Testimonials

SHERI Helped Me to Deal with Not Knowing Who I Am

Mike, 32

“I was always one of those people who played it safe, followed the crowd, and did what others expected of me, sometimes without even questioning it. I’ve been good at pleasing others, you might even say great, all of my life. But I never really felt satisfied or fulfilled. And until I discovered SHERI, I never really knew why. I joined the baseball team in high school because my dad expected it, even though I hated the game and really would have preferred learning how to play the guitar. But artsiness isn’t looked on very highly in the house I grew up in, it was all about sports. So I forced myself to be like my brothers and to be good at the sport because that’s what my dad wanted. I joined the frat my friends joined just to stay in my comfort zone, even though I later realized that a totally different fraternity would have been more my speed. I even went to law school just because that’s what everyone was doing and thought I should do -- but I secretly wanted to become a journalist. 

“By the time I was 31 all of this people-pleasing and herd thinking started causing some problems. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was suffering from depression and that caused me to binge-drink alcohol. I’d go to happy hour after work with my firm mates or my college buddies, all of us lawyers, and I’d be the last to leave. As my friends started getting married and having families, I realized I hadn’t even been able to sustain a solid relationship. Ever. Because I didn’t know myself. Shortly after law school in my mid-20s a girl I was seeing told me she couldn’t see me anymore. When I protested -- I thought we were doing great -- she told me that I was “inscrutable” and “unknowable.” That I should find someone with a really passive personality who could handle that. Another girl told me I was “mysterious,” before telling me she later realized that I wasn’t at all, but rather that, “there was no one there.” These critiques would sting but I couldn’t get too upset because I knew they were right. I was bent up. And, frankly, I would just go drink the shame and feelings of rejection away anyway so it really didn’t matter.

“At 31 my drinking was so bad it started causing trouble at work. I started to look older than my friends. I was no longer on the partner track and those who I thought were my peers, my equals, they started freezing me out socially. No more happy hour invites. My frat bros were “too busy” and meeting new people after 30 seemed impossible. I eventually went into a depression serious enough for those people in my life who hung in there to intervene. I started seeing a therapist and got back in the gym and that helped for a while but after a few months I was back where I started. And then in the middle of the night I started thinking to myself, “What if it’s not my brain that’s not wired right, but my spirit? What if there is something to spirituality?” I clearly wasn’t a therapy person. The gym was depressing, as out of shape as I was. So I started to look around online and got really into this term called consciousness. I’ve always thought of that as being simply cognitively self-aware. But it’s also a spiritual self-awareness. The Internet searches I started doing on my lunch break and at night eventually led me to SHERI. I immediately liked her. Unlike a lot of people into spiritual awakening, she wasn’t this hippie-ish, lofty or hoity-toity guru type. She wasn’t talking about crazy stuff. She was applying our own inner thoughts and feelings and traumas to real life. I gave the course a chance and now it’s like I’m a completely different person. People tell me I even look different. Which is funny: ever since I started meditating and dream-journaling and following my SHERI courses, I actually love going to the gym now. And women seem more gravitated toward me than ever. This works. I can’t emphasize how divergently this has changed my life. I left the firm and applied to graduate school where I’m going to be studying New Media at a great school in Southern California. I see myself writing and reporting, finally. And teaching myself to play guitar on the beach.”

SHERI Allowed Me to Forgive My Father

Shilya, 34

“When I was ten years-old, my father got a new job for a tech startup in Silicon Valley. My mother had a full-time job where we lived just outside Beijing and wasn’t willing to risk everything we had on a flaky American startup that might go bust in a year so they agreed to this arrangement where he would just come visit us every few months until the job eventually stabilized or did in fact go bust.

“That tech startup is now one of the biggest companies in the world. My father took a risk and it paid off. However, it didn’t have its intended effect on our family. He basically met another woman, she became pregnant, my mother filed for divorce, and my father essentially disappeared, leaving my brother and me as if we were something he’d shed from a former life. He paid for stuff and when I was accepted to NYU he agreed to cover my tuition. But even though I was now in the same country as my father, he never made an attempt to visit me in New York City, rarely called other than to talk to me about financial issues, and certainly never invited me to California. I have not even met my half-siblings.

“Between this, the pressure of school in a foreign country, and my mother’s inability to discuss anything related to one’s emotions or feelings, her own or anyone else’s, I started unraveling. My grades slipped and this warranted a rare call from my father, who threatened to stop contributing unless I got back on track. But I wasn’t doing drugs or skipping classes. I just wasn’t able to care about my future anymore. I lost interest in my major, Biology, which I knew was what my parents would expect. But the endless memorization bored me and the tedium of my curriculum made me space out in class. Sometimes I felt like I was meditating. In retrospect, I was…

“After my first semester midterms junior year, I decided that I didn’t want to live anymore. I knew my roommate took Xanax and that you weren’t supposed to mix that with alcohol. So I did exactly that. I took her whole newly refilled prescription and drank it with the tequila and vodka we had sitting around. I ended up being found on the bathroom floor by my roommate sometime later. I was unconscious and I had been vomiting so violently I was told I nearly choked. I was hospitalized for several weeks afterward. My father pulled me out of school -- at least, he pulled his money out of my school. And when I called my mother from the hospital she told me to leave, that I had contracted America’s neurosis disease.

“If it weren’t for my roommate I would not be here to tell this story. When I came home from the hospital, my enrollment hanging in the balance between my dean’s recommended leave of absence and my father’s cut financial cord, my roommate told me about a program someone she knew had ordered after a similar depressive episode. The irony of all of this is that my roommate’s actual name is Sheri. And she is the one who introduced me to her friend’s course, SHERI. I wasn’t particularly in the mood for what I considered self-help American mysticism, but Sheri reminded me that I’d just barely been found alive throwing up medication she needs for her anxiety and lying on the bathroom tile and that I no longer have the resources to graduate from college. ‘You need to try whatever might save you,’ Sheri said. I was intrigued by this other SHERI, so I went to the website and it started poking around. I found some of the techniques and concepts resonant with the kind of Eastern philosophy that, of all people, my father used to read and try to discuss with us when we were little. The inner-mind, the innate wisdom of the organic, untouched self. And yet it was so relatable. The testimonials of SHERI followers sounded so much like me that I found myself wishing they were friends of mine. So I took a chance and charged the course to the one lifeline I knew my father would never break, as his duty to me as his daughter, and charged it the bank account that housed and fed me. That money would still be there, even if he, the person, and the school, would not. I decided it would be worth eating Cup O’ Soup until my next monthly installment to get myself into a different headstate.

“It’s been four months and, while I’m nowhere near my ‘higher self,’ I’m certainly closer to that than I am to overdosing on a cold bathroom tile floor. My meditations are my favorite moments of the day, my breathing is calm and steady, and even though I’m still trying to figure out how to stay in school with little money and a part-time job at the library, I feel whole again. “I don’t know where this is going to take me, ultimately. But I’m a million ways better than I had been before. I realize now that my need to reconnect to my father was a set up. I set myself up. He does not want us and that is okay. Leaving my mom and traveling all the way to NYU, hoping that I could show him that I’m more like him than her, that I am my father’s daughter, was a futile exercise. It made me forget myself. I only saw myself in relation to him and measured my own self-worth by how much he might want me in his life. I even found myself in a pattern with new friends that mimicked this relationship. The more someone liked me, the less interested I became in them. The more aloof and unattainable a prospective friend appeared, the more I clamored for their attention.

“Needless to say, I became at home with rejection because I was self-rejecting. I learned all of this and so much more through connecting with my inner self, grounding, practicing lucid dreaming and dream journaling, all techniques I am learning in the SHERI course. Sometimes you have to almost die to feel alive. I recommend this course for anyone who recognizes any of the feelings and experiences that I’ve been through.”