Someone asked me on Quora today, Did you ever have a life-changing experience?

I’ve had many. The biggest ones were really a series of them, due to some courses I took.

Let’s start the story when I was 28 years old. I took an amazing 4 and a quarter-day, $400 course called The Forum (today it’s called The Landmark Forum, is around $600 and is only 3 and a quarter days.).

I took it in 1985, mainly to get over my shyness. It was fascinating. We looked at how we put together our worldview as children, and how that view warps how life appears. I saw that I was afraid of rejection, so fear arose whenever I met strangers. When the fear hit, I froze and had nothing to say. So my family had said I was shy, and I believed them. Seeing that it was all due to a view, and not a strange substance called “shyness”, my mind was no longer so paralyzed. I saw new ways of talking with people and new opportunities for it. I began practicing not being shy.

It wasn’t till the next course that it fully hit me that all through my childhood I felt I wasn’t wanted! I sifted through my memories and my thoughts about myself and saw how completely the “not wanted” view had warped my life. It caused me a lot of lonely misery as a kid. Almost all the time, I had felt deep, hopeless loneliness. And I began to see that it was still shaping my life.

For instance, when I was with a girlfriend, things were fine. But after a few minutes apart, I felt lonely! Before the courses, feeling lonely in the middle of a relationship meant she wasn’t enough for me, she wasn’t the right one. After, I realized it was just a feeling that came over me out of habit. And when the feelings came up, those thoughts came up to. They weren’t accurate, they were automatic!

One of things I learned in the Forum was the difference between “what happened” and “what it meant to me.” For instance, the feelings of loneliness had meant “she’s not the one”, or “I’m not wanted.” They also had meant, “I’m miserable.”  Increasingly, knowing the difference, I saw the feelings really meant just that I was having feelings that I had practiced for many, many years. They say to master something, practice for 10,000 hours. I had practiced misery and loneliness for closer to 60,000! I stopped taking them so seriously, and the feeling lessened.  Life got MUCH better!

A few years later I fell in love with a wonderful woman and got married.  I stopped taking Landmark courses, we bought a condo, then a home and had two kids. But then things soured.  I’ll tell more about that, and how I over it, in the next article.