Free est by Adelaide Bry Page A

life. While the

trainer kept hammering at this theme, and I complained to myself and

anyone who would listen to me (outside the training room) about the

interminable repetitiveness, eventually my resistance gave way and I got it. I got that I had total responsibility for my life -- all

of it, the happiness and the sorrow. It was -- and continues to be --

an incredible revelation.

The dinner break late in the evening was a mad dash for a toilet and then

some lukewarm soup and chow mein at a nearby Chinese restaurant. I was

dizzy, as were the three trainees who had spontaneously become my dinner

companions. Strangely enough, I was also not hungry. After visualizing

delicacies of every variety throughout the day, I could eat barely half

of what was on my plate. I noticed when we were ready to leave that a

lot of the plates were still half-full. Either becoming enlightened was

stilling our appetites or discovering we were assholes had made us too

nauseous to eat.

We swapped stories about what had brought us to est . The one

I liked best came from an intense young man who earlier had openly

acknowledged that he was homosexual. "It started when I ran into an old

friend on the street one day," he told us. "He looked marvelous, sort of

blissful So I said to him, 'What are you on these days?' He'd been into

every drug imaginable. And be answered, 'I'm on est these days.'

I hadn't heard of that one so, naturally, I asked him if he had any for

me. Whatever it was, I wanted it. Let me tell you" -- he chuckled --

"I freaked out when I heard it wasn't something you smoke or eat!"

The rest of Saturday night for me was one long headache. Around midnight

the complaints became louder and more frequent. In response, the trainer

finally asked people to raise their hands if they had any kind of ache

or pain. Over half the hands in the room went up. He picked one trainee

to come up front for a demonstration.

What followed was a rather incredible exercise in taking responsibility

for your own experience of your body. Based on the notion we'd already

looked at in relation to our life situations, which is that resistance

only makes things continue, the technique we were now shown was a way for

us to go deeper into our pain, to experience it totally. Miraculously,

the pain disappeared. The technique assists you to experience the pain

fully -- for example, a backache or headache, by experiencing very

specifically its color, size, shape, and how much liquid it would hold

if it were a container. For me it has become an invaluable tool in both

my life and my practice. (Although est tells people with medical

problems to see a physician, several trainees told me that they had

gotten rid of medical problems during the training.)

We were finally released to return to beds and bathrooms in the wee hours

of the morning. Tucked into our psyches were a couple of other throwaway

techniques to blow our belief systems. One that I found incredibly

effective was to tell myself just before sleep to wake up on time alive,

alert, and refreshed. The next morning, on four hours of sleep, I felt

terrific.

When I had hauled my exhausted body out of the hotel that first night,

I had felt that I wanted to get as far away from est as I could.

I had a backache; I was tired; I was bored; I was also, surprisingly,

anxious. I resented everything and everyone connected with est ,

and especially the trainer for holding a mirror up to my act and not

letting me forget my agreements. Was more of the same all I was going

to get for my $250? I had a sinking feeling that the whole thing was

an enormous fraud. I finally fell asleep more curious than furious. The

next morning, though I felt better, I was soon outdoing Lewis Carroll's

White Queen; I had 5,000 impossible thoughts before breakfast. And,

again, I went off to "transform" my life.

Having taken the time for a second cup of coffee, I arrived at the training

a few minutes