A very dear person recently told me about the importance of participating in the Landmark Forum for them and highly recommended it to me.
I spoke with some of my teachers and mentors about it and the general message was, “You are already doing the things that this course promises.”
Still, I felt like I had somehow find out for me:
1. Is Landmark beneficial?
2. Why or why not?
So what happens at a Landmark Forum seminar? You get bombarded with new and unfamiliar ideas and usages of language for 45 hours over a weekend, are encouraged to share your deepest feelings and experiences in front of a room of 100 +strangers, and have your whole previous life and beliefs demolished and new thinking patterns implanted.You get very few breaks and are strongly encouraged not to leave the room during the entire time besides these allowed breaks.
The website is a bit fuzzy on what you actually get from Landmark (if you take the time to think about it). However, Landmark comes from est. “The purpose of est was to allow participants to achieve, in a very brief time, a sense of personal transformation and enhanced power.” -Wikipedia
This is exactly what Landmark does. If you want, in a very brief time, a sense of personal transformation and enhanced power, stop reading and do Landmark now!
But, the key word here is “sense”. In other words, it convinces you that you have had personal transformation and enhanced power. It doesn’t really give you those things. How do they convince you?
They use brainwashing tactics such as repetition, sleep deprivation, group pressure, reframing and language manipulation to get people to submit to the Landmark ‘doctrines’. Most people are much too confident about their own mental and emotional power and resistance. If you lock just about anybody in a room for 45 hours with people skilled in brainwashing, you can convince them of just about anything In this way, I can convince you you can fly as well.
This is how the ‘confessions’ for show trials in Stalinist Russia were implanted. So, whether benign and useful new ideas or dangerous brainwashing…the process is the same. You decide whether that is for you.
More links about:
Issues with these types of Training (Great Checklist for participation)
Landmark’s openness to criticism
All the info you could ever want about Landmark.
One girl’s experience of the first evening.
Also Google/Check Youtube for “Landmark Forum”.
Well, it turns out you can, as long as you don’t do any extremely intensive physical work during this time.