And I stood up. But there was an error I unwittingly made when I stood
up, at the end of my first exposure to
his work:
I assumed what he'd just made available was as obvious to everyone else
as it was to me. In hindsight (and hindsight is always
20/20 vision), that was naïve. Just because it was obvious to me,
didn't guarantee it was equally obvious to everyone else. So when I
communicated
later with people about what I got, I wasn't
speaking
to where they were at (I couldn't have been).
Some pundits say
Werner
put together pieces from various disciplines, isms,
Zen
etc, along with a big dollop of common sense to create the
earliest iterations of
his work.
I don't think that's accurate. My
opinion
of what he did was he retraced his own steps toward that
inexorablemoment out of
time
on the
Golden Gate Bridge,
then developed a participatory theatre (if you will) which
re-produced the sequence of insights he'd had along his own spiritual
hejira, culminating in the
moment of transformation,
his rationale being if it worked for him, and if it worked for him
in that order, then it should work for others too. No,
Werner's work
comes from his experience of who he is for himself, from
discovering who he really is, not from some hodge-podge, some
olio of other disciplines and isms. That simply has no
rigor.
At the
moment of reckoning
ie at the "If you got it, stand up"
breakthrough
which marked the
tipping point
of the four days and three evenings long conversational process, my
being leapt up even faster than my body did. It was as
brilliant
as it was stunning. I had the sense it was important - in
the real sense of the word: it had import. Why had I not
discovered this before? How could I have missed it? How could
anyone have missed it? And so I assumed everyone knew this
(or at least knew about this). It was a cardinal error. To
be sure, in my
speaking
over the years since then, I've resonated totally with many of my
listeners.
But given the cardinal error implicit in my assumption about them, I
wasn't resonating with at least half of them, maybe more. Even my
enviable enrollment
statistics
couldn't mask the fact.
I recognize that now. Since then I've developed a certain way of being
with the
experience sourced by
Werner
which
communicates
something interesting for people. This approach seems to work, even if
a few of them don't totally get my
speaking
it ie even if the possibility of being transformed, isn't 1,000%
obvious for them too.
Here's what I respect about the commitment of all
est
Trainers,
Landmark Forum
Leaders,
program
leaders etc (ie it's one of the many, many things I respect
about them): they're willing to take the time to
speakthis work
in a way that people will get it, and they're willing to do the
the work
on themselves necessary to be able to
speak
it that way. After
forty years,
I've seen this cardinal error of mine for what it is. And I get I've
been impatient. And I get what it's cost me. I've been kind of selfish
- stingy really. Transformation / who we are is
communicated
through
speaking
and
listening.
I get that. But it's a cardinal error to assume everyone already
listens
it. There's no already knowing this. There's no
pre-exposure to it. If it's not generated newly every moment of every
hour of every day, then it's unavailable.
