should be kept here. do you have anybody that you talk to about anything you do or think or say? michel gave us all new names to help us move beyond our past and create a new way of seeing ourselves. it was a common practice in the group. amy was now called emiliana. lori was called crystal. i was now named francesco. they would come home to us and told us that they had changed their names and this was what they wanted to be called. i said well, we re not going to call you that. we gave you your names and that is what we are going to call you, and you might as well get used to it. they came for dinner and said
it s like a big death of your family all at once. i did so much service for him and didn t worry about the future that when it was over, i had $45 to my name, i didn t have a bank account, i didn t have anything. i remembered just laying on the floor in fetal position. it was like i was dropping through this trap door. it was black and there was no bottom. where am i going to find that awe? who is going to make me dance in the forest? who is going to make me be willing to sing when i can t sing? i questioned everything i thought when i came out of the
group. i sold my house and i took a job as a bouncer and reclaimed my masculinity. i was so angry, i was so bitter, so cynical. i couldn t trust anything. all of us who left the group needed to heal. happy birthday like many of my friends, i tried to mend the relationships i had given up in the past. happy birthday to you we embraced them. we told them we loved them. we never gave up on them. i had prayed that they would come back and they did. it was unbelievable, really, what they d been through. and i was glad that they were rid of this man and i just feel
leading the group and he laid out serious accusations about andreas, and one of the most serious was that he for years had been forcing unwanted disciples into unwanted relationships. andreas immediately told all of those around him that the letter was full of lies and not to read it. and all of a sudden there started to be this division. some people didn t believe it, some people did. it s just some letter somebody wrote, they could write anything they want. i didn t have personally any reason to believe what they were saying. some people coalesced around him. even i did initially. i wrote a rebuttal to the letter. yeah, it was bull [ expletive ]. i had been in a sexual relationship with him. i knew that everything in there was pretty much true.
and some of the older people that had been around since the beginning were kind of looking at each other going i didn t hear to where this suddenly changed to where it s all about him instead of all about your inner experience. i wouldn t refer to him other than anything he was, an out-of-work actor who stumbled on the role of a lifetime. one of the people that had been around for a long time wrote an e-mail and he sent it out to like everybody in the buddhafield. there was this e-mail that was sent out about all this stuff, it was like what the [ expletive ] is this? the author of the e-mail was