wasted on the young, but there’s tremendous potential in removing barriers to having the energy you thought you lost; mainly, you still have the energy to actually live the next three to five decades with the same verve you lived the first ones.
In my earlier example, I’m saying “before the I am ugly program you chose to run (and were thrown into by the prevailing culture of ‘ugly’) that wound up making you into your own adversary and bogging you down with all kinds of baggage that you cannot see but that saps your energy, and obscures your Being.
You have to be truthful with yourself. Referring to my example the truth would be; you thought you were an Ugly Human Being, but you discovered you were a Being an ugly human. Now that you have it in the right order, you can be Being anything human (including but not limited to ugly). Once you experience it (as opposed to reading about it like you are doing here) the choice becomes whether you want to keep the ugly part.
Maybe you’ll hang on to it, but just for times when it’s useful, and not to forget -- it’s like a screwdriver-- you don’t have to use it.
BTW, that’s what’s meant by the truth will set you free - but first it will piss you off; I mean it’s a hard thing to wrestle with- the idea that you yourself could be the source of your own misery, instead of the world around you that you’ve been pointing your finger at lo these many years. But you might not have known you had any choice but for the experience of the Training. And that’s the truth, too. There are lots of things, as Werner first said (and Donald Rumsfeld later butchered) “There are things that we don’t know that we don’t know.” (And I really don’t know if Werner made up that phrase – he might have gotten just about anything he said from somewhere else.)
And that was the value of doing the Training in a room full of 200 people -- it keeps the transformational technology in place, and you use it ever after, even when it’s not comfortable. When you really see yourself in a room filled with others who would have denied you the right to be anything but ugly at one time, but who now realize what labeling others has done to themselves, you come out feeling alive in direct opposite to how you had felt since before you knew you were ugly. And you can then “recreate” the experience for yourself over and over, in any situation.
And you become a damn sight more attractive than 99.9999% of all the other ugly people in the universe who self-destruct by way of their own ignorance.
No, it’s not easy all the time. That’s why you can say about me that I’ve ‘never changed’.
A couple of other little slices of est parlance…”taking responsibility for”: until the Training and the language – and language-“ing” that it brought forth, our culture only viewed responsibility through a filter of blame and shame. The est Training allowed for responsibility to mean what it really means; willing to accept yourself as (at) cause in the matter (better known in the well-worn saying: the courage to change the things you can…) “The shift” (as in the shift occurs): not something you would say to anyone in the 70s if you wanted to have friends, and ditto for “language-ing”, “completions”, and the all-important “creating space” which John Denver devoted a whole song to (“Looking for Space”).
This doesn’t have to mean anything to you; I’m writing this for me, anyway. All I’m saying it that this kind of educational retreat, whatever you want to call it, is an excellent tool for clearing up issues ongoing-ly, and grants the user an acceleration in clearing things up whenever the shit gets too thick. I suppose others would prefer to go on a vacation, but I don’t. I want something that makes returning home feel like a brand new life.
You always have a choice about being stuck in anything unsatisfying; any little thing, and any big thing. In contrast, Getting away from it on a cruise only serves to insure that whatever it is survives in your consciousness.
The est Training was the most liberating thing I’ve ever done. I’m pleased with life as it is; simply out of being able and willing to experience all of it as my choice – at any moment – something I would otherwise not be just so certain of.
Mother Theresa claimed that she suffered a ‘crisis of faith’ her entire life. I did too until the Training, which enlightened me about Being in a Faith as a choice instead of trying to have Faith in a Being (I also spontaneously stopped Being afraid of Math - and it’s a lot less work).
Some People are Afraid of Being “Brainwashed”
This is perfect for people who think you can be brainwashed. The culture we have come up in is what our brains have been floating in for all of Western Civilization, which makes you, technically (and functionally) a Brainwashed Being. If you have a chance to transcend the world’s label of ugliness – to choose whether you will continue to float in that toxic bath or be free of it, I guess I would have to confirm one’s potential to Be brainwashed.
But I’ll take that; it looks more like a choice to me than the former.
You-can-never-remain-stuck-in-experiencing-it-the way-you-did-before, even though you can go back to looking at it, perceiving it, assessing it or measuring yourself through the filter of the toxic elements of Western Civilization without consciously permitting them. You have the choice over how you would contextualize any issue for yourself. That’s the ability that gets transformed in there; to wash your own brain of whatever you see that it needs washing of.
In the 70s, everyone thought someone else was “washing” our brains. When your whole window on the world expands geometrically, you need a new language to describe it. And if you hadn’t been through the Training, the language was alienating, even though the language of science in general is not.
People accept tinkering with science and machines, but (at least back then) few could accept that technology could be applied to the mind for anything other than ‘evil” so they called it brainwashing and cult-ism and so on. I guess some of the more hack-y “seminars” that came out of the human potential movement were, but I think it was Napoleon who said “Never suspect conspiracy when incompetence will suffice.
You could get the same results as the est Training for free if you knew how to use the Bible, the Koran, the Upanishads or any other text of wisdom, but apparently nobody’s beating down the door for it because they don’t realize what they have at stake (which is why you have to pay, either for a private program or a religious institution).
And many people were really are afraid to do it with others - preferring vacations to being witnessed with their guard down for two weekends. But that’s the power of something that becomes permanent- the witnesses.
It takes a lot longer to discover all of this unless you have the singular intent to do it, which most people are too busy focusing on their paycheck or the weekend (not even most people…about 99.99999% of people.)
There’s a whole host of powerful by-products of the act of telling oneself the truth*. And the Training wasn’t ultimately about one single thing for anyone. It was about whatever it was about for each individual, and is significant in that abstraction. It allowed for whole new paradigms that were not formerly available to anyone in mainstream culture.
Paradigm is another term, along with context that has, through the influence of Werner Erhard’s est Training and the Forum - now Landmark Forum - taken a prominent role in mainstream conversation – (and so is conversation, in some instances.)
And I don’t mean to say that the Training is the only source and catalyst for the possibilities that have been brought forth over the last thirty years; all I’m doing here is justifying my choice of getting life-coached instead of a vacation. So:
Back to the Point!(And considerable redundancy for the sake of truly resistant readers)
I’m justifying my choice of a human potential seminar entitled the Fenix Event - over “vacations”.
Why take a vacation to “get away from it all” if what you actually need is a way to be empowered (uh oh, another est jargon word) by every moment just as it is, right where you are. Granted that’s easier said than done, but only because of oneself and one’s point of view, which is what you go to one of these events to let go of.
Getting away from it all is costlier money-wise, and if there’s anything that leaves absolutely no lasting result it’s a “vacation”; so I can’t see myself spending money on a vacation when the only thing I want to improve is the quality of my life while I’m in it.
Sure one can gain insight and enlightenment all by oneself- and do it while on a vacation. It’s just easier, in my thinking, to get a guaranteed transformational experience, as opposed to packing your entire life up, dragging it with you for two weeks everywhere you go, and hoping to produce a life-altering realization with the same tools you have at home (i.e. you and your entrenched point of view) while all the time knowing that more than likely you’ll returning to the same crap and dealing with it in the same way?
Most people I know cry that they need a vacation from their vacation, because traveling is stressful, not to mention that you know when you get home that everything you were trying to escape is still waiting there to aggravate you. Because while you were gone all you did was be you in a different place, so not only hasn’t the crap changed but neither have you.
I say it too (I need a vacation….) although I do know better, and here’s my point about why it is difficult to keep the space open, and your aliveness alive…when the surrounding environment pulls for things being unenlightened, and one’s reference is so unconsciously triggered to behave the same old way, it’s the only way to share in membership of your same old milieu.
If, on the other hand, you used language that you picked up in the est Training (or any phrases from any New Age or Human Potential seminar) to describe your experience in life now, or communicate with other people, they have a tendency to distance themselves (it’s unfamiliar and creepy) from you, and the only way to get your old friends back is to be a way they can recognize.
I’ve met few people here in my little slice of paradise who’ve ever even heard of such a thing, much less considered that it might be worth a thousand vacations. And even though I took the Training in 1980 and there no longer is one, they have Landmark Education, which is the same thing as est.
Every phrase people use, on all platforms from home life to work to, yes, vacations, has its roots in, duh, the est Training, the est Forum, the Landmark Forum. Our whole world is permeated with est “jargon” that people used to claim “proves that you’ve been turned into a brain-washed automaton”. Today people who didn’t understand what “getting it” was are “getting” all kinds of things. I mean, if you could really get how absurd that conversation is, you might actually be an independent thinker, God forbid.
But enough about me, right? What about the horses? (I won’t be staying on the subject- I’m not done venting and ranting yet.) My apologies for sounding sarcastic; I’m just insecure in this area. I’m deeply afraid of being judged, so I guess I’m compensating by trying to chip my readers down a notch.
A Little Respite
Remember, I’m saying all this back in April
My horses have been doing very well. I love that! Both of Lori Dinoto’s fillies out of her mare Guilty As Charged, have won. Fantasy had 2 seconds in a row before that, and Mercy, the one I had written about that was so difficult and sore had won last winter (and got me paid up! Of course, Lori got lucky in that she can afford surgery for both of them, ‘cuz we wound up with two broken legs. Not bad breaks; just little fractures, but both could use screws.
Sometimes I wonder about the quality of X-rays here at the Mount, because I could have told you something was wrong with those legs just by how the fillies were hitting the ground and how nervous they both became. But if something cannot be seen, it’s hard to stop training; lots of times something that seems serious, especially in a young horse, is merely a case of growing pains. If it didn’t come down to dollars and survival, the horses would get more rest, but unfortunately, the economic reality is brutal.
Lori thinks that maybe there isn’t a sufficient power supply to Doc Weir’s x-ray machine- thinks maybe mountaineer outfitted the electric to only generate the bare minimum necessary to power the back side. I suppose it’s possible.
My horses of Paula’s are doing well, also. The one they call Buddha (Don’t know his name) won, the goofy galloper, Ruby Wren (we have a mutual understanding, she and I) and the chestnut filly we call Foxy went wire-to-wire her last out.
Hughie Mahan’s filly Blazinett has won two races; Maiden and Never Win Two, both Allowance. She crapped out last time but it’s clear to me that she needs a break. Whereas a Champion Race Horse will eat it all up without showing the stress, most horses, like most people, become weary of the high-pressure routine. Blazinett is a very intelligent mare and I think that racing isn’t her only bag. Hugh said something about taking her home, which would be a good idea - before she hurts herself.
Mostly people who train don’t like to hear me say that, so I avoid it. When you’re averaging twenty dollars a day (exercise, vitamins and electrolytes) just to maintain the animal’s physiological chemistry, you don’t want to entertain the possibility that the mechanical or emotional part is running rough. Too often the red meat is the only part that gets any attention when it comes to conditioning.
It’s easy to get a muscle fit- just feed it and work it, and it will make up for most of your mistakes. It’s the most resilient part of conditioning. Keeping athletes in a positive mental and emotional state is the hard part; but attending to the mental state, on the other hand, will tell you a lot about how the mechanical part will ultimately function.
There’s a million ways that a horse will tell you it’s not feeling right. Even the classiest horse will balk momentarily before loading into the gate when there’ s a bad wheel or something isn’t up to par.
A classic example is that many horses that are raced into fitness will wash out in their first race or two after a layoff, knowing that they are not physically fit enough to run a winning race. When these horses are ready, often after a race or two, they don’t break out in a nervous sweat.
Some people say that if a horse washes out regularly, as long as that sweat is a clean, white foam, then it’s only nerves and not pain. If they have a yellow, brownish or other discoloration in their sweat, it means that they are experiencing pain. I don’t know if this is true, but I honestly think it is, as a rule.
The weather is typical April here in the Ohio Valley. March is nearly always cold and mostly dry. April is the lion/ lamb month, and it’s hard telling which way it will begin or end; followed by May, which rains right through the first two weeks of the turf season. It seems to me that we rarely run those Memorial Day dashes on the Turf. Then, when the ground finally dries out, it becomes as hard as Homer Laughlin china, and the divots (that are never replaced) become dangerous holes in the ground.
At this point it looks to me as though I am going to be galloping all summer. I have decided that a job in the racing office is a waste of my time, even if it gives me the hours of officialdom that I need to get accredited. All I ever hear about is how much everyone hates the job and hates each other in there, and I wouldn’t want to spoil the party by showing up (nor do I need the aggravation myself). Chuck Lloyd is coming back with 19 horses, and I think, on Maureen’s suggestion, that I’ll ask him for a salary job.
I think I’d have to get $250 per week, and only work to the break; that way I can do whatever I want after the break so I still have a shot of making six or seven hundred a week anyway, if I want.
It’s six days, four hours a day (actually three-and-a-half hours, because we take a half hour to renovate (re-harrow) the track, just as they do between races. I could say I only work 24 hours, but when you factor in having to rest afterward and having to handle business on the phone, keeping up with news in trade publications, doing promotional stuff like baking cakes and brownies for the crews you work with, plus accounting and bookkeeping, you’re well into the 40 hour range. Many gallop people pony at night, but that’s too much for me right now, although it would be fun for a little change of pace- to be there during the races, I mean. It’s a whole new dimension, the races.
In the meantime, I’m working on making the Internet work for me, by scouting around for affiliate deals and learning about how to use SEO, PPC, Social Networking sites, etc. While I have always had an interest, I am beginning to understand how the tools work Anyhoo, I’m about to break into the reverse funnel model and my confidence is growing by leaps and bounds, so if I never become a racing official, I won’t have to.
Who wants to work for someone else anyway? I’m happy to say I have done very little of that. Being a gallop girl, a jock or a horsewoman, I’m the boss; even when I’ve had an agreement with a farm and even when I wasn’t working for freelance pay, because the bottom line is you can be fired (or quit) at a moment’s notice and suffer little, if any, repercussion (or consolation) within the industry.
Really. It’s a profession where people come and go so suddenly, and getting injured is always a possibility, so that each horse could be your last, at least for an indefinite period of time. People think they can’t work without you until you get hurt and five minutes later they have someone else doing your job. The reality in this business is nobody expects anything to be permanent.
So this latest entrepreneurial effort came about because my friend Mary Louise is such a rabid enrollment machine that I had to do this Kyani Network Marketing thing. Of course it helped that I met Steve Niumatalolo and listened to his shtick, and that when I looked at the freakin’ compensation plan (the absolute best I have ever seen- always room at the top, and phenomenally high payouts for everything you do) I got greedy.
Now I have a box full of Kyani samples sitting in the shed. I know that I am not selling my friends on the same idea. I want to keep my friends. My thoughts about Kyani were, HEY I WANT TO WORK WITH MY FRIENDS…but I never asked them if they wanna work with me.
There are people who really want to do Network Marketing. Just as I do, they want to work with their friends and use their work as a vehicle for socializing - that’s a good thing, and one of the reasons I love my day job! I satisfy three needs in four hours; occupational, recreational and social (people think it’s strange that I never go out, but who needs to when you’ve already been out?).
The only way to find the Network Marketing people in the volume that you need them, though, is on the Internet. So what I’m doing now is something I’ve previously balked at; I’m learning about Lead Capture (squeeze) Pages, Pay-Per-Click marketing, Google adsense, and Social Networking sites. I’ve been aware of them as marketing channels for a long time but always hated the matrix – especially squeeze pages.
But when it comes down to all I want to do in my life and my sincere desire to get beyond survival and up to contribution, having a regular job isn’t gonna do it. It amazes me how most people don’t already know this and they are still trading their time for money. There is no more time! We’re out of time! Literally! (in this age we’re out of doing things in TIME and into doing them in SPACE).
I need money enough not just to take care of me, but so that I have the freedom to spend time helping others. And I have lots of plans, baby! They don’t all have to become reality, but I have so many ideas I want to share, or try, or do.
I’ve imagined having an Ohio Valley Sculling Team, out of East Liverpool, or Chester/ Newell; A natural foods co-op, where we trade time, create orders and at least have a once-a-month or once-a-week pickup-dropoff, if not a warehouse or storefront. I’ve thought it would be great to have just a bread bakery specializing in the kind of bread you walk down the street to buy fresh in the morning- not too many fancy styles, just tasty fresh bread at a price-slashing price- enough to feed a small town every day. No shipping costs, so cheaper than WONDER bread (and better, too..)
What about a Recycle yard, where you drop off stuff you’re not using, and take stuff you need? kind of like Freecycle with a central location. Or a community rental system- where you rent - by point system or by deposit, community held equipment: bobcats, augers, air compressors, leaf blowers, wood chippers, etc.? Membership covers insurance on equipment and pays for experts to assist with proper use. Could even create a levy for it as an opt-in tax…maybe make it part of the Streets & Highways dept.
Have a committee for the promotion of a Big City-Small City exchange. A campaign to draw a community from a major city to relocate, by promoting the charm and advantages of small town living and work to a large corporation to get them plant one of their subsidiaries, complete with employees in, say, East Liverpool, where there’s tons of room, lots of beautiful old homes, and everything in walking distance. Add promoting the same to some artists, continue to expand on the already popular FROLF course in the Park. Presto; new city.
The reason nobody thinks any of this is possible is that nobody has the free time to dream up just how it all will happen. Where there’s a will, there’s a way; but when there’s no freedom from survival, there’s no will. Poverty creates a downward pull. A little surplus wealth could make it easier for us to spend our creative energy to source (there’s another est/ Forum inspired term) the logistics, feasibility and application of our dreams - but all of it’s do-able.
There isn’t anything that can’t be done. Can you imagine if people in ancient Egypt said; “oh, we can’t build the pyramids!” Or the Romans arguing “how the hell are we going to make the Coliseum; with all that stuff underground?” or the aqueducts; a jazillion feet above the ground, over-the-river-and-through-the-woods-at-an-ever-so-slight-angle-to-the-city so that the water runs toward it?….all one needs is the freedom to move with; and right now, for me, money is that freedom.
So since I’ve figured out I’m not going to walk into a seven-figure job tomorrow, I think I’ll take a chance on being able to create my own seven-figure income. It’s the only worthwhile pursuit.
I even have a favorite person I am following on this; his name is Jonathan Budd. For anyone interested enough to check it out, I have purposely inserted my affiliate link. I hope you have a look and wind up buying his whole “Mastermind” Course. The fact is, if you are looking for a way to make money in any Internet platform, this is, in my opinion, the fellow who will give you the most in terms of comprehensive resources, free information and assistance and honest coaching than any you will find anywhere, including (with his partner, Jason Shawver) creating a community forum of like-minded individuals to team up with and assist each other in learning everything.
I say this with the following qualifications: Since 2003 I’ve spent over $10,000 on Internet moneymaking education. I’m familiar with most applications and well acquainted with numbers of different “schemes”; I’ve been to forums where people who’ve tried them discuss what works and what doesn’t, and tried several of the simpler ones, sometimes more than once, myself. From the benefit of all I have experienced I can promise that you won’t find a more honest person who is purposefully giving you more for your money than you even think he needs to. Don’t get me wrong; there are lots of truly honest people who give you a lot for a little. I just happen to like the resources and the influences he credits for his successes.
Despite the utter turn-off to me that the tacky squeeze pages present (if you visit the link, that is what I mean by a squeeze page) behind them is someone who, at only half my age, “Got it” a lot quicker than I did. I don’t think the Squeeze page model is going to remain valid for long, because now that we have so many social networking sites we no longer need to “search” the Internet randomly to find what we’re looking for.
It’s taking me so long to get through this, uh, testimonial? Testifictional? Diatribunal?
I’m only just starting to write about what I’ve been up to since I last wrote; I still have the cold frame, the wooden chairs, the absence of practicing my violin (bad news) the asparagus roots I bought, my house, and so on, but I’ll have to do that another time. I’m going to post this with the apology that it’s less about my horses and racetrack business, but at this point, I need to handle Who I Am with a BLOG post because I have so many friends online now that I’m going to point them here and use this as a generic catch-up letter. Gotta go to work…6 a.m.
*Before then, I recall, there were things that people never discussed: one is the rather offensive truth that many people who pick their noses eat the stuff. As it turns out, in one of the “Why do (Men Have Nipples; Men Fall asleep After Sex..” books by Leyner and Goldberg, the authors explain Nature’s intentional benefit to the human immune function of this otherwise disgusting habit.
This turns the issue completely on its head,
so that now it might not be whether you do,
but whether you don’t --
because apparently if you don’t,
perhaps you should…..
April 9, 2009
Getting Back on Track After a Brief Sabbatical
Readers may have noticed my absence of late, so I will bring you up to speed. I left town to visit a friend in Utah and attend her husband’s transformational seminar titled The Fenix Event. But like many experiences, it’s difficult to keep one’s head clear after leaving the event without the support of the environment in which it takes place.
I guess this is why it’s a tough sell – the “self-improvement” seminar – sounds either selfish or needy. And at times I feel mildly persecuted for being the type (whatever that is, and surely it cannot be qualified) of person who does those kinds of things. Why this would be compared unfavorably to other types of education I don’t understand. When you need to improve your plumbing you get a plumber, right? If you want to wire a bandstand you get a skilled technician. If you want some guidance in life, you get a guide. Even if your guide is free of charge- say, your uncle or your neighbor, who cares? It just happens to be that I find my best guidance in human potential seminars.
As far as neediness goes, who doesn’t need a life coach? Who the hell knows how to do life before they’ve already done it? You don’t learn anything without either making mistakes or taking the guidance of better-informed wisdom than your own. And as far as selfishness goes, why would human potential seminars be considered more selfish than climbing the corporate ladder, open-wheel racing, being a movie star or engaging in extreme ironing?
I’ve reached a significant passage in my life; for what I am now up to, I don’t expect to find coaches in the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia. I need time and money to be able to contribute to the world I love, so I am often working on my own business to create it.
What Follows is an Explanation of Who I am:
Sad to word it as though I feel that I need explaining, but I know when I proof this for the final time I’ll be saying to myself “this sounds like she’s insecure and believes that she needs to explain herself.” But of course I’m insecure! Still, I’m not so insecure that I wouldn’t admit it. I’m actually a step above whatever insecure bastard needs to point out my insecurities.
What I am passionate about is transformational technology. I don’t care whose it is. When I sought it in the horse business it was Monte Foreman horse handling. When I sought it for my own use it was the est Training. When I look toward the future, I see the value of applying it everywhere. And learning the technology and using it are essential to moving our world forward in step with other technology. It’s my passion – it means the most to me – transformational technology - - and creating language that moves people and things.
Taking a Stand:
Nobody knows what I’m up to because I never take any kind of stand. I don’t use the language publicly for fear of being ostracized, especially when I make mistakes (no way around making mistakes). I have to do this here in my blog to identify myself. Since I’m not able to speak it (articulate it) yet, I’m doing it in writing, for the purpose of moving myself forward.
This manifesto should open space for me. If you know me, and you read this, and you decide I’m a nut job or too dangerous to associate with, then get out of my road. You’ll be doing both of us a favor.
I’m OFF!
As they say before the starter hits the button, “tie on” (because the gate is about to open and you will shortly be paying me company at full pace). Everyone who knows me is about to get schooled on my internal world.
Why Human Potential Seminars and Life Coaching Beats a Vacation
The general influence of the human potential movement of the 70s, and in particular (from my perspective) the est Training is as pervasive in our culture as is that of the computer and digital technology. It is the human-advancing counterpart to the age of intelligent machines.
I can’t continue without using words now ubiquitous to our common culture that sprung from the est Training and its effect on our consciousness. To assist your comprehension of both my vocabulary and the thrust of my post here, a good analogy would be; new vocabulary generated by the computer age that has in its own way transformed our culture; expressions I will use as I write here first found use (and were ostracized) as “est jargon” but now are commonly understood.
There’s a point here; at one time est graduates couldn’t use these expressions without alienating everybody else. People thought we were all in a cult and needed brainwashing (the seventies and eighties). Enough time has passed however, for the whole world to forget who and what was behind these words, so they are now acceptable to use.
For example, “getting it”; what does that mean? It used to be that you could understand ‘getting it’ only if you were in the est cult. And if you could actually ‘get it’ (or if you said you could) about anything then you probably were in a cult.
25 Years later, people say “I got it” or “if you could really just sort of…”get it”…that (blah blah, whatever) people don’t mind entertaining the possibilities that ‘getting it’ might offer them. It seems to me that once Werner Erhard (the “Leader” of the “Cult”) was out of the equation, it was safe to “get’ things. What a joke! Maybe we’ve started out “brainwashed”.
If you had taken the Training back in the late 70s or early in its heyday, and then simply stayed close to WernerErhard’s work by way of friends or Landmark Education, you know that the vocabulary (I maybe should say language, instead) we use every day traces directly back to the est Training. And all of this vocabulary is screaming back at us here in the 21st century, and we’re wandering around with only the vaguest of recognition that we had so much to do with it.
You don’t have to like it, or him, but it’s true; people said it was all too strange back then; but now you don’t need to explain yourself when you say; “I really got it*…” It’s the language of transformation; Werner’s Transformational seminars were the human and social counterpart to the age of machines and technology. So what about all the “cults”? Consider that they were the R&D needed to produce at least one technology that would fit into the culture that artificial intelligence will take us to in the material world.
Edison didn’t make a light bulb in one day.
*or “the shift happened for me when..” “teachers need to empower their students” “somehow her art resonated with me”… “PEPSI….Transform your summer!” “Integrity; it’s what we’re all about!”
Out of the Box
The Training allowed for re-contextualizing literally any experience. That’s essentially what is meant by “thinking out-of-the-box,” so that one can, if one desires, reinvent any element of one’s life; move it forward; free oneself from a self-destructive pattern. I remember reading in the est brochure that:
“The purpose of the Training is to transform your ability to experience living so that the situations that you have been putting up with or trying to change clear up just in the process of life itself.”
That statement alone led me to choose to spend my $300 on it in 1980 (the price has remained stable through the life of the program, and you can still get it for not much more than that!). Who wouldn’t want a tool that internalizes one’s ability to remove any barrier to being completely satisfied at any and every moment of life and in any area of life?
What I mean by that is the sense of being engaged in every day as if it were new, instead of anticipating the stifling feeling of just getting along and making it through, or realizing in middle age that we not only don’t do the things we used to, but we don’t want to and we really don’t want to do anything (which is why many people die when they retire - from jobs they thought they needed to retire from).
I know you can do this without a program. And that’s what you are saying if you disagree with me. So go ahead and do it your way. I’ll do it mine.
How I would describe transforming your ability to experience life is this (although it won’t appear to be rocket science): Say you are physically unappealing – ugly, at best. This fact takes a personal toll on you, because it dictates the course of your life; it owns every choice you make and colors every thought you have. It affects your mood and personality and you find it impossible to make friends or have a good time and you don't know if you even want friends or not because you don't have a choice about it. As you’ve aged you quit venturing out except to get groceries so you wind up weighing 400 lbs.
For all practical purposes your life is over; you’ve lost your alive-ness.
This is my example of a situation you put up with, may have tried to change, and are really stuck in.
But if some people are abhorrently ugly yet still astonishingly alive, creative, curious, animated and attractive inside their ugly skin, why are you not one of them? And how come even when you try to change your outlook, it won’t change?
Don’t focus on the issue of ugly I am relating here; focus on whatever your issues are. Your kid won’t clean his/ her room; you can’t deal with large crowds; you never have enough money; you have so far failed to attain the level of your potential at whatever it is, __________?? (fill in your own blank).
How would it be to transform your ability to experience that whole sector of your life – so that you could start anew? How could you “be new”?(get along with your kid; enjoy public activities; have enough money; achieve what you so far have not? If not overnight, then, at the very least, open the door; accelerate the process? To the best of my ability to describe it, the result of the Training
is the ability to be beyond any set of circumstances. The cost is that you have to give up the excuses you use for convenience because they stop you when it’s not.
Over the two weekends, you get to shed (let go of) much of your knowledge about who you know yourself to be. But not by remembering everything from your past, although memories certainly come up, but by recognizing key choices you have made and the mechanism by which those choices have become subconscious dictators of your present choices.
That’s what keeps you from being new or feeling alive, at any (or every) moment of your life. It’s what keeps you from creating anything other than a new version of the same thing you always create; in your conversations, your behavior and your actions, and stifles whatever vision you have for you.
These are the kinds of things that, not only do you not even notice, but that your friends try hard to ignore. It's as if there's a "silent conspiracy" to avoid bringing that aspect of your personality up.
If one of these unattractive elements of your personality is accidentally exposed, it has a paralyzing effect on you. Exposure is the stuff that "interventions" are made of; the things that you thought nobody noticed about you…and then...as if you were returning from the bathroom and discovered you had forgotten to shut the door!
That was one of the big bonuses of the est Training. You were exposed to the things you felt unsafe addressing about yourself - in a room full of 200 or 300 people, all of whom are simultaneously doing the same thing. You and your group collectively witness something nobody has ever seen before; that we are all fundamentally the same, no matter how we deny to others, or lie to ourselves about what's real.
The good measure is doing this it in a room full of other people, because then it’s a done deal. There's no denying that all the convoluted rationalizations we come up with for our eccentricities are bankrupt. And there’s no reversing the absolute reality that there isn’t a human on the planet who isn’t in the same boat (their convoluted rationalizations are equally bankrupt) For me, that was the single greatest equalizer ever rendered in action, and was permanently burned to the Hard Drive of my experience.
You experience what the human experience is, and you see that there are actually levers you can pull that accelerate the process of discovering whatever has you stuck in unsatisfactory conditions of life. Suddenly all of who you know yourself to be becomes much smaller – like a screwdriver or a table saw. You see through yourself just as your friends see through you, and you drop your bullshit like it's a hot potato!
Let me qualify that as; your unworkable bullshit; the workable bullshit is something you can choose freely to keep or not, depending on its usefulness. From then on you never forget that all you have to do is tell yourself the truth and sooner or later, you will shift any barrier you have in your life to whatever fulfillment you thought you were missing, or you will choose your unfulfilled condition of life as fulfilled; and either way it works for you to return you to the passion you have for simply being in your life (its like feeling like a kid again).
Of course it’s not a miracle, and of course it has less and less apparent influence over time, for two reasons; the first is that when you return to the world as you know it, you ave also returned to the world as it knows you. All your friends allow interact with you in the same way they always have; your environment looks the same, and so on, so the effect is one of pulling you back into the unconscious state that you have spent most of your life managing yourself with.
Back to the Point:
So now, if we go back to regarding the situations that you were trying to change or just putting up with that I began this digression on, what you discover is an opportunity to intercept whatever automatic behavior isn’t working for you and begin to replace it. Simply put, whenever you are not on auto-pilot, you can return to the space that childhood innocence bestowed on you; the space of creation and self-expression that is the feeling of aliveness and wonder that we all desire and wish we were in every day!
When you first leave that seminar, or any transformational seminar, your mind gets very quiet for a while. Things look simpler, and you free up a lot of stuck-ness you were experiencing. Mostly what happens is, you go home to your really cool friends who give you such a dose of bullshit (the silent conspiracy I referred to before) that you have to be a pretty amazing person not to buy right back into it for fear of losing all of them.
From there it’s a short stretch for them to pin you back into your same old crap so that they can run their rackets on you and you won’t try to help them out of their excuses of convenience. If they had been where you had been and seen what you had seen, they would fear their conspiracy more than they would fear your revolt.
And so on goes the culture of mediocrity.
But because the est Training was experiential in nature, it sticks. It was an experience that becomes the tool in the same way that – once you have learned to fly a plane or ride a horse, you never forget. It never leaves you. So in that sense it has the power to accelerate your ability to make satisfying choices and changes in your life.
It helps that you do it in a concentrated two–weekend format. It keeps you from getting so far away from the first 40 hours (80 if your group is really resistant) that the next 40 has to be wasted on “review”.
Transformational Technology is Not a Belief System
Back to my “ugly person” example, as seen through your ability to recontextualize it; it’s more like a math equation. While you may be unattractive to others by default, you have also learned from your experiences (of what it feels like to be unattractive to others), to be (behave) unattractive. You realize that just because people called you (named you) ugly doesn’t mean you have to ‘be’ ugly. So you stop wearing your “sweatpants”, and if you like pretty dresses and makeup you dress up pretty-like and put your big lipstick smile on. You can choose to wear “ugly” like a pin you put on, not one that has been put on you.
Or, you might realize that although you thought you hated socializing because other people were mean to you, that’s really not the case. Your shrink told you it was; but what’s really true for you is that you don’t enjoy socializing with people who you hope will make you appear prettier than you are. You never were broken and you don’t need fixing. So you find people with similar interests and you suddenly have less trouble appearing pretty. Because you show up when you show up, instead of someone pretending not to be ugly showing up in your space.
Or you don’t. But if you don’t, you still know that you can, and you know how.
Your body might never look different; but your being would. You would have the space to actively choose to be alive again, instead of being the label of ugly that our culture has pinned on you. That’s recontextualizing.
It’s not believing in some new advice or religion (a “belief system); it’s not about knowing (because we all know) – it’s about “being”. It’s about experiencing being the creator of your life again, instead of a victim of it, by letting go of emotional baggage you have. It’s about not simply accepting yourself and the contents of your life grudgingly, but like choosing who you already are as if it were a great gift.
And I’m not saying belief and faith are bad or don’t work. But you live only once so if you can accelerate the rate at which your powers of belief or faith can benefit you, then it’s worth the time and beats a vacation by miles -- and money.
And that’s aliveness. It’s not about stuff that we don’t already know. But it is about being able to identify consciously those things which are healthy for you and toss the things that drag your energy down and make you sick – both figuratively and literally.
“The Sage is sick of sickness;
Therefore he is not sick.” ------- Lao Tzu
And Finally Back to the Other, Original Point
Don’t forget where I am going- I’m actually comparing vacations and Transformational seminars.
As I mentioned, in the years since the 1970s (when doing human potential seminars was considered very selfish, or needy, or brainwashed, and was nonetheless very popular) it has become common knowledge that while your brain has the capacity to do many things, it’s also a limiting factor that not only dictates your increasing fear of risk in life but ultimately your experience.
But back then, this was amazing; to have your hands on a lever so powerful was better than all the Disney Park adventures you could ever have! It was close to having your hands on a magic wand! We knew it worked even though we didn’t know why! But my friends thought I was nuts because I went for it.
What would you rather have; a week of sunshine on the beach or a permanent door to freedom? I should say opening to freedom… And I mean a permanent opening to return to being you before your reticular activation system took over and ran you on automatic like it does most of the time, like a brainwashed automaton. A lever to pioneering new neural pathways out of the rut that eventually limits you to eating, sleeping, and peeing (not my words) and waiting to die.
And if you say to yourself (or to me) I’m already free! What do you mean, freedom? Then I would have to reply that you are not free from running on automatic – that is a neurological function, so don’t give me crap. In fact if that was your immediate knee-jerk response, you just proved it to yourself. Worse, you might not even understand what I mean.
Truthfully, you’d still be automatic most of the time, but you’ll have the power of choice far more than you would otherwise. I know I am, but I also know I’m far more able to be “present” when I need to be -- my non-automatic present.
Nobody doesn’t want to be 10% more satisfied in life than they are now -- that is, if they think they need a vacation. Besides, what else are you doing while you’re here, if you don’t even have some little thing you’re working on and you only get two weeks vacation a year. I’d spend that two weeks doing something that makes the other fifty worth living.
WWJD?
And what about the larger, global issues I mentioned before-you are free to speak and free to vote, and free to give your life to whatever you see fit. Would there be anything you might be putting up with or trying to change that, by virtue of your Being, you might value clearing up in the process of life itself?
If you buy what I’ve been saying here, you can’t say you are only human. All humans are only human. What about you? You’re in the flesh, but you aren’t the flesh, so what is your extraordinary Being up to?
To quote the now famous human Being Susan Boyle: “And that’s just one side of me!” Would you like to be human or would you like to be Being?
What’s the Truth?
We say youth is wasted on the young, but there’s tremendous potential in removing barriers to having the energy you thought you lost; mainly, you still have the energy to actually live the next three to five decades with the same verve you lived the first ones.
In my earlier example, I’m saying “before the I am ugly program you chose to run (and were thrown into by the prevailing culture of ‘ugly’) that wound up making you into your own adversary and bogging you down with all kinds of baggage that you cannot see but that saps your energy, and obscures your Being.
You have to be truthful with yourself. Referring to my example the truth would be; you thought you were an Ugly Human Being, but you discovered you were a Being an ugly human. Now that you have it in the right order, you can be Being anything human (including but not limited to ugly). Once you experience it (as opposed to reading about it like you are doing here) the choice becomes whether you want to keep the ugly part.
Maybe you’ll hang on to it, but just for times when it’s useful, and not to forget -- it’s like a screwdriver-- you don’t have to use it.
BTW, that’s what’s meant by the truth will set you free - but first it will piss you off; I mean it’s a hard thing to wrestle with- the idea that you yourself could be the source of your own misery, instead of the world around you that you’ve been pointing your finger at lo these many years. But you might not have known you had any choice but for the experience of the Training. And that’s the truth, too. There are lots of things, as Werner first said (and Donald Rumsfeld later butchered) “There are things that we don’t know that we don’t know.” (And I really don’t know if Werner made up that phrase – he might have gotten just about anything he said from somewhere else.)
And that was the value of doing the Training in a room full of 200 people -- it keeps the transformational technology in place, and you use it ever after, even when it’s not comfortable. When you really see yourself in a room filled with others who would have denied you the right to be anything but ugly at one time, but who now realize what labeling others has done to themselves, you come out feeling alive in direct opposite to how you had felt since before you knew you were ugly. And you can then “recreate” the experience for yourself over and over, in any situation.
And you become a damn sight more attractive than 99.9999% of all the other ugly people in the universe who self-destruct by way of their own ignorance.
No, it’s not easy all the time. That’s why you can say about me that I’ve ‘never changed’.
A couple of other little slices of est parlance…”taking responsibility for”: until the Training and the language – and language-“ing” that it brought forth, our culture only viewed responsibility through a filter of blame and shame. The est Training allowed for responsibility to mean what it really means; willing to accept yourself as (at) cause in the matter (better known in the well-worn saying: the courage to change the things you can…) “The shift” (as in the shift occurs): not something you would say to anyone in the 70s if you wanted to have friends, and ditto for “language-ing”, “completions”, and the all-important “creating space” which John Denver devoted a whole song to (“Looking for Space”).
This doesn’t have to mean anything to you; I’m writing this for me, anyway. All I’m saying it that this kind of educational retreat, whatever you want to call it, is an excellent tool for clearing up issues ongoing-ly, and grants the user an acceleration in clearing things up whenever the shit gets too thick. I suppose others would prefer to go on a vacation, but I don’t. I want something that makes returning home feel like a brand new life.
You always have a choice about being stuck in anything unsatisfying; any little thing, and any big thing. In contrast, Getting away from it on a cruise only serves to insure that whatever it is survives in your consciousness.
The est Training was the most liberating thing I’ve ever done. I’m pleased with life as it is; simply out of being able and willing to experience all of it as my choice – at any moment – something I would otherwise not be just so certain of.
Mother Theresa claimed that she suffered a ‘crisis of faith’ her entire life. I did too until the Training, which enlightened me about Being in a Faith as a choice instead of trying to have Faith in a Being (I also spontaneously stopped Being afraid of Math - and it’s a lot less work).
Some People are Afraid of Being “Brainwashed”
This is perfect for people who think you can be brainwashed. The culture we have come up in is what our brains have been floating in for all of Western Civilization, which makes you, technically (and functionally) a Brainwashed Being. If you have a chance to transcend the world’s label of ugliness – to choose whether you will continue to float in that toxic bath or be free of it, I guess I would have to confirm one’s potential to Be brainwashed.
But I’ll take that; it looks more like a choice to me than the former.
You-can-never-remain-stuck-in-experiencing-it-the way-you-did-before, even though you can go back to looking at it, perceiving it, assessing it or measuring yourself through the filter of the toxic elements of Western Civilization without consciously permitting them. You have the choice over how you would contextualize any issue for yourself. That’s the ability that gets transformed in there; to wash your own brain of whatever you see that it needs washing of.
In the 70s, everyone thought someone else was “washing” our brains. When your whole window on the world expands geometrically, you need a new language to describe it. And if you hadn’t been through the Training, the language was alienating, even though the language of science in general is not.
People accept tinkering with science and machines, but (at least back then) few could accept that technology could be applied to the mind for anything other than ‘evil” so they called it brainwashing and cult-ism and so on. I guess some of the more hack-y “seminars” that came out of the human potential movement were, but I think it was Napoleon who said “Never suspect conspiracy when incompetence will suffice.
You could get the same results as the est Training for free if you knew how to use the Bible, the Koran, the Upanishads or any other text of wisdom, but apparently nobody’s beating down the door for it because they don’t realize what they have at stake (which is why you have to pay, either for a private program or a religious institution).
And many people were really are afraid to do it with others - preferring vacations to being witnessed with their guard down for two weekends. But that’s the power of something that becomes permanent- the witnesses.
It takes a lot longer to discover all of this unless you have the singular intent to do it, which most people are too busy focusing on their paycheck or the weekend (not even most people…about 99.99999% of people.)
There’s a whole host of powerful by-products of the act of telling oneself the truth*. And the Training wasn’t ultimately about one single thing for anyone. It was about whatever it was about for each individual, and is significant in that abstraction. It allowed for whole new paradigms that were not formerly available to anyone in mainstream culture.
Paradigm is another term, along with context that has, through the influence of Werner Erhard’s est Training and the Forum - now Landmark Forum - taken a prominent role in mainstream conversation – (and so is conversation, in some instances.)
And I don’t mean to say that the Training is the only source and catalyst for the possibilities that have been brought forth over the last thirty years; all I’m doing here is justifying my choice of getting life-coached instead of a vacation. So:
Back to the Point!(And considerable redundancy for the sake of truly resistant readers)
I’m justifying my choice of a human potential seminar entitled the Fenix Event - over “vacations”.
Why take a vacation to “get away from it all” if what you actually need is a way to be empowered (uh oh, another est jargon word) by every moment just as it is, right where you are. Granted that’s easier said than done, but only because of oneself and one’s point of view, which is what you go to one of these events to let go of.
Getting away from it all is costlier money-wise, and if there’s anything that leaves absolutely no lasting result it’s a “vacation”; so I can’t see myself spending money on a vacation when the only thing I want to improve is the quality of my life while I’m in it.
Sure one can gain insight and enlightenment all by oneself- and do it while on a vacation. It’s just easier, in my thinking, to get a guaranteed transformational experience, as opposed to packing your entire life up, dragging it with you for two weeks everywhere you go, and hoping to produce a life-altering realization with the same tools you have at home (i.e. you and your entrenched point of view) while all the time knowing that more than likely you’ll returning to the same crap and dealing with it in the same way?
Most people I know cry that they need a vacation from their vacation, because traveling is stressful, not to mention that you know when you get home that everything you were trying to escape is still waiting there to aggravate you. Because while you were gone all you did was be you in a different place, so not only hasn’t the crap changed but neither have you.
I say it too (I need a vacation….) although I do know better, and here’s my point about why it is difficult to keep the space open, and your aliveness alive…when the surrounding environment pulls for things being unenlightened, and one’s reference is so unconsciously triggered to behave the same old way, it’s the only way to share in membership of your same old milieu.
If, on the other hand, you used language that you picked up in the est Training (or any phrases from any New Age or Human Potential seminar) to describe your experience in life now, or communicate with other people, they have a tendency to distance themselves (it’s unfamiliar and creepy) from you, and the only way to get your old friends back is to be a way they can recognize.
I’ve met few people here in my little slice of paradise who’ve ever even heard of such a thing, much less considered that it might be worth a thousand vacations. And even though I took the Training in 1980 and there no longer is one, they have Landmark Education, which is the same thing as est.
Every phrase people use, on all platforms from home life to work to, yes, vacations, has its roots in, duh, the est Training, the est Forum, the Landmark Forum. Our whole world is permeated with est “jargon” that people used to claim “proves that you’ve been turned into a brain-washed automaton”. Today people who didn’t understand what “getting it” was are “getting” all kinds of things. I mean, if you could really get how absurd that conversation is, you might actually be an independent thinker, God forbid.
But enough about me, right? What about the horses? (I won’t be staying on the subject- I’m not done venting and ranting yet.) My apologies for sounding sarcastic; I’m just insecure in this area. I’m deeply afraid of being judged, so I guess I’m compensating by trying to chip my readers down a notch.
A Little Respite
Remember, I’m saying all this back in April
My horses have been doing very well. I love that! Both of Lori Dinoto’s fillies out of her mare Guilty As Charged, have won. Fantasy had 2 seconds in a row before that, and Mercy, the one I had written about that was so difficult and sore had won last winter (and got me paid up! Of course, Lori got lucky in that she can afford surgery for both of them, ‘cuz we wound up with two broken legs. Not bad breaks; just little fractures, but both could use screws.
Sometimes I wonder about the quality of X-rays here at the Mount, because I could have told you something was wrong with those legs just by how the fillies were hitting the ground and how nervous they both became. But if something cannot be seen, it’s hard to stop training; lots of times something that seems serious, especially in a young horse, is merely a case of growing pains. If it didn’t come down to dollars and survival, the horses would get more rest, but unfortunately, the economic reality is brutal.
Lori thinks that maybe there isn’t a sufficient power supply to Doc Weir’s x-ray machine- thinks maybe mountaineer outfitted the electric to only generate the bare minimum necessary to power the back side. I suppose it’s possible.
My horses of Paula’s are doing well, also. The one they call Buddha (Don’t know his name) won, the goofy galloper, Ruby Wren (we have a mutual understanding, she and I) and the chestnut filly we call Foxy went wire-to-wire her last out.
Hughie Mahan’s filly Blazinett has won two races; Maiden and Never Win Two, both Allowance. She crapped out last time but it’s clear to me that she needs a break. Whereas a Champion Race Horse will eat it all up without showing the stress, most horses, like most people, become weary of the high-pressure routine. Blazinett is a very intelligent mare and I think that racing isn’t her only bag. Hugh said something about taking her home, which would be a good idea - before she hurts herself.
Mostly people who train don’t like to hear me say that, so I avoid it. When you’re averaging twenty dollars a day (exercise, vitamins and electrolytes) just to maintain the animal’s physiological chemistry, you don’t want to entertain the possibility that the mechanical or emotional part is running rough. Too often the red meat is the only part that gets any attention when it comes to conditioning.
It’s easy to get a muscle fit- just feed it and work it, and it will make up for most of your mistakes. It’s the most resilient part of conditioning. Keeping athletes in a positive mental and emotional state is the hard part; but attending to the mental state, on the other hand, will tell you a lot about how the mechanical part will ultimately function.
There’s a million ways that a horse will tell you it’s not feeling right. Even the classiest horse will balk momentarily before loading into the gate when there’ s a bad wheel or something isn’t up to par.
A classic example is that many horses that are raced into fitness will wash out in their first race or two after a layoff, knowing that they are not physically fit enough to run a winning race. When these horses are ready, often after a race or two, they don’t break out in a nervous sweat.
Some people say that if a horse washes out regularly, as long as that sweat is a clean, white foam, then it’s only nerves and not pain. If they have a yellow, brownish or other discoloration in their sweat, it means that they are experiencing pain. I don’t know if this is true, but I honestly think it is, as a rule.
The weather is typical April here in the Ohio Valley. March is nearly always cold and mostly dry. April is the lion/ lamb month, and it’s hard telling which way it will begin or end; followed by May, which rains right through the first two weeks of the turf season. It seems to me that we rarely run those Memorial Day dashes on the Turf. Then, when the ground finally dries out, it becomes as hard as Homer Laughlin china, and the divots (that are never replaced) become dangerous holes in the ground.
At this point it looks to me as though I am going to be galloping all summer. I have decided that a job in the racing office is a waste of my time, even if it gives me the hours of officialdom that I need to get accredited. All I ever hear about is how much everyone hates the job and hates each other in there, and I wouldn’t want to spoil the party by showing up (nor do I need the aggravation myself). Chuck Lloyd is coming back with 19 horses, and I think, on Maureen’s suggestion, that I’ll ask him for a salary job.
I think I’d have to get $250 per week, and only work to the break; that way I can do whatever I want after the break so I still have a shot of making six or seven hundred a week anyway, if I want.
It’s six days, four hours a day (actually three-and-a-half hours, because we take a half hour to renovate (re-harrow) the track, just as they do between races. I could say I only work 24 hours, but when you factor in having to rest afterward and having to handle business on the phone, keeping up with news in trade publications, doing promotional stuff like baking cakes and brownies for the crews you work with, plus accounting and bookkeeping, you’re well into the 40 hour range. Many gallop people pony at night, but that’s too much for me right now, although it would be fun for a little change of pace- to be there during the races, I mean. It’s a whole new dimension, the races.
In the meantime, I’m working on making the Internet work for me, by scouting around for affiliate deals and learning about how to use SEO, PPC, Social Networking sites, etc. While I have always had an interest, I am beginning to understand how the tools work Anyhoo, I’m about to break into the reverse funnel model and my confidence is growing by leaps and bounds, so if I never become a racing official, I won’t have to.
Who wants to work for someone else anyway? I’m happy to say I have done very little of that. Being a gallop girl, a jock or a horsewoman, I’m the boss; even when I’ve had an agreement with a farm and even when I wasn’t working for freelance pay, because the bottom line is you can be fired (or quit) at a moment’s notice and suffer little, if any, repercussion (or consolation) within the industry.
Really. It’s a profession where people come and go so suddenly, and getting injured is always a possibility, so that each horse could be your last, at least for an indefinite period of time. People think they can’t work without you until you get hurt and five minutes later they have someone else doing your job. The reality in this business is nobody expects anything to be permanent.
So this latest entrepreneurial effort came about because my friend Mary Louise is such a rabid enrollment machine that I had to do this Kyani Network Marketing thing. Of course it helped that I met Steve Niumatalolo and listened to his shtick, and that when I looked at the freakin’ compensation plan (the absolute best I have ever seen- always room at the top, and phenomenally high payouts for everything you do) I got greedy.
Now I have a box full of Kyani samples sitting in the shed. I know that I am not selling my friends on the same idea. I want to keep my friends. My thoughts about Kyani were, HEY I WANT TO WORK WITH MY FRIENDS…but I never asked them if they wanna work with me.
There are people who really want to do Network Marketing. Just as I do, they want to work with their friends and use their work as a vehicle for socializing - that’s a good thing, and one of the reasons I love my day job! I satisfy three needs in four hours; occupational, recreational and social (people think it’s strange that I never go out, but who needs to when you’ve already been out?).
The only way to find the Network Marketing people in the volume that you need them, though, is on the Internet. So what I’m doing now is something I’ve previously balked at; I’m learning about Lead Capture (squeeze) Pages, Pay-Per-Click marketing, Google adsense, and Social Networking sites. I’ve been aware of them as marketing channels for a long time but always hated the matrix – especially squeeze pages.
But when it comes down to all I want to do in my life and my sincere desire to get beyond survival and up to contribution, having a regular job isn’t gonna do it. It amazes me how most people don’t already know this and they are still trading their time for money. There is no more time! We’re out of time! Literally! (in this age we’re out of doing things in TIME and into doing them in SPACE).
I need money enough not just to take care of me, but so that I have the freedom to spend time helping others. And I have lots of plans, baby! They don’t all have to become reality, but I have so many ideas I want to share, or try, or do.
I’ve imagined having an Ohio Valley Sculling Team, out of East Liverpool, or Chester/ Newell; A natural foods co-op, where we trade time, create orders and at least have a once-a-month or once-a-week pickup-dropoff, if not a warehouse or storefront. I’ve thought it would be great to have just a bread bakery specializing in the kind of bread you walk down the street to buy fresh in the morning- not too many fancy styles, just tasty fresh bread at a price-slashing price- enough to feed a small town every day. No shipping costs, so cheaper than WONDER bread (and better, too..)
What about a Recycle yard, where you drop off stuff you’re not using, and take stuff you need? kind of like Freecycle with a central location. Or a community rental system- where you rent - by point system or by deposit, community held equipment: bobcats, augers, air compressors, leaf blowers, wood chippers, etc.? Membership covers insurance on equipment and pays for experts to assist with proper use. Could even create a levy for it as an opt-in tax…maybe make it part of the Streets & Highways dept.
Have a committee for the promotion of a Big City-Small City exchange. A campaign to draw a community from a major city to relocate, by promoting the charm and advantages of small town living and work to a large corporation to get them plant one of their subsidiaries, complete with employees in, say, East Liverpool, where there’s tons of room, lots of beautiful old homes, and everything in walking distance. Add promoting the same to some artists, continue to expand on the already popular FROLF course in the Park. Presto; new city.
The reason nobody thinks any of this is possible is that nobody has the free time to dream up just how it all will happen. Where there’s a will, there’s a way; but when there’s no freedom from survival, there’s no will. Poverty creates a downward pull. A little surplus wealth could make it easier for us to spend our creative energy to source (there’s another est/ Forum inspired term) the logistics, feasibility and application of our dreams - but all of it’s do-able.
There isn’t anything that can’t be done. Can you imagine if people in ancient Egypt said; “oh, we can’t build the pyramids!” Or the Romans arguing “how the hell are we going to make the Coliseum; with all that stuff underground?” or the aqueducts; a jazillion feet above the ground, over-the-river-and-through-the-woods-at-an-ever-so-slight-angle-to-the-city so that the water runs toward it?….all one needs is the freedom to move with; and right now, for me, money is that freedom.
So since I’ve figured out I’m not going to walk into a seven-figure job tomorrow, I think I’ll take a chance on being able to create my own seven-figure income. It’s the only worthwhile pursuit.
I even have a favorite person I am following on this; his name is Jonathan Budd. For anyone interested enough to check it out, I have purposely inserted my affiliate link. I hope you have a look and wind up buying his whole “Mastermind” Course. The fact is, if you are looking for a way to make money in any Internet platform, this is, in my opinion, the fellow who will give you the most in terms of comprehensive resources, free information and assistance and honest coaching than any you will find anywhere, including (with his partner, Jason Shawver) creating a community forum of like-minded individuals to team up with and assist each other in learning everything.
I say this with the following qualifications: Since 2003 I’ve spent over $10,000 on Internet moneymaking education. I’m familiar with most applications and well acquainted with numbers of different “schemes”; I’ve been to forums where people who’ve tried them discuss what works and what doesn’t, and tried several of the simpler ones, sometimes more than once, myself. From the benefit of all I have experienced I can promise that you won’t find a more honest person who is purposefully giving you more for your money than you even think he needs to. Don’t get me wrong; there are lots of truly honest people who give you a lot for a little. I just happen to like the resources and the influences he credits for his successes.
Despite the utter turn-off to me that the tacky squeeze pages present (if you visit the link, that is what I mean by a squeeze page) behind them is someone who, at only half my age, “Got it” a lot quicker than I did. I don’t think the Squeeze page model is going to remain valid for long, because now that we have so many social networking sites we no longer need to “search” the Internet randomly to find what we’re looking for.
It’s taking me so long to get through this, uh, testimonial? Testifictional? Diatribunal?
I’m only just starting to write about what I’ve been up to since I last wrote; I still have the cold frame, the wooden chairs, the absence of practicing my violin (bad news) the asparagus roots I bought, my house, and so on, but I’ll have to do that another time. I’m going to post this with the apology that it’s less about my horses and racetrack business, but at this point, I need to handle Who I Am with a BLOG post because I have so many friends online now that I’m going to point them here and use this as a generic catch-up letter. Gotta go to work…6 a.m.
*Before then, I recall, there were things that people never discussed: one is the rather offensive truth that many people who pick their noses eat the stuff. As it turns out, in one of the “Why do (Men Have Nipples; Men Fall asleep After Sex..” books by Leyner and Goldberg, the authors explain Nature’s intentional benefit to the human immune function of this otherwise disgusting habit.
This turns the issue completely on its head,
so that now it might not be whether you do,
but whether you don’t --
because apparently if you don’t,
perhaps you should…..
posted by hoofstep at
3:07 AM
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