I thought I’d be brainwashed. But how wrong could I be

It claims to be about self improvement but it’s been accused of exploiting the gullible, even of being a cult. Others say it transforms their lives. So what is the Landmark Forum? And what does it do? Amelia Hill decided to find out. What she discovered about the Forum - and about herself - will surprise you.

I don’t do epiphanies. I don’t make leaps of faith or have life-transforming realisations and I have never experienced anything even remotely resembling a breakthrough.

I have never read a self-help book and consider myself immune to out-of-body experiences. Meditation bores me and the few times I tried yoga, I ended up inexplicably angry.

Above all, what I most certainly do not do is stand up in front of 200 people who openly talk about sharing, loving and personal journeys, and apologise for getting it all wrong. Except, as of last Tuesday, I apparently do.

This is how it happened. When I signed up to a course held by Landmark Education, I wanted to investigate tales I had heard about a course that turned intelligent, predominantly middle-class professionals into strange automatons.

Students were said to lose all sense of themselves and take to phoning loved ones late at night to bring up long-forgotten arguments while excoriating themselves for real and imagined character flaws.

A quick look on the internet revealed even more dramatic claims. Since its creation in 1991, Landmark Education has been described variously as a cult, an exercise in brainwashing and a marketing trick cooked up by a conman to sap the vulnerable of their savings.

Landmark rebuts such claims. Not satisfied with simply transforming the lives of its students, it promises to deliver the secret of what it means to be human and guarantees them futures greater than they could imagine.

For £275 and 39 hours of my time, it seemed like an offer worth considering. In my head, however, I had already begun to draft an article about a society so needy that even its educated elite were mugs enough to pay through the nose for such vague, preposterous promises.

Mugs or not, over the past two years, Landmark has experienced an astonishing surge of interest. While most companies congratulate themselves on achieving a 6 per cent growth, Landmark boasts a steady 10 per cent rise in customers across 100 cities and 21 countries.

More than 125,000 people in the world participated in Landmark’s courses last year. In 2001, its revenues reached $56 million, although the organisation is struggling to recover from the destruction of its main New York office in the Twin Towers.

But it is on Britain’s cynical shores that the organisation has struck gold, attracting more than 1,050 students each month, 80 per cent of whom go on to take a second course.

Questioning former students on what the course taught them got me nowhere: happy to talk, they spoke winningly of transformations and breakthroughs, insights and possibilities while remaining vague as to how such magic was achieved. Clearly, the only way to get to the bottom of the course was to attend myself. So it was that three weeks ago, I reinvented myself as a human resources manager for an unspecified City firm, and signed myself up.

Read the whole story at the London Observer to find out how it turned out.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/dec/14/ameliahill.theobserver

My Landmark Experience

Huffington Post

By Diane Odessa

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diana-odasso/my-landmark-experience_b_105502.html

Inside a Landmark Forum Weekend

Health 24

By Wilma Stassen

http://www.health24.com/mind/Other/1284-1303,47905.asp

Attain Freedom from the Past

Jewish Independent

By Baila Lazarus

http://www.jewishindependent.ca/Archives/April08/archives08Apr11-05.html

 Harris Interactive Survey of Health Professionals and Educators Who Have Completed The Landmark Forum 

 Harris Interactive did a survey of over 46,000 health professionals who completed the Landmark Forum.

The Promise and Philosophy of the Landmark Forum

Social Science Research Network

by Steven McCarl, Steve Zaffron, Joyce McCarl-Nielsen

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=278955

From the Landmark Education Website (http://www.landmarkeducation.com/menu.jsp?top=26&mid=655)

Tried & Tested, Landmark Forum

Psychologies Magazine, November 2007

By Michelle Lamb

Managing My Inner Brat

The Sunday Times (London), December 2006

By Helen McNutt

The Story of Our Lives

London Times Magazine, July 2000

By Victoria Bennett

Right Here, Right Now

Vive Magazine, June 2008

Felicita Benedikovics

Landmark Education New Mexico. This is a website created by Landmark Education Gradautes in Albuquerque New Mexico. Find out more about it here.

http://www.mylandmarkstory.info/ is a website that has been created by Landmark Education Graduates as a place where people can share their personal experience of Landmark Education and the Landmark Forum. More details here.

JimTsutsui created a web page to share about his experience with Landmark Education programs and the difference that it has made in his family. For a summary of his results, go here.

GE Nordell of New Mexico has a website dedicated to taking direct personal action to make a difference with an assortment of issues affecting society.

Carol Redfield shares the results she has produced in many different areas of her life. Details here.

New Zealand business consultant Ted Howard gives his take on what the Landmark Forum is, how it works, and the kind of difference it makes in people’s lives. Read more here.

Steve Feitelberg’s website, Not an Answer but an opening, details his experience of the Landmark Forum and the effect that it has had on his life and his family. Read a summary of what he saw here.

Entrepreneur Bruce Mayfield shares his personal perspective on Landmark Education.

New Jersey graduates Jeff Clapp, Donna Clapp and Jeff Rudy have formed Where Peace Lives, a group that promotes global and local peace through art. Read a summary of the website here.

Arnold Keiser has taken what he has learned from Landmark’s programs to form the Organization for International Cooperation, where Landmark graduates are busy meeting with strategists at the U.S. Department of State, the Israel Department of Foreign Affairs and at the United Nations to work on conflict resolution throughout the world.

Finally, more personal blog posts from Landmark Forum graduates can be found at the Wordpress page that collects tags about blog posts relating to landmark education reviews and other search terms, such as ‘landmark education cult‘!