FFS.

Consensual dining experience.

The Forum is a hard call. So _many_ people I know have gone through it. Some got immediate and fairly positive change.

In the end though, for most of them, whatever the effects were ultimately wore off and they've each gone back to something close to their default selves. Not all, I hasten to add.

An orientation meeting I went to...at the begging of a recent graduate...did give me a phrase I use often in my own life.

When you are trying to share your experience with someone, "Glow on them, don't sunburn them."

It's a great phrase that is sadly underused by the recent grads of the Forum!

I personally have no problem with brainwashing when it is consensual. Sadly, lots of folks who enter the Forum and its ilk don't have the filters to separate themselves from the process enough to benefit from it without being consumed by it.

eta: hilarious 'consensual' crosspost. I was typing while Hil was commenting, I swear.

Here's the Cafe Gratitude menu. (Or, one of them, anyway. They've got a bunch of locations in California, and I think they're opening a new one in Kansas City, or somewhere really unlikely-sounding like that. [link] )

I won't go to those restaurants anyway, because they're the ones where all the dishes have names like "I am empowered" or "I am enlightened," and you have to order by saying, "I am enlightened," and then the waiter responds, "You are enlightened."

That is really hysterical! And yeah, I wouldn't eat there either.

It looks like the menus at the locations other than the Berkeley one don't have all the "I am" things. I know they used to. I guess people in places other than Berkeley weren't as willing to play along.

Okay, who's opening the restaurant where the menu items are all, "I'm bitter" and "I'm disillusioned" and "I'm fucking peeved"?

I am...going to punch you in the face if you don't bring me some quinoa.

That would be the Roadkill Cafe. No kidding.

Didn't need to be said twice.

We were just talking about that in NOLA.