| The
Founding of Lifespring, A History by John Hanley - Page 2
After the training, I talked
the company into hiring me in Milwaukee. Since they had nothing
there, I told them, the worst I could do was get their name
known. They gave me the job. Reluctantly. Nine months later,
on the basis of my results in Wisconsin, they promoted me
to National Field Director. One year later, shortly before
resigning to establish Lifespring, I was named Executive Vice
President and a member of the Board of Directors.
I'd proven my
worth all right, but in many ways I remained totally unconscious.
In those days I had the awareness of a brick. Before joining
the human potential movement, I had decided the last thing
I wanted was to know more about John Hanley. I was afraid
of what I'd find out about me. I was afraid I wasn't as good
as everybody else. I thought people wouldn't like me, that
I wouldn't like myself. I feared a lot of dreams I'd set for
myself were unattainable. I think a lot of people feel that
way.
I got hooked
on self-awareness merely as a byproduct of my job. I witnessed
some awesome results being created in the lives of the thousands
of people who participated in the seminars. Where originally
I became involved for business opportunity and money, by 1973
this totally reversed itself. Just before starting Lifespring,
I was no longer motivated by money. I had created this feverish
desire to produce seminars that worked and to grow in the
knowledge of myself.
What I discovered,
painfully at first, was that "I" was an illusion,
fabricated by belief systems and perpetrated by presenting
a fraudulent image of myself to myself and other people. Beliefs
accompanied me from childhood. I had been taught that hard
work is good. I considered myself a hard worker, but, in reality,
I was an unproductive worker. Most of my time was spent pushing
the throttle to the floorboard and getting nowhere. Beliefs
also burdened me with guilt. To be a good father, I thought,
you must spend every night at home with the kids. My dad did.
But work kept me from it, so I condemned myself to thinking
I was a bad father.
By separating myself from beliefs
and image, I soon began seeing what was real for me. I learned
that things I didn't know about, things that were scary or
unclear to me, I would make wrong automatically. I would make
good looking people wrong, for example. I would make rich
people wrong, and intellectual people wrong. The fact was,
I was afraid of them, so I'd work to find holes in them. The
justify and invalidate game. It seems true for all of us:
the things we are threatened by we make wrong in hopes they'll
go away.
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