Of course that alerted my interest in finding out about her.... so I landed on her FB page. At first, the page seemed to be kind of 'censored' (meaning: not fully public), so that I asked Shana if I could be her FB friend. Her response was positive, and all of a sudden I could read more postings which I had not seen before.

A few days later, she wrote me a private message asking me to tell her my story. Those in here who know me will be aware that I have no 'horror stories' to tell, as I was a young mother already, when I received K. and so the 'cup' of being an ashram premie passed me by gracefully. Just being a regular community member, my experiences were mostly positive - which was mostly due to the very pleasant and loving behaviours among each other. But this picture changed over the years, and what used to be the kind of a 'developed hippie scene' enriched by what we thought was a spiritual development slowly but surely deteriorated.

I had always been a kind of sceptic (generally) person to try and find out what's (probably) going on behind the scenes .... I had started out in my early premie days with M's claim that "Knowledge is completely free of charge" ... and that was my gimmick by which I would plug into the endeavour. "So let's see, what happens if I take him by his words"  was my approach.

Over the years I realized that the majority of premies developed into 'loners' who no longer were aware of the whole community, but mainly looking for their 'best position possible' to get as close as possible to the 'master'.  ... I became more and more critical and distanced myself from this development just as my former good friends (my original peer group) had imperceptibly distanced themselves from "a too close personal relationship" with me - one of the foot soldiers of DLM, and therefore, unimportant to them.

Etc. etc. I could go on and on, because in those 15 years, I "realized" (in the proper sense of the word) more and more that this just was no longer "my crowd", 'my kind of' people. It was one sad 'realization' after the other - and yet, I blamed the flaws in their individual characters instead the hierarchy which filtered these behaviours through, from top to bottom. It took me a looong time to understand that *the fish stinks from the head* and when I finally fully realized that this was really the case with what had become of the former idealistic DLM (with the help of all the expremies websites), my house of cards finally crashed for good. [And the constant flow of malibu guys and gals touring the communities for money they needed for *projects* (meaning ever more expensive consumer goods) were the point in time where I thought to myself: 'I think now they have lost it completely'. The peak being collecting money for "HIS" private plane! This was utterly appalling to me!]

I need to stop my story here, because it is really too late (early morning hours) and I need to go to bed for now.

I am so happy with myself that I allowed myself to go through this bumpy kind of ride through my "premie" years and to end up here ... in a community of people, who sooner or later had found the way back to their honesty towards themselves. Kudos to all of you!