Dave and Joan Zoller

GRADUATE PROFILE

Dave and Joan Zoller, married twenty-eight years,and in their fifties, were so moved by their Lifespring trainings that they took on the extraordinary task of bringing the trainings back to their friends and family in Kansas City.

“I remember thinking one night,” says Joan, “that I had had a great day, but I had no feeling of passion about anything. I remember thinking I would love to feel passionate about something in my life, to have a life's work, something that would carry me on through the rest of my life. I felt like an unfinished woman.I had been a housewife and raised kids, and felt that there was something else ahead of me. I had to make a decision about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I had another life coming and didn't know what it was about. I had a great relationship with Dave. We had just built our dream house on thirty acres. We had raised five great kids and had several beautiful grandchildren. Since the kids have grown, we've done whatever we've wanted to do. Dave makes a good living. I have felt no material limitations.I've had everything in the world I could ever want.Yet, sitting in my beautiful home doing decorating and gardening would just be maintenance, hanging on to what I had, playing it safe. I didn't understand my lack of passion in the midst of abundance.

“I think the Basic Training is wonderful for everybody,"continues Joan,“but I think it’s especially important for people who are in mid-life. At this point in our lives, having been married twenty-eight years and raised our family, we've done what we set out in our lives to do. So where do we go from here? The attitudes of society have changed so much: toward women, toward aging. It used to be that people our age were settling down to enjoy their golden years for ten more years before they died. That's not true anymore. And yet people our age are frequently still operating on old principles of stereotypical roles for the ideal woman and the ideal man. It's especially important to step outside those roles and be willing to take a look at our lives and to recognize that society is changing and that we are really in a position to push against some of the barriers that society has set up. By living what I got out of the Basic, I am making my life really exciting instead of being old ahead of my time."

Dave, formerly a pathologist, has begun a new chapter in his life by leaving his thirty-year profession to manage the Lifespring center in Kansas City. “When I was twelve years old, my dream was to take care of people and assist people in making their lives work. That's why I went into pathology. I admittedly had fears about leaving that to become a manager for Lifespring because I had doubts about whether I could do the job. Pathology is like falling off a log for me. I know the work from A to Z. It doesn't threaten me at all. My services are always in demand, I get well paid for those services, and I have a comfortable living as a result. In the Basic Training I discovered that there are ways I can contribute to people that I had never thought about before. All of a sudden I was looking at making this jump to doing something I'm not trained for. I really struggled with the decision. On the one hand, I didn't know if I'd succeed. Yet on the other hand, I didn't want to look back on this opportunity and wonder why I never did what I wanted to do.

“Once I made the choice it was really easy, even though I had been way out of my comfort zone during the time leading up to the decision. Once I made the leap, there was no resistance, it just created a new, broader comfort zone. It's exciting for me because I keep mastering my life by going up against bigger challenges. I feel I have put that twelve-year-old's dreams into action."

How did it all begin for Dave and Joan? First, Dave's brother took the Basic Training, then their son, and then one of their daughters.In one of many conversations about it, their daughter told Joan that it was the most liberating experience she had ever had. "That spoke to both of us," says Dave. “Maybe there was something to it. I still had this judgment that there's nothing of any real lasting value there, but I was ready to give it a try.

“When we got to Denver and went into the training, I knew I was going to participate fully even though I didn't know why the hell I had decided to come. The first night I argued with the trainer for about forty-five minutes about coming back from Kansas City a week later for the Post Training, which I had no intention of doing. I was ready to leave at the break."

During this time, Joan was pulling on Dave's coattails."I wanted him to just sit down. Tell them you'll be there and then don't show up.I didn't stand up because there was no reason why I couldn't come back. But I was really angry. I thought the trainer was the most arrogant son of a bitch I had ever seen in my life."

“I wasn't going to sit down," continues Dave. "Either I would stay and be in agreement with the Ground Rules, or not.In retrospect, I actually think I was trying to manipulate a situation where I would get thrown out of the training and I wouldn't have to do it. I decided to stay. Throughout the training whenever there was sharing my hand went up. I must have talked every day at least two or three times. I just started pouring myself out and I really began to get an experience of the love I have for people."

“And the more this happened with him," Joan interjects,"the more backed up I got. By Friday I had one of my major migraines. I was very sick. This was my avoidance. I wasn't going back Friday night. I didn't see how I could possibly sit there and be this way. I knew inside that something was happening for me, but I didn't understand it. And seeing Dave so involved scared me to death. I was scared I was going to be left behind."

Joan did go back, and Friday night something opened up individually for both of the Zollers during one of the exercises. “I realized how much of my life I let go by without standing up and making myself heard,” Joan recalls. “Without taking a stand. Even if I knew what was right and how to do something, I would make an attempt, but would back down at the first little puff of wind that came my way. When the trainer explained the rules of the game we were to play,I understood and knew what to do right away. I stood up and told my team how to win the game. They told me to sit down, that I didn't know what I was talking about. I angrily went to the back of the room, folded my arms and sat there saying to myself,‘Okay,don't listen to me. Go ahead and lose. Then I can say I told you so.' When we finished the game and looked back at our own participation, I was heartsick because I realized what I had done. I had let someone else take the responsibility, and the game was lost. I hadn't put myself on the line.It was a real eye-opener for the rest of my life in that I recognized how I was hiding out everywhere, playing it safe. I had built this nest around myself. I thought it was going to be safe,but I was closing down within it. Saturday morning I was one of the first ones to stand on the stage and share. I was scared to death. When I walked off that stage, I knew that I had to deal with a lot of those things in my life that I now had new insight into. I couldn't go backwards."

Meanwhile, Dave, who was on the other team in the game, was also facing,among other things, his reluctance to take a stand.“There was a woman sitting next to me.She was very soft-spoken. We were discussing the game and she explained to me how to win. I stood up and said that she had something to say and I wanted everyone to listen. She wouldn't get up and speak, so I told them what she had explained to me. I put it out, but wouldn't take a real firm stand about it. If they were not going to listen to it, they were not going to listen to it. Obviously, they didn't.

“Some guy had jumped up to be the captain of our team. How I played the game after not being listened to was to criticize his participation. He was totally out of control. Who appointed this jerk captain anyway? What was significant was that I did not get up and be the captain of the team and run it the way it needed to be run. I didn't take a stand.

"What was really disturbing was how blind I was to the purpose of the game. I was so focused on my own competitive drive, that I didn't even see the possibility that the game was really trying to demonstrate. I didn't even listen to the instructions, I was so busy calculating how to win the competition, how to beat the other team."

After having really engaged in the training process, Joan continued to have breakthroughs.“During another exercise, we were imagining ourselves sailing our own boats. That was truly my turning point. I had been a housewife, Mrs. Nice Guy, all my life,and hadn't worked since we married. Over the years we had sailed some, but I was always too scared to ever be on my own on the boat. In the closed eye exercise in the Basic, though, I was enjoying this incredible feeling of being in charge of this beautiful, shiny craft. In the picture in my mind,I looked over to the side and saw Dave in his boat. He waved and I waved back. Then I looked to the other side and there were all five of my children in their own boats. We were all going along in a line together, but we were each in our own boat. I didn't think ahead on this, it just happened spontaneously in my imagination. Instantly I realized that I could be out there in the world on my own, that I didn't need to depend on Dave for who I was or what I was doing. And I didn't need to depend on my image of being a mom and a granny. They all have their own lives to go forward with and I am free to go forward with mine.

“It's funny because on the way out of the room for the break after that exercise, someone turned to me and said that it was the dumbest thing they had ever experienced and a total waste of time. I wondered how they could say that. My whole life had changed and I was walking about a foot off the ground! One result of that experience is that the next fall I enrolled in school. I had gone back to college years before, but stopped. I kept saying I'd go back someday-as soon as the house is finished, as soon as so-and-so has her baby.I've been going ever since and have one more year to complete my degree."

Dave remarks on another significant experience: "During the whole training I remember sitting in the room looking up at this silly sign that said, ‘What Are You Pretending Not To Know?’ Seeing that sign every day irritated me so much. I did not generally spend a lot of time in introspection. I kept thinking there's nothing I'm pretending not to know. I know everything about myself. Maybe they're talking to somebody else. Finally, actually months later, I began to acknowledge how much I don't know and that there is a ton I am pretending not to know. I'm still just beginning to open up to some of those things; the process just keeps unfolding and unfolding. There was a little peephole in the Basic that keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger."

How has doing the training changed the Zollers' lives?

Dave: "It has created a tremendously free space to operate from My appreciation of Joan just grows daily. Often when Joan would speak to me in the old days, my internal conversations with myself were so loud I never even heard her. Whenever she addressed me, what was going on in my head was,‘She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.' That has stopped. Now I recognize that she did know what she was talking about. It was me who didn't know what I was talking about a lot of the time. I recognize that she's got a point of view and, while it may not be in total agreement with my point of view, it's valuable nevertheless, and it's something for me to look at. And so what's happened is I've become more vulnerable and much less defensive about protecting myself. It's opened me up to a relationship with Joan that is free of control. I don't have to control. She doesn't have to control. The power that gets generated from that is fantastic.

“During and after the training, little things kept coming up.All the garbage of twenty-eight years of marriage that had been swept under the rug. We each knew each other's spots not to touch if we wanted to keep peace. My way of dealing with those things previously was to just sweep them under the rug rather than be honest and open and confront the issue. All that began to come back out again. Once we got all that out and sorted it out and dealt with it, it all disappeared."

Joan: "It took a period of time for us to do that. Now that we've done that, it's changed our whole relationship. On my part, there's a tremendous feeling of admiration and tenderness and caring for Dave. We both experience the success of having a new life together. And it's a partnership in the best sense of the word because we're working together to focus out in our lives instead of getting something from each other. We do get something from each other, but our relationship isn't about what I'm going to get from him or what he's going to get from me. That has made possible some decisions and choices that weren't possible before. He has made tremendous space for me to put myself forward as a person, as a woman. In return, I want to allow him the space to do what he wants to do in his life. He's supported me and our children materially for thirty years. I want to pitch in and be productive so that I can give him the freedom to do exactly what he wants to do. I have a great feeling about it because I'm furthering myself by getting out in the world and contributing something here to our mutual support.

“Dave leaving his practice and going to work for Lifespring was a tremendous exercise for me in letting go of my need for security. He made a good living. But I feel like we're ready to move on. I've found that I don't want things anymore. What is most important to me doesn't have a dollar sign value. This change has given me the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is. I look at it as a challenge.

“This is another chapter. After the training, I have never since had that experience of feeling unfinished. I've got commitments to complete yet, but I still feel total. The passion is there. And this is a passion that we share.Hand in hand we're leaping ahead. And that, to me, is really exciting."