Growing up, I never wanted to be like my parents, yet as my first girlfriend said about my dad, “The more you try to be different from him, the more you will be like him.” She’s married with a kid now and she calls me old man. One day in circa 1996, I put hundreds of flyers on cars around UCLA seeking a hot chick (it was a tip I learned in one of these pick-up manuals I bought for $25). Her soon to be husband found one on her car and got upset.
* For much of my peer group, Landmark Forum is their favorite tool for personal transformation. Now I’m noticing more people getting into taking ayahuasca and some say that it changed their lives for the good. They say they got the benefits of 20 years of therapy with a few ingestions of this wicked brew as part of an ancient healing rite. Count me skeptical of all programs that claim to give the benefits of years of therapy in just a few sessions.
Joey writes: Having done both Landmark Forum and a ten-day Ayahuasca retreat, I agree with you wholeheartedly. Everyone comes to these things being told that this brief experience will utterly change who they are, and most of them go home saying it’s so. As far as I’ve seen that’s wishful thinking. Best any individual experience can do is provide some new strengths/insights/resources to be used in a longer-term program.
* My connective tissue is not as pliable as it was. Over the past few months, every time I’d find a new exercise that did not strain my aching joints, I’d hurt something new to the point where all I could do for exercise was FB (yes, I could swim and daven and didn’t). But now I’m on the upswing, walking around like a mentch, taking long meaningful strolls in the dead of night through leafy and deserted Venice streets with my mate.
