The Forum
A friend of mine did the Forum. Maybe it has other names in different countries but it’s the same thing: You go there and admit you’re afraid of people and then you discover you are merely a part of a whole and that everyone is fragile and that you should confront your childhood fears instead of ignoring them, and then you call everyone you’ve ever feared and hated (which means everyone you've ever known) and you tell them, “I forgive you.”
So pretty soon people started to get really annoyed by her forgiving them.
But her life got much better. Facing the world with no fears, she started a business, got a divorce (she later called her husband to tell him she forgave him), rented a place by herself, quit smoking, and exercised.
These things don’t usually last, and soon she was back to her old all-too-human self. When you’re a part of a religion it’s easier to adhere to certain guidelines, but when you’ve just learned something and then you're thrown into the world, all it takes is that one experience you didn't prepare for, and you go back to what you know and trust, fearing people and keeping your feelings inside.
I think at one point in my life, after I was fired from my job and started reading The Golden Sayings of Epictetus, I was also on my way to come to terms with the world, but shit happens and before I knew it I was getting angry at people for stupid stuff and getting offended because I lost the little humility I had gained after getting fired. Like Flannery O’Connor said, we could all have been good people if there was someone there to shoot us every minute of our lives.
It’s not easy, living right. Or maybe it’s the easiest thing in the world.
13 comments:
Yeah, maybe. But being afraid is part of that... You feel anger, you're afraid, you're not the one you want to be; then you come into terms with yourself and the world... Then something happens and you start all over again. BUT, each time you make it better. One day, is not that hard to reorganize yourself and it's almost and automatic process that causes no pain.
Maybe that's why people says that what can't kill you, only turns you stronger.
Wow, this post speaks to me in many ways! I have anxiety disorder and live in fear often, but not as gripped by it as I once was some ten years ago.
Definitely stronger now, but from time to time I do slide back in to my old negative-thinking ways.
I just want my life to be simple, yet exciting at the same time, without being so boring at my current dead-end job.
IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR?!
Why do people try to take on so many things at once? Baby steps. That is the way to go.
I looked up Epictetus--maybe I'll read it after grad school. My reading list just gets longer by the day.
Dude, that thing that Flannery O'Connor said, uh, it totally cracked me up.
I know what you are saying though. It's hard, we can only be good to people if we are good to ourselves, need to find our own peace...
The Forum, is that similar to est (Erhard Seminars Training; they spell their initials with lower case)? It was big in the '70s. People would take the training and come out very self-aware and free of hangups, but their self-absorption would often alienate everyone around them.
Who Hijacked Our Country
iShe, Nietzsche said that about himself because he thought the rest of the world was all-too-human whereas he was a grand philosopher who only grew stronger with every blow. This has made many wannabe Nietzsches act in very strange ways as they took his words literally (I had a roommate in London who slept with the window open in the middle of winter just so he could prove he was the worthy to be the superman Nietzsche was talking about). But no one is Nietzsche, not even Nietzsche. We're all all-too-human, and as such, all we can do is try to do the best we can. Some of us will found Greenpeace, some will write blogs, and some will freeze in a cheap apartment in London.
WAT, that's not too much, and there's a way, and something tells me the answer is very simple. But I don't know what it is. Maybe if I spent one day thinking about the right way to live I would find it, but when was the last time anyone did that? We're busy living, and we don't even know what we're doing most of the time.
durante, it's a pretty amazing little book. Very strange to realize people were struggling with the same bullshit 2000 years ago.
Sebastien, I read "A Good Man is Hard to Find" so many times (as an English Major in College it's a required reading for almost every class), but I didn't get it until--well, maybe until I was ready to get it.
Tom, I looked on Wikipedia and apparently it's an offshoot of est. Now, this friend was self-absorbed at first, but then she became more social than ever, often getting people to talk very candidly about their lives. But then she regressed when she stopped getting involved with the Forum and started living a normal life. She didn't have anyone to shoot her every day, and she didn't have anyone to guide her every day, so she became one of us again. (The Wikipedia article says The Forum or another est offshoot was featured in Six Feet Under. People there were also getting annoyed when they were being forgiven even though they did nothing wrong).
I like what ishe said; "One day, is not that hard to reorganize yourself and it's almost and automatic process that causes no pain."
We start each day off partially to satisfy ourselves and in that special moment, we add a touch of others within our being to be accepted because of that fear of being rejected or indiffernt.
The Forum is very like "The Plan" from Six Feet Under, but it gets to be a little too fake on a daily basis.
Living well seems to take being at peace with yourself and your surroundings. That takes patience and understanding and perspective. All of those things are like relaxing a muscle: a very hard thing to do; I know, I teach dance and as soon as someone thinks about a specific muscle they tend to tense it.
It's amazing the consentration it takes to turn off a muscle. Anger and anxiety and insecurity are all very strong muscles. We like to flex them. It's hard to let them go (which funny enough reminds me of a song I heard at a concert on Thursday, "Love Is Letting Go")
Let's Talk, that's what I'm thinking. It's not a hard thing or a painful thing to do. In fact, if only we act naturally we can make a difference in the way we view the world and the by that, perhaps, the world. And maybe it is the easiest thing in the world. It's a slow process of learning, this whole life thing.
Scot, true. What is it that stops us from letting go? It seems so easy in theory, but then you have a roommate who eats your food and it's like you've just landed on that worst spot in Chutes and Ladders. I can't be too hard on myself. I'll get there one day.
Castenada said we should live with death over our left shoulder....Knowing that at any moment we could die (without a standby shooter)....
I did many of those retreats as a leader for many years....All were lacking in follow-up and mainly money pits preying on the deepest needs and fears of people....I helped develop one that was truly non-profit and created social support networks for folks afterword...We have forgotten how to to socialize and share face to face to help each other...
Maybe blogging/social communities are a path back to helping each other and ourselves in the process..
Hey from China...
Lonnie, thanks for the comment. I was given a Castenada book when I was a teenager and didn't understand anything. Maybe it's time to try again.
I do believe that even though I'm not exactly a blogging pioneer I'm still a part of something resembling a community. Granted, it's a community of introverts, but still, we are the ones who'll make blogging what it will become in the future, and it's up to us to make sure blogging doesn't become merely a get-rich-quick scheme (I get sick when I see those blogs that have one post talking about their lives and the other talking about a new cell phone gadget).
I think Wat puts his finger on the problem when he says he wants an exciting life. My hunch is that that is how we all come to be here on the planet. The trouble is that you can't have exciting without drama and you can't have drama without pain. But we don't like to experience pain, so we stifle it and eventually all that unexpressed pain builds up inside and we start going crazy.
By the time you hit fifty you're really seriously crazy, believe me - I'm there. So we look for ways to get rid of it all and we find things like therapy or The Forum. Personally, I prefer something simpler like meditation, where you don't *focus* on the shit as it comes away - you just understand that it's energy that needs to be released, as simple as that. So you don't need to analyze it all or go round forgiving people.
I've just found an excellent yoga-type breathing technique which is really working for me. It's called Quantum Light Breath. I'm releasing loads of pent up stuff and I hope to be sane one day soon. I shall post about it on my blog shortly - and also about this really shit hot new gadget for cell phones...
By the way, many thanks for your review of my blog on Stumbled Upon! Looks like an interesting site - I shall look into it.
Simon, you're welcome, first of all.
I will look into that breathing technique. For a moment last year I meditated every day and found the whole experience great (even though it felt strange and foreign). I even had a self-hypnosis experience where a former-me talked to present-me. If it didn't happen to me I would have probably dismissed the whole thing, but it happened. Then after a while I stopped and never came back. It's time. People around me need a more peaceful me right now.
And as for forgiving people, there's some kind of power relation missing from the picture. When you tell people you forgive them it puts them in a lower position than you (at least that's how they might feel), so obviously people will get defensive about it (I never felt my friend had anything to forgive me for).
And by the way, have you heard about the new service from Agloco? You surf the web and make money at the same time! How come nobody came up with this before?
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