Yes its like weekend at Bernies!

Dear mindconcern,

I'm sorry to hear about your mom. I can definitely relate to what you are describing. I hope she won't go to the seminar. My husband was getting pretty weird just listening to the tapes and the teleconferences. After the seminar, he came back a different person.

Regarding money concerns, the sales pitch comes on real strong at the seminar (even my husband realized this), but that didn't stop him from buying more courses at the seminar and even more afterwords. He also now spends 2-3 hours per day on the phone with "releasing partners" or in teleconferences.

Here are some articles I have found helpful about the tactics generally. I have also found that although the specifics differ from program to program, the basic techniques of LGAT's and destructive groups are remarkably similar so it may be helpful to read about other programs also.

[www.icsahome.com]

[rick-ross.org]

[b:88a99a7bbd]I cannot overemphasize the importance of your approach. [/b:88a99a7bbd]I had big concerns about Release Technique before my husband went to the seminar but I knew nothing about how these mass marathon trainings work. I blew it big time in the beginning by blasting my husband with an onslaught of critical information, thinking I could make him see what was going on. This was definitely not helpful and drove him further in. Then I took some time to educate myself and change my approach and it seems to be helping but there is still a long road ahead I think. What has been helpful is :

* to remain consistently loving and concerned

* to keep or re-establish rapport

* to shift the focus from "getting him out of the group" to empowering him to think for himself.

* when he uses thought stopping cliches or group jargon, ask for clarification of what that means

* ask open ended questions and be prepared to wait a long time for an answer

* getting him out of town for a time to break the daily interaction with the group

I would encourage you to read around under other topics because there is good advice you can adapt to the Release Technique program and your mother as an individual.

Below are some resources I have found helpful. Best of luck to you. Let us know how it goes.


Mr. Ross has great coping tips. [www.culteducation.com]

The family connection
[www.freeminds.org]

Steve Hassan
[video.google.com]

[www.freedomofmind.com]

Here is a post from these boards under the topic Landmark that I have found very helpful:

Ether Dragon,

Sorry to hear about what happened with your wife. This is very sad and your feelings/reaction are normal. It sounds like your wife is still on the initial "high" from the Forum, and this will be an exciting time for her and a difficult time for you. It's like a drug and they don't want to let go of it and right now Landmark can do no wrong. She has a coach and a new family of self-affirming friends that praise her every move and word. It's addicting -- and Landmark knows it.

This self-affirming atmosphere is why debating her doesn't work. It just drives them deeper into Landmark's grasp. It's human nature to move towards approval, and I believe Landmark counts on that. I know it's hard not to debate and tell her the truth you know, but she is resistant right now. They are trained to resist debate especially from concerned loved ones/friends/etc. and they are trained well. Her coach will keep re-affirming Landmark philosophy to her, so they have an internal support system. It's infuriating, but that's the reality.

The best advice I can give is that which I received: be supportive of her activities outside of Landmark, don't debate or argue with her about Landmark now, let her bring up the subject and when she does, gently discuss your concerns with her. Essentially, back off and wait for her to come down off the high and for the resistance to weaken some. Be prepared for "blocking" techniques that dismiss your information (you can search the board for more info on that). You have to be a welcoming place, or she won't want to come back and discuss it with you. If and when she wants to leave, then you'll be there and able to help her. Until then, you just have to stay in the game. She may never be ready to leave, in which case at some point you have to decide how much of this you can take. You have to take care of yourself too and not be a martyr. Unfortunately, the road out of Landmark is a lot longer and more uncertain than the road in.

Disclaimer regarding Steve Hassan

The Ross Institute of New Jersey/May 2013

See [www.culteducation.com]

The inclusion of news articles within the Ross Institute of New Jersey (RI) archives, which mention and/or quote Steven Hassan, in no way suggests that RI recommends Mr. Hassan or recognizes him in any way.

News articles that mention Steve Hassan have been archived for historical purposes only due to the information they contain about controversial groups, movements and/or leaders.

RI does not recommend Steven Hassan.

RI has received serious complaints about Steve Hassan concerning his fees. Mr. Hassan does not publicly disclose his fee schedule, but according to complaints Steve Hassan has charged fees varying from $250.00 per hour or $2,500.00 per day to $500.00 per hour or $5,000.00 per day. This does not include Mr. Hassan's expenses, which according to complaints can be quite substantial.

Steven Hassan has charged families tens of thousands of dollars and provided questionable results. One recent complaint cited total fees of almost $50,000.00. But this very expensive intervention effort ended in failure.

Dr. Cathleen Mann, who holds a doctorate in psychology and has been a licensed counselor in the state of Colorado since 1994 points out, "Nowhere does Hassan provide a base rate and/or any type or accepted statistical method defining his results..."

Steve Hassan has at times suggested to potential clients that they purchase a preliminary report based upon what he calls his "BITE" model. These "BITE reports" can potentially cost thousands of dollars.

See [corp.sec.state.ma.us]

Steve Hassan runs a for-profit corporation called "Freedom of Mind." Mr. Hassan is listed as the corporate agent for that business as well as its president and treasurer.

RI does not recommend "Freedom of Mind" as a resource.

RI also does not list or recommend Steve Hassan's books.

To better understand why Mr. Hassan's books are not recommended by RI read this detailed review of his most recently self-published book titled "Freedom of Mind."

See [www.cultnews.com]

Steve Hassan's cult intervention methodology has historically raised concerns since its inception. The book "Recovery from Cults" (W.W. Norton & Co. pp. 174-175) edited by Dr. Michael Langone states the following:

"Calling his approach 'strategic intervention [sic] therapy,' Hassan (1988) stresses that, although he too tries to communicate a body of information to cultists and to help them think independently, he also does formal counseling. As with many humanistic counseling approaches, Hassan’s runs the risk of imposing clarity, however subtly, on the framework’s foundational ambiguity and thereby manipulating the client."

RI has also learned that Mr. Hassan has had dual-relationships with his counseling clients. That is, clients seeing Mr. Hassan for counseling may also do professional cult intervention work with him.

Professionals in the field of cultic studies have also expressed concerns regarding Steven Hassan's use of hypnosis and Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP).

Based upon complaints and the concerns expressed about Mr. Hassan RI does not recommend Steve Hassan for counseling, intervention work or any other form of professional consultation.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/10/2013 09:14PM by rrmoderator.

Thank you for all of that information, I appreciate the time you must have spent to put it together.

I feel exhausted right now. My step dad and I kind of got worked up and explained our concerns to her. I have always been interested/frightened of cults and seminars like these because of some earlier experiences in my life with manipulation.

We thought she was only in the beginning curious stages of indoctrination, but she already has the responses fairly solid "You're spooked because I'm happier than I've ever been."

We explained critically all of our concerns. I explained that I had held an interest in cults for a while, and that I knew her response to our intervention would be to 'begin to considerate us ignorant and afraid, get on the phone with her release partner, and reaffirm our ignorance and their closeness."

Its also obvious that any conversation on this matter is going to reaffirm that we are trying to take her happiness away because we are jealous- like a Tension Finger Trap.

She definitely felt attacked, but the release technique is brilliant in its evolution away from the browbeating of landmark: it apparently teaches passivity and acceptance, and the complete refusal of negative emotions.

I try to think what my saving grace was to the cult encounters I had... perhaps just an inherent revulsion to nonsense.

Thanks again- I guess I'm in for the long haul. I just have to remember not to feel guilty about not acting earlier. I'm just so exhausted and sick to my stomach right now. I guess I should release.... just kidding. This seems alot like the 'serenity now!' from Seinfeld.

I can't find any news articles about Lester, Howdy Doody, or Larry Crane. The only thing that comes up on google is the same glowing testimonials. Also, sedona, and release are not listed in the LGATS on the database yet. Is this the thread the single first discussion on it?
The only other thing I found was an archived wikipedia article that mentioned Larry Crane being in court for something, and then it made reference to Lester living to a normal natural age and then dying of cancer, and of course how his only means of making money was his seminars and sales of various items related to his method.

I tried to get information about the gurus of the Sedona Method via the internet, and ran into the same problem. Only glowing testimonials of how wonderful it was. Nothing even slightly critical of either the method or the gurus.

I actually wasted quite a bit of money buying the tapes, books, and even took a couple of 2-day seminars. I can't say that it made a significant difference in my life.

I purchased a series of book full of Lester's quotes and some occasional claims for mystical powers. For instance, at one meeting of Lester groupies, Lester claims to see Jesus in their midst. Another time he claims to he teleported down a hill. Of course, we are told that these things are not important. As far as Lester dying of cancer, Lester said that once you evolve to certain level of spirituality, it is better ("higher") to just let the body be as it is, even if you have the capability of healing it. Isn't this a great out if someone questions why Lester did not heal himself of cancer?

He also emphasizes that you should not take his word for anything - just take it for checking. I've certainly heard that before. However, the reality is that anyone presenting themselves as enlightened, with superhuman powers is likely to be questioned less than an ordinary, average person on the street, no matter how bizarre their statements are.

It is so frustrating when all the information on the Internet is glowing testimonials. Ditto for Eckhart Tolle.

QE

...It just sounds to me like the same old snake-oil, "erasing engrams," or similar idiotic recipes for turning away negativity, learning to ignore the unpleasant or embarrassing, ~disappearing the past,~ etc., etc. I'd go so far as to suggest that this is selling a form of insanity, for those who lose touch with reality - the part of it they "release," ignore, bury, "erase," avoid, dismiss, disavow, or pretend doesn't exist - are on the path to the asylum. (On a brighter note, perhaps all these happy-clappy, positive-only-thinking, "Secret"-types will fall off various cliffs and therefore remove themselves from the gene-pool.)

I'd like to offer this (longish) piece as an antidote to all the bliss-ninny stuff that gets passed around as enlightenment or transformation or whatever the buzz-concept of the day they are calling it. Better to call it what it really is; a form of psycho-quackery.

The Darkness Has Its Own Light:

[www.odemagazine.com]

Healing through the world's hurt

Miriam Greenspan
This article appeared in Ode issue: 4

Conventional psychology points to our past as the source of our increasing fear, despair and depression. But according to the American psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan, personal failure or our upbringing are not always to blame. The threatening societies in which we live provide fertile ground for our 'dark' emotions. Her message? Open yourself up to the big bad world and let the healing begin.

For some 30 years as a psychotherapist, I have listened to painful stories. When people come for the 'talking cure', they generally wear their pain as a badge of shame. They believe that they are suffering because of some core defect resulting from bad parenting they received, and that therapy will rid them of this defect and remove their bad feelings - hopefully forever. Conventional psychology is largely responsible for such ideas, which is why therapists always ask questions about how their patients' pain is connected to their families of origin but almost never ask: 'How is your suffering connected to the world?'
Our world, so full of beauty and wonder, is also a place of unthinkable terror, ecological devastation, and a baffling, overwhelming mass of ongoing collective sorrows. In these times of war, despair about the military 'winnability' of safety and freedom from terror nips at our psyche like a snake. In this global context, the dark emotions of grief, fear, and despair are, and for the foreseeable future will be, unwelcome guests in our consciousness. We all suffer from these emotions, or from the ailments that stem from denying or numbing ourselves to them.
One by one by one, we in the psychotherapy profession see the common suffering of our age: the depressed and suicidal, chronically anxious, psychically numb, attention-deficient, relationally-impaired, multiply-addicted, spiritually wounded men, women, and children who come to us for help and healing. In increasing numbers, at ever younger ages, Westerners are finding it impossible to sleep without Ambien, to work without Prozac, to live without alcohol, nicotine, or heroin, to be without our endless array of techno-toys. Mood-altering drugs, once a type of medication largely confined to the closed halls of psychiatric inpatient units, are now household words: Who has not heard of Prozac? Terms like 'serotonin-deficiency' are now in the common lexicon, expressing our culture's reductive view of why we are so depressed.
Psychiatry diagnoses and treats these problems as though we are all little narcissistic bubble-selves floating around in space, with no relation to the social universe or earth we inhabit. Not one of the approximately 360 diagnoses of the DSM IV - the psychiatric bible of pathology - makes any connection between our emotional disturbances and the state of the world. What conventional psychiatry and psychology do instead is reduce human suffering to a plethora of categories of pathology, and document the steady escalation of these mental disorders in our time. These statistics tell us that some 100 million people around the world suffer from depression, and that each successive generation is more depressed than the one before. Millions more will be diagnosed with one or more phobias, or severe anxiety disorders with names like panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, substance-induced anxiety disorder. Sleep disorders too are on the rise. Children at younger ages are being diagnosed in increasing numbers with mental disorders once reserved entirely for adults - bipolar disorder, depressive disorder, borderline personality disorder, and eating disorders, along with escalating disorders of learning and attention and alarming new diagnoses like oppositional defiance disorder and attachment disorder.
In my view, our inability, both individually and collectively, to mindfully tolerate our grief, fear, and despair - emotions that are continually triggered in an age of global threat - is a crucial source of what ails us. These are the emotions we most dread and that most urgently require our attention. Aborted or suppressed grief easily devolves into depression, anxiety, and addiction. Benumbed fear often turns into panic, phobias, irrational prejudice, and violence. Overwhelming or unconscious despair can lead to severe psychic numbing or express itself through destructive acts to oneself and others, including suicide and homicide. Sadly, these patterns play themselves out on the world stage as much as in the individual psyche. Our children, growing into a world in which the 'normal' adult psychology of the older generation has traumatically endangered their world and their future, are carrying the burden of dark emotions that the adults in their world can barely name or tolerate.
If the bad news is that grief, fear, and despair are inevitable in the global environment we inhabit, the good news is that these emotions themselves offer us a means of individual and social transformation and healing. For more than 20 years, my work has focused on the healing power of the dark emotions. Most of what I know about this power I learned through my own personal odysseys in these realms. Being born and living for four years in a Displaced Person's Camp in Germany just after World War II gave me an early intimacy with the intense currents of grief and fear that circulated through the community of post-Holocaust Jewish refugees. From these beginnings, I learned that painful emotions are a power to be reckoned with, that they are transmitted inter-generationally, and that they tell a story the world needs to hear.
I started writing about the dark emotions in 1989, after my daughter Esther took a fall from her crib. Esther was born with a neuromotor disability for which medical science has no name. After her fall, I was warned by her orthopedist that falling again could cause Esther to become quadriplegic. I spent a long night looking straight into the face of my terror for my child's fragile life - and found that this fear, fully experienced in my body, had a trajectory, a movement that culminated in a state of unexpected, exuberant joy. In this moment, the idea for a book came to me, inspired and complete with chapter headings and title: 'Healing Through the Dark Emotions'. But the book was germinating for a long time before this. I date its beginnings to 1981, the year my first child was born and died. This grief was my harshest and most extraordinary teacher. It was a tornado that uprooted me and threw me down in a devastated landscape that mysteriously opened into a magical world where spirit was alive, even after death. It led me by the hand, like a child, and showed me that a great suffering can open the gate to a world charged with the sacred.
What my life has taught me, repeatedly, is that the heart heals itself when we know how to listen to it. In befriending our most dreaded emotions, we discover the heart's native intelligence. Each dark emotion has its own kind of wisdom, its own value and purpose, and its own alchemy. Each, in its own way, calls us to transformation. The alchemy of the dark emotions is a movement towards healing, harmony, and metamorphosis that happens when we know how to open to them, honour their wisdom and power, and use their energies wisely. In my own personal and professional experience, these alchemies move us from grief to gratitude, fear to joy, and despair to faith.
It is not the dark emotions themselves that hurt us but our fear of them, our belief that they are negative, and our inability to bear them mindfully. There are no negative emotions, only human emotions. But there are negative attitudes toward emotions, and negative consequences of emotions we ca not tolerate. I call grief, fear, and despair 'dark' not because they are unwholesome or pathological but because they tend to be shunned, silenced, or denied in patriarchal culture. 'Emotion-phobia' dissociates us from the energies of emotions like grief, fear, and despair and tells us that they are untrustworthy, dangerous, and destructive. Generally, we regard painful emotions as signs of psychological fragility, mental disorder, or spiritual defect. We suppress, intellectualise, judge, avoid, deny, or medicate them.
Grief, fear, and despair are primary emotions, as fundamental to human existence as love, awe, joy, and hope. Emotional suffering does not mean we are sick. It means that we are alive; that we live in a damaged and damaging social environment; and that we are challenged to use our suffering for the purpose of transformation.
Grief arises because we are not alone, and what connects us to others and to the world also breaks our hearts. Grieving our losses allows us to heal and renew our spirits. Grief is a sacred, redemptive psycho-spiritual process that develops our empathy and compassion - when it is not inhibited by well-meaning friends, religious clerics with blandishments not to mourn because it is God's will, or psychiatric taboos that give us two months of grief time before declaring that we are suffering from a major mental disorder. Redemptive grief - by which I mean grief that has been honoured and allowed to flow, mindfully, in its own unique manner - brings us to an awed sense of gratitude. When we fully grieve for what we have lost, we discover, as though for the first time, what we really have. We know our blessings - and we are grateful. This is grief's alchemy.
Fear is perhaps the most strongly stigmatised of the dark emotions, especially for men. Yet it is actually critical to our survival, both individually and as a species. Fear alerts us to protect life, extending beyond our instinct for self-preservation to our concern for the survival of others. Its call is an alarm that we ignore at our own peril. While we think of fear as paralysing, it is actually energizing. The paralysis sets in when we afraid to experience fear in our bodies, and so deny or numb ourselves to it. Fear is the adrenaline surge of 'fight or flight' which moves us to act. The trick is maintaining our awareness in the midst of this powerful emotion, allowing fear to move through us, and finding the right action - rather than trying to kill our fear through bold, aggressive moves (like destroying an 'enemy'). In the alchemy of fear, we find the courage to experience our fear mindfully and to open to our vulnerability. We are then released into the joy of knowing that we can live with and use our fear wisely, that fear does not have to stop us from living fully.
The alchemy of despair may seem even more remote than that of fear. At face value, despair seems to be a 'loser' emotion - an immediate threat to functioning and living well. Yet despair too has its uses. Arising as a response to something in ourselves or in the world that we cannot bear to accept, despair insists that we face into a dark truth from which we'd prefer to avert our gaze. It asks us to create meaning from unbearable pain, to radically transform the ways we think and act if we are to avert self-destruction. When we honour our despair, it delivers us to a more resilient faith in life. Having looked at the Medusa's head and not been turned to stone, we find a faith that is all the more unshakeable because it is not based on an avoidance of the dark. We discover that the darkness has its own light.
Again, our tolerance for this challenging emotion is only decreased by psychiatric assumptions of pathology. Psychiatry loves to put arbitrary deadlines on emotions it pathologies - timelines which, appearing in a diagnostic and statistical manual, attain the ring of hard science. It is not normal to feel sad, dejected, or hopeless, say the experts, for more than two weeks at a time (regardless of what is going on in one's life or in the world). But anyone who has ever experienced despair knows that despair requires a great deal of patience. The darkest of the dark emotions, despair needs some spacious attention before it lifts. Feeling this bad in a feel-good culture is transgressive; it goes against the grain of a culture of denial. In my view, depression is unalchemised, chronic despair. It is what happens when despair becomes chronically stuck in the body. This is not to say that depression is not a serious mental health problem, or that it has nothing to do with serotonin. The problem is that the way we think about depression as a reified, pathological, strictly biochemical condition blinds us to despair as an honourable emotion and makes its alchemy unlikely.
Each dark emotion has a gift, a sacred redemptive power which we discover when we come to it with openness, and when we know the art of attending, befriending, and consciously surrendering to it. These are the three basic skills I teach in my therapy practice and in my book. Attending to emotions does not mean noticing and distracting ourselves from them. It means cultivating a deep awareness of emotions as in-the-body energies, and of the thoughts that both trigger and subdue them. Befriending our dark emotions is an extension of this process, elongating our emotional attention spans and developing what psychologists call affect tolerance. Finally, in surrender we do not give up our will, wallow in our pain, or become victims of our emotions. We simply allow the energy of emotion to flow through the body to its end point, without venting or melodrama. Surrender, like attention and befriending, is a 'staying with it' process, not a 'getting away' process. The only way to authentically let go of an emotion is to let it be, and this requires a great deal of spiritual discipline.
We generally do not come to these skills intuitively because we have deeply internalised a 'contain and manage' model of how to cope with emotions. We learn in our families, our schools, and in the culture as a whole that control is the best or only way to cope with intense feelings. In keeping with the patriarchal ethos of hierarchy, suppression, and fragmented consciousness, we try to keep those nasty feelings down before they overtake our reason. While this kind of control may be exactly what is needed in certain circumstances, it is also a culturally-sanctioned compulsion born of our emotion-phobic reactions to the flow of emotional energy in the body. If we are to receive the gifts of emotional alchemy, we need a more feminine model of 'connection and flow' in which mindfulness, not control, is the key. When we know how to ride the energy of the dark emotions on the surfboard of awareness, emotional flow becomes transformational.
The loss of connection to nature in Western post-industrial society, the devastation of our environmental resources and the crippling effects of patriarchy are the largely overlooked global contexts that trigger and complicate the dark emotions in our time. These emotions are the conduit of our moral responsiveness to the world, carrying information our conscious minds would often rather deny or avoid. They are affective markers of our collective fate, and the unrecognised vehicles of an urgently needed worldwide social and spiritual transformation - the tikkun olam for which we fervently act and pray. If we ever needed the wisdom of the dark emotions, we need it now.
Yet, even as the dark emotions increasingly dominate our psyches, the wisdom they offer continues to elude us. This is obvious when we look around the globe. From our high school halls to the Pentagon, from the Middle East to Washington, D.C., we see not emotional alchemy but psychic numbing combined with violent acting out of intolerable emotions. In the Middle East, Israelis and Palestinians, two chronically grieving people, fight over the same piece of turf, creating collective traumas that destroy the possibilities of peaceful coexistence. Intolerable grief, fear, and despair emerge as a proclivity to violence around the world, especially in spots where compulsive, ritualistic cycles of vengeance continually both re-enact and produce more and more traumatized grief, fear and despair.
Huge mushroom clouds of unalchemised dark emotions afflict us in our time, transmitted transpersonally to all of us in some form. The 'sensitives' among us (who tend to be women and children) are 'carriers' of these emotions who hold dark emotional energy in their bodies, often unawares, putting them at risk for a host of mind/body ailments. Others become numb 'bystanders' to dark emotions in themselves and others, masters of the dominant mode of emotional cut-off. This patriarchal style of dissociating from emotion is killing us - contributing to interpersonal impasses, violence both perpetrated and tolerated, moral failures to respond empathically to human suffering, and the eco-cidal destruction of the earth. If our leaders were more attuned to the empathic properties of their dark emotions, such bystander crimes would be a lot less likely. What is needed is a shift to a more feminine emotional style and meaning system, in which emotions are seen as powerful ways of knowing that guide us to develop empathy, nurturance, and care of others; a shift in which these qualities are no longer privatised or devalued as second-order business. Perhaps then emotions - dismissed, trivialized, and pathologised in patriarchy - would not lose their potential for redemptive healing and transformation.
We live in the world and the world lives in us. The dark emotions that our bodies carry are transpersonal energies housed in our flesh and rooted in our responses to the world - to the inevitable pain of being alive and being humanly connected to others. We see our private feelings through the lens of our separateness, but when we widen the lens, it becomes clear that everything we feel is experienced within a larger system of emotional ecology. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., we are all interconnected in an 'inescapable web of mutuality'. We can use the energy of our most dreaded emotions for the purpose of healing not only ourselves but this larger web. The call to healing is, in fact, a fundamental message of the dark emotions: because we all feel sorrow, fear, and despair, because these emotions are universal, we are all intervulnerable, for better and for worse. We feel together and heal together. In recognizing the profound ways that we are interconnected in our suffering, we come to understand healing in a larger sense than simply the amelioration of individual pain. We hear more vividly the cries of others in the human family, and of the earth itself for healing. We each have a particular gift or vision, skill or song to contribute to global healing. Individual healing, as I see it, has a lot to do with finding this gift and giving it to the world. When we can do this, no matter how small our gift may seem, we are made more whole. In this process, we break out of the prison of ego. We become fuller and more connected to others, and to life. This to me, is what healing is about. A healed life is always a work in progress; not a life devoid of all traces of suffering but a life lived fully, deeply, authentically, and compassionately engaged with the world.
'There is nothing so whole as a broken heart,' goes one saying. The world breaks our hearts wide open - and it is the openness that makes us whole. We cannot and should not expect to be completely cured of grief, fear, and despair in a broken-hearted world. We learn to accept suffering and vulnerability as a normal part of life, and how to use our suffering for the good. Because we are vulnerable, life hurts. We are not here to be free of pain. We are here to have our hearts broken by life, and to transform our pain into love.

Miriam Greenspan newest book is 'Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear and Despair' (Shambala).

I see some wisdom in that also, but just like anything we're concerned about being entranced by, its interlaced with the extra dogma of spiritual energies and sacredness.

If people are going to be made to care about the ecosystem or future generations, they're going to have to not feel like there's a perfect world after this one, like they get a do-over.

And for those who do believe in a secular reality, we need to believe that the only eternity we get is the effect of our temporal life on those who come after us.

All emotions are a chemical reality in our brain. Most often they do relate to something that is occuring in our lives, and we certainly need to be aware and mindful of all of them.

Thanks for posting the article Elena. I agree with the sentiments.

mindconcern - I can understand your concerns about the dangers of entrancement by talk of spiritual energies and sacredness. It certainly can be an illusory trap. I am actually a very spiritual person, but that doesn't mean I believe because something purports to be spiritual, it is. Particularly if the so called "spirituality" is being sold by a for profit corporation.

I'm sorry to hear your first talk with your mom didn't go so great. Any progress? Is she going to a seminar? Perhaps you can continue to let your mom know that you really do want her to be happy, you are just concerned about whether this path really is making her genuinely happy. Was there some unhappiness in her life that may have made her more susceptible to the programming?

Here, progress is slow, incremental and uneven. But there is progress nonetheless.

You are right that there is not much negative information about Release Technique on the internet and lots of glowing testimonials. It appears from Crane's website that other sites can become affiliates, i.e., get $ for posting his advertising and link on their sites. He's a darn good marketer.

The lack of negative information about RT is one reason I thought I should post. It may be that RT is not as destructive as Landmark and some of the other more notorious groups for a variety of reasons, but I know what I observed and what I have learned about their methods so if it quacks like a duck . . ..

[b:d95de72c62]?lady[/b:d95de72c62] The talk had a good effect over time even though it seemed uncomfortable at first. Luckily I had some foreknowledge of these manner of things and was able to word my concern sooner rather than later. Her feet are back on the ground... at least closer to the ground, anyhow.

I think its also important to realize that when a loved one is seeking this unconditional love from strangers, for money, its a call for more love and attention. I think its definitely important to offer the same things that the groups are offering, in a more realistic fashion of course.

Spiritual needs can be met by doing charity and nice things for others. No matter how good you feel after a meditation, you're going to have to return to the flawed world thereafter.

I've been using the Sedona Method and Release Technique (Which I recently discovered can be illegally downloaded for free; don't I feel like a fool for paying for some LGAT crap) for 6 months now. I started using it for anxiety. Well, that's not true. I used it because I was 20 and hadn't had sex in 2 years. Now I have all the sex I want in loving, connected relationships with people who have never heard of the Sedona Method. for the past two years I tried everything I could find: NLP, hypnosis, clinical psychology, etc etc. Nothing worked quite the same. To clarify: I do not advocate illegally downloading the course and checking the efectiveness for oneself with specific, concrete goals. The success of some of us could be explained by placebo. This does [b:4b22380573]not[/b:4b22380573] mean it will work for you.

The reason I am posting this is because I want to appreciate all the hard work done by forum posters here to question the outrageous claims made by LGATs. If you look at sedona.com, it's all new-agey and shady looking "The Secret" style self help that cries out to be slapped by the firm hand of reason.