Someone asked me on Quora today, Did you ever have a life-changing experience? In the previous article, I told how a course, The Landmark Forum, let me overcome shyness and loneliness and get married. But then the marriage soured.
My marriage became difficult. We had a son with special needs, and my wife was often stressed. Often she’d yell at me and that made me miserable. Over the years, I had built up a lot of resentments about her behavior. So I did some therapy. How could I escape the misery when she yelled? Or at least, could I get rid of the resentments? Two different therapists said no those weren’t things they could help with.
Shortly after, I was trying to write a book about something I felt deeply about. I’ve always like to write, but could never stay on topic long enough to write more than a single chapter. Something reminded me about Landmark’s seminars. They were inexpensive and pretty close by, so I signed up. It was called “Being Extraordinary”, mainly looking at how we often don’t think of ourselves as extraordinary, so we don’t aim for extraordinary results. Like many of their seminars, the goal was to find all of our cultural beliefs and see them as beliefs instead of truth, so we could have more freedom in creating the lives we want. I signed up to have a breakthrough in writing the book.
I got my breakthrough in the first session! So in the second, I was done- I could just coast. But then the seminar leader asked me if there was something else in my life that wasn’t extraordinary- my marriage! And what would be an extraordinary outcome there? If I could be free of my resentments!
We did some work together and I saw that a “resentment” wasn’t a real thing- it was just an idea. So all I had to do was catch myself putting energy into them, and stop doing that. It took three days, and then I was free of a decade of resentment. A huge weight had been lifted from my life!
The next seminar was different. It was a deep view into how we think of “experience”. In it, I looked at the misery I felt when my wife yelled. It’s just a loud voice and words- why must I get so upset? When I looked deeply, I found the miserable associations that arose when she yelled. I practiced, when she yelled or scolded, to see them arise for what they were- old memories. Within a couple of weeks, my misery had stopped. Life got MUCH better!
In the 7 years since, I’ve stayed in seminars. I’m bright, but we all have blind spots. Landmark courses are all about revealing what’s unseen. And usually to see the unseen you have to develop a whole new perspective. And when you do that, life changes.