Free est by Adelaide Bry

certain I would not be among the defaulters. I was wrong

on both counts. About half the room would stand up the next weekend to

acknowledge they had cheated and another large contingent would join

them when Stewart said that if we weren't sure if we'd cheated or not,

we had. I was in the second group. For a glass of red wine I drank after

agreeing not to.

The hours rolled by. Without a watch and with the hotel drapes pinned

closed, I had no sense of time. The training was just barely endurable

and mostly agonizing. I yearned for activity, interaction, anything to

escape from the endless passivity I had been thrust into from a life

that was a model of motion.

Stewart continued to hammer away at us. Most of us don't enjoy any degree

of aliveness, he pronounced, because we are content to stay at a level of

existence where we neither experience nor participate in life. In fact,

a lot of us "go unconscious" a lot of the time.

"I tune out while I'm driving," a young woman shared. "Last week I went off

the road and narrowly missed a major accident. I woke up and jammed on the

brakes in front of a giant elm tree."

"When you are responsible," Stewart thundered, "you find out you just

didn't happen to be lying there on the tracks when the train passed

through. You are the asshole who put yourself there."

The theme of responsibility prevaded every aspect of the training. In

fact, if I were to sum up in a few words what I got from the training

data it would be that we are each the cause of our own experience and

responsible for everything that happens in our experience.

"I know that your agreement with everyone you know is that life is tough,"

he went on, "and that you have to be cool to survive. I want you to get

that that doesn't work.

"It also doesn't work to wave the traffic on the freeway in the opposite

direction to the way it's going. The traffic doesn't give a damn about you

and neither does life. You have to be responsible for the way it is rather

than stuck in the way you want it. You set it up this way. Now dig it.

"However it is for you, that's the way you've set it up and no amount

of resistance will change that. Now you have a choice. You can keep

resisting. Or you can choose it. You can bitch about it. Or you can

take responsibility for it. If you are willing to acknowledge that you

are cause in the matter, then you can be responsible for it instead of

having it run you."

It was powerful stuff and I had a hard time staying with it. I had spent

half a lifetime blaming the dissatisfaction of my life on a sad, angry

father who had worked his way through Harvard and then went nowhere;

on a sad, angry mother who learned to read Greek and Latin at Smith

and then spent the rest of her life in a flowered housedress, eating

to drown her misery; on an ex-husband who was compulsive, guilt-ridden,

and who tried but couldn't give me what I wanted; and on bosses

and shrinks who never quite lived up to my expectations.

I had begun to see my own responsibility in all this some years before I

took the training, but the est experience deepened my experience

of being the cause of my life. It also became clearer how I manufactured

both my problems and my pleasures.

The irony was that I had never had a problem taking credit for the joys

and successes of my life: an early career as a magazine writer,

followed by a wonderful stint writing and broadcasting a radio program,

followed by a successful public relations career, followed by a return

to college in my middle years to study psychology and, subsequently,

by my becoming a psycho-therapist. Through the past several years, my

children have brought me incredible joy in their sanity and ability to

function well. My daughter is now at Harvard Business School and my son

at the University of Colorado Law School.

It was too painful for me to accept that I, not anyone else, had caused

the anguish and despair that had marked so much of my