I am indebted to Charlene Pekas Afremow who inspired this
conversation.
If you were to ask me who the two most unforgettable women in my life
are, excluding my family members, it's not even close. One would surely
be
my first girlfriend,
and the other would surely be my first
est
trainer.
Both of them altered my future in heretofore unimaginable ways. And
they didn't simply alter / expand my perspective on my life and living.
They altered / expanded the very premises on which my perspective on my
life and living were based.
My first girlfriend
showed me what it was like to be loved so much by another human being
that from then on, I could settle for nothing less. My first
est
trainer
showed me what it was like to be known so well by another human being
that from then on, I would be seeking out all my inauthenticities and
any behaviors which weren't grounded in integrity as fast as I could
locate them, then telling the truth about them, getting them complete,
and letting them go.
Seated in an auditorium in the Alameda Veteran's Hall in Alameda,
California in 1978 along with about three hundred other curious
participants,
I waited for our
est
training
to begin. When she walked out on to the podium, she was neither too
short nor too tall. She was dressed impeccably, sharply, in business
casual. She introduced herself and welcomed us, then began taking
questions from the audience along the lines of "What do I do if ...?",
"How do I ...?", and "What if ...?" etc. And even if I say it myself,
many of their questions seemed childishly simple and a bit irritating.
The group as a whole wasn't paying
attention.
At some point, she stopped talking, given the jarring background drone
of the audience chattering, without
listening
to a word she was saying.
Eventually everyone realized that she wasn't going to continue until we
were quiet, so we all shut up. And as soon as the room was silent, she
said as loudly as it's possible for a human being to say anything,
slowly and emphatically "What I want you ... to get is I
... AM ... NOT ... YOUR ...
MOTHER!". But I'm not telling the full story here. What she
really said was "What I want you F***ING
*SSH*LES to get is I am not your mother.". It was deafening.
My jaw dropped. I was transfixed. In a trice she'd gotten my full
attention
in a vise ... and she held it there intently for the next forty five
years and more.
It's not just that at some point or another, she trained most if not
all the heavyweights in
the world
of transformation to come. It's often been said that if you trace back
the chronology of all the major leaders and schools of transformation
on
the planet,
it all began with her. And it was more than that really. You
could say that all the major leaders of transformation on
the planet,
each had two personae: one, they were a leader of transformation, and
two, they were a human being who was a leader of transformation. But
with her, there was only one: with her, the leader of transformation
was inseparable from the human being she was. That's what she lived.
That's what she
demonstrated.
It was riveting theatre watching her leading. With most leaders, you
got what you got from what they were saying. With her, you got what you
got from who she was being. She was just mesmerizing in front of
people,
24 / 7 / 365.
Subsequently at one of the many introductory events she led which I
attended, I boldly asked her if she'd go for coffee with me. I had so
many questions. To my delight and surprise, she agreed, and our
individual
friendship
was born. I was fascinated by the process of
the est
training,
how it worked, how it produced the extraordinary results it produced in
such a relatively short period of time. More than anything, I wanted to
find out who / what a person had to be / become to lead it. Inevitably,
given the
listening
she was during that coffee and others, I
shared
my personal life with her until there was nothing I had going on that I
was working through, that she didn't know about. Whatever she said left
me in a higher, clearer space than I was in before I started.
I'm not a "car guy". But I did appreciate
her gorgeous platinum blue
2003 Mercedes-Benz E320
which she allowed me to drive around the
Napa Valley,
the
wine country
in California where I live so she and her family could taste some of
our fine local product without being concerned about driving. And it
wasn't just the fine wine. With her, there was no separation between
the
rigors
of a
transformative
inquiry, and the good things in life. And honestly, in this regard she
was quite unique. I knew no one else quite like her. Whether you were
around her in
the training room
or in her home, she was the same person.
She was, I subsequently learned, the eldest of twelve siblings. So from
the get-go, life had carved out a place for her to take care of people.
It was all but inevitable (I would say pre-ordained were
it not for the unnecessary
significance
it brings with it) that she would work with
Werner
as
an est
trainer.
What's not so widely known is before working with
Werner,
she led the Mind Dynamics course in which he
participated
before releasing his
magnum opus
of transformation on an unsuspecting
world.
That's right: she trained
Werner,
then went to work for him, having seen what so many others would come
to see about what was possible with him. There's something totally
selfless about that for me. She could have had her own empire. She
chose him instead.
She was a huge human being, and yet when she wasn't
leading
the est
training
or the Forum or
Werner's
programs for young people and teens, she was just "Mom" or a friend,
just another ordinary person but with an extraordinary commitment to
people and to who people really are, who had been trained by her
immersion in a simply staggering number of disciplines. That's how most
leaders of conversations for transformation rise up, leaders who can
impart both the discipline and the abstracts of conversations for
transformation, as well as have their lives work and thereby represent
what's possible with transformation. But she wasn't like most leaders,
and she hadn't traveled the path they had traveled. She had taken a
short cut: she was born that way.
I'm
the guy who started Werner's
work in South Africa
when,
fulfilling
on a promise I made to
Werner
at 2:00am one morning over a midnight snack of celery spears and cream
cheese, just he and I in the kitchen of his home in the Pacific Heights
neighborhood of San Francisco,
the Franklin House,
I went there in 1979 and over the course of a year, led the first ten
introductory events in all the major cities,
enrolling
the first one thousand people there.
When I returned to these United States, she invited me to be her guest
at an Advanced Course she was leading. I watched her from the back of
the room, always amazed, always looking for her
secrets.
She was talking with the group about our
resistance
to
sharingWerner's work,
how some people avoid inviting guests, holding back. She said to that
group "So you have a problem
sharing your
transformation
with one or two people? Well look: Laurence over there (pointing
directly at me)
enrolledan entire country!". Then she invited a startled me up to the
front of the room to stand next to her on the podium, and
share
what it was like for me. What she gave me / the gift she gave me then,
standing on that podium next to her, looking out over a sea of bright,
eager faces, was
a moment of awakening,
an insight / an einsicht into what
the world
of
est
trainer
/ Forum Leader must be like.
Indeed, she wasn't
my mother.
Yet through knowing her, I got to know (Man! I really got
to know)
my own mother,
and to complete my relationship with her, to have a renewed,
extraordinary relationship with her. There are some gifts in life you
just can't put a price tag on. Hers was one such priceless gift.