Resurfacing
It was the quality of this attention that drew me into the conversation. Clean, free of projections, poised, and just there. I wanted what this lady had. I knew that. And she was a lady. Not just a girl, or a woman, but a lady.
She was promoting a weekend seminar I had never heard of, which the unusual name Resurfacing. She showed me the book that belonged to the seminar, full of hokey airbrushed new age images of bubbles floating through charmed universes of jumping dolphins.
I moved on, not being an impulse buyer, but found myself some weeks later looking up the name of the seminar. Annoyingly, I could not remember the lady's name, so ended up doing the seminar with two other, equally fascinating, hard to put my finger on women. These were women, though, more tough, a little bit more sales pressure to do what I considered at the time a fantastically expensive 7 day seminar called Avatar.
But in all three of these Avatars, as they called themselves, I recognized a clarity and presence I had never experienced before. Their attention was so focused, so relaxed, it seemed as though mental turmoil was something these people existed without.
As my own attention was becoming more focused with each hour of the deceptively simply Resurfacing exercises, I persuaded them to give me the name of their colleague, Gail Franko, the lady I had met during the new age fair.
Over the following weeks, I calculated whether I had the $2000 New Zealand dollars required for the Avatar course with Gail. Strangely, deciding to do the course didn't seem to be in question. I just knew that out of all the hokey New Age stuff that liberal New Zealanders were tossing around at the time, Avatar was my next step.
