#9 in the Series of my 10 weirdest Seminars
Cow Dung
The early summer of 2001. Me and an esteemed colleague envisioned the most beautiful seminar location, at a place called King’s Lake (Koenigssee) in southern Germany (image below). A high-level course in Manifesting preferred outcomes. It was here I spectacularly failed to manifest my preferred outcome.
I arrived the evening before to prepare the room for 20 attendees. That’s when I discovered we didn’t have a room.
The location was so desirable I had booked a year in advance. I’d booked for the 5/6/2000. For an American that’s the 6th of May. But in Germany it’s the other way around and means the 5th of June. By an error in date, the room was not available.
Everyone was in excited expectation for a 4 day event, while I was desperately trying to retain a room last minute.
I spent the rest of the evening calling any Hotel I could find. All were fully booked. Pacing around outdoors, smoking like a chimney (yeah, I used to smoke), I walked past a house that said “Vacany” and “B&B”. It was 9pm but I knocked on the door. A grumpy guy in his pyjamas and frazzled gray hair opened. I explained the situation.
He was skeptical, ready to close the door. “What kind of seminar is this?” He didn’t strike me as a broad-minded fellow, so I claimed it was “Business Training”. – “And what industry are you in?” – I said “I’m coaching people from many industries”.
He said “Well, I don’t have a room that can hold 30 people”. I was still standing outside his door. It started raining.
“Are you sure? Can I have a look?” – “Well, I guess I could give you the dining room. But then I’d have to send other guests home. How much are you willing to pay?” Sensing my urgency he got dollar-eyes and went on to fleece me.
It was a small family dining room, suitable for about 10. How could we fit 30 people in here? No matter. It was getting late and I needed the room.
“Can I remove all the tables and chairs?” – “Hmm, I guess. But not tonight, our children are sleeping”.
The cheesy, antiquated room hosted corner benches with flowered upholstery that couldn’t be removed. It felt grandma-like, but not in a good, homey way, rather in an outmoded, dated way. The curtains looked worn. The wallpaper was a red-white checkered pattern. Nobody in their right mind should do a seminar surrounded by LSD-wallpaper. I felt embarrassed to present this room to my students. The entire back-wall was made of cheap wood, like in 1970s trailer-homes. It had dark spots, presumably from years of indoor smoking. There was a smell of cold smoke and I’d have to air out a lot in the morning. The guy wanted all money in advance so I drove to a bank an hour far away and arrived back at his place past 11 pm.
After securing the place, I looked for a room for me. None were available. One luxury Hotel asked $7000 a night. I opted for sleeping in the backseat of my car. What a great foundation for teaching on “Manifesting preferred outcomes”. 😉
I never once thought about using the manifesting techniques I was teaching. In those days, when the going got rough, I forgot them. That means they weren’t yet subconscious, second nature. I was teaching from the mind not from the heart. Most “spiritual teachers” are like that – they have no practical experience and just blather on without walking the talk. Mind-based teachers are profoundly boring. Teachers speaking from the heart, are interesting. The event helped me realize and change my ways.
Next morning I sent text messages informing everyone of a change in address.
I had advertised the seminar with pictures of a modern, friendly space with large glass windows and a view of the lake. Absolutely gorgeous! There were even three rooms available with views of the stars at night. The place had just the sound-system I wanted and at the push of a button I could open or close curtains and windows.
Instead we got a smelly private dining room with creepy wallpaper and stained upholstery that was several miles away from the lake. I would need to act at the very top of my game to distract from it. Leisurely walks at the lake while meditating on the majestic vista were not manifesting. Instead, we were actually surrounded by cow dung.
The seminar was to begin at 9 am. At 8 am I was at the door, ready to bring in equipment. But the guy refused to open before 8:30 because his family was using the room for breakfast. There were breadcrumbs, nutella chocolate and marmalade that I had to handpick from the floor before letting my students in.
Soon, 30 attendees crowded into the small dining room. “Can we get any coffee around here?” one was saying. I hadn’t even accounted for water and coffee yet, much less snacks.
“The seminar hasn’t even started and you already need coffee?” I snapped. Very impolite. The stress was getting to me.
My colleague had a laughing fit when he saw the room. He mocked me about it for years after. The biggest cringe moment was when a woman asked
“When will we see the seminar room? Is a bus picking us up, or…?”
Everyone was wondering about that. This place looked nothing like the brochures I had printed on glossy paper and spread around. Good thing this was before the days of online reviews.
Once everyone calmed down I explained what had happened. A wave of disappointment and puzzlement swept through the air. My colleague wasn’t helping when he, in front of everybody, blurted out laughing “Are you serious? We can’t stay in here!”.
But we did. Some sat on the benches, some on chairs but most sat on the floor so that there was enough space. People who visit these kind of events are extremely good-willed folks and I was lucky to have them. I probably would have stepped out on such a mess, but not one of them stepped out on me.
Usually negative things stack up on each other, they rarely come alone. I had never co-hosted an event. The type of students my colleague attracted were of a vastly different mindset than the ones I attracted.
To put it mildly, he attracted people who were physically fit but mentally unfit. His clients were mainly athletes.
My colleague had a military-style motivational thing. “Blood, sweat and tears is what gets you success!” Back then I had a purely “law of attraction” type teaching, which is the exact opposite. We kept contradicting each other and students were confused. “But Fred said…”, “But Richard said…”. I tried handling the contradictions with finesse, but my colleague wasn’t making it easy. I said “Well, the two philosophies are simply different levels of consciousness. If you’re in the muck you need blood, sweat and tears. But once you go higher, it’s more about magnetically attracting”. This is actually true but my colleague laughed out loud. Pointing at me he said
“Get a load of this guy! He is SO TRICKY! Sly as a fox! A master of manipulation!” It went like this the entire four days and would be the last time I worked with him.
We had people unknowingly stepping in cow dung and bringing the smell into the room until they washed their boots in the faucet. We had the parents of one of Richard’s attendees call me on my private phone, threatening me. “Our son is acting like a smartass ever since attending your thing. We hold you responsible”.
The room had no door, so family members (and it was a big family) pass by the room all day on their way in and out of the house. The younger ones sometimes lurked there. The host’s wife secretly listened in, standing right beside the door-frame. We saw her skirt poking out. It was so strange. We had my students complaining about Richard and Richard’s students complaining about Fred. There was only one very small restroom. An overweight student could barely fit in. There was nobody cleaning it, so me and my colleague had to rid it of cow dung in the sink and sometimes worse in the toilet. We took turns teaching so that we could attend to errands such as toilet cleaning and coffee buying. My days of glamorous red carpet seminars that I got flown to on private jets were still a decade far away.
Late afternoon on Day 2, my colleague had sex with one of my students. They were shamelessly pounding away in an adjacent room, to the complete surprise of me, the students and the host of the house. Unfortunately we could all hear it from the seminar room and knew it was them. It was violently loud. Both were grunting and screaming to a point I had to raise my voice to make my teachings heard. In my 30 years of seminars this never happened before or after. A student remarked “Your friend is experiencing his preferred outcome”. Some people chuckled, others were dead silent.
He returned to the seminar room with flushed cheeks. The student returned a short time later, still arranging her hair. She announced she had been down the road to make a phone call, even though we all knew otherwise. The room was awkwardly silent and Richard asked “What’s wrong?”. I quickly introduced another exercise to distract from the situation. The seminar had begun with me distracting from awkward outcomes and I was still at it. Like begets like.
At lunch break I told him that sleeping with students is an abuse of his position as a teacher. Even worse, everyone heard it.
The host of the house also heard it. The same evening the host threatened to kick us out. “What kind of seminar are you doing down there? Are you making porn movies?” It took come convincing to let us stay.
When I confronted Richard, he said “So what? Sex is natural. It’s reality. It’s also creation. Sex is reality creation” he said mockingly. “Come on Fred, I didn’t know you’re so uptight”.
Henceforth the student was distracted from the course and enamored by Richard. But by the 3rd Day, Richard was already flirting with another one of my students, much to the upset of his first flirt. A jealousy drama between the two students developed that, according to student reports, culminated in a fistfight that evening. They were spread across a couple of Hotels but the two women happened to be in the same Hotel.
By now he already had two women derailed from the course. It was all unbecoming of a teacher complaints started rolling in. The first instance could be excused as two people meeting and falling for each other. But the second instance revealed that Richard wasn’t showing up in the role of a teacher – much less a teacher of higher-mind. Instead of reviewing the course materials or taking peaceful walks at the lake, people were gossiping about these events all evening.
Even more strangely, on the 4th Day Richard used his position as teacher to lecture our students about their hypocrisy regarding sex. It was a cringe moment because everyone in the room had enough knowledge of basic psychology to know this wasn’t part of his course curriculum. I interrupted his rant to move on to other material.
Also on Day 3 one of the students asked “When are we going to the lake? Your ads were showing a lot of the lake but we haven’t seen it”. The question irked me because it assumed ignorance of the explanation I had given on the first day. “You can go to the lake on your own accord before or after our seminar times”. They didn’t accept that as an answer.
So in the late afternoon we did car-sharing and all went to the lake. Before I could organize the group they were all off on their own. Some booked boat rides, others took walks. One swam, some were sunbathing. Richard my esteemed colleague was sunbathing and I was surprised he was keeping his shorts on.
I couldn’t blame them for going their own ways, it was more beautiful here than in that disgusting room. But since I hadn’t officially called off the seminar some asked when we would continue. They complained that their seminar-time had been cut short and insisted I return to the room with them for some more exercises. So I reluctantly took only three students back to the room and did exercises with them. The whole four days was like this, a litany of complaints and strange problems most of which I never experienced in any other seminar before or after.
When people visit my courses I usually hear from them years, even decades later. But I never heard from anyone in this group again 😉
All of this is why this was the 9th weirdest Seminar of all time.
