It is only when the contradictory thoughts, talk, and images are removed that your desired results will manifest. The faster you remove your resistance, the faster your dreams can be realized.

– Jack Canfield

“Experience more joy, peace, and abundance by living in harmony with the vibrations of the universe”

JACK CANFIELD’S NO FAIL SUCCESS THEORY FAILS HIS CHILDREN & MARRIAGES 1&2~”CHICKEN SOUP” NEW AGE SELF HELP THEORIES DISPROVED BY CANFIELD’S FAMILY HISTORY 

My Training Approach | Jack Canfield

A LIFE WITHOUT A RELATIONSHIP WITH JESUS CHRIST 

Oran Canfield: My childhood in freefall

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:

Musician Oran Canflield's early memories are of growing up in a punk rock 

commune, juggling in a travelling circus and hating his father, a famous self-help 

'guru'. His parents don't remember it in quite the same way.

Oran Canfield writes that his birth in 1974 was presided over by 10 ­Buddhist monks who chanted throughout the 72-hour delivery. His ­parents, Timothy Leary-types who ran a holistic health centre in ­Massachusetts, dined on the placenta. For the first year of his life, as Canfield describes in Freefall, his memoir of growing up in a dysfunctional family, he was cared for by "a community of weird therapists, early self-help freaks and drug-experimenting hippies".

It set the pattern for the rest of his childhood, which was lived in the shadow of two parents more devoted, as Canfield tells it, to the human potential movement than to their children or each other. Their two boys, Oran and Kyle, were sent to live in a succession of progressive boarding schools, libertarian communes and even a travelling circus run by Wavy Gravy, the Grateful Dead's "official clown", ­famous for his tie-dyed false teeth; aged 14, ­Canfield took his first acid trip with Jerry ­Garcia's daughter.

Canfield's humorous chronicle of his countercultural upbringing is ­intercut with the story of his struggle with heroin addiction, which saw him confined to various rehabs for much of his 20s (he has been clean for eight years). I meet Canfield, now 35, in a cafe in ­Williamsburg, the hip section of Brooklyn to which he moved from San Francisco several years ago. He arrives, hunched over against the cold, ­looking world-weary. With pensive brown eyes, a furrowed brow and circumflex eyebrows, he reminds me of one of the anxious-looking clowns painted by Jean Dubuffet.

In conversation he is spiky and funny and at ease with his past. His memoir, for all its cynicism and bitterness, is devoid of self-pity; it is a black comedy influenced, he says, by David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, two writers who have also wittily documented their crazy childhoods and, in Burroughs' case, a journey to sobriety.

The book, perhaps predictably, ­upset his family, who remember things rather differently. His mother goes as far as describing it as "fiction". But Canfield says that writing it was "more cathartic than anything else I've done – much of the victimisation and blame that I felt throughout my life went away. A lot of the drug stuff I'd already processed and got through, but the childhood stuff was really hard to write – I'd never looked at it that closely."

He has just returned from a tour with Child Abuse, the noise band in which he plays the drums, and when I ask him if he ­considers himself to have been an abused child, he says, "I think that maybe I would have said yes to that before writing this book."

Canfield's father is Jack Canfield, the bestselling author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of self-help books and a motivational speaker who styles himself "America's No 1 Success Coach". In 1998, seven of Canfield Sr's titles were on the New York Times bestseller list simultaneously, earning him a place in the Guinness Book of Records. "At the time," Canfield says, laughing, "there was a great contra­diction between how he told other people to live their lives and how he ­interacted with his family."

Canfield was only one when his ­father left his pregnant mother for a masseuse, and he only saw him every few years after that. He demonises his father as a "lying, cheating, ­conniving, ­manipulative, inhuman son of a bitch". Canfield has read only a few pages of the first volume of Chicken Soup, which was dedicated to him, and says he was disgusted by the vacuous platitudes of its ­inspirational ­anecdotes. The working title of his memoir was Give Me Some Bread with that Chicken Soup; he describes it ­jokingly as Chicken Soup for the ­Misanthropic Soul.

After Jack left, Canfield says his mother took her two babies on the road in a camper van and spent the next two years in Central America waging a one-woman crusade against Nestlé baby formula. She returned to the US to set up a practice as a Gestalt therapist in Philadelphia, and at night would take her two small boys to watch her play jam sessions at a ­local bar. "My mum is a strong, intense woman who has always tried to expose Kyle and me to all the wild variation that America has to offer," Canfield says, taking a sip of coffee. "She's wilful and controlling, which is bad if you're her kids, but all my friends loved her."

She was the kind of mother who, when she found out her son had eaten a burger, made the manager at the local McDonald's pin up a picture of him and promise never to serve him again.

Struggling on her own, she sent the boys to a progressive community school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which consisted of a couple of trailers on a dirt lot. Lessons were voluntary and the seven-year-old Oran and his younger brother spent most days honing their trampolining skills, while the older pupils taught them how to steal golf carts and throw stones at cars. When they got into trouble with the police for smashing the windscreen of one passing vehicle, Canfield was sent to live with Fred, a former clown at Wavy Gravy's circus, where they spent the summers. Fred was now a born-again Christian and spoke in tongues. Canfield was expelled from the fundamentalist school to which Fred sent him, when it was discovered just before he was due to be beaten, that his mother had refused to sign the corporal punishment waiver – she had written "Do Not Hit My Son" in a cursive hand where the signature was supposed to be.

"Believe it or not," Canfield tells me, "I never felt abandoned by my mum. We got dropped off and lived with different people, but she was 110% involved, all the time … with every detail. Even if we spent a year without her, we still couldn't eat sugar or watch TV, eat dairy or meat – everything was planned out."

Some children dream of running away to the circus, but Oran's mother, who had always encouraged his ­juggling (in 1986 he came third at the International Juggling ­Convention), signed him up to one. Canfield moved into the Farm in San Francisco's ­Mission district, which he describes as "part circus rehearsal space, part punk-rock club, part apartment complex, part animal farm, part community garden, part preschool, and part anything else that could bring in a few extra bucks". He juggled five clubs atop a human pyramid, rode a 6ft-tall unicycle, was immersed in punk rock, and played a small part in a political commentary on the Reagan administration as told through the circus arts. The organisers got tired of having to talk to his mother by phone every day, with her constant demands, and he wasn't invited to join the circus on tour. But his time there, he says, was the ­happiest period of his life.

It was in his attempt to recreate it that he first became involved in drugs. He was a 23-year-old art-school dropout living in San Francisco, working as a ­piano restorer, drumming in a band called Optimist International, and trying to found a Farm-like events space in the converted storefront in which he and his friends were squatting. A Stanford University professor staged a performance piece there called ­Composition for Mood Swings that involved inviting an audience into the damp cellar, where a small pharmacy of illegal drugs was laid out on a table under a 120w bulb, and inviting them to choose their poison. Canfield chose heroin. He was soon a secret user, lying to and stealing from his friends, and funding his habit by selling the recording studio equipment that his father had given him a $10,000 loan to buy so that he could set up a business. "My mind wasn't involved," he explains of his addiction. "It's like muscle memory. These environmental cues happen and your body just goes and does what it needs to do." Heroin fuelled his self-loathing but it was also the only thing that seemed to soothe it. After eight years of AA, he now wonders whether he might have been more addicted to self-loathing than he was to heroin.

Ironically, it was drugs that brought his family back together. One day he fell out of his top bunk, knocked ­himself unconscious and came around three days later to find his parents, brother and 20 friends crammed into his hospital room ready to stage an intervention. His family drove him to a rehab facility, the first time that they had all been in a car together since a childhood trip to Disneyland. They dropped him at the clinic, locked the car doors and drove off as he chased them. "It was the worst day of my life up until that point," he says. Even though he had no money with him, he made it home by hiding in a train toilet and got high again, but he eventually agreed to seek help. He spent the next few years in and out of rehab clinics, none of which seemed to help him.

One of the difficulties was that the doctors all seemed to speak his ­father's language of self-help, which was anathema to him. "In a lot of ways it didn't seem like I had a chance ­because of that," he acknowledges. "It was very hard for me to get past all my criticism of that whole scene … even if it meant my life." At 16, Canfield had been ­invited to assist his father in one of his self-esteem seminars, during which he and the audience were given foam baseball bats and instructed to vent their rage. "I hate you, Jack. I hate you, Jack," Canfield shouted. He ridiculed his father's happy-clappy pop ­psychology, accusing him of being ­"essentially a drug dealer peddling temporary relief from a permanent problem". But, in the end, it was his father to whom he turned. He made the journey to his mansion and begged for help. In a phone conversation, Jack Canfield tells me how painful it was to see his son after he had been speed balling for weeks at a time. "He was in his late 20s," he says, sighing, "and he looked like he was 83 years old".

After two more spells in rehab, he made a last-ditch attempt to get clean, signing up to an expensive experimental treatment with ibogaine, a psychedelic that is still illegal in the US (he was test subject no 121). He travelled to the Bahamas to submit himself to the powerful mind-altering nightmares the drug induces. "It was horrible," he says, "but I came away from it realising that I'd been living the bad acid trip for the past four years". Ibogaine induces a huge serotonin boost, which numbs the addict's usual painful experience of withdrawal and, though he did relapse, Canfield says, "The drugs weren't doing what they were supposed to do. I was done." His father says he is proud of his son for staying clean: "The cure rate is only about 15-20% at best, so Oran beat the odds."

Canfield tells me that his relationship with his father "actually kind of started as a result of writing the book – he was overwhelmingly supportive, weirdly so". When I speak to Jack ­Canfield, he admits that he was hurt when he read the "sarcasm and ­cynicism" directed at him and his work, but that he could empathise with his son's point of view: "I was teaching things about love and relationships and going for your dreams and yet he wasn't that included in my life at that point."

To deal with the emotions that the book opened up, Jack Canfield says, the entire family have gone on a series of therapeutic family retreats. "All ­anger is really traumatised fear layered over hurt," he says. "There was a need to just be in a safe place where he could talk and I could listen."

Of his relationship with his mother, Canfield says, "It's not great right now. I knew my dad could take the criticism, and I know my mum can't." She threatened to sue him if he included her name in the book (he didn't), and she was horrified by his portrayal of her in it. "She tells me that I've ­defamed her, ruined her life, stuff like that. It's touchy," he adds with some understatement. Both Canfield and his father doubt that she will talk to me, but I phone anyway and she does, but demands: "My name is not to be used. There is a lawyer involved. I am a ­professional person." She ­explains, "I'm in a huge bind. I love my son and I support my son but I can't give ­credence to the book … What I've read of the book is so far beyond anything that I recollect." She made a list of all the factual inaccuracies. "I was a 24/7 mum. I don't know anything about Nestlé and baby food, I didn't play jazz piano … it's one story after the next. So it's very hard for me."

"The book is fiction," she claims. "Oran lived at home, except for the one year when we did the transition from Pennsylvania to California … it's false memory syndrome."

It is all very reminiscent of the ­debate (and court case) that ­surrounded Augusten Burroughs' ­Running With Scissors; his stepfamily, the children of an eccentric therapist, sued him for exaggerating and twisting the facts of their lives in damaging ways. Coincidentally, Canfield told me that he was born in the same town where Burroughs grew up and suspects that his parents knew this rogue ­analyst. In person, Canfield is persuasive, but when I listen to the tape of our conversation, I find myself wondering if he has elaborated on the truth for comic effect. I'm struck by how he talks about his book as if it were ­fiction – of ­"having empathy with all the ­characters", of how he realised in writing it that "really everyone in the story did the best they could with what they had". But then Canfield's mother denies that they've been ­engaged in family therapy, which both he and his father had talked about and it becomes hard to know what to believe.

The Canfields are caught in the strands of their competing narratives, and the book, though entertaining to those outside its orbit, has created a sticky web that has reunited, strained and entangled them. "Everyone's got their stories that they've been telling themselves over the years," Canfield says, "and to read someone else's ­version can be jarring."

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SEE BIOGRAPHY AT: http://www.orancanfield.com/bio.html; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
Oran Canfield was raised in Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Central America, New Mexico, Arizona, and the San Francisco Bay area. While attending the San Francisco Art Institute, Oran began his career as a drummer and became heavily involved in San Francisco's flourishing underground music and art communities. Along with his involvement as a drummer for numerous bands in the nineties, he also owned and operated a recording studio and cooperated a music venue featuring experimental and creative jazz music. He has also been a bike messenger, piano restorer, housecleaner, limo driver, and sex-toy maker. Early in 2001, after seven separate stints in rehab, he got clean after attending an experimental treatment center in the Caribbean islands. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and works as a musician and freelance art handler.

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SEE ALSO:

https://www.harpercollinsspeakersbureau.com/speaker/oran-canfield/

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/healthy-living/daddy-dearest-the-son-of-a-self-help-guru-reveals-all-1888522.html