Landmark Forum - Day 3 "O...M...G"

So Day 3 was pretty interesting and worth the price of admission. However, Landmark is neither for the weak of mind nor heart. If that doesn't apply to you, then the Forum might be worth your time. I've heard mixed reviews about the Seminar Series that comes free with the fee for the forum and the Advanced Course. The forum's got something for everyone.

Somehow, they seem to have stumbled upon a system that reliably produces an "Aha!" moment for most people. Do this exercise, say these 3 things, etc and blammo! Epiphany! Eureka.

There's something like this in MBA training called the Five Forces Model. You supply all the inputs of info, talk it through and presto -- you see something you didn't see before. A blind spot. Or an opening.

I can see now why people don't talk much about what happens at the Landmark Forum, and just urge you to check it out for yourself. It's not that anything really wacky happens per se. It's that the process is best left untouched so you don't spoil the surprise of discovery for someone else. It's sort of how movie reviews can sometimes tell you so much about the movie you don't want to go -- or the trailer that you can tell has all the best jokes in it.

The feeling one is left with after Day 3 feels to me like when you've cleaned out a junky closet and thrown a whole bunch of stuff away and sorted the rest. It's kind of refreshing. However, I could do with about 50% less of the pushy peer-to-peer marketing stuff. I have a feeling that once the hippie generation retires, Landmark may ease up on that a little. If you just ignore that and try not to get too sucked into that aspect of it, Landmark is kinda cool in how it works.

So what did I get out of it? What's my revelation? See me after the jump...

So what I thought was a minor epiphany was pretty major once I started talking about it. You may know that my father had a massive near-fatal heart attack/stroke when I was 5 and my brother 3 1/2. He spent maybe a year in the hospital and started coming home for weekends and then for good. When he first started coming back, I thought he'd be like he was before. But my lively, animated, funny, engaged father had become a passive, silent, still and angry figure. Of course he was angry. The former professor was paralyzed on the right side of his body and had a vocabulary of 10-20 words. His mental faculties were intact. He had just lost the power of speech and was trapped inside an uncooperative body.

What also got me was that he couldn't say my name or my brother's. I'd been Cheryl or Puddin' or Chocolate Puddin' or Sweetheart or Babydoll. Now my new name was Girl. And my brother was called Boy. Because that's what my father could say.

And I remember how angry and terrible that made me feel. I was also resentful because he could remember my mother's name. He called her Carmen. That just pissed me off even more. Why her and not me or my brother?

We were a close, loving family and so this type of anger and resentment was threatening to family solidarity in a difficult time. My brother and I weren't really allowed to be upset about Daddy's new names for us. We had to make it okay. The feeling of de-humanization and de-individualization-- not such a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But of course -- it had an impact.

All this time, somewhere deep inside, I hadn't let go of this. Hadn't even realized what a defining moment it had been for me. All this time,  I'd held on to this part of the story and the anger inside, managing to overlook the following:

1) My father never gave up trying to say our names and 2 years later, I can still remember when he said my name to me again and how it felt. 2 years later. He had that kind of dedication. He was that kind of man.
2) The fact that my father couldn't say my little brother's name meant that he could not say his own name for a couple of years either. They had the same name.
3) The miracle here is that even when he couldn't say his own name, even when there were only a handful of words left in a brain shrouded in his own blood, one name never left him. And that was the name of his bride. That's the power of love.

So, um, did I get my $440 worth? Well, certainly this opened up a whole different conversation among my brother, mother and myself.  Even though what my family went through was very painful (which is why I know we have avoided talking about this for so long), there's also some much love and hope to take away from this experience. And I never saw that before until the Forum.

Now, might I have arrived in this same place at some point? Maybe over the next 10 or 20 years. So I'm grateful to have gotten there sooner rather than later.

Comments

[Michael]

I did the Landmark Forum a long time ago and it looks like Landmark Education finally listened to its customers and you can now watch introduction to The Landmark Forum online and choose whether or not to attend with out any pressure at all. It is definitely worth checking out: www.landmarkforumintro.com and you can e-mail the link to anyone you think might be interested.