Decades-old Asthma and complicated relationship issues were a cause of immense misery, suffocation and great fatigue. My self-esteem was at its lowest though I was not doing all that badly in life. I felt my life was a chaos. At thirty six I wondered when will all this end finally. I tried psychiatrist, I toyed with the past life regression therapy and tried religion as therapy. I attended Landmark Forum out of hope and curiosity. I hoped that Landmark Forum would offer me some insight and show me some ways of dealing with this suffering. I had longed for some drastic paradigm shift in my life and Landmark did not let me down.
I always knew that my past was painful, but the Landmark taught me that I was responsible for it. I clung to it in the form of serious grievances and suppressed anger. I discovered that I had serious complaints and veiled anger beneath every single relationship. The blame-games (` racket’ in LM terminology) drain us of our vitality, joy and sense of freedom. The blame-games, Landmark revealed to me, were ways of evading responsibility.
Responsibility, here, is not in the sense of ` blame’ or `guilt’, as can be misunderstood. In fact, this is how I looked at things. I blamed myself and felt miserable about almost anything I did. This, Landmark Forum taught me, was actually a way of evading responsibility. One needs to reconsider the meaning of the word `responsibility’ here. The compact Oxford Dictionary defines responsibility as ` responsibility • noun (pl. responsibilities) 1 the state or fact of being responsible. 2 the opportunity or ability to act independently and take decisions without authorization. 3 a thing which one is required to do as part of a job, role, or legal obligation.”
I discovered that taking responsibility was not a way of blaming yourself or saying sorry to everyone I knew but to recognize my role in the mess I have created in my life. It means taking charge of your life which actually is extremely empowering. Blaming oneself or someone weakens you, taking up the responsibility makes you feel powerful. I was blaming everyone including (most importantly) myself for my miseries. Instead of blaming myself, I learned to owe up the suffering as my own creation and I have started doing something about it. I owe the sense of being in charge of my life to Landmark.
The Forum taught me to separate `what happened’ from ` what I made it mean for me’. For instance, my mother used to be very bitter and quarrelsome most of the time. I had extremely bitter and rancorous fights with her and then I kept feeling extremely guilty about it. My relationship with her was that of extreme anger, fear, revulsion, pity and guilt. I discovered that her behavior was due to her own disturbed life and I was actually adding to her unending sorrow. In some ways, I was responsible for her misery. And this was because I interpreted her behaviour to mean, ` she doesn’t love me or care for me’. Hence, during one of the assignment, I called her up from Mumbai and apologized to her for making her life miserable. I discovered that the wall I had created around myself to protect myself or rather avoid my mother was the wall I had created to avoid the whole world. I did the same with my father, Ashwini, my sister and even with my five year old kid. I felt the great burden on my back falling off, much in the way it falls off Christian’s back in the Pilgrim’s Progress. I felt incredibly light. I felt huge surge of energy flowing through my life once again. I was no longer dragging my life but was actually driving it.
The Forum’s philosophy that nothing has any meaning apart from the one that WE give it can actually be extremely powerful and liberating. I had given so many `meanings’ to asthma, incidents in my childhood and relations and these things actually had no ` meaning’ apart from the ones I gave them. Asthma is just a disease like thousand other diseases. But I had made it mean something. Like for example, that I was `unfortunate’ or that it was because of my parents or because of my nature and the things like that. It dawned upon me that asthma was nothing but asthma.
The Forum’s philosophy distinguishes between the choice and the decision. The term `decision’ like its etymological relative `incision’, involves cutting out the alternatives. The Forum sees `decision’ as being based on ` reasons’ rather than on responsibility and as being based on the past. I learned that choice is not dependent on reasons and life has no real alternatives from which we can select. You don’t decide upon your father or your disease or your being. I learned as asthma means asthma and nothing else I have learned to choose it. I have learnt the significance of the position which says ` I choose asthma because I choose asthma’. I no longer cling to it or make an issue out of it. In the same way I choose my distress and anguish because I choose my distress and anguish.
Thanks to the forum, the environment at my home has changed for better and the life appears in a new perspective. Once you realize and accept that it is you who are holding on to your past, past is no longer holding on to you. They equip you to change your rigid and ossified ways of thinking and behaving which are limiting you. These constraints fall off. You realize that you have wings and the earth is simply not interested in holding you down…
