4/16/12 – Part I
My BFF, The Queen, works for a local company that
specializes in making people better thems.
One of their taglines is “Ready to live a balanced and meaningful
life?” They do seminars which are
designed to help folks figure out what’s not working in their lives, what they
would like instead and, at least hopefully, how to bridge the gap. Make the change. Work the voo-doo. Hocus the Pocus.
Among my longtime friends I’ve been significantly
outnumbered by folks who have done the Magical Betterment Seminars (or “MBS,”
trademark pending) for literally decades.
The folks who’ve done the MBS’ have all come out the other side with
stories of epiphanies and revelations and big plans to make big changes and get
big payoffs and other things of bigness.
Most of them will tell you that they think that everybody – EVERYBODY –
should do these seminars. And yet with
all of that I’d never done one. Never
even considered doing one.
Don’t get me wrong:
I’ve never been opposed to the
Magic people and their seminars. And I’m
all for any of my loved ones doing anything that will make them happier, be
that religion or seminars or sleeping with a Kardashian. (ok, not the last one…) To be honest, I just never had anything in my
life that I wanted help to fix. Not
saying my life is or has ever been perfect, but my woes have been tiny compared
to so many (and don’t you worry – I’m very aware how lucky I am to be able to
say that!!!!) and generally things I felt like I had a handle on.
Jump forward those decades of “no thanks, not my thing” to
that dang break that T.E. and I had earlier this year. While waiting for those two weeks to pass and
having WAY too much time on my hands I did some thinking. Lots of thinking. Gobs and piles and oodles and frickin’
gallons of thinking. Some of it was
good, and some of it seemed really good at the time, but then later turned out
to be utterly insane. One of those
thoughts was about how much time I seemed to spend needing T.E. to reassure me
of my place in his world. I decided, in
my crazybrain, that this meant I needed to do something about my apparent lack
of self confidence in relationships.
That I shouldn’t put all that pressure on my partner, and I needed to
figure out how to reassure myself. I
couldn’t afford therapy, but thought about The Queen and those countless
invitations to check out the MBS’s. I
decided I finally had something in my life that seemed broken and that I
couldn’t fix, so this was the time.
Though there are a bunch of seminars that these folks run,
and many of them are specifically focused on things like relationships or
communication or… possibly gardening?
I’m not sure. There are many
focused ones. Anyway, though there are
focused ones you have to start with
the same one. It’s designed to cover a
lot of ground and give, I would say, a good starting point for the more focused
ones. The initial seminar takes 4 days
(Thurs, Fri, Sat and Sun) and you’re in there and working a seriously long day
– 9am to around 9pm or sometimes later!
I took the necessary days off of work and made excuses to the rest of my
friends and family and headed in.
Oh crap, wait. I
should explain a couple of things here:
Explanation #1: No, I
didn’t tell anybody other than The Queen and her family that I was doing
this. Don’t get the wrong idea: I wasn’t ashamed about doing the seminar or
anything like that. But this kind of
thing doesn’t really resonate for most of my family. Now I was going in with as open a mind as I can
manage. No kidding, my mind was
super-open. Thoughts and memories and
very stupid limericks kept falling out of my mind, so open was it. Really, really open. Really.
BUT I knew that openness was a tenuous thing after having spent so many
years watching my friends join the cult from afar and raising my eyebrow ala
Spock, and the rest of my social sphere is still Spockish about this idea. So I decided I didn’t want to let any of
their possible doubts or concerns, or even their possible enthusiasms and
potential dirty jokes, color my view.
Best to just give them vague and mysterious ideas of where I was going
to be for four days and let them wonder if I was in rehab or just getting botox
in my butt.
Explanation #2:
Though the inspiration for doing this was part of various plans and
plots to save my relationship with T.E. by the time I actually WENT to the
seminar T.E. and I were done. Done for
about 6 days. So where as I was slightly
worried about overly emotional moments in such a seminar when I signed up I
went in knowing that I was going to be on the verge of big, dumb tears all the
damn dumb time during this seminar and being proactively resentful about the
situation. I hate to show the vulnerable
emotions to people who I know, and would pretty much rather gouge out my eyes
rather than allow them to leak in front of strangers. In short, I went into this seminar with every
single worst fear and possible nightmare I’d ever envisioned totally real and
in full freaking Technicolor.
Awesome? No, no awesome.
So, there I was:
emotions as raw as an elbow that has been attacked by cheese grater and
dipped in Tabasco Sauce; surrounded by people who were coming to this MBS for
real issues and problems and seeking true revelations and epiphanies and doing
it all on the down low. (yeah, I’m
regretting that last choice of youth-oriented slang too.) What could possibly go wrong?
To Be Continued…
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