The Workshop
Updated: Feb 20
Sadna (workshop in Hebrew) – According to Inuit mythology, the sea goddess who resides in the cold depths of the Arctic Ocean.
Sadna (Workshop in Hebrew) – A practical short-term course.
When Shlomit called me, she promised that at the end of this short-term course, I would leap forward with the full force of my personal potential and conquer all my goals. However, on this day, which is the second day of the Movement towards Empowerment workshop, it seems as though I have come to a meeting with the frozen sea goddess who dwells in the icy depths of the Arctic Ocean.
Yes, it is nice to meet a few speakers of my mother tongue, and there are moments of insight here and there. But when we are instructed to pair up and I see all my friends' eyes turn away from mine, that horrible old inferiority complex resurfaces – "You don't belong here," it whispers and "no one loves you!"
Perhaps one needs to be in the right place at the right time and with a comfortable environment for change to happen. Conversely, it may be entirely true that one needs to be in the most challenging place at the least proper time, surrounded by not so friendly people, to make familiar patterns disappear, and for your true self (whatever that means) to emerge from your old being glowing with a new light. I haven't really delved into this dilemma.
But right now I feel terrible, terrible, terrible. I can't understand how I was persuaded to come, and in the most Feng Shui of Feng Shui spaces I can't tolerate a single word of all the words making up the sentences that are floating around me.
I will use the names of fruits to illustrate the atmosphere of the chatter. "Today we will focus on realizing the banana within us. Well, to define the banana, we must agree that the banana represents the ability to be the avocado, which is the true self, without trying to be something else. The problem with the banana is that we were conditioned to see it through the eyes of others who viewed us as avocados, which means that we regularly try to meet other people's expectations, that is, to be an avocado, while who we really are is a banana... Pay attention to your posture. You, yes you... this is the posture of a Surinam cherry. Do you want to be a Surinam cherry or do you want to feel the watermelon within you? Open your chest! Breathe deeply! Oh! Already you look more like a watermelon than a wrinkled cherry..."
After a whole day where no one sings to me the traditional song "Shall we practice together?" and where every time we are told to work in couples, again, I am the last woman left out to dry, and again I am pushed toward the the other person no one wants to play with, and we both pretend to move in sync while really imagining how his banana is beating the shit out of my avocado and vice versa, and I just want to cry.
At the end of each day, I promised myself that tomorrow, I will quietly fly away from this godforsaken workshop and never participate in any workshop ever, whether it be about empowerment, potential, bananas, or pickled capers.
Now the village rooftops are bathing in an almost full moon's silver light, the back doors of my Nadedet are open and overlooking a peach orchard, a night bird is hooting, I looked up at the sky, and my soul is trying with all its might to summarize the authentic experience I am going through.
I was, indeed, lured here because Shlomit is incredibly persuasive. But I have to admit that I am someone who rushes to please certain women, and that is why I came. In simple terms, I drove two thousand kilometers and paid about two thousand Euros just to make Shlomit like me more. However, on the very first day of the workshop, I discovered that Shlomit came with a handsome male partner, and both he and she were part of the workshop's organizing committee, and as expected, the committee members have no time for love-struck crumpled old pleasers whose place is in a youth movement or an Assisted Living Facility and not in the movement towards banana empowerment.
But in Alcala de la Jovada, beneath a peach tree, sleep is sweet, and early the next morning, I heat the water in my van and take a shower outside, under the canopy, with warm water washing over my body and surrounded by a cold mist. Inside Nadedet, I dry off and put on clean clothes, and the new day smiles, promising to be better than yesterday, and I believe it.
The days of the workshop pass. My heart opens to some of the participants, but it has closed hermetically to the method and its administrators, and I understand that the Greenberg Method chapter in my life has come to a definitive end. Now, a passion burns in my bones to move freely in space, to run between mountains and rocks, to sit under a tree in a grove, and to sleep beside sheep in meadows stretching to the horizon. That's it. Tomorrow, my Nadedet will carry me to a new destination.
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