This is the second of a set of posts about my life and how PeopleCount came to be. In the previous article about my background, I told about how my personality formed and how I got into Landmark courses, covering about 30 years. In this one I tell about the next 24 years, from about 1987-2011, including my return to Landmark.

Marriage and kids

In 1988 I began dating a wonderful woman. I declared her to be “the right one” and we were married in 1990. After she tried The Forum, I stopped taking Landmark courses.

We bought a condo, married and had a child, a son. My wife quit her job to raise him. We traded the condo for a house and a mortgage just before we had a second son. I worked steadily as a software engineer. My wife took care of the house, the kids and then a dog.

But there were problems. While I could retreat to the ecstasy of enlightenment, I was doing that less and less frequently, and married life was difficult at times. Over the decade starting when my older son turned two, I built up some strong resentments about my wife and our marriage. They began to weigh me down. I had upsets 2-4 times a week that were taking 2-24 hours to get over.

Plus, the Bush debacle weighed on me. He seemed completely incompetent. Both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars seemed at the outset like mistakes. And then he bungled them into huge, expensive failures, decimating millions of lives unnecessarily. In 2006, work became increasingly stressful.

Returning to courses

In 2007, I turned 50 and started a new job. I met a new colleague who seemed like he could really benefit from The Landmark Forum. I invited him and he declined. But it gave me the idea of taking a seminar. A Landmark seminar is an inexpensive, ten 3-hour evening sessions over the course of 13 or more weeks. (They give you one for free when you take The Forum.)

In many of them, we look at an aspect of life and see “how it is” for us. What are the meanings, what are the limits, what are the problems, what seems real? All of these are attachments to thoughts and emotions, components of a limited human world view. We got to see them as artificial, things we put together, invented and then got stuck with. Seeing we invented them gives us the freedom to invent something else, new ways of relating to life that are free from the old limits. New possibilities arise. Seminars aren’t just in the evening. There’s homework- questions to ponder as we study our own lives in relation to the new ways of looking we practice in the seminars.

In the first seminar, I let go of my resentments and life got much better. In the second, I saw the meanings my brain created around the upsets that made them so miserable. They stopped upsetting me and life got even better. In the third seminar, I saw how I reigned in my emotions and was rarely passionate. I played at being passionate and loved it. I kept taking seminars.

I also reviewed the Landmark Forum, and I took the new Advanced Course and the Self Expression and Leadership course. Life was fascinating and wonderful. There were two sets of courses I hadn’t taken. One was the Wisdom Course, which was much more expensive, over $3,000 for 6 weekends over the course of ten months.

Burning out at work

At the same time, work became more and more stressful. I was working mostly alone on difficult projects. I had turned 50 in 2007, so maybe I was slowing down a bit, too. The possibilities in seminars were wonderful. I grew tired of the sterile world of computer software.

In 2011 I felt burned out. I wanted a job that was less stressful and more social. I signed up for The Wisdom Course with the intention of finding a new career.

In the next post, I’ll tell about how PeopleCount arose out of the Wisdom Course.