Chapter 8: The Seminar

Lydia held her seminar on Saturday afternoon in a hotel ballroom on Michigan Avenue.

The sign at the door said Facing Fear: Reclaim Your Calm.

Two hundred people sat in rows of gold chairs, and most of them were women.

I bought a ticket at the door with my own card.

Sam sat next to me in a plain jacket with his hands on his knees.

"You don't have to do this," he said.

"I do."

"Then I'll sit here and look ordinary."

"You can't look ordinary," I said. "You're six-foot-two."

He almost smiled.

The lights dimmed and Lydia walked onto the stage in a cream dress, with a headset microphone and no notes.

The room went quiet for her.

"Fear is not your enemy," she said. "Avoiding it is."

She talked for twenty minutes about breath and trauma and the body.

She was good at it. That was the horrible part.

She spoke slowly, and she made eye contact, and she smiled at the back row.

"I had a client recently," she said. "A brilliant woman. Successful. She suffered from a respiratory fear response after a traumatic event."

I felt Sam's hand move on his knee.

"Every time she smelled smoke, her body told her she was dying. And everyone around her, out of love, reinforced it."

Heads nodded in the rows around me.

"Do you know what finally helped her? Someone had the courage to say: you are safe. You can face this."

A woman in front of us wiped her eyes.

"She isn't well yet," Lydia said softly. "But she will be."

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