At Lifespring it was said you can’t have a Lifespring training without John Denver and here he is with Werner Erhard founder of EST. Lifespring was an offshoot of EST.
In Annie Hall, Woody Allen is asked out of the blue at a party, “What do you have against EST?” Funny scene but the whole film was hysterical.
Robert and I were working on preparing an event and Robert asked an important question of one of the higher ups: ‘Are royalties paid to the artists whose music is used during the trainings.’ The answer was no.
I was captaining a Master’s course which I loved and we got to the very last song on the very last day which was the trainer’s personal message to student. The song was “Takin’ it to the Street performed by the Doobie Brothers. Lifespring thrived on perfection and preparedness and when the music guy went to pull the tape it was missing which was pretty much a huge sin as those tapes were supposed to be checked well in advance of the training. So he asked me what to do and I said to ask the trainer who was a wonderful African American woman who got excited tell about the time she met Shirley Maclaine. She loved me because anytime she asked for something, no matter how minute or difficult to find I’d always manage to come up with a couple minutes later. One night she went into some kind of beautiful admiration state of me and I literally had to push her out the door to go home because she kept finding things for me to do for her and I was afraid of what was next. It was an awesome training but this damn tape was missing.
The guy came back and said to me she said we should pick out another song. So here it is the last five minutes of a three day training and the trainers special message song to the group of 58 of us is missing. I grabbed the play list and went through them.
What song did I pick? Which song would you have picked??
The list was all popular tunes written by Ron and or his posse.
Ok so which was it?
There it was sitting right next to Takin’ it to the Streets…Take it to the Limit by the Eagles. Which was a great choice, so I was told and things ended perfectly as LIfespring was always about perfection!
LIfespring had a bunch of lawsuits against it for using people as free labor. I didn’t care cause I got lots of hugs and there’s very little better than that.
I was also Medical Director of Lifespring NYC for a few weeks which I though better of and resigned as I had no malpractice for that and I wasn’t being paid and I was already getting all the hugs I wanted so why buy the cow?
I was there for several years. The best hug I got (in fact ever) was during senioring a basic training. A guy named Jack Batman grabbed me during the exercise and gave me the warmest most nurturing and nourishing hug I’d ever had…simply amazing.
The second most amazing hug was from this beautiful ebony woman about 29 years old. I wasn’t going to hug her, you had a choice, but instead just look into her eyes which was important for me at the time however, it was like she flipped on some magic switch and I got consumed with heat and we went into each other’s arms and she pressed against me and ground me like I was French Roast Coffee. She was amazing! She got what she wanted and apparently…so did I!
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