Finally, here is my email to Art Ticknor about the group. Most of what is covered here has also been covered above. I do not know what is indicated by the fact that Art has not replied either to this email or the phone message that I left him. Maybe he doesn’t want any part in this conflict. Or maybe, being in his seventies, he has health problems or other issues to deal with.
Hi Art:
We haven’t spoken since you left Pittsburgh. I hope you are doing well there in Florida.
I am writing to keep you posted about the self inquiry group as it continues here in Pittsburgh.
After you left, Ben and Corina met and decided to end your Self Inquiry group. I am sad that I was not invited to that meeting because I would have volunteered to continue the group and Ben could have transferred the Meetup to me instead of just canceling it. Because Ben canceled that Meetup group, we lost the names of over 70 members. Worse, after more than six months of emails with Meetup.com, they have refused to do an emailing to that list of people to tell them that the group is continuing.
After Ben and Corina decided to end your group, I continued to return to that empty meeting room every other Monday for the next two months. Midway through the summer, I re-launched the Meetup group and started having new members join me, teaching them the format of the Self Inquiry group to the best of my ability. I think that a lot of the reason why people joined the group was the informative write-up that I did about the methodology of Self Inquiry.
A month later, Corina emailed me about the Self Inquiry group and I told her that I had restarted it. Once Corina joined my Meetup, I let her facilitate, mostly because she had been involved with Self Inquiry longer than I had. When she joined my group I gave Corina access to my Meetup page, which she then decorated and posted with quotes. Corina also negotiated with the meeting space when your agreement for the Director’s Room ended. After that negotiation, we met in a third floor meeting space at the back of the Pennsylvania room. I was happy that Corina was helping with my group and I told her so.
Privately, it was clear that Corina was having problems. She has gained a lot of weight and was beginning to fight with people in the Self Inquiry meeting. Oddly, this seemed to get worse after she visited you and started bringing your box of books to the meetings. She got very strident and talked about “the right way to practice Self Inquiry,” specifically mentioning you and Richard Rose. Two meetings ago, she went after me in the meeting, and was so aggressive that I had to leave the room.
Retrospectively, I should have thrown her out of the group after that meeting, except that I didn’t want to create a conflict with her at that time. I still felt that the group was a small recreational activity, and didn’t recognize how seriously Corina took it. I just didn’t want to take the group that seriously. For me the group was a break from the serious things I needed to do during the week. When Corina blew up at me I had a flash from the film City Slickers, where Billy Crystal went on vacation with a group of his friends from the city to participate in a cattle drive. At one point he had roped a calf who was dragging him across the scrub grass of the desert, and as he was being dragged he was yelling, “I’m on vacation!”
None of the ten group members who saw Corina’s outburst that evening have ever returned to the group, except for her, myself, and one other long term member. I talked with three of these group members on the phone who specifically said that they would not meet with Corina again.
After that meeting, Corina said that we should have strict rules for the Self Inquiry meeting. I encouraged her to write these rules down, thinking it might reduce her stress. The next meeting was small and had a different group of people. It went okay, but again after the meeting, Corina went on about how having a big meeting wasn’t a good idea, saying that self inquiry wasn’t for everyone. Corina’s behavior felt like a soldier who had lost their chain of command and now was failing under the stress of the responsibility that they now felt.
I thought that I was reducing Corina’s stress by writing her an email that pointed out that the group was mine now, and not hers to be so stressed about. In response to my email, Corina lost it. She wrote a libelous email to every member of the Meetup group telling them that the group was disbanding because I, by name, had a lack of financial transparency. She then deleted all of the content from the Meetup group, re-titled the Meetup group, and deleted all of the group members. She also wrote a nasty letter about me to the hosting organization, and then she canceled our meeting space there.
I called and spoke with Ram who said that Corina was “just having a bad day.” Ram wants to meet with Corina and me at a coffee shop this week, but I see no point. I would not choose to have someone as unstable as Corina in my life for any reason. If Corina is an example of someone who practices strict Self Inquiry, then I want no part of it. Later, Corina wrote a nasty letter to Ram that, as he described, was full of four letter words, and was so was so insulting that in his words, “I could barely read to the end of it.” After Ram received that email he said, “Corina is really insane,” and conceded that there would be no point in meeting with her. In my phone conversation with Ram, he also said that Corina had offended a number of people at the most recent TAT conference that she attended.
On the specific point of me being not being transparent with funds, I did mention at one dinner that I was paying for the Meetup group fees entirely myself, to that date a total of $144. It was Corina who then suggested that members of the group contribute toward the Meetup costs, and she repeatedly told me to bring a collection box to each meeting for this purpose. I kept the money that I collected in an envelope in my wallet with a note about who had contributed each amount, a total of $43. My intent was to deposit this money into my account for payment of the Meetup group fees the next time they were due. I have not deposited this money, and still have this envelope in my wallet. I was openly collecting money for the Meetup fee, and many people saw me put the money in the envelope and record what I had collected. Corina’s comment as to my lack of financial transparency is unfounded.
I will now restart the group again, without Corina. It is sad to see her go, but she is too reactive for me to work with. I will find another meeting space if needed, and I will follow the question structure of a self inquiry group in the way that I feel it best serves the group members. I am sorry if this will not be as strict as Corina, or maybe you, would practice Self Inquiry, but I still feel that there is value in Richard Rose’s format.
Attached find the sequence of email correspondence between Corina, me, and the group. If Corina did not like the email that I sent her, she could have just emailed me back instead of involving all of the group members and the meeting space in our private conversation.
In all, I am unsure at this point of what to do. On the one hand, I am angry at Corina, and I would like an apology from her. On the other hand, I can only think that her actions are that of a person who is having difficulty, and I am concerned for her. Because I do not know what to do, I am reaching out to members of the TAT community, and to people who know Corina better than I do, to ask for help as to how to proceed.
Thank you in advance for your help. I look forward to hearing back.