Transformation, Landmark Education

It is amazing.

On my way to work this morning, I called and left a voicemail for a friend noting that I feel like a different person each day. I wake up and I'm not the same person I was the day before. Almost two weeks ago I took Landmark Education's Advanced Course. I'd gotten fantastic insights and results after taking their Forum. To say that I'd been looking forward to the Advanced Course would be an understatement.

They promised it would offer an opportunity to see your life differently, to break free of old patterns that weren't serving you and all the other usual benefits promulgated by self-help books, seminars and events. And they delivered.

New ways of being are showing up in so many areas. All of them wondrous, marvelous and miraculous. All of them catching me by surprise. It's like all my default settings got reset to something closer to powerful and further from resigned.

Not to give away their process or curriculum, but the course helps you identify a habitual go-to stance developed as a child in response to something unpleasant. It was a response that suited and served a little child trying to defend itself and survive in world not fully understood. Basically, you uncover your ego's main point-of-view.

I'd go into details about my particular go-to stance in the world and the experiences I suspect are at its root, but that would take three entries right there. Suffice it to say that somewhere along the way, sometime in early childhood, I learned to have the attitude "I don't have to" in response to anything unpleasant or potentially threatening. If I might fail, be rejected or found out as someone who doesn't truly belong, then my automatic ego response would kick in--more reaction than response. In the tone of a frustrated three-year-old: "I don't have to!!!" Picture the arms crossed forcefully, a foot stomp and pout as the words are screeched out.

What is fabulous, just amazing, is that having identified that unconscious fall-back ego attitude, I now have the ability to thank it for sharing and get on with whatever action I turly desire, freed from the constraints of what others will think or whether the action helps me fit in, belong and get along.

If you haven't done their course, it's hard to explain. I'll try. You know that voice in your head that drones on and on when there's something you don't really want to do? Imagine hearing it and knowing body, mind and soul that it is an automatic response and not you actually thinking. For example, I needed to attend to my budgeting and had been putting it off for quite a while. I hadn't been getting 10% into charities like I want because I'd been too busy indulging my whims. I needed to take an honest look at what lifestyle choices I can and cannot afford if I want to both save money and give the 10% that I believe blesses my life.

I woke up at 5:14am Monday morning. The old me would have stayed under the covers till 5:55am when the alarm went off. Being wide awake and fully rested doesn't trump "I don't have to" on most days. But this past Monday morning, I heard a little whisper say, "You could have a breakthrough right now." I got up, got my stuff organized and created the budget and financial goals I'd been putting off for months and months.

That can sound pretty basic, even simple, unimpressive and a bit shy of miraculous and amazing. Yet, for me, it was miraculous. My commitment came before my go-to ego-driven "I don't have to". Since the course, it's happening at work, around the house. I take more risks, too. I don't mind being told no or trying something and failing. It's so powerful!

Of course, it is also heady. I'm squeezing more into each day. I'm interacting with friends and family more frequently, less the loner persona that served my "I don't have to" act.

The result of this "success" is that I'm also a little off-balance. I'm me, but I'm a me I don't know very well.

Landmark is about transformation. I've been transformed.

I look forward each new day to getting to know a new me, a more powerful me than the day before.