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March 1, 2021 - Conspirituality
04:50
Bonus Sample: Stranded On The Lifeboat: Escaping The Large Group Awareness Cult

One-hundred-and-twenty seekers filled the LA hotel ballroom. We sought the life-changing experience that could only happen by holding in our pee, being religiously on-time, and taking full responsibility for creating the lives we said we wanted, but hadn’t achieved… yet. -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
You can support our work and have full access to bonus episodes and other premium content by subscribing for as little as $5 a month at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
Thanks for listening and your support, which keeps us ad-free and editorially independent.
Now I can't recount everything that we did in the LifeSpring Basic Seminar, but these initial events stood out in my mind a week later as I paced back and forth on the sidewalk waiting for a bus after work and turning the whole experience over and over again in my mind.
You see, I had come to work the Monday after the seminar and talked about it with my boss.
In fact, the conversation started in the car as he was my neighbor and drove me to and from work every day.
I explained to him that the average person was sleepwalking through life, controlled by their programming, afraid of facing their fears, and not fully committing to taking action.
Now, I'd found a way forward, and I could be part of something that might just change the world.
We picked the conversation up again over lunch in the office.
Now, Selwyn, my boss, was a heavyset, extroverted Jewish South African music publicist about 10 years my senior.
He paused from eating Pad Thai out of the to-go container, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and said, It sounds like you've been brainwashed.
Oh no, I said, it's you and everyone else who is brainwashed by the mainstream conventions of society and the emotional repressions of this world.
What we did in the seminar was the antidote to that brainwashing, which you can't even see.
Okay, he said, and dug his plastic fork back into the dense mass of orange noodles.
The rest of day one at Lifespring was about accepting full responsibility for creating your own reality through the power of free will.
One guy stood up and talked about having his retail store robbed at gunpoint.
How could he have created that?
Well, you chose to open the store, didn't you?
Pointed out the ever insightful and helpful leader.
There were a few more tearful exits as people took a stand for how their abuse trauma was not really their fault and they were told they could only be empowered by accepting full responsibility.
Day 2 went deeper into partner exercises, psychodrama techniques, and group bonding in a highly charged emotional soup of confessions, empty chair venting, sobbing catharsis, and bold assertions of new commitments to goals for the future.
For many who experienced the most dramatic emotional outbursts and then testified on the microphone to the whole group, this was their first time really acknowledging and expressing some very deep and painful emotions.
It was powerful.
Moving.
Feeling the support in the partner and small group exercises as we identified fears and set audacious goals was pretty amazing.
One, I remember, involved one person boldly asserting their vision and gifts, while a second played the role of someone in their family who had shamed or judged them, and a third played the cheerleader, just rooting them on.
I believe in you, Billy!
You can do it!
You'll never amount to anything, William.
You're not as smart as you think.
Best to be honest and play safe, son.
I'm going to be the CEO of my own company.
I can do it because I have the ideas and the confidence and I deserve success.
That's right, Billy.
You can do it.
That's not for people like us, William.
But I'm not anything like you, Mom.
You can do anything, Billy.
After about 15 minutes of that, Billy was beaming with pride as tears rolled down his cheeks and we all hugged him and one another.
Deep work was happening and we were doing it together.
Day three consolidated a lot of this work but then switched into multiple phases of inculcating the importance of communicating the new gospel to the people we loved.
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