CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
REBIRTHING ORGANIZATIONS

     In the years that I’ve been involved with Rebirthing, several Rebirthing organizations have come and gone.  Some of these have been national or international groups.  Others have been One Year Seminars that have become well-established and essentially perpetual.  A few are still sustained in their original form with the people who were originally involved.

     The first centralized Rebirthing organization that I learned of was Leonard Orr’s group called Rebirthers International.

     So far as I know, anyone involved with Rebirthing was free to join that organization upon payment of the annual membership fee, which was something in the nature of $100 a year.  The organization published an annual Rebirthers Directory that indicated what kind of Rebirth experience the person had had and what his status was.  Essentially, anyone who had done a Rebirth training with Leonard, Sondra, Phil, Steve Kamp, or any of the other earliest Rebirthers was listed as a “Rebirther.”  Anyone who customarily Rebirthed people for a fee outside of workshops was listed as a “Professional Rebirther.”  Anyone who conducted trainings and workshops or organized them was given an additional appropriate listing as a “Rebirth Trainer.”  Any member who presented himself for “Certification” and who was voted for unanimously by the others was “Certified.”

     After a couple of years, the organization was revamped because the “Certified” Rebirthers at the time argued that other requirements had to be met for people to join.  It was no longer enough to have taken a Rebirth training, especially only one.  Some of the requirements were relatively poetic, like watching the full moon all night.  Some of them involved changing a person’s diet to put him back into more childlike experiences, for example, drinking only milk for a week or going on a juice diet for a week.  Others dealt with requirements like: Must have Rebirthed a certain number of times.  Must have done a full Rebirth in cold water.  Must have done a full Rebirth in hot water.  Must have Rebirthed a certain number of people a certain number of times. 

     Oftentimes, the requirements seemed to me to be about as significant as the requirements in high school for joining a particular sorority or fraternity.  Maybe they got to the issue of how much trust in the universe a person experienced, but they seemed more just hurdles for a person to jump, proofs of willingness to put up with nonsense in order to belong.  I don’t honestly know if they had other merit.

     Eventually, people who wanted to be Rebirthers, plain or Certified, were given a set of approximately twenty requirements that they had to meet, and presumably they did their best to meet them.  No one checked up on them.  If anyone felt that a particular requirement was nonsense, he may not have met that requirement, although he may have said he did.  The number of Certified Rebirthers rose to approximately twenty.  It didn’t matter.  The whole business of Certification was just another opportunity to find out what old negatives were still being held on to.

     At the meeting when these “criteria of excellence” were first proposed, a lot of discussion about the validity of such requirements took place.  How can you possibly determine whether some particular Rebirther is “good” or “not good”?

     As I’ve said before, I have had children as young as four years old be in Rebirthing trainings and have had the people those children Rebirthed say that they had marvelous Rebirths with them, that they could feel their young Rebirther’s childlike innocence and purity.  Obviously children don’t have a lot of prior experience in life and they don’t know “from nothing” about psychology and personality difficulties, interactions, relationships, etc.  And they probably know even less about metaphysical and spiritual matters.

     So it appeared to me that the Certification requirements were interesting, but silly.  At the last Certification training attended by Leonard and all the old Certs, I missed out on being voted a “Certified Rebirther” because some brand new Rebirthers, people who had only Rebirthed once, wanted me to wear makeup and re-style my hair.  Even so, I thoroughly enjoyed being acclaimed “Certified Rebirth Training Leader.”  The only one, ever, so far as I know.

     My feeling at the time I first started Rebirthing was that I wanted to belong to Rebirth International.  I wanted to support Leonard and the rest of everybody in the Rebirthing community.  I saw Rebirth International’s Directory as a way to stay in touch with people that I met at jubilees and at workshops, and to keep track of who was doing what and where.  I didn’t see Rebirth International as a “professional” organization especially, just more a social group.

     When Leonard separated himself from the other Certs in the early 80s, Rebirth International began to become defunct.

     About 1985, Leonard Orr gave up running Rebirth International completely and turned it over to Phil Laut, but that lasted for only about a year, as I recall.  Soon thereafter, as Phil started working with Jim Leonard and developed his concepts of Vivation, Phil changed the named of Rebirth International Associated Vivation Professionals to which I belonged for years.  So far as I know, Rebirth International then ceased to exist until Leonard resurrected it a few years ago, primarily as a support group for Campbell Hot Springs, the place in the Sierras of Northern California Leonard called the Rebirth Training Center.  It’s hard to know how viable the organization still is, following Leonard’s removal from CHS first to Chico and then to Virginia.  Rebirth International hasn’t even issued an annual directory of members since 1990, although the organization still exists as of 1996 and I still send membership dues each year.

     About the time that Phil started his Vivation organization, Sondra Ray started a directory of Rebirthers who had taken her Loving Relationships Training and had worked with Rebirth Training trainers she approved of and had dealt with.  These people were called “LRT Rebirthers.” (Although I was grandmothered in on the original list, I have in fact, received almost no referrals from being listed, and I don’t even know if I’m still listed on that roster.)

     In late 1995, the LRT was disbanded.  Shortly after, a meeting was called by Leonard, inviting East Coast Rebirthers to come to his place in Staunton, Virginia, to meet with Bob and Mallie Mandel and other LRT people to consider a restructured organization combining both groups.  I haven’t yet heard what happened (although I was in Falls Church, Virginia, at the time, a ten-inch snowfall kept me from driving the 300 miles to the meeting). 

     I have always felt bad that there has been such a schism here in the United States.  A lot seemed to have to do with social status.  To me it seemed that the Rebirthers who belonged to Leonard’s organization were generally not as young, beautiful, wealthy, or dynamic as the people who were affiliated with the LRT.  And the people who branched off into the AVP were regarded as another thing, apart completely, not “real” Rebirthers, in fact.  So I hope a united organization soon comes about.

     Whenever I have completed a Rebirthing training, I have suggested to the people who have attended that they agree to meet again a month later to form a One Year Seminar.  They can thus continue to meet each month as a group to consider a specific topic and to Rebirth each other and continue to make progress on what is referred to in New Age talk as “their process.”  Several One Year Seminars have been very stable, lasting much longer than the larger, centralized organizations, probably because they all formed from people already bonded by a specific group training.  Many of the OYS’s that were started as long ago as thirteen years ago are still intact, meeting regularly and presumably benefitting the members involved.  Some of these organizations are what I call inclusive and some of them are what I call exclusive.  In most cases they tend to reflect the prevailing personality of the countries in which they were formed.

     For example, in Sweden, there are lots of requirements which are very carefully monitored where people must be observed and Rebirthed by their supervisors over an extended period of time—two years is my recollection—and are only allowed to become members when they finally win the approval of these other people sitting in judgment over them.  That kind of exclusive approach is moderated somewhat for the British Rebirth Society.  Although it has certain kinds of requirements and does involve having the petitioners achieve the approval of its members for entrance, I don’t have the sense that the BRS is trying to keep otherwise qualified people from calling themselves Rebirthers.  I just see it as a manifestation of the typically British attitude that certain qualifications have to be met in order for a person to be regarded as a particular kind of individual.  OYS’s that exist in other countries that I’ve visited, in Australia, New Zealand, or Spain, for example, all have varying requirements.

     Fundamentally, my predominant feeling with regard to most exclusive rosters or groups is that they are control organizations, based on ideas of dominance and submission: Certain people are in charge and restrict the practice of Rebirthing to people that they approve of.  I believe that some variation on the theme of scarcity consciousness underlies all these exclusive organizations.

     In Los Angeles, especially during the first half dozen years that I was involved with Rebirthing, I made several attempts to create OYS’s from the people attending a weekend training.  Possibly because I didn’t require a year’s membership fee to be paid in advance, they all fell apart after the second meeting.

     A few years ago, a friend of mine and myself finally succeeded in organizing two OYS’s that lasted the full year.  We convinced Leonard to travel to Los Angeles once a month to lead a One Year Seminar which we organized for him.  The first group had about fifty people at its first meeting and the second had about fifteen.  However, only the three of us who were present at the first meeting made each of the meetings and actually attended the last meeting with Leonard at the close of the year.  Further, even we three had no desire to contract with Leonard for another year.  Since then, there hasn’t been a Los Angeles OYS.

     I have always acknowledged the material, practical value of some kind of central registration of people who are involved with Rebirthing, so that other individuals who are seeking to make a connection into Rebirthing can find them.

     To that end, I formed an organization about fifteen years ago, which I call Rebirth Associates of Los Angeles.  That organization is listed in the phone book, both as a separate organization and also as a referral organization for psychological services, and at least one person a week calls to ask about Rebirthing as a result of seeing that listing in the general pages of the phone book.  At one particular time, many people belonged to Rebirth Associates, and when queries were made for Rebirthers in a particular area, the referral was made to whichever Rebirther was closest.  Essentially its primary purpose was just to provide a rubric under which people could locate Rebirthers in Los Angeles.

     I’ve twice requested that the companies that turn out the phone directories have a separate listing for Rebirthers, but unfortunately, even in the megalopolis of Los Angeles, there are not enough Rebirthers making enough money from doing Rebirthing to pay the bill to have a separate listing in the phone book as Rebirthers.  And so, that separate listing has yet to exist.

     Since 1978, Rebirth Associates of Los Angeles has held a meeting every Monday evening from 7:00 P.M. to 9:00 P.M.  Anyone can attend.  The meeting enables people to ask questions about Rebirthing, share reports of their own experiences with Rebirthing, and generally explore their relationships with Rebirthing and with Babaji.  For periods during most of the past several years, an Aarti to Babaji has preceded the meeting, or else alternate Monday evenings have been the Aarti service only, with no general discussion about Rebirthing at all.

     I’m sure there are many ways of dealing with the whole thing, but what I have wanted to do has been to provide a space where Rebirthers and their clients and their friends could come together and talk about Rebirthing, regularly, without anyone having to rent a hall to do it or put out expensive flyers, etc.

     So, my attitude about these informal evening Rebirth seminars has been pretty consistently to donate the service, gratis.  When people have asked to give a donation, I’ve told them I’m always open to receiving money, but I’ve generally shied away from soliciting.

     By contrast, Leonard believes that one should always charge for the Rebirth seminar, and yet not make paying for it a condition of attendance.

     If a Rebirthing Center existed, perhaps such regular introduction seminars would be profitable.  But Rebirthing Centers, like OYS’s, have also been transient and short-lived, at least in Los Angeles.

     One of the aims of several Rebirthing groups here in Los Angeles, was to provide a genuine Rebirth center, a place where people could come and, bringing or meeting their clients, could even Rebirth them, and also a place where trainings could be held.

     In the absence of any significant endowment, unfortunately, every time such a center has been rented and renovated and established, it has fallen apart for lack of funds and for lack of interest—usually within a matter of one or two months.  Rebirthers in Los Angeles that I have spoken with all want to continue to Rebirth people in the space in their homes that they have already established as a Rebirthing space.  They haven’t wanted to drive across town.  They haven’t wanted to pay extra rent for something they didn’t really believe would benefit them.

     In other parts of the world, Rebirthing Centers have worked out more successfully.

     I know of one successful center in London that operated as a Rebirthing center for quite a while, and I also know of one in Sydney, Australia, and one in New York City.  But, by and large, the same problem seems to be present wherever this approach has been tried.  There hasn’t been sufficient capitalization to ensure staying in business long enough to start being automatically thought of as the Rebirth Center by the community of local Rebirthers.

     Leonard originally had his training center up at Campbell Hot Springs in the center of the High Sierras in Northern California.  He claimed that there was at least one Rebirth training going on at Campbell Hot Springs every week of the year, and that anyone who wanted to learn Rebirthing could go there anytime and would find a training going on, even if only for him.

     When I first experienced CHS, it had been running on that basis for about a year and a half, and it continued to run on that basis for many more years of its existence.  But it should be mentioned that during the coldest months, the trainings often consisted of only the two or three people who happened to be spending the winter in residence up at CHS.  Until there was a great deal of renovation in the mid-80s, the lodge at CHS was prohibitively cold during the freezing weather.  It never became a real Rebirthing “university” people attended year round for advance scheduled instruction.

     There is a Rebirthing center in Poland which seeks to become essentially such a university, such a training center, such a Rebirthing Center, but as yet it also is not off of the ground.

     Symbolically, I find all this chaotic disorganization ideal.  I think that the process of Rebirthing is the essence of individuation and individual empowerment.  So it’s almost internally inconsistent that a person involved with Rebirthing would also be interested in subordinating his behavior to the control of someone else who presumes to know more about being a powerful, self-actualized individual.  That’s poppycock.  I don’t think that a restrictive, exclusive organization of Rebirthers can possibly be vital, because the more fully and freely each member of such an organization breathes, the more fully an individual each person becomes, and the more free of the dominance of other people’s expectations and requirements he also becomes.  Just as anarchists can’t form an International Anarchy Society that has regular meetings, I can’t see Rebirthers forming societies to do anything other than support each other and publicize the whole process of Rebirthing.

     As mentioned earlier, I hold a Rebirth seminar at my home every Monday, and if I’m in Los Angeles, I’m always present.  Many times, only one other person shows up to discuss Rebirthing.  Often two or three old friends show up and we spend the evening mulling over things that we have talked about dozens of times previously, then we get in the hot tub for more talk and relaxation.

     It really doesn’t matter.

     After all, Rebirthing is a technique for perfecting oneself.  It doesn’t exist to turn someone into another person who’s important or wealthy or idolized or acclaimed or whatever.

     So I, myself, am not terribly disappointed that I don’t belong to a strong Rebirth organization which has all kinds of qualifications for membership and makes certain that everybody tows the line and takes a yearly updated training, etc.  I already belong to the American Psychological Association, which has all sorts of such rules and regulations.  And I already am licensed by the State of California with its continually revised requirements for Continuing Education in order to renew biannual licensure.  I have in the past belonged to other organizations.  Mostly, I’ve maintained such memberships only to meet licensing and insurance requirements, so I may bill my time.

     I’d much prefer that Rebirthing establishes a central organization that allows everyone who is interested in Rebirthing to be represented in a directory, and that provides some form of networking and some form of publicity.  To date, no such organization has emerged, but that’s not to say that such a group won’t have materialized even before the time that you read these words.

     From my point of view, anyone who wants to become a Rebirther only needs to practice the breathing and the use of affirmations to become better and better and better as a Rebirther, as well as, of course, better and better and better as a person.  Such a person probably wants to associate with other like-minded people.  So it’s wholesome and useful for such a person to “belong,” to join a weekend training or a week-long training every few months, to meet with colleagues in a One Year Seminar, and to set aside quality time for Rebirthing.  I think it is a good thing that all such people can be recognized by the public at large as being such people, so I support a central organization as a referral service.  But not on any selective or exclusive basis whatsoever.  I would love to see a regular newsletter, preferably monthly, that contains contributions from all and any people who are interested in making such contributions.  Anyone who wants to say whatever it is he wants to say about Rebirthing ought to have a forum or an arena in which to do that and ought to have a guaranteed audience.  But, all of that takes people who are willing to spend their time and money taking care of the Rebirthing community.  Up to now, most of the whole Rebirthing movement has essentially been running on a shoestring, and not enlarging itself.  The British Rebirth Society turns out an excellent journal, called “Breathe,” four times a year that has been appearing for 66 issues!  I recommend that everyone reading this join immediately so Breathe can continue its excellence.

     I occasionally still entertain visions of setting up an organization here in Los Angeles, run on a volunteer basis, that people would tithe to, giving it its material foundations.  Churches do this, and do it very well.  Charities do this, and, again, do it very well.  Rebirthing hasn’t done it, and when it has tried to do it, it hasn’t done it very well.  

     Whatever suggestions you have about how to form such an organization will be cheerfully received by me, and I’ll be happy to help us network.  In addition to welcoming your suggestions and plans, I’m also open to safeguarding and receiving vast amounts of material support to be used to run such a Rebirthing center here in Los Angeles.  I’d be more than happy to work with other people to get such a center established and functioning here in Los Angeles.

     Rebirthing is such a jewel, such a precious jewel in everybody’s life!  What a shame that we haven’t yet provided a setting for it, a secure foundation that would help it to flourish.

     At my age, I’m no longer especially interested in being the instigator of such a nationwide group.  But I make this public pledge: I’m am quite agreeable to tithe a full ten percent of my annual income into an escrow account awaiting the amassment of a given specific threshold amount of money needed to start and maintain such a place by an organization here in Los Angeles that fulfills the aims that I’ve just spoken of.  Until a sufficiency has been pledged and paid, my money will just sit, accumulating interest, safely. 

     My guess is that such an organization will only proceed as there becomes an increasing number of older, stable people involved with Rebirthing.  Young people who are still knocking themselves out to earn a living, to keep themselves alive, seem to have trouble when it comes to sharing.  Their natural mode is exhibitionist and competitive, especially about sex and money and power. 

     So, in any case, here’s my open invitation to anybody out there who wants to support a Los Angeles Rebirther center.  I propose that it will be run on a business-like basis and will be a not-for-profit organization.  Aside from paid clerical work and printing, it will be maintained through voluntary labors of love by members of the Rebirthing community itself.  I’m not at all interested in throwing my money down the drain to provide space for a bunch of flakes to hang out, using Rebirthing to save themselves from having to learn how to earn an honest living.  The people involved must be secure, stable business people.