The Yacht
He had a self-driving car in 1996, years before anyone even dreamed of them. He gave me a ride to show me that it followed his every command. I wouldn’t see anything like it until a student took me for a ride in his Tesla in 2022.
He also owned a yacht that I couldn’t escape from for 10 days.
We met in a group seminar. In front of everybody, mid-session, he pointed at me and said “I’m booking you as a private teacher!”
I was working under contract for a training company and said “Call the company to book a single session”. But he demanded to work only with me personally. “I won’t deal with those losers” he announced.
At the time, he was the owner of a large European football (soccer) club that played at Champions League level.
He was also an alcoholic and cocaine addict.
And he had authored a book on Zen-Meditation.
He handed me the book as a parting gift after the group-seminar. I didn’t bother reading the book. Call me narrow-minded but all that sniffing, nose-running, white-powder-residue in his face and binge-drinking didn’t feel Zen to me.
I’m not saying spiritual teachers should be sanitized, holier-than-thou new-age marshmallows. But this guy was a troubled man, as you’ll see.
My plane landed on the Island of Majorca. I found his yacht in the harbor. Sunny skies, beaches and palm trees – just my kind of thing, I thought.
He wasn’t even there the first day. I was shown my cabin. I read books and had snacks, walked at a nearby beach and then went back and slept. On the second day we started our session on deck in the searing sun. It was 9 am and he was already binge drinking. One bottle of beer. Then another. Then another. Then another. Nonstop.
Focusing was difficult because there were scantily dressed women walking around us. No, not the attractive kind. That’s not why they distracted me. They were tattooed, some pierced and looked dangerously undernourished, with bony stomachs and dark patches under their eyes. There was a “sex slave” vibe and it scared me.
“They are Ukrainian Prostitutes” my student told me, sipping on beer every time he spoke. He had picked up on my puzzlement. “In Ukraine you can get the most
beautiful women in the world for the cheapest prices. The whole country is a whorehouse”. He grunted while laughing.
These women didn’t look at all beautiful to me. They were worn-out. The one who brought the beers had bloodshot eyes and matted hair, as if she had been sleep deprived for days.
It’s one of the most unsettling things I’ve ever seen and felt, to this day. Another bikini-wearing woman served me Diet Coke. Her hands were trembling. She wasn’t happy to be here, she looked terrified. From her demeanor I inferred that the guy I was coaching was a certifiable creep.
I was supposed to give him training in NLP, which was a popular self-improvement method in corporations in the 1990s. I taught NLP as a method for “releasing limiting Beliefs”. I’d have liked to help him overcome alcoholism.
But the kind of NLP he wanted to learn was for manipulating people. He kept asking me about seduction, hypnosis and “making people do what I want”.
To imagine that hundreds of thousands of people fancied him an enlightened teacher of Meditation!
He abruptly fell asleep at 10 am, only one our into coaching. Too much beer. I let him sleep. He woke about at around 10:30. In insisted we move under a canopy to avoid a sun-stroke.
At 12 he had one of his bikini servants bring a bucket. He vomited into it in front of me. Then he ordered another beer to “flush it down”.
Couldn’t he have gone to the restroom for that? At this point I was pondering whether I should quit and give him a refund.
By 12:30 he asked to quit for the day because he was “tired”. We had planned 6 hours a day but had barely gotten in 3 (with several interruptions). I didn’t see him again that day and spent it mostly in my cabin room because I didn’t want to be around these people.
***
“Did you get a chance to read the book?” he asked next morning. “Not yet, I have a whole stack to read before I get to yours”. I humored him. Later that day, he drew a line of cocaine up his nose, mid-session. He didn’t even wait for coffee break. He offered me some. I declined.
“You’re a great teacher, but you need to loosen up” he said in a disapproving tone, as if rejecting cocaine was the same thing as rejecting his friendship.
If someone did that to me today, I’d have cancelled in an instant. Sincere psychological work and alcohol/drugs don’t mix. He was suppressing stuff he didn’t want to deal with. I later learned that his father had been a violent alcoholic who was either absent or, when he wasn’t, beat him. But he was not willing to face it – the one thing that would have helped him.
He hadn’t remembered anything we had done the day before because he was zoned out all the time. I felt like I was wasting my time.
At around 11:30 he asked “Do you want one of the women? You can have any of the women here, just ask”. I declined.
To my utter surprise, he got angry. He pounded a fist on the table. My espresso cup flew off. “What the fuck is it with you? You think you’re better than me? I say you can fuck any woman here, and you say no? Are you some kind of faggot?”
The memory is still vivid today. His face was red with alcohol and his eyes bulging from the cocaine. The coaching wasn’t going anywhere, we were a mismatch. He was too exhausted to retain anything we did. Because he was exhausted, he tried getting energy for our sessions from the cocaine. The cocaine wasn’t getting him energy so he tried getting angry.
I looked down and said nothing, frozen, uncomfortable. At 22 years of age I had never experienced anything like this and wasn’t sure how to handle it.
“I asked you a question, faggot. Are you a fucking faggot, you faggot?”
(He used the word “faggot” many, many times more, than I am recounting here. He was obsessed with the word. Later I’d hear him shouting it to crew
members and friends).
Spit was coming from his mouth as he spoke. This was the least pleasant student I had in my entire career.
Sex was the last thing on my mind when I looked at his “girls”. I felt like they needed medical attention asap. And yet this weirdo felt personally insulted that I didn’t want to have sex with them.
In that moment I remembered what I used to do with high-school bullies: Look them in the eye. So I raised my head and looked directly in his eyes without talking.
This was the right move. By looking in his eyes, I saw his weakness. I remembered him saying, just a moment ago “Do you think you’re better than me?” Just that saying revealed his weakness, his brokenness.
My fear was replaced with compassion. The moment I flowed it, the atmosphere changed. That’s right – you can diffuse dangerous situations by changing your energy. He eased up, gave me a pat on the back and said “just messing’ with you”. Then he left
without excusing himself, again hours early. I sat there for another hour until I was sure he wouldn’t return.
Back in my cabin I decided to quit. Not because of the outburst but because the guy was unable to focus and unwilling to do anything to address his issues.
***
“I’ll give you a full refund of your money. I just don’t think we’re getting anywhere”. I announced on Day 3.
His insecure-self came through instantly:
“You think I’m not good enough for your training? I thought we were doing well”.
The most dangerous men are not powerful men, they are insecure men. I felt like I always had to phrase things in a way as not to shake his fragile Ego.
Then the shocker:
“You’re not going anywhere. I booked you for the trip. We won’t reach land for another two weeks. You’re stuck here”.
I had no way of telling where we were other whether it really took two weeks to get back. We had only been traveling for 3 days. One of the evenings, they did dock on land, in the evening. But it was dark outside and no lights on the island, so I decided it was not the right time and place to make a run for the exit.
I wasn’t getting out of it. We pushed on with our sessions. He put away 10 bottles of beer between 9 and 12. It was incredible. Sometimes he added cocaine to offset the effects of alcohol. And sometimes he spontaneously drifted into sleep. One moment I was talking, the next I heard him snoring.
One evening, on the seventh day or so, I heard a bunch of men laughing and a woman screaming. The screaming went on for an hour.
Another time I was served some water and saw the “waitress” had scars from old knife cuts all over her arm.
And one time I saw our Meditation teacher slap one of the girls so hard she recoiled and bumped into the wall behind her. I don’t know what the reason was and never asked.
But every morning, the woman-beating, alcoholic, cocaine-addicted and bad-tempered zen-teacher came to me for some more coaching.
After 10 days I stepped off the yacht, acting all normal and friendly while saying my goodbye’s. But the moment I got out of their line of sight, I frowned and the sadness of what I had witnessed overcame me. My eyes watered. Every single person on board – the guy, his friends, the girls was enslaved in one way or another. Back home I took a week off of work to process all that had happened.
The takeaway was that I became more choosy who I worked with. As long as I worked under that company, I couldn’t choose. But the day would come, about 7 years later, that I could work
with who I want
when I want
where I want
as much as I want
on what I want.
The bad experience drove me to achieve this best of outcomes.
All that is why this was the 7th weirdest seminar of all time.
