There is a picnic bench at East Prairie School, somewhere in the suburbs of Chicago, and on it a group of girls who call themselves the Cleftos. They are not mean girls. They are the cool girls, which is a different thing, and on this particular day one of them walks over with a girl who is decidedly not cool and says, guess what, we brought you here because we want you in the club.

The uncool girl’s eyes light up. You could have handed her a million dollars and it would not have meant as much.

And then they tell her they were only joking. They would never let her in.

The thirteen-year-old sitting at the bench feels her heart break into pieces. But something else happens too, something she has never quite stopped describing in the decades since. She sees the universe open up like a matrix. She watches the rejected girl’s sadness travel outward to the furthest ends of creation. And she watches it boomerang straight back into the two girls who caused it, and fry the hell out of them.

That girl at the bench is Debra Poneman. She is now in her seventies, the founder of a seminar company that reached the world before the world had email, and she will tell you that everything she has taught since traces back to that bench. One person’s pain radiates into all of creation. And it returns to its source.

A street in Skokie full of kids

She wants you to know her childhood was happy. She says it almost as an apology, the way some people apologise for not having suffered enough to be interesting. Two loving parents. A small house in Skokie. A street where every door let out two or three more children, and the games of kick the can ran until someone’s mother stood on a porch and called a name into the dark.

She attended East Prairie School with the same children from kindergarten through eighth grade. Some of them are her friends still, sixty-seven years on. When one of her oldest friends lost her husband, Debra flew to Chicago without thinking twice. The Cleftos still gather when she comes to town.

Her former husband, Fred, once told her she should write a book called something like, even though I had a happy childhood, I could still become someone who changes how people live. It made her laugh. But it points at something true about her. The playground did not crush her by way of hardship. It opened her by way of clarity. She watched what cruelty does and made a vow on the spot, to the God of her understanding, that she would never knowingly do anything to hurt another person. She was thirteen. She has not kept it perfectly. She will tell you that herself, plainly, more than once. She has kept it well.

Years later she put the vision to a teacher. She had begun Transcendental Meditation in 1970, and by 1971 she was training to teach it, turning twenty-one during the course. The Beach Boys were in her small group. They sang her happy birthday. For the whole decade of the 1970s she taught TM full time and served as director of admissions at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, where she also took her degree. When she finally met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, she asked him whether it was true, what she had seen at thirteen. That one person’s pain radiates into all of creation. That it boomerangs back and embeds itself in whoever caused it.

He said yes.

The morning after the seminar that was not about money

By the end of the seventies, she had reached a private conclusion she states with characteristic bluntness. Woman does not live by mantra alone. She needed health insurance. She needed a car to insure. She did what seemed obvious from Fairfield, Iowa: she moved to Los Angeles, where everybody is rich, and she began selling investments because that looked like a fast way to money.

She was, by her own accounting, a complete failure. In a full year she sold exactly one investment, and the buyer was her father.

A friend at her financial firm, watching her struggle, invited her to a seminar at the Learning Annex billed as a money event. It was not a money event. It was a new-age gathering, and the man on stage was talking about vibration twenty years before Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret made the idea a publishing phenomenon. If you spend your life talking about how poor you are, he said, you vibrate with lack, and success will approach and bounce off you like a note off the wrong tuning fork. And here is the part that lodged in her: one of the surest ways to become prosperous is to help other people prosper. Mentor them. Connect them. Wish them well.

She went home. She slept. And the next thing is the whole hinge of her life.

“I woke up in the morning and I thought, I know what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. I’m going to teach what that guy is teaching, how to change your vibration so that you attract what you want.”

For six months she read. Napoleon Hill. Wallace Wattles. Florence Scovel Shinn. Catherine Ponder. She built her own seminar out of what she found and called it Yes to Success. The year was 1980.

Within three years it had spread to twelve major American cities, with representatives teaching in nine countries across four continents. She wants you to hold that against the calendar. This was a quarter of a century before the internet. The telephones were attached to walls by curly cords. Calling overseas meant shouting can you hear me into static. There was no fax machine. She built it on belief and curly cords, and it went around the world.

She has an explanation for how, and it is not about her cleverness. An idea arrives, she says, because you are the one meant to bring it into being. It is whispered into your ear, and if you do not move on it, it goes to someone who will.

When the path is unclear, that is the flow

Her second husband, Fred, telephoned her one day to say he had finally understood something that had nagged her for years, why the law of attraction never felt completely accurate. Fred called it the attraction of law: natural laws already running through the universe, already in current, and the work is to fall into them.

Katherine met that idea with a sentence of her own, from the territory she has been living in since she left a long corporate life. When the path is clear, she said, you are not in flow. When the path is unclear, that is when you are in flow. Debra took it gently, the way she takes most things, and turned it back toward silence.

Because the current is not loud. Source does not speak to a person running around like a chicken with its head cut off, or sitting in a corporate meeting spinning twenty plates. It speaks in quiet. This is why meditation, which she has now taught for fifty-three years, sits underneath everything else she does. Try to build a skyscraper of success without it and you are pouring a tower onto no foundation. The tall buildings go down deep first.

She is exact about her own practice, and unhurried in describing it. She rises, washes, drinks water with lemon, no coffee, no food before the morning sitting. A short stretch, eight or ten minutes of asanas. Then about fifteen minutes of breathwork, then twenty minutes of meditation, then a further ten of advanced practice she learned through the Art of Living Foundation. She teaches meditation now through that foundation and earns nothing from it. No fee. No toaster, as she puts it, if someone signs up.

She does not promise it makes life perfect, because she does not believe in perfection inside a relative world. What she describes instead is a slow loosening. There is a man in a purple shirt, and something about him makes you want to flee, and you do not know that the reason is a uncle who wore a shiny purple shirt and frightened you as a child. The impression is lodged in the nervous system, what the Sanskrit calls a samskara. Meditation, she says, does not require you to relive it or analyse it. The deep rest simply dissolves it. First the man in the purple shirt is unbearable. Then he is merely uncomfortable. Then there is nothing left in you for the purple shirt to strike against, and he is just a man in a shirt.

Maharishi gave her an image for it that she still hands on. An inflexible nervous system holds a hurt like a line carved in stone. You replay the moment you embarrassed yourself, and you cringe at it for years. After enough meditation, a fresh hurt lands more like a line drawn in sand, and a day’s wind and rain take it. Eventually it is a line on water. The impression is made and does not stay.

A nurse said she would be fine, and she saw the words

In 2014 she came home on a Sunday from a country far from home where she had not been careful about what she ate, sitting on ashram floors eating off banana leaves. She thought she was only dehydrated from the flight. By the following Saturday she was lying in bed thinking she could die there and nobody would know, because she lived alone.

She called her favourite healer. He looked in on her from a distance and told her she was in serious trouble and would help her only if she did exactly as he said. She agreed to anything. He told her to call 911 immediately. The paramedics had to break into her apartment. Her blood pressure was 52 over 28, a reading she says should have meant she was already gone. There was no time to reach the hospital she asked for, so they took her to a small one around the corner, and in the emergency room she began to die.

She knew it because she could see the room from two places at once. With her eyes open she watched the staff rush around her. With her eyes closed she watched the same scene from somewhere else entirely. And from that other vantage point she saw something she has spent the last decade telling people about.

A nurse fumbled an IV bag and dropped it on the gurney, and the others shot her a look. But Debra saw that in bending down, that nurse moved her head clear of a monitor, and another nurse gasped and made an adjustment that saved her life. There are no mistakes in the universe. She saw it, she says, not as a slogan but as a fact, every movement of every hand orchestrated by a divine light.

Then came the part that became her life’s second vow. A nurse put a hand on the shoulder of her weeping former husband, who had been called to her side, and said, don’t worry, she’s going to be fine. And Debra saw the words leave the nurse’s mouth. They were carried on a sparkling light, and they entered her body and began pulling her back toward life. Moments later the doctor looked at the monitors and said in an urgent voice, get that blood pressure up, we’re losing her. And those words came out too, but they came out as a grey-brown gunk that smelled like a swamp, and they pushed her back toward death.

She made a deal with God, which she says she is fond of doing.

“If you let me live, I promise I will tell everybody I can about the power of their words. Thou shalt decree a thing. She’s going to be fine. I started becoming fine. We’re losing her. I started dying again.”

She lived. She has since told that story to something like a hundred thousand people. The lesson she draws from it is hard and unsentimental. We are forever blaming our lives on a lousy partner, ungrateful children, a witch of a mother, an insecure boss. But the words we speak over a person, he’s an idiot, he’s a moron, he’s evil, do not merely describe them. They strengthen in that person the very thing we say we cannot stand. She quotes Jack Canfield: take full responsibility for your life and it becomes a blessing.

What she has actually built, and what she will not call the most important thing

Yes to Success is forty-six years old. It has run in twelve American cities and through representatives in nine countries on four continents. Tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, have gone through her programmes or heard her online; she says she does not count. She came within reach of her own daytime television talk show and walked away from it to be a full-time mother at home, to people’s horror, because she has always told her students to follow their hearts and saw no honest way around following her own.

There is a story she tells that holds the whole philosophy in miniature. At one of her earliest seminars in 1980, a college student came bouncing up afterward, declaring she would quit graduate school to be Debra’s assistant. The room was full of people who wanted Debra’s attention. She could have glanced past the eager girl. Instead she gave her her whole attention and listened to her ideas without judging her for being young. That girl was Marci Shimoff, who went on to sell twenty million Chicken Soup for the Soul books and to appear in The Secret. Fifteen years later, when Debra was at home raising her children, it was Marci who handed her the chance to write a bestseller of her own.

This is the engine of everything she teaches. The person in front of you, at any given moment, is the most important person in the world at that time. The only reason we scan the room for someone more useful, she says, is that we do not trust we live in a benevolent universe. Give a stranger your full presence and the universe brings you the person who signs your book.

And yet, asked what matters to her now, she does not lead with any of it. She thought, before the conversation even began, about what she would say if she were asked. She has the company, yes. But what is important to her in this season is being a good friend and a good mother. Two biological children, two more who lived with her for years, seventeen godchildren, several of them in Minneapolis having a hard time of it, one of them a security guard who calls at night from a ten-hour shift in thirty-below wind and says, Auntie Deb, I can’t do this anymore. She shows up. She pours love in. That is the whole of it.

“What’s important in my life right now is being a good friend and being a good mom.”

Watch your talk; the children are watching everything

Of all the moments in a long and visible life, the one she names as the greatest happened in a sentence she did not even speak. Her son, an NBA agent who fights for the pay owed to young athletes, was asked once whether he had learned his sense of justice from sitting in on his mother’s Yes to Success seminars. No, he said. He did not really know much about what his mother teaches. He learned it from watching how she and his father actually live.

She says she could die happy on that sentence. Then she turns it toward anyone reading who is raising a child or being watched by a younger person: your actions are so loud the words underneath them cannot be heard. The children arriving on the planet now see everything. Do not tell them to be one way and live another.

This is the quiet centre of her practice. Guard your words because they have dominion over life and death. Refuse to need to be right, because being right at the cost of another person’s feelings makes them wrong, and a week from now no one will remember who won. Stop being the discouragement committee for other people’s dreams. When a friend tells you what they hope to build, do not list the ways it could fail, because you have just planted those failures, and the mind builds what it is given.

There is a softer practice she shares too, born of an evening when she and her friend Mary Pat sat at lunch tearing apart a spiritual teacher who had been dishonest and cruel. They stopped themselves and made a game of it. Three good things. Each of them had to name three good things about the woman. By the third, they were in tears, because hurt people hurt people, and the wound underneath the cruelty had become visible. She does the same now with the people whose politics frighten her. There but for the grace of God. Had she grown up where they grew up, she would believe what they believe. You do not have to like a person’s positions. You can still love the divine spark in them and put your attention on whatever good you can find.

What her life is asking us to see

Go back to the playground. A girl watches another girl’s heart break and sees, in the same instant, two things most of us spend a lifetime refusing to believe. That what we do to one another does not stop at the edge of the moment, but travels out and comes back. And that the harm we cause lodges first and deepest in ourselves.

Everything that followed is a working-out of that single vision. The seminar built on the idea that helping others prosper is how you prosper. The years of silence underneath the success, the insistence that the skyscraper needs its foundation poured first. The vow on the emergency-room table to never again speak over anyone a word she would not wish made true. The son who learned justice not from a lecture but from a kitchen.

What she offers is a current you can step into, again and again. We live in a relative world, she says, and perfection is not on offer inside one. She puts her own record at about ninety-five per cent and laughs. It is not a destination but a current you can fall into on an ordinary morning before coffee, in a sentence held back, in the full attention given to a stranger who looks like nobody.

For anyone carrying the weight of the world’s darkness more than they can explain, she would say this: you feel it because you are the kind of person who feels it, and that same sensitivity is the reason you want to add something good. The darkness was not made by your noticing it. It was already there. What is being asked of you is only the next small thing: one cruel word held back before it can leave your mouth. Each time, she says, the universe says yes back to you.

And she keeps a promise made between life and death, decades ago, in a room that smelled of swamp and sparkled at the same time. She tells people their words have power. She watched it with her own inner eye.

This is the kind of leadership our moment requires.

It is the kind of leadership Sincerely was built to honour.

A few hours with Debra

This conversation runs a little over an hour and moves the way the best conversations do, looping back on itself and ending somewhere neither of them expected. There are near-death visions and playground heartbreaks and Beach Boys singing happy birthday, and underneath all of it a single steady invitation to slow down and watch what your words and your attention are doing in the world. Pour a cup of something. Sit with it.

There is no hurry. The library is always here.

Three things Debra said I am still sitting with

“The person standing in front of you at any given moment is always the most important person in the world at that time.”

“Now is the time to cling to your spiritual practices so that when the world shakes, you remain unshakable.”

“Every time we treat somebody as the most important person in the world, every time we don’t need to be right, we bring more light into the world.”

About Debra Poneman

Debra Poneman is the founder of Yes to Success, the seminar company she created in 1980 after a decade of teaching Transcendental Meditation and serving as director of admissions at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. Within three years her programmes had spread to twelve American cities and to representatives in nine countries across four continents, long before the internet existed. A bestselling author and a teacher of meditation for more than fifty years, she now teaches breath and meditation practices through the Art of Living Foundation and her AWAKE Method, having reached hundreds of thousands of people. She divides her time between San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and the people she loves.

Find Debra: yestosuccess.com · Art of Living Foundation · LinkedIn

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