Moscow Training Introduction

Lifespring in Russia: Making the Impossible Possible. An Interview with Candace Hanley, President and Executive Director of the Lifespring Foundation, by Valery S.

VS: What do you see as the purpose of the Lifespring training?

CANDACE HANLEY: The training enables a person to understand how life works. When you have to make a decision, you reach out in your mind for a past experience. The past provides you with a system of convictions, beliefs, and attachments which you have today; it creates your present and future. Lifespring helps a person to revise his past experience to see what was spurious and a hindrance and what was useful. You bail yourself out of the past. Then you can decide what is true for you and take concrete steps to get what you want. In other words, Lifespring shows you how to pass from the way you live today to the way you want to live.

VS: Unlike other types of trainings, Lifespring does not say a word about God or such things as life after death, reincarnation, or karma. Why? What is your attitude to these notions?

CH: Any action by a living person is reflected in somebody or something. I think everyone must become aware of it and assume full responsibility for what he/she is doing. I don't know if I will have a chance to come back to this world to rectify my behavior, so I must make the best of my stay here. I must do it immediately. Everyone must die some day. To resent death is to resent the opportunity life offers you. This breeds fear--fear of death and fear of age. To escape from your fear, you deceive yourself and start believing in life after death.

Lifespring doesn't speak about religion because it is not the aim of our program to impose convictions or dogmas on people. I, myself, am a religious person, though.

VS: During your training sessions, people usually cry as they recall episodes from their childhood, especially those connected with their parents. What is the need to stir old wounds?

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