Betty (who wants to be
a teacher) teaching EFT
for an internet mailing
to 300,000 people.
What an unbelievably wonderful two days (but we do believe it). Yesterday we started our usual way with the Energy Medicine Daily Routine and then the Check-In where students tell what has been difficult and what they are grateful for since the last Check-In. We had an extremely busy day planned to be sure to get in a session on forgiveness, more on heart-focus, more on business planning, and more on changing perspective. Lori tore up the notes she had after the third student’s Check-In. Unbeknownst to us, all of them had gotten together and gone over all their notes from the three weeks and thought about what the program has meant to them. Remember that they started out with most of them feeling isolated, hopeless for their future, feeling unworthy and with extremely low scores on the Quality of Life Inventory. I want to quote some of what was said (we did not script this at all): Drogba said “The first few days I was in darkness and now I am in full light, and I won’t cover my light ever again, I will share it so others can find it too.” Etienne had a dream that he was in another African country teaching what he has learned at Project LIGHT. Mathieu said, “In Leadership I learned that you have to change yourself before you can help or lead others and always ask, ‘What is needed here?’, so if there is a riot you can think about what makes people come and riot.” He also talked about two high school students with problems that he has been helping and they consider him their counselor so he really doesn’t want to leave them. Yvette said, “I started feeling well for the first time when I came here. After I got my diploma from secondary school I was happy for a few months, but then saw that it was meaningless because I had to just stay at home with no job, no money and just being sad and confused. In the beginning here when you taught that we have to love and accept ourselves, at first I couldn’t feel it at all. Then I prayed and asked for the learning to enter my heart. It did and now I love myself so much.” Fidele: “I am so grateful for your love. You come from a country where life is much easier and you even come up the mountain from Kigali on bad roads and bad climate and you leave your families to come here. The Bishop taught us about unity and reconciliation and it is not easy to live with someone who killed your family, but I believe I can and I can teach others. I have learned that everyone can be a leader, and I now believe I can succeed. I now know so many people around the world think about us.” Etienne said, “Before I came here I had no hope and could do nothing and I didn’t even pray. All the things I’ve learned here are very important. It’s helped my critical thinking and bettered my mind and all my abilities. Now I pray every day and in the future I will become a pastor.”
I will write more in future blogs of what the students have said, but the impact of their words had all of us on the team in tears of joy and gratitude. The way these young people took everything we taught them, shared and multiplied their understanding, connected and supported one another, trusted us enough to try things totally foreign to anything they had experienced before, and found their inner passion for life and the future blows us away. The only explanation we have come up with is that above anything else, we loved them and we showed up for them through harrowing drives up the mountain in the rain even when exhausted and slightly ill. The other explanation is that when a person suffers the most extreme of traumas, the crucible of that experience creates a strength of character, soul, that yields expanded capacities. All it takes is clearing the negative effects of the trauma and a catalyst to ignite their innate knowing. Words cannot express the joy, amazement and humility I feel at being allowed to be a part of this. To all of you who supported me financially, emotionally or spiritually, thank you, thank you.
Dr. Frankl would likely have the same tears of joy and gratitude. Seeing his work finally blossom into his true vision would have done that. Its a shame your plane could not stop in Austria before embarking for the US as that would have been apropos ...
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