Landmark Forum, anyone?

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I have done the Landmark Forum and it was one of the most powerful and enlightening experiences to date. Once I let go of my past and the story that I was a victim who had been excluded and discriminated against, the results were miraculous. I wrote about it in my blog - http://introspectrum.blog.com

I had forgotten about this thread. As it turned out I did indeed (stupidly) take the class, and all my fears (and more) were very justified. I'll explain more below, but in short, it was an absolutely awful experience.

First of all, if I recall correctly, the class is held over 3 days + one night session the next day. The first three days are roughly from 8AM-11PM - 15 hours a day in other words. And while there are "breaks", the entire thing is very clearly designed to mentally wear you down and leave you exhausted and vulnerable. There are group assignments given to you for every break, lunch and dinner included. Your expected to remain with other students during these breaks to complete the assignments. They basically get angry at you if you attempt to take a break at any other time, even to get up and walk across the room for a glass of water, or to use the bathroom. And when the class ends, you're given an assignment to do at home before the next day's class starts, which would take at least a couple of hours. In other words, in 9 hours or so before the end of one day's session and the start of the next, you're expected to go home, do your assignment, sleep, get up, get ready, eat breakfast, drive back to the class etc. Basically you end up not sleeping very much at all, immediately followed by another 15 hour day.

The class is basically lecture sessions with little projects/discussions that you're expected to do with other students. And from time to time they ask for students to get up and share their experiences and thoughts with the rest of the class. I should mention that the classroom is filled with "volunteers" of various sorts. The volunteers are there setting up before the class, and cleaning up after the class, and are there constantly in between. They're all supposedly volunteering, we're told, because they've all taken the course too and they all love the Landmark experience so much and they want to help other people experience it too. All I can say is that no rational person in my opinion would spend roughly 16 or 17 hours during one day free of charge volunteering for anything, which makes the presence of the volunteers suspect. It is the volunteers who basically are patrolling the room, preventing people from taking breaks, and basically confronting anyone who isn't behaving how they want them to behave.

Also, maybe one in every 15 students in the class is someone who has taken the class before and is "auditing" it or something like that. These guys seem to be there to raise their hands at the appropriate times and contribute to the discussions in such a way as to steer everyone towards what seems to be the ultimate goals - get everyone there to realize how wonderful and life changing the experience is, and even more importantly, to make sure everyone brings at least one or two people to the night session, which is held the day after the last of the three classes. The purpose of the night session is, simply put, to sign up your friends for future sessions (who will then in turn take the class and sign up their friends for future sessions, etc.). Oh, and I forgot to mention that during the three days they're also pressuring you to sign up for some of their more advanced and supposedly wonderful courses. I can't help but think the volunteers and the people auditing the class were those who had signed up for the more advanced courses.

I wish I could remember better the content of the course but a lot of it is talking about how we're all running "rackets", scamming everyone when none of us are very good people, etc. And a lot of it was playing on people's difficult relationships and resentments of their mothers, fathers, etc., the power of forgiving them for whatever they had done to you etc.

For me personally, I was basically brought to tears on at least a couple of occasions, first by one of the volunteers who decided I wasn't participating enough with the other students in the exercises and was upset that I never volunteered to stand up and share with the rest of the class. The second time, the instructor's assistant, who lead some of the lectures, decided to confront me too for some reason or another. Honestly under normal circumstances I'd have told both of them to "shove it" and not been the least bit bothered, but these both happened on the 3rd day when I was just so mentally exhausted I didn't have enough energy to defend myself. One of them actually threatened me that I wouldn't graduate the course, which honestly is about the biggest empty threat they could have made to me, but it registered and resonated with me at that time. Wisely I decided after the 3rd day not to go back the next day for the night session / bring your friends and sign them up session.

Another disturbing part was there were a some people there who worked for companies that paid for all of their employees to attend the landmark courses.

I got a lot out of the Landmark forum.

What daisy blue wrote- that was my experience.

Very positive.

Its not a cult.
It has competition from Lifespring and from MTL. Both, like landmark, seemed to be offshoots of Est, and theyre all good from what I gather and are similiar in a general way.

Being an aspie like myself doesnt make the experience any harder or less rewarding than it would be for anyone else.
Anyone can benifit from it.

But its like boot camp. Its not for the fainthearted. Its very intense.

I respectfully disagree. Read what I wrote about the "volunteers". Besides the fact that they're volunteering for 16 or 17 hours at a stretch (who does that?), I'd also point out that they are volunteering, for free, for a for-profit company. Again, its not a charity. Its a for-profit company. Who "volunteers" for a for-profit company? More properly, who volunteers for a for-profit company for 16-17 hours at a time of their own free will?

Very intense indeed. The thing is, there's no reason for it to be. If the class were purely informational, there's no need to do it in a marathon, bootcamp type situation where you're involved for 15 or 16 hours at a time with no break. Instead the information could be distributed over several shorter classes, spread over a longer time period. But instead, the class is all about the "experience", and for this they need to get you into a certain mental state, which they can only achieve with such intensity. And really, that mental state is exhausted and vulnerable, with low resistance to suggestion and persuasion.