By Diane Majeske

Crazy Wisdom Journal asked a number of leaders in southeastern Michigan’s conscious living community to reflect upon times in their lives that they’ve left their comfort zones to venture out in new ways. In the distant past or much more recently, we asked, what did you do, what inspired you, did it change you, inside or outside, big or little? Did you attend a new class, take an adventurous trip, go skydiving, stretch beyond a long entrenched boundary, start a new relationship or end an old one, take a leap, retire, join the Peace Corps, go on a night trek in the wilderness, or just do something way out of your ordinary?

Harry D. Cohen—Be the Sun, not the Salt

Harry D. Cohen is an executive coach, speaker, owner of the Black Pearl, and author of the new book Be the Sun, Not the Salt. He stepped out of his comfort zone in 2015 to deliver a live TEDx talk at Elon University. You can watch his talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4QUp6tuo-E.

Here is my attempt to articulate my experience of pushing through my discomfort zone. Five years ago, I was asked to do a TEDx talk. I speak for a living so giving a public talk is not a big deal, but a TED talk is the equivalent of an actor being asked to host the Academy Awards. I had never done anything like that before.

The performance is recorded live, and you get one take, that’s it. You don’t get to edit it. You don’t get to shelve it. If you blow it, you’re the guy who blew it. There is a permanent record online. Shall I go on? Putting yourself out there for the world to give you the big thumbs-up or thumbs-down was, and is, and will always be, quite scary.

I experienced the fear, and I did it anyway, and it was just okay by my standards. My heart was pounding in my chest as I got up to speak... I could barely breathe... one chance ...stand on the red circle and deliver.

Here is the big breakthrough. It wasn’t great, it was only okay. I know that. But that was as good as I could muster that day, and that is just fine. Maybe I’ll get another shot; maybe not. I know I’ll say yes now to any opportunity that makes me uncomfortable in the service of something noble. I love, love, love, the message of the talk. But, I’m disappointed in how I delivered it. I know I can be better. It’s like blowing the high note while singing the National Anthem at a ball game. Well, maybe not that bad, but close.

But, so what? My discomfort is about my ego being a little undernourished. My ego needs no more food! It gets enough. Since giving my TEDx talk, I’ve been working on my message over and over, until I get it right. I’m more inspired than ever to get better at conveying the message of being a positive energizer to the people around us. I ended my talk with the simple suggestion to be the sun, not the salt, and to leave people with an afterglow, not an aftertaste. The moral of my story is to not salt my own roots and to practice what I preach.

Read related article: Out of My Comfort Zone, Fall 2020

Ellen Sapper — From Meditation to Paintball Wars

Ellen Sapper retired from 39 years as a high school English teacher and guidance counselor, and currently has a private practice in college preparation and educational consulting. She holds master’s degrees in communication, and guidance and counseling, as well as bachelor's degrees in comparative literature and social sciences.
She is a lifelong seeker of enhanced psychological and spiritual growth, and has participated in The Planned Change Internship in organizational development, EST and The Forum, group therapy, Trails CBT training, Tavistock-style Group Relations conferences at Northwestern, Rosh Hodesh circles, psychoanalytic teachings, women's growth groups, and workshops in comparative spiritualities based on Carl Jung’s teaching and transpersonal psychology. She has also been involved with the Siddha Yoga, Kashi Nivas, and Kirtan communities, the Diamond Heart path, and vision quests with The Deer Tribe Metis Medicine Society. For the past 16 years, she has been engaged in the Spiritual Guidance Wisdom School programs of Atum O'Kane. She is regularly involved in spiritually-oriented pilgrimages to such places as India, Andalusia, Assisi, Morocco, Poland, and others.

I had an awakening in 1974 that propelled me into an Indian tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, a non-dualistic philosophy from India. I meditated and chanted mantras happily for many years, though eventually wanted more grounding in what I’d call an “Earth tradition.” New psychological and spiritual challenges were part of my comfort zone in the 1970’s and beyond, or so I thought, until I signed up for The Warrior’s Retreat in California with a shaman-medicine man who taught in the Twisted Hair tradition. The brochure touted learning ten different martial arts, psychological warfare, healing through sweat lodge ceremonies, and learning to live in balance in the natural world. All this sounded good to me in the mid-1980’s, to balance the teachings from the Indian Guru with the teachings from Native American Indians in the shamanic tradition.

What I did not realize was that this particular retreat would be run in a quasi-militaristic fashion. The shaman’s purpose was to teach the hippies as well as the Vietnam vets strength of body and spirit, to know the enemy and know yourself, to prepare for what he said would be the future terrorists who would not care if we put a flower in their gun barrels. Hence, we were divided into companies and platoons, donned fatigues, learned to shoot paintball guns, to combat attackers with jujitsu and tai-chi moves, eat foraged plants, and outwit the enemy. From before sunrise until after midnight, we alternately froze and baked in the sun and moon of the Tehachapi Mountains, crawling on our stomachs through brush to avoid the enemy, camping, and hoping for a moment to eat what little food we brought. I was not prepared for any of this. I wanted to become more grounded after years of living in the world of “everything is unified consciousness,” yet learning self-defense against male attackers I might meet on the streets of L.A. or during a battle with the terrorists, wasn’t what I had in mind.

Still, with an eighteen-day retreat, and nowhere to retreat to, I persisted. At age 36, I was taught to kick and punch where it hurts, and to aim a paintball gun to destroy my opponent, all while nearly starving in the heat of the mountainous desert of southern California. After the first paintball “war,” a week into the retreat, we were told that the next week it would no longer be a “children’s war” (a simple paintball game of three hours), but that we needed to be prepared for real terrorists, who someday would be attacking us near home, or at home. We participants prepared tobacco and passed a pipe, sending prayers to the heavens that the next war would be cancelled.

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Our shaman teacher brought us together under the stars to tell us the “adult war” the following week would have himself and others as “secret terrorists among friends.” We could not just get hit and out, as in normal paintball rules, but we would have to meditate under the tree and “reincarnate” to enter the game again, either as a peace-lover or terrorist, thus confusing who was on which side of the battle. By the time the dawn to midnight “game” was over, we had been double-crossed by our chosen leaders who turned into “terrorists.” The woman dressed as a grandmother pulled her paintball gun out of her goody basket and smiled wryly as she splattered her followers with paintballs. We were confused, and exhausted, by a fake war meant to mirror the feelings of what it might be like to become disoriented, even when supposedly prepared through mental and physical preparation during the weeks of the retreat. We ended the day with our shaman explaining the trials of war and then steamy healing sweat-lodges, in preparation for the upcoming finale of a self-defense exhibition against fake attackers brought in from L.A. and the culminating Harmonic Convergence, where the planets aligned for the world’s first synchronized global peace meditation in August of 1987.

Some folks had left the retreat in disgust at the militaristic nature of the program. I stayed, weary, having no way to get home from the desolate mountain. Still not fully comfortable with fighting, with or without weapons, I dressed in my combat clothing for the martial arts extravaganza. We gathered on mats under a makeshift tent, the women divided into groups of six, while the men sat around the outer edge of the tent, watching, awaiting the big guys from L.A. When it was my turn, I stood nervously, in the middle of the circle, but there was no big guy, only the Qigong instructor, filling in as too few big guys showed up. Each circle of women was told to go all out on these men, who were padded and wearing goggles and ready to be taken down. But not my guy. He was a martial artist himself and had his own idea of how to proceed. I was the second in my circle attacked. I kicked and grabbed and elbowed and successfully brought him down. But as I proudly returned to the circle, he grabbed me a second time! I wasn’t alert but came to my senses and went for his knees. Victory!—until the third unprecedented attack, at which point I fell backward, twisting my leg. I couldn’t stand, nor stop the pain.

We had signed releases that we were responsible for our own well-being. A tanned, bare-chested man came up to me wearing a pouch of needles and offered acupuncture. Others offered, or should I say, in the way of spiritual emergency medicine, did crystal healings on all parts of my body. The concern lasted minutes. Then, the extravaganza was over, and everyone went to the next activity while I lay on the mat unable to move, miserable, and lonely in the heat of the day.

Eventually, a friend carted up the sandy mountain to my tent, where I lay in pain, contemplating the inner lesson of my predicament for a few days. The harmonic convergence came with hundreds of hopeful aspirants drumming and chanting through the night, but no planet alignment healed my leg. I begged a woman with a car to take me to a clinic in Bakersfield where I was x-rayed, handed an envelope with the x-ray, and days later, I was taken to the UCLA hospital. When the doctor clipped the x-rays to the light-board, he suggested, “Perhaps you were hit with a hammer about three weeks ago? Your leg is fractured but it is healing nicely.” I didn’t tell him I was attacked by a Qigong master but did tell him it happened only three days ago, and that I had no medical treatment except acupuncture. I left out the crystal healing. Soon, all the doctors in the ER were looking at the x-ray and saying, “Acupuncture? acupuncture?!” Hmmm, I thought, maybe it did help. They put on a soft cast, and off I went to continue the healing journey of body, mind, and spirit.

It was an important experience to come into my body after many years in more of a mind-based spirituality. Now older, I do prefer a more serene spiritual practice, but that retreat awakened my sensibility to the importance of awareness of my physical being and the threat of terrorists long before the shaman’s prediction came to pass on our shores. I will always remember the shaman saying, “They won’t care if you stick flowers in their guns.”