The Landmark Forum: Day 3 (Part V)

(sorry for the delay in publishing this sucker. if you missed my earlier essays on my Landmark experience, you can find them here; read from the bottom.)

“life is meaningless and we are meaning-making machines.” this is the crux of the Landmark Forum, the conclusion we arrived at after three grueling days of instruction. everything had led up to this, the big transformative lecture, given sunday afternoon at around 4pm, the one that would make us “pop” into our new and improved selves whose futures were brighter than before.

life is meaningless and we are meaning-making machines.

we are all going to be dead one day. you can’t take anything with you. there is no inherent meaning in anything. there are only experiences, which we ruin with our interpretations of them. we project our views onto everything and everyone around us, views whose only function is to reinforce our belief that we are right.

we need our meanings to live, to make sense of the world, to make sense of ourselves, to put everything in a neatly labeled box. we put ourselves in that box, too — with fixed ideas about our strengths, weaknesses and limitations, ideas that are artificial and borne of trauma.

the weekend had been spent examining that trauma and the ideas it has created, ideas that have cemented themselves into the baggage we have carried from one life experience to the next, baggage that has made us self-righteous and self-conscious, that has stopped us from pursuing our dreams and becoming the person we were meant to be.

the time had come to let it go. because the simple truth about life is that things happen and then other things happen. none of it means anything, even when we force it to mean everything. life is just events. and a transformed life is taking those events at face value and not coloring them with our judgments and interpretations. a transformed life is joyful and limitless, positive and fearless, honest and authentic. on this side is nothing, on the other side is everything.

Angie delivered this speech while running around the room. she had clearly given it many times before and knew which words to emphasize and how much eye contact to make. as expected, the crowd drank the kool-aid with great enthusiasm, questioning nothing, with a few vocal dissenters resisting the idea that their lives held no meaning. some people had their head in their hands, crying uncontrollably, while others looked elated, as though all their burdens had been eradicated.

“do you get it? do you get it?” everyone was asking everyone else. a buzz weaved through the room. people were hugging, some were still crying; smiles were everywhere. after being lost at sea for two days, we had finally hit the shore and walked toward it as changed people.

life is meaningless and we are meaning-making machines.

Angie opened the floor up for questions and the hits kept coming, with several suddenly transformed participants gushing about their new personal philosophies and listing the myriad ways their lives would change. the unhappy campers stepped up to the mic as well, looking forlorn and arguing with Angie about purpose and god.

i looked uneasy, as usual — and felt bewildered. i didn’t feel particularly transformed and wasn’t sure whether that made me totally crazy or perfectly sane. why was i resisting so much, i wondered? why was i looking at all these seemingly happy people with such a judgmental eye? why did i refuse to walk toward the light of unfettered possibility, toward a life without the trappings of the past — the baggage of hurt and rejection, disapproval and disdain, ridicule and grief, heartache and disappointment?

why did i cling so fiercely to that baggage now that Landmark threatened to remove it? why did i not want to transform into a blank canvas on which i can create a future that’s more beautiful than the past? “go there,” i told myself. “just let it take over. look at all these happy people around you. don’t you want to be happy like them? what do you need your misery for?”

but i can’t do it. my ego refuses to vanish. it needs the pain. it wants the pain, with its hard-won hurts to linger and learn from. it needs to interpret the events in my life, because events inherently do have meaning. otherwise, it’s just birth, love, school, work, marriage, loss, death, and then the end?

how could i not ascribe meaning to any of it? how would i be able to keep stringing sentences together, sentences that are sometimes about pain and disappointment, about stories aching for interpretation? how could i create a life where meanings no longer existed? i would need to cancel this blog, abandon my Dish-Interested column, stop reading the newspaper and live in a cocoon.

i won’t do it. as corny as it sounds, i need to suffer for my art. i need to accept every ounce of pain that life is kind enough to bestow upon me, because that pain will keep me honest in my work. without it, i’ll have nothing to write about. without it, i’ll lose any heaviness that resides in my heart, the teen angst that still lingers in my soul and the Russianness that defines the very fiber of my being and transform into an over-inspired L.A. asshole who’s high on her own positivity and can only write about one topic: self-help.

me writing articles on self-help? me becoming one of Those People who frames her life in daily affirmations, loads up her shelves with stupidly titled self-help books — “A User’s Manual for the Human Experience,” anyone? — and confuses enlightenment with a moralizing superiority complex that nauseates all her friends? me transform into THAT?

the thought disgusted me.

i looked around again. people were still smiling, seemingly overjoyed with their newfound non-identities — glowing, vibrant and beautiful. they looked alive and, suddenly, they all looked alike: a mass of empty vessels, colorless, humorless, detached, eyes glazed over with a semi-smile etched onto their faces. they had crossed over. i had lost them. i suddenly felt very alone.

“do you get it?” the guy sitting next to me asked. i turned to face him. he looked positively giddy. “life is meaningless,” he said, “so we should just enjoy it and quit worrying about what everything means. that’s so awesome!”

“yeah,” i said, “i got it — years ago. you’ve never heard anyone say that life was meaningless before? didn’t you read ‘The Stranger’ in high school? this is just rehashed existentialism. it’s not that awesome.”

the idea that i was being a bitch didn’t escape me, nor did it bother me much. the idea that i paid $420 and wasted three days on a clichéd motivational seminar that amounted to nothing more than “seize the day” bothered me A LOT.

the dinner break came and i congregated with my newly transformed friends, who were all sorts of happy. it was as though they were all part of a group orgy where everyone came at the same time, everyone except for me. i tried not to play Debbie Downer during dinner and instead ride on the coattails of their good vibrations, which was easy to do as their positivity was quite contagious. i found myself getting contact high.

i also found myself still getting criticized by the group, this time for rejecting the transformation, but i countered their arguments with accusations that they were making meanings out of my actions — meanings Landmark would not approve of.

after dinner, i would congregate with my fellow Landmarkians for one final time. there was a “graduation ceremony” the following Tuesday that i skipped, the one we were encouraged to bring our friends and family to (even if that meant flying them into town) so they could learn about the transformative possibilities of Landmark.

clearly, i didn’t believe in these possibilities for myself, at least not if they were administered by Landmark. while i could get behind some of the coursework — such as examining one’s past in order to make peace with it and living life to the fullest — the mildly abusive coaching sessions, the nonsensical lingo, the emphasis on obedience masked as integrity and the discouragement of independent thought make Landmark Education a company i could never give another dollar to.

because even though Landmark claims to give participants their lives back, it can also take their lives from them. Landmark understands better than anyone the human inclination toward creating meaning, and after chipping away at our identities for two days, Landmark fills the empty space that it created with its dogma. it made sure to do all the thinking for us, with homework every night and assignments at every break that deprived us of any time we could have spent thinking for ourselves.

Landmark filled the gaps, owning us, dominating us, brain-washing us by erasing our personalities and chasing away our quirks and idiosyncrasies — things from our pasts that may scar us, but that also define us as fully formed individuals. instead, we were left with a blank slate on which to create a future of our own making, a blank slate we are told we can do anything we want with.

but we can’t do what we want; we can only do what Landmark wants, because we are no longer in control. and Landmark wants us to take more classes, to hand over more money, to enroll our friends and family in our transformed lives, otherwise our great experiences might end. this is why Angie insisted we drink no alcohol or take drugs during the process. Landmark wanted to be our drug. and it became a drug akin to cocaine, whose addicts feel invincible.

why would we ever want it to end? Landmark has made us feel alive again by re-engaging our senses and awakening us to a world of possibilities that we knew existed yet somehow could never access. Landmark helps us access it now, because Landmark’s promise is power — a power it’s convinced us can only be found in its coursework, even though it’s resided in us all along.

i don’t doubt that plenty of individuals have benefited from Landmark’s coursework, and i admit that i felt invigorated in the weeks immediately following the Forum, as i would have after taking any motivational seminar (which is all the Landmark Forum is). but in time that vigor faded and life became average again.

i suppose i could have returned to the Center and gotten my next fix by enrolling in another course that would have made me feel invincible, only to come down again and then re-enroll and re-enroll until my savings were depleted. but cheesecake is much cheaper. hell, even cocaine is cheaper.

so even though i never suspended my disbelief and reached Landmark’s nirvana of transformation, i am glad i took the Forum. if nothing else, it reminded me of a few basic truths about life and reawakened a few dreams i intend to accomplish in this one. it also helped me appreciate my past as something meaningful that should be cherished instead of discarded, even the miserable parts.

and, despite all its attempts not to, Landmark actually strengthened my personal belief system, making me even more secure in who i am and how i think, so much so that i could fail a self-help seminar and feel just fine about it.

The Landmark Forum: Day 3 (Part IV)

i came late to class on the third day — intentionally. landmark made such a fuss over being on time for everything, claiming that we lacked integrity if we were even one minute late, that i tried to be late as much as possible. i arrived only 10 minutes after class began that morning and was thankfully spared the pestering phone call from Landmark asking if i planned to attend that day (i think those started at the 15-minute mark).

i felt uneasy walking into class, not only because i was late but moreso because the third day held the mighty promise of transformation, the day of salvation when our souls would be saved by the holy hand of Landmark. it seemed that people had already started transforming by way of the confessionals that lifted their burdens and buoyed their steps. a buzz permeated the room. it was almost infectious.

i took my usual seat in the back row, tired from a sleepless night that saw my mind racing aimlessly at lightning speed. i had disregarded the homework assignment, this one again instructing us to call someone and “enroll” him or her in a new possibility we’ve created for ourselves. (bonus homework was to call three people.)

beyond surviving the day, i had created no new possibility for myself. i called no one the whole weekend except for my parents (just to say hi) and one of my best friends, Sharon in San Francisco, who is knowledgeable about new age stuff given her job as a life coach. she had taken the Forum ten years ago and was also freaked out by it, which is a surprise considering her tendency to gravitate toward this sort of thing.

“you know, in self-help circles people make fun of landmark. it’s known for being cultish and weird, especially because some people become so obsessed with it,” she told me.

it was easy to tell who from my class would become those people. they were the oversharers, the “seminar stars” whose hands shot up at every opportunity to speak. they were the ones everyone knew everything about: the guy who was newly sober, going through a divorce and had a childhood gay experience his father walked in on, thereby turning him into a macho athlete; the closeted bagpipe player turned workaholic who also had daddy issues and couldn’t keep a girlfriend; the verge of divorce girl with two kids, a history of depression, a love for yoga and a master’s in clinical psychology.

they were the ones who routinely sat in the front row, their eyes bright, backs straight and hands folded in their laps. they not only drank the kool-aid, they guzzled it as though their very lives were on the line. the verge of divorce girl told the class on the first day, “you can hypnotize me, you can cut me open, i don’t care because i need help any way i can get it.” by the third day, she had vowed to get off antidepressants and was calling every person she knew to “complete” with them.

the day began with more lessons aimed at deconstructing our identities. there was talk of our “strong suits,” which were otherwise positive aspects of our personalities formed from traumatic childhood experiences. so if we experienced rejection during grade school, we may have arrived at a life of independence because our underlying fear of rejection convinced us that we couldn’t rely on anyone. to me, this sounded like Landmark’s lame attempt to make us feel insecure about things we normally felt good about. so what if i’m independent now because some girls were mean to me in kindergarten? isn’t that better than being co-dependent?

there was also talk about life being dangerous, which Landmark says is a belief cemented at birth, as we slide from the cozy comfort of our mother’s womb into the bright and scary world where a doctor smacks our ass to make us cry. every interaction with the world thereafter reinforces this belief, we are told, so by the time we reach adulthood we take no risks and are afraid of everything and everyone.

i found myself sitting next to Mike during this exercise, a savvy twentysomething i had not met before the third day. when it was time for the requisite sharing with a partner, i discovered that Mike was a fellow skeptic who told me he had become so bored over the weekend that he began counting the lights in the ceiling and the letters in the laminated posters on the wall. he said he felt almost offended by the curriculum. “i know who i am,” he said, “but i’m really surprised that so many people here don’t know who they are.” i must have pinched him to make sure he was real. along with Sophie, who was still rolling her eyes at every lesson, he was the only other skeptic i encountered.

that’s not to suggest that the other 72 students succumbed to the brainwashing. i recall that one woman who admitted on the second day to being in a sexless marriage did not show up on the third day. other people were dropping off as well, a handful every day — sometimes after particularly brutal confessions — but Landmark made it impossible to identify who or how many by removing their empty chairs, making it seem as though every seat was always occupied.

the morning session ended with a lesson on how to invite people to our “graduation” ceremony on tuesday night. we were asked to bring at least three of the people we had enrolled in our new possibility over the weekend. part of living a transformed life meant inspiring others to transform themselves, we were told. one man raised his hand to say he had recently moved from australia and didn’t know anyone in LA he could bring. Angie suggested he fly his family and friends out. “be unreasonable! a reasonable life is the lowest form of living,” she said, a common battlecry of the weekend.

anyone we brought in as a referral would have a chance to sign up for the Forum on tuesday night. and if we wanted to sign up for the Landmark Advanced Course, which typically follows the Forum, the discounted rate was $595 if we signed up by tuesday; after then we’d have to pay the retail price of $850.

during the mid-morning break, i sat with my Forum buddy Eduardo who was falling down Landmark’s rabbit hole. he felt incredible, he told me, his worries were slipping away. his transformation had begun. “it’s amazing what i am feeling. it’s like a connection to the universe flowing through me. everything is beautiful around me and i’m open to new possibilities in this life that i can now create for myself. there are no limits anymore.

“i feel a big change happening in my body. feel my hands, they are so cold. i would normally be hungry right now but i’m not at all. i feel light, like i could just float. and i feel alive, like this energy is running through me and i am it and it is me and it is everything. i feel so connected to the world. it’s so amazing. i want to feel this way all the time.”

“wow,” i replied. “sounds like you’re tripping on ecstasy.”

“that’s exactly what it feels like!” he said. “you know ecstasy activates neural pathways in your brain that already exist so you can get that feeling without doing the drug.”

“so now Landmark is the drug.”

back in class, Angie was acting pissed off. people were still coming late after the breaks, she said. (sadly, i had come back on time after that particular break.) we had no integrity, she said. we were uncoachable and uncaring, and she was tired of trying to help us when it was clear we didn’t care about helping ourselves. we were one of the slowest groups she had ever worked with, in fact. we were not getting it and it looked like we never would. we were still “running rackets” and “waiting in the stands.” and she was done with us. she was considering walking out because we just weren’t worth her effort.

the students immediately began pleading with her, promising that we’d try harder, we’d be better. she shouldn’t give up on us; she should allow us to prove her wrong, to show her that we could get it and that we were committed to our transformations. people stood up and begged. would she please stay to coach us and grant us the second chance she already knew she’d give us?

the whole exchange was wildly surreal and yet totally convincing. it was also thoroughly nauseating. i had read about this sunday morning tantrum in my research, but couldn’t believe the groveling it actually produced. more unbelievable was how quickly the students became the Forum enforcers. we had to check each other, it was said. we had to go on breaks only in groups and promise to return to class five minutes early from now on. like it or not, we were all each other’s keepers. as a group, we could do it. alone, we might fail.

the pressure kept on. it was suffocating in its intensity. conform, obey, transform. conform, obey, transform.

i looked over at Eduardo, who was sitting hunched over in the front row, his head practically in his hands. he looked as though he was still tripping on ecstasy. i tried to locate Mike and Sophie but couldn’t find them among the sea of heads. i started to feel queasy. what the hell was happening? everyone around me looked shaken, fearful over the threat of abandonment as if some primal childhood fear had been triggered. it was disgusting and manipulative.

Angie seemed pleased with herself. she stood at the front of the room, her control consolidated, about to deliver The Transformative Lecture, the one that would make us “pop.” but first she had to know: were we ready? did we really want it?

The Landmark Forum: Day 2 (Part III)

while the first day of the Forum felt long and uncomfortable and third day felt dramatic and surreal, the second day fell somewhere in between. it also felt long, though not quite as draggy, and events did move into surreal territory as the vacuum created by 75 isolated people being lectured to nonstop began producing odd moments that could not be replicated in the outside world.

the day started with us going over the prior night’s letter-writing assignment, an assignment i had ignored in favor of sleep. people began reading their letters to the class and then to each other during the share sessions with a partner. thankfully, i sat next to fellow skeptic Sophie that morning, who also disregarded the assignment. we talked instead about how weird yet mesmerizing the Forum was.

instructor Angie, who was still doing her tough love coaching shtick, approached Sophie and i during a break to ask us if we were getting anything out of the class. the conversation couldn’t have been more awkward as we both tried to tell her nicely that the whole thing seemed like horseshit to us. i reassured Angie that i was enjoying my time at the Forum, which i certainly was, but that i hadn’t had any breakthroughs and wasn’t feeling particularly inspired by the material.

“that’s ok. things will come up in time. you will transform on the third day,” Angie told me.
“maybe i will, maybe i won’t,” i replied. “you can’t come to a conclusion about the third day when we are only in the second day.”
“everyone transforms on the third day,” she smiled.

we were told this constantly throughout the Forum — that we would transform, be reborn anew into a life we never thought possible. suggested outcomes seemed to preface new lessons frequently, no doubt to influence our experience of them. we were often told such things as, “this next discussion is considered by many to be the most powerful one of the weekend” and “people sometimes respond emotionally to the exercise we are about to do.” it was the power of suggestion leap-frogging itself into fact, so much so that every exercise became the most dramatic rose ceremony EVER. it was crafty, tiresome and usually effective.

the lessons of day two were less effective for me. the early lessons centered on psych 101 teachings about how perception influences reality and how people are products of their environment. odd lingo began entering the discussion as well, with “new realms of possibility” becoming a particular focus. we also began talking about “enrolling others in a new possibility we’ve created for ourselves,” which i took as yet another subversive suggestion to enroll them in a Landmark course, but we were told it meant notifying friends and family of the changes we planned to make in our lives following the Forum.

our assignments during breaks involved calling and “enrolling” these people, especially if we had tense relationships with them. we were encouraged to “complete” with them, to take responsibility for our lousy behavior even if it was their behavior that was lousy. we were told that we were difficult to live with, that our lives didn’t work because of all our “rackets.” we had no integrity; we were frauds to the core, lying liars telling lies that made us look good even when they didn’t make us feel good. we had to “remove our pasts from our present” and unencumber ourselves from a lifetime of baggage that poisons our relationships and skews our perceptions of our place in the world.

“no wonder you’re tired all the time,” Angie said while dragging a chair behind her. “you keep carrying that heavy baggage with you everywhere you go.”

the pressure to submit to the material remained unyielding, with lessons often beginning with urgings to “get out of the stands and onto the court.” we needed to engage if we wanted to transform; we needed to step up and get coached. we were encouraged to “try on” the teachings like a jacket to see if they could fit into the framework of our belief system when, in fact, they were designed to replace our framework.

resistance to the curriculum was always met with more curriculum, with any attempt to debunk the material only serving to strengthen it. sometimes fellow students got into the mix by yelling out “rackets” or some other term coined in the coursework as a response to a skeptical student’s questions. after a while, people stopped protesting altogether and started conforming just so they wouldn't feel excluded. groupthink began to settle in.

as the tides turned, new people started coming to the microphone to share and be coached by Angie, who maintained total mastery over the class. the confessions kept coming, some anecdotal and others traumatic, with each one seeming to up the ante of what could be said. a tale of childhood molestation was followed by an admission from one participant that he kissed his little brother when they were both kids and has always feared that this kiss made his brother a bisexual adult.

people spoke of witnessing abuse as children, of spousal infidelity, with some admitting that they had done the cheating. there were tales of unfulfilling sex lives with spouses, of childhood ridicule that left lifelong scars. one man even admitted to never telling anyone he was a champion bagpipe player because he wore a quilt during competitions and worried about being perceived as unmanly.

each confession was met with unconditional acceptance from the group. we were told we were in a safe environment where no judgment would be passed so we could say anything without fear. some secrets had never been spoken before the Forum; others had never been realized until the Forum.

the most poignant confession for me was made by a woman i sat next to during one of the many sharing sessions with a partner. i don’t recall the lesson we had been discussing, but i’ll never forget the look on her face when she turned to me, her eyes filling with tears, and said, “i just had a breakthrough. i realized that i resent my children because i can’t abandon them in the same way i’ve abandoned every other thing that gets hard in my life — like my marriage to my ex-husband.” she began to cry. i tried to comfort her as best i could, wondering to myself whether some breakthroughs were better left unrealized.

but there was no holding them back now. they were forcing their way through, releasing a torrent of emotions with them. people seemed to yearn for the catharsis. they wanted to share in an effort to rid themselves of the secrets they had been living with their entire lives, maybe even living for, secrets that constrained them, consumed them with guilt, controlled them with the fear that these secrets would be the very thing that defined their lives for the rest of their lives.

with the sharing, the secrets seemed to evaporate into nonexistence after being spoken, releasing the confessor from having to keep it any longer. here began the transformation. people looked positively radiant after confessing to the group, their tear-stained faces now relaxed, their demeanors buoyant, their spirits finally free. it was beautiful to witness.

through all this, i maintained my journalistic distance, never once stepping up to the microphone to make my own confession. i felt obligated to, mostly to honor the other participants, who awed me with their bravery, but ultimately something about the whole spectacle felt obscene and almost exploitative to me. after all, we were still strangers to each other.

this point was driven home during that night’s dinner break when a random assortment of us decided to walk to the hotel restaurant across the street. as i looked around the table after we were seated, i realized i didn’t know anyone’s last name or occupation, but i did know that one woman was on the verge of divorce, one man had a DUI and another man felt unworthy of love. recognizing the imbalance, they asked me why i hadn’t yet shared with the group (and eyed me disapprovingly as i drank a glass of wine with my dinner).

“i just don’t feel comfortable,” is the only thing i could say.

it was true. i didn’t feel comfortable spilling my darkest secrets to a room full of strangers, but i did began to feel attached to the people who did. i even began referring to them lovingly as my “fellow prisoners of war.” we were all in this together, developing something like a trauma bond — its energy palpable, infectious and overwhelming. and i liked this group of people. i wanted to belong among them, to experience the breakthroughs and get swept into the energy of the new realm of possibilities i kept hearing about, but every instinct in my body held me back.

all the while the pressure never let up, now administered solely by the other students who told me that i was “close-minded,” that i was “ruining other people’s experiences of the Forum” with my bad attitude, that i was allowing my “rackets” to hold me back. after enough of these admonitions, i became skeptical of my own skepticism. why couldn’t i stand up and share with the group? was i really seeing things as clearly as i thought? maybe i was the crazy one and they were the sane ones who had it all figured out?

i couldn’t be sure. and because of my uncertainty, i decided not to decide anything. i would ride it out, wait it out, not succumb to it and not be self-righteous about it either. i would float in the uncertainty while abiding by one of my life’s guiding maxims: doubt means don’t.

after dinner, the last exercise of the day was upon us, an exercise Angie told us “could produce some dramatic results, including strong physical reactions.” i didn’t like it already. we were told to close our eyes, take deep breaths, relax our bodies, shut out the world and focus only on Angie’s voice. if this sounds like hypnosis, that’s because it is.

then we were told to experience our fear by imagining we were afraid of the person sitting next to us. then we imagined being afraid of everyone in the room, then everyone in Los Angeles, in California, the country and, ultimately, the seven billion other people in the world.

we were asked to feel our fear, to bring it up through our stomachs, allow it to permeate our bodies, engage it, experience it, let it wrap itself around us before guiding it to the surface of our skin, all the way up to our skull where it could be released into the air. we had to abandon the limitations our fear imposed on us and let go of the long-held beliefs we carried from our past, beliefs that would muddy our future and dash our hopes of living a transformed life.

we needed to get over ourselves, to rid ourselves of the need to always look good in every situation. our self-consciousness doomed us. it drove us to lead inauthentic lives without integrity. our fears obscured our purpose, hid it from us, layered it with circumstances, consequences and excuses. we had to let go of our fear if we wanted to live a fulfilled life, and we needed to recognize the cosmic joke in the equation that is this life — that while we were busy fearing everyone around us, they were just as busy fearing us.

the exercise must have lasted close to an hour. i had read about it during my research of the Forum and already knew the script, but i couldn’t deny its impact. people were sobbing uncontrollably, some practically lying on the floor, others with their head in their hands. the energy in the room was indescribable. it was heavy, to be sure, though not exactly sad or happy, just overwhelming. my own body felt tingly, my head light. i didn't feel particularly emotional, just slightly disoriented but mostly relaxed. i checked my neck and wrists to make sure i hadn't been microchipped during the exercise.

people raced to the microphone to share. there were still tears, but plenty more smiles now. one man came forward to say he planned to write a letter to the CEO of his company. another said he planned to blow the whistle on the unethical practices he had witnessed at his work. one woman admitted to having been ashamed of her autistic child, vowing to never be again. their faces glowed.

i came home that night with more homework, which i disregarded in favor of drinking two beers. my head was a scramble of thoughts, all bouncing around at light speed and never landing on anything concrete. i almost felt as though i forgot how to think, having spent two 13-hour days letting someone else do the thinking for me. i must have spent a good hour staring at the ceiling wondering what the hell i got myself into. i slept poorly that night, kept up by anxiety about the next day, the third and final one of the Forum — transformation day when we would arrive at the promised land.

The Landmark Forum: Day 1 (Part II)

so what happens at the Landmark Forum? it is no exaggeration to say it would take three days to tell the whole story, the first two of which would be spent chipping away at your personal identity, before replacing it on the third day with everything Landmark. in short, the curriculum centers on self-reflection, with exercises that ask participants to examine their patterns of thinking and beliefs about the world.

on its own, this is not a bad thing, but Landmark’s methodology makes this process emotionally intense. epiphanies and catharses abound at the Forum. tears flow. there are meltdowns and breakthroughs. nothing about the weekend was typical and i can honestly say that it will go down as one of the most memorable weekends of my life.

the morning of the first day (a Friday), the class of 75 met our Forum leader, who would be our guide, our “coach” through our transformation. (what we were supposed to transform into was never really specified, but we were repeatedly promised transformation by the third day.)

the coach, Angie, had complete dominion over the class; there were no guest speakers. Angie’s demeanor alternated between tough, funny and encouraging. she was mostly tough, however, and sometimes even mean. her instruction was peppered with well-rehearsed personal stories of her life before Landmark and her life since, with her post-Landmark life being the clear winner.

on the whole, the group of participants was diverse, consisting of all races, ages and classes, and representing the same cross-section of Los Angeles that one might find in a room full of people summoned for jury duty. this surprised me given Landmark’s hefty price tag, but it soon became clear that many attendees were sponsored by other Landmark “graduates,” including employers, friends and family who had their own transformative experiences at the Forum. referrals are huge at Landmark, which contributes to its cultish reputation.

after taking a few questions from the class, coach Angie laid out the rules: in the three 13-hour days, there would be two half-hour breaks and one 90-minute meal break. there were assignments to complete at each break and homework every night. we were encouraged to spend our breaks with other participants and to speak up in class (three microphones were stationed in the room).

after each lesson, we would discuss the coursework with the person sitting next to us, which means we had to sit somewhere new after each break so we could mingle and meet everyone in class. we would also have time to ask questions, “share” at the microphone and be coached in front of the class. we were asked to be on time, to visit the restroom only during the breaks, to raise our hands before speaking and to not drink or use drugs during the entire three days of the Forum.

with everyone on board, we began class with our first lesson: integrity. as defined by Landmark, personal integrity is based on the extent to which we keep our promises. it’s understood that there are many flaky people in the class, people who routinely make empty promises to their loved ones, their employers and even to themselves.

Landmark aims to change all that. we are asked to restore our integrity with a promise to adhere to the Forum rules, to participate in class, finish all assignments and commit to completing the three-day course. we are told to raise our hands to show our commitment to this promise, which we all do, and thus our new life with integrity begins.

it’s the first lesson of the day and i’m already uncomfortable. i consider my own definition of integrity, which i see as being accountable to my loved ones, keeping my promises to them, being reliable and trustworthy in their eyes. i consider my list of special people and wonder if they would say i am a person who keeps her promises. on the whole, i think they would.

i’m unnerved about Landmark adding itself to my list without permission, especially because i paid to attend the class. i could understand these rules if they paid me to be there, if my attendance were a job i was contracted to do, or a class where assignments produced a final grade and had consequences in the real world, but none of that was true. it was my choice to be in class, a choice i had the power to reverse at any moment, a power i would not relinquish because Landmark asked me to. this wasn’t an exercise in integrity; it was an exercise in obedience.

admittedly, this red flag, so early in the course, left me incredibly guarded. i refused to suspend disbelief and decided instead to remain vigilant in my questioning of every lesson that followed. my self-proclaimed open-mindedness suddenly became very narrow, as i resisted everything told to me, uneasy about any ulterior motives.

ultimately, this made me experience the Forum more as a curious observer than an active participant, which proved increasingly difficult to do considering that another of the first day’s lessons amounted to “get out of the stands and onto the court,” a lecture about how our transformation hinged on our participation, which meant sharing at the microphone, completing the assignments and re-evaluating our lives through the prism of the lessons we were being taught.

and the lessons? they had their hits and misses. the integrity lesson was followed by the authenticity lesson, which was basically a lesson about being an honest person. then came a lesson on the “viscous circle,” which examined how we add interpretations to all the events in our lives, interpretations that turn into emotional baggage and hinder our future. so someone who was cheated on by a man might become mistrustful of men and assume that all men cheat, when, in fact, only one man did the cheating. we’re repeatedly told that “our pasts are in our present” — pasts we need to release if we want a future of our making.

if this sounds remedial, that’s because it is, but Landmark manages to repackage kindergarten basics in a way that made them seem revolutionary. as each lesson ended, storytime followed, with participants racing to the microphone to discuss their lives with Angie, who would always make them squirm with “coaching” sessions that were more tough love than they were warm and fuzzy. at times, they were even cringe-inducing, borderline abusive and almost always pointed to the sharer as being the one at fault for the mess in his or her life.

sometimes Angie was spot on in her assessments, like when she called one particularly immature and gregarious 22-year-old in the class “a self-involved narcissist” when he talked about problems he had with his friends. other times she missed the mark completely, like when she accused one man of “playing the victim” after he recounted a memory of seeing his father beat his mother when he was a child.

witnessing the nonstop confessions at the microphone was bizarre, to say the least. i found myself holding my breath every time someone new stepped up to the plate, my hands unconsciously traveling to my face, landing practically across my eyes in an effort to shield myself from the train wreck i was about to witness.

by the end of the first day, i heard stories of people sabotaging their marriages, cheating on their spouses, being addicted to drugs, grappling with self-loathing, hating their parents, and a man who was married four times by 40. it was like watching a 12-hour Lifetime movie. i honestly didn’t know what to make of it. though i regarded the sharers as incredibly brave for being so honest, i couldn’t understand what compelled them to confess their darkest secrets to a room of 75 strangers. i knew i couldn’t do it, so i stayed seated and quiet.

when dinnertime rolled around, i was exhausted and considered ditching class in favor of going home to sleep. i ate dinner with Eduardo, whom i already knew via our mutual friend Juan, our shared link into Landmark. Eduardo became my buddy during the Forum, the one i spent most of the breaks with. we spent plenty of time discussing the coursework, with me being my usual cynical self and him telling me to be more open-minded.

i also became buddies with Sophie, who was also distrustful of the coursework and served as a valuable touch point for me during the weekend. she was the one i could exchange across-the-room glances with, our bewildered faces both registering a look of “what the fuck?” together, Eduardo and Sophie became my angel-devil dichotomy, with each sitting on my shoulder, persuading me to come around to their way of thinking.

that first night, Eduardo won and convinced me to stay for the final lesson of the day, which, to my surprise, proved to be worth staying for. the lesson asked us to examine our bad habits and ways of thinking, renamed “rackets” by Landmark, which are defined as “unproductive ways of being or acting that include a complaint that something shouldn’t be the way it is.” we are racketeers, we were told, drama kings and queens who hang onto our bad habits to get the payoff of always being right.

this one resonated with me because, well, i have a lot of bad habits, chief among them procrastination. in fact, whenever i was asked by a fellow participant why i was taking the Forum, i always replied with, “i want to stop procrastinating.” it’s a boring complaint, i know, but too often i’ve found myself acting like a college student during finals week who’s playing video games instead of writing term papers that were all due yesterday. this is why all my Dish-Interested columns are late and my garage still hasn’t been cleaned out.

(writing the last sentence has suddenly thrown into question my earlier assessment that i already live a life of integrity. awesome!)

in any case, the rackets lesson was useful in that it helped me examine my lousy life as a procrastinator. it made me think about the costs of procrastination and helped me realize that i need to just shut up and do what i need to do instead of waiting until never because — duh! — doing it will take it off my plate and remove all the stress the undone thing is causing in my life by virtue of its undoneness.

more sharing and final thoughts followed the lesson, as did a homework assignment that involved us examining three of our rackets in addition to writing a letter to someone about the new possibility we intended to create in our lives following the Forum. at this point, it was after 10 pm. i was looking at a half-hour drive home and a second 13-hour day of class that would begin at 9 am the following morning. i began to wonder whether sleep deprivation was the ulterior motive in these assignments.

i came home, drank a dark beer, ignored the assignment and collapsed, exhausted, into bed, where i enjoyed a dreamless sleep before getting up the next morning and doing it all over again.

The Landmark Forum: Conclusion First (Part I)

this has to be the most expensive blog entry i’ve ever written. its monetary cost is approximately $420, which doesn’t include the $3 a day parking, plus the cost of all meals, snacks and drinks i consumed while attending The Landmark Forum, a three-day seminar that promises to transform the lives of its attendees in profound, permanent and meaningful ways. i could insert a snarky joke here about how i should have spent that money on laser hair removal instead, but i’m actually glad i attended the Forum because it did do me a lot of good.

Landmark Education has been around for a long time. its history is sordid, with associations to a creepy self-help movement of the ’70s known as est and a founder who, by all accounts, seems like a major douchebag. i spent many hours reading accounts of the Forum by people who attended it, learning the lesson plans and understanding the process so i knew what to expect during the three 13-hour days i would spend in a conference room near LAX with 75 other people during a holiday weekend.

i’m very glad i did that research (thank you, journalism degree), because it made me very skeptical of the process; it made me promise myself that i would think critically about all the material Landmark put in front of me over the three days, that i would examine it thoroughly before deciding whether i agreed enough to incorporate its lessons into my life and way of thinking. this certainly colored my experience of the Forum, as i didn’t go into it fully open-minded, resolving instead to heed my questioning, skeptical self the entire time, but that research — and i know this sounds dramatic — probably saved my life.

Landmark has long been called a cult by many of its critics, an accusation that has its merits, primarily because Landmark’s many “graduates” are super enthusiastic about it, to the point of being annoying. i’ve had a few friends go through the course as well, none of whom were particularly annoying, but all of whom were indeed very enthusiastic. Landmark engenders this kind of enthusiasm among its graduates because its methodology is very powerful.

graduates are encouraged to recruit friends and family to take the Forum, to volunteer at its centers making phone calls (always unpaid), to commit to taking more classes (there are more than 60), and subscribe to an ideology that is full of strange lingo and catch phrases such as “what you don’t know you don’t know” and “running rackets” and “the vicious circle.” the language is very ritualized, where you learn to say things a certain way, and the ideology is nothing short of a religious dogma that must be adopted without question. there is no room for interpretation, examination or disagreement.

Landmark’s way is to tell you how to think, and they do it so effectively that, before long, you forget that you ever once knew how to think for yourself. having said this, i want to go on record and say that i do NOT think Landmark is a cult because it doesn’t encourage participants to become isolated and break off ties with friends and family the way traditional cults do. instead, it encourages everyone to join. it’s not really shrouded in mystery either. anyone can sign up and take courses (though the Forum is always the first course).

i had heard rumors about minders following participants into the bathroom, taking their car keys and locking the doors during the Forum, but i did not see any of this. we were free to come and go as we pleased. i never felt trapped, nor was i tied to a chair with an interrogation light shining in my face. but i definitely felt a lot of pressure to conform, to accept everything i was told without reservation, to transform and submit and obey, and to toss aside my long-standing ways of thinking and replace them with Landmark’s dogma. this is brainwashing, and Landmark does it well.

despite how that sounds, some of their techniques were extremely helpful. i did learn a lot about myself and examined both my good and bad habits — and the events that likely shaped them. i learned how to think about situations differently and emerged from my three days of instruction feeling incredibly motivated. to that end, it was definitely money well spent. i took away several valuable lessons about life and possibility from my Landmark experience, but the majority of the coursework i left behind, because while i don’t think that Landmark is a cult, i do think it is very, very cultish. it is also very powerful.

so what happens at the Landmark Forum?

part two to be published soon.