What’s up with ISTA?
That simple question has driven me to devote an unreasonable amount of time and energy trying to come up with a good answer. Sitting here now, many years into that journey, I’m actually a little embarrassed about how much attention I’ve given this research project I didn’t realize I signed up for.
On the other hand, as someone who runs their own events and organizes their own community, attempting to get to the bottom of what’s going on with ISTA has revealed useful wisdom in understanding the systems that are at play, both helpful and harmful, not just in ISTA and the sacred sexuality community, but also the American self-help industry.
Before we dive into this, I’d like to do a content warning for ISTA fans. This may seem mean or like I’m attacking you personally. Please understand that I believe and stand behind what I’m writing, and my critique of ISTA comes from a core belief that there are good people being hurt by bad systems put in place, and kept in place by well-intentioned leaders. I also believe the issues I’m pointing to are not unique to ISTA, because once you recognize them, you’ll see them all over the self-help industry.
You might also be wondering why I’m writing this. Why am I going out of my way to criticize this organization when I could just leave them alone? I’m part of the sacred sexuality community and have been for fifteen years. ISTA is the major player in that scene, and their influence, both good and bad, is felt by everyone. People copy their ideas, not understanding how to discern between what they should keep and what they should discard. I’m concerned about the influence ISTA has had and I think we need to be having more honest conversations about them. As I will discuss later in this essay, ISTA is a good business model (not original, but effective), which makes it even more appealing to people who want to copy them.
I spent several years in private conversations with ISTA leadership trying to help them see the things I’m saying in this essay, and with the help of many friends and a global community of allies and whistleblowers, we’ve been able to accomplish maybe 5-10% of the progress needed. While I’m still holding the possibility of them seeing the deep patterns of deception, emotional manipulation and abuse of power, I’ve reached the limits of what I can do as a pseudo-consultant.1I explain what I mean by “pseudo-consultant” more in the next section.
I believe my perspective, given the experience I’ve had and the research I’ve done, will be valuable to others and is worth sharing in this format.
I have more incentives (socially, emotionally and financially) to side with ISTA than I do to criticize it. My life is surrounded by friends who love ISTA. Like many who have come before me, partnering with them could be a fast track to status, money and power, especially for someone who is already established and is willing to use their reputation to publicly defend ISTA. I am not willing to do that, and while myself and others have spent significant time working with ISTA leadership to try and help change their policies and create accountability for teachers, I have never endorsed ISTA, and neither has anyone in 3SC. What’s 3SC? Why am I saying all this? Let’s start with a quick history.
A Quick History
In the spring of 2022, myself and a handful of concerned friends joined a public conversation, centered around former students of ISTA trainings that experienced being harmed, abused or abandoned, as a result of their participation. ISTA (International School of Temple Arts) is a world-wide organization started in 2007, that holds trainings for folks exploring the intersection of sexuality, shamanism and spirituality.
For a detailed overview see this useful timeline of events, but the result of the public outcry and subsequent commotion was a proposed set of conversations between ISTA and volunteers from our group. We decided to organize ourselves under the title 3SC (Safer Sex-Positive & Spiritual Communities) and in January of 2023, four members of 3SC and four leaders from ISTA formed a container with a professional mediator that lasted 12 months and consisted of 30+ hours of meetings. I was one of the volunteers on the 3SC side of those meetings and I wrote about my reflections on that process in a January 2024 essay called Reflections on 30+ Hours of Mediated Conversations with ISTA Leadership.
As a result of that involvement, I was invited to attend an ISTA training (I hadn’t previously been, a fact that was often a point of contention because how can you critique a thing you haven’t experienced…), so in April 2024 I took them up on the offer. What I got to see at that training, and what I learned later about LGATs (Large Group Awareness Trainings), brought me a type of clarity that for me was previously missing.
Love and Hate
Over the last 2+ years I’ve had many conversations with past ISTA participants who have loved their experience and greatly benefited from it. A lot of them are friends, so I know them well enough to trust that they aren’t exaggerating or trying to hide something. These are smart, discerning people, and I believe their reporting is accurate.
Over the last 2+ years I’ve also had many conversations, and read over a hundred reports (both formal and informal) from people who had experiences with ISTA that were not so positive, ranging from “icky” and “that felt off” to sexual assault, gross misuse of power and abuse. Some people required thousands of dollars worth of therapy to recover from the harm that occurred, some have still not recovered. These are smart, discerning people, and I believe their reports of stress and anguish are accurate. I also believe that these incidents of harm were not bad luck or happenstance, they were the inevitable result of the systems ISTA has in place, and still have in place today, based on the fact that there were clear patterns running throughout the reports.
The reason accurately characterizing this organization is so complicated is it has to include and affirm both of these realities. To better explain ISTA, I think we need more appropriate metaphors.
Large Group Awareness Trainings
ISTA calls itself a school and as such, the narrative surrounding it is one where you come for a training, then leave with some sort of knowledge or life upgrade (those are my words). While it’s true that education is delivered at the trainings, the medicine that ISTA hopes to impart is more in the world of “transformation” vs “information”, as the Landmark Forum would put it.
They do this by using a format made popular by folks like Werner Erhard (who started what would later be known as the “Landmark Forum”) in the early 1970s that academics and psychologists call “Large Group Awareness Trainings” or LGATs for short.2I don’t believe ISTA directly copied the LGAT model, but rather arrived at it through a series of values and incentives that were put in place, both consciously and unconsciously. This essay will explore those values and incentives.
The reason the classification of “Large Group Awareness Training” is important, is that I don’t believe organizations like Landmark and ISTA are accurately described as a cult in the same way that groups like Heaven’s Gate, The Branch Dividians (group from the 90s in Waco, TX) and the Children of God are. If we lump everything together under one banner the conversation ends up overly polarized, and we lose the ability to see the unique problems that are associated with LGATs. While there are some similarities and overlaps, LGATs are a different beast than cults, and we need to study them accordingly.
No organization self-describes as an LGAT. There is no LGAT handbook and typically the only people talking about LGATs are criticizing them (it’s a bit like the word “cult” in that way). In an effort to be somewhat concise, I’ll do my best to summarize the key elements of a Large Group Awareness Training, but for more thorough research I recommend the work of John Hunter who completed a PhD thesis on the effects of Large Group Awareness Trainings.
LGAT Characteristics
1. Promise of Transformation
The central theme of every LGAT is the concept of life transformation. LGATs promise “lasting” change and often love to compare their work to years of more traditional therapy, touting it’s effectiveness in a much shorter amount of time (seminars typically last 3-5 days).
2. Emotional Intensity
LGAT programs typically involve long, immersive sessions over several consecutive days, often with participants spending many hours in a high-energy environment that is designed to challenge their existing belief systems and patterns of thinking.
3. Charismatic Leaders
Often LGATs have a handful of people who are qualified to lead the trainings. They typically have magnetic personalities, have a strong understanding of psychology, and can be “larger than life” figures. Within the trainings, these leaders have ultimate authority and often talk down to the participants, framing their actions as “tough love” or necessary for the participants growth.
Something I’ll add from my experience is that the leaders are often spoken about like celebrities, and participants often get social credit for how many different leaders they’ve gotten to experience. Following that, LGATs also use this idea of “one day you could be a leader” to bait participants into signing up for advanced courses and working for free, in hopes to someday reach the promised land of the elite class of respected (and often well-paid) leaders.
4. Secrecy and Insider Jargon
Something I experienced at Landmark that’s true of many LGATs is a kind of superiority that often manifests itself in the need for participants to keep what happens a secret. They believe that no one can really understand the experience (because from their perspective it’s like nothing else that’s ever existed), so why bother trying to explain it? This typically goes along with jargon that only the “initiated” folks understand, as well as an explicit or implicit desire for participants to keep what happens at the trainings a secret.
5. Euphoric Endings
After what is often a stressful, sleep deprived 3-5 days, LGATs end with a big dose of love and acceptance, generating a type of euphoria in participants. Participants are told they are now part of the group and are welcomed in, much like an initiation ceremony. John Hunter describes the inner workings of the stress/euphoria combination in his useful Dopaminergic Defense Hypothesis.
6. Group Size
While LGATs can vary greatly in size, what they all have in common is that they are set up for large groups. The teachings are “broadcast” from the front of the room, and personal interaction with the leader is generally reserved for “hot seat” moments where participants are in front of the room, working with the leader on a block they are experiencing. Tony Robbins trainings are a great example of this, and he has used this broadcast model with great success by allowing it to massively scale the number of people he can work with.
7. Experimental Learning and Emphasis on Personal Experience
LGAT trainings rely heavily on experiential activities, such as role-playing, group discussions, and interactive exercises, encouraging participants to engage deeply with their emotions and experiences. From a 2019 article from John Hunter: “Over the course of the training participants are convinced that questioning and reason are barriers to “transformation”, and that personal experience (or some equivalent) is the only way to be certain of anything.”
ISTA and LGATs
If you’ve been to ISTA, the comparison here should be clear. I saw all these characteristics in my training, as well as the downstream effects of them in the reports of harm I read. To begin to talk about the harm that is caused by this style of training, I’ll describe the ISTA training in my own words. It’s also important to note that almost all of the criticism from here out could be applied to any other LGAT, but because I have experience with ISTA I’m going highlight the ways they do harm and abdicate responsibility.
ISTA trainings are designed for intensity, disorientation and peak experiences. Their programs hope to create an experience of “cracking open” their participants. The way they do that is by a firehose of exercises that are often very emotional and intense, leading straight into other exercises, again and again over the course of a 14-hour day. In my experience, the result is participants become exhausted, dissociated and more open to shifting their identity to assimilate to the group.
Why would this be their goal? Wouldn’t they want students to be well-rested and not overwhelmed so they could digest what was being taught? That’s a good question, because it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. To answer that question, let’s talk about military boot camp.
Boot Camp Without Aftercare
Before I became a sarong-wearing hippie gallivanting around Tantra festivals, I was a U.S. Navy Officer, and I’m a graduate of the United States Naval Academy class of 2005. The first summer at the Naval Academy is called “Plebe Summer” and it’s similar to the experience most people have when joining the military, commonly known as “boot camp”. If I were going to describe plebe summer, I could use the exact same words as I used to describe an ISTA training, so I will.
Plebe Summer at the Naval Academy hopes to create an experience of “cracking open” their participants. The way they do that is by a firehose of exercises that are often very emotional and intense, leading straight into other exercises, again and again over the course of a 14-hour day. In my experience, the result is participants become exhausted, dissociated and more open to shifting their identity to assimilate to the group.
One of my reactions to the ISTA training was “oh… this is just like boot camp”. And yet, ISTA trainings are held in a completely different context than military boot camp. Boot camp is the predecessor to joining the military, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. When boot camp is over, you belong to an organization, not just a group of customers. The military community then takes care of you, it pays you a salary, gives you a sense of purpose, and if you don’t show up to muster the next morning, your peers will come looking for you to make sure you’re okay. Everything from your meals, to healthcare, to gym memberships is all provided as part of your job.
LGATs like ISTA use initiation rituals and influential tactics like military boot camp, but don’t show up in a significant way for the care needed to complete or even participate in the next step of someone’s journey of transformation, or more accurately — they monetize that too. ISTA will tell you that a training will “change your life” but what they don’t tell you is if you want an ISTA training to change your life you will need to likely invest thousands more dollars in multiple trainings over the course of several years, find your own integration help in between and also become part of an in-person community that will support your growth with peer-to-peer support. As of a few years ago, ISTA created an online integration course that participants are offered after the training, and it’s a step in the right direction, but wholly inadequate for what is actually needed. As is true with the “transformation” vs “information” distinction, integration should be an embodied experience, it’s not a box you can check from an online course.
ISTA and other LGATs love to see themselves as a “fast” way to personal growth, but when you actually count the costs and time of real-life transformation, and include the fact that ISTA participants are often taking three steps forward and two steps back due to the intense nature of the training, it can actually be slower (and certainly more expensive) than a more sustainable, nervous-system aware approach. It’s the classic “get rich quick” scam, but for personal development.
If ISTA was serious about making good on their promises of learning and transformation they would enroll students in a program that lasts one or two years, and has several in-person weekends. In some ways you could see ISTA’s struggle with integrity as the inevitable result of an organization that’s trying to squeeze a year’s worth of personal growth into a week, then convincing students it’s just as effective.
Culty Capitalism
At best, you could say ISTA is being lazy and rounding up the benefits of their trainings, and confusing actual transformation for feeling transformed. At worst, they are perpetuating a model of self-help that is riddled in deception and actually more harmful than helpful. ISTA provides a hyper-normal stimuli by giving people massive doses of affection, love and sex, then convincing people this is the way life can always be, and this is the “new paradigm” they are now a part of.
Then on the last day after an intense week, participants are love bombed and given the message of “we’re all family”, followed immediately by a separation where they return to their regular lives. Inevitably (as I witnessed in the WhatsApp group from my training) there is a sentiment of “no one understands me now” as people return home to interact with their “uninitiated” friends and relatives. The other ISTA students then echo this and bond over that feeling, only to long for a type of familial connection with each other that isn’t possible because people are spread out all over the world, not to mention the fact that these people barely know each other. ISTA doesn’t set people up for success in their real life, because on some level they don’t believe that paradigm should exist. They are the only ones on the true path, not all those “normal” people.
The result is ISTA essentially becoming people’s drug dealer. The reason drugs create dependency is they adjust someone’s baseline, then convince them they can feel that way all the time, leaving them continually chasing the high. Tony Robbins has practically perfected this method. ISTA follows this pattern, and the more desperate participants are for love and belonging, the more they will act like addicts jonesing for another training, and the better a customer they will become. Is this ethically dubious? Is it a good idea? I have some thoughts, but what it’s not is illegal. Welcome to capitalism, and welcome to Large Group Awareness Trainings.
Culty tactics and capitalism go hand in hand, because they both benefit and profit from dependency. A company loves it when you can’t live without their product. If you want to understand why ISTA operates the way they do, don’t look at the intention to help people, look at them as a company that profits from addiction and dependency. ISTA facilitators love to talk about the “technology” of ISTA and praise it for innovative approaches to growth and transformation, but what ISTA is actually good at is hooking customers.
Also, to be clear about ISTA’s intentions, it’s not all about money, although studying the economic incentives is a useful way to understand what’s going on. They operate more like an evangelical religion with the goal of converting all the non-believers, so anything that brings more people in the door is a win.
Power Dynamics Squared
To say that ISTA struggles with power dynamics between teachers and students is just the tip of the iceberg. Yes, the power dynamics between teachers and students make sexual interactions risky, that’s understandable, but there’s another important characteristic of LGATs that ISTA gladly implements, and downstream effects of this were found in almost all the reports of harm I read from past participants.
ISTA calls it an “agreement” but it’s not something a person can agree to, and it’s also introduced during the training, so by the time people arrive they’ve already invested thousands of dollars and are bought in, both literally and figuratively. The agreement is stated “I agree to take full responsibility for the nature of my experience”. On the surface that sounds fine, and under the right conditions it’s actually a great context through which to view your life. The problem is that it can also be used against people, which is exactly what has happened at ISTA, and Landmark, and many other LGATs, because this rule is not unique to ISTA — it’s found in some format at every single LGAT.
Again, it’s important to say that this mindset can be, and is often extremely useful in identifying the ways in which we are needlessly suffering over something for which we haven’t accepted full responsibility. However, when it’s mixed with cult-level power dynamics, a “school” that has for many years protected and has not created enough accountability for teachers who abused their power by having sex with vulnerable students, this useful mantra becomes a weapon used to gaslight participants who are bringing legitimate complaints about how they were harmed by facilitators and assistants who acted out of integrity, and made their short-term pleasure more of a priority than the growth and health of the students.
So what’s the good news?
Unfortunately, I’ve only scratched the surface of the cultural problems with ISTA. There’s also the way they operate with what I call a “status MLM” model, which is a classic thing that culty groups use to hook members into serving the group’s needs at the expense of their own. Honestly, one of the biggest red flags for me was seeing that the assistants pay nearly two-thirds of the price that participants pay, and they work their asses off at the trainings! Assistants pay thousands of dollars to work for ISTA. Let that sink in. Most LGATs are criticized for making their assistants work for free. ISTA is like, “Free…? Hold my kombucha.”
But as the subheading promised, there is some good news, because as I said in the introduction, there are a lot of people who have had great experiences with ISTA, and their stories are real and legitimate, so what’s up with that?
I believe ISTA is better described as something more similar to an ayahuasca ceremony than a “training” or a “school”. Do many ayahuasca and medicine communities have their own bullshit? Yes of course, but for the sake of this argument, I’m going to compare ISTA to an ethical ayahuasca experience. I’ll also compare this to an ayahuasca ceremony where the facilitators aren’t fucking the participants while they’re high — and if it sounds ridiculous that I should even have to say that, then good. You’re on the right track.
Any decent Ayahuascero will tell you that the medicine can be part of your journey to transformation, but it’s not the transformation itself. As much as western marketing would love to pitch an Ayahuasca retreat as a one-stop-shop — it isn’t, which is why there is now a trend of wealthy spiritual seekers going from medicine retreat to medicine retreat “changing their life” every weekend with no tangible results to their mental health. I digress…
ISTA is a peak experience, and it can be (for some) a really fun peak experience. As Cara Cordoni puts it, it’s like “skydiving for personal development”. Integral theory teaches us about the important difference between “state change” and “stage change” when speaking about consciousness. “State change” can be very profound, but it is often characterized by a temporary high, maybe lasting a day, or a week, sometimes even a few weeks. “Stage change” is more akin to what people describe as transformation and it can only be measured in years, because it’s a permanent change. It lasts forever. A weekend training may be an important part of someone’s transformational journey, but anyone who returns from an ISTA training declaring that their life has transformed has experienced a beautiful state change, and nothing more (yet). Has their life actually changed? Have they truly transformed? They can’t know, and they are likely high. Give them a year, then look at their life.
That’s because one of the most essential ingredients to sustainable, healthy life-change is a supportive, loving community of people who give you the slow drip of acceptance and nudging in the direction you want to grow in. Again, if ISTA were serious about making good on their promises of transformation, they would do the work within the context of a one or two year program.
If you attend an LGAT like ISTA, then immediately return to your isolated, lonely, community-less life, or if your community and friends back home don’t know how to be with your newfound insights about sex and spirituality — you will inevitably go right back to your old way of being, often in a few weeks. I call it “planned obsolescence for personal growth”.
Every person I talked to that had great experiences with ISTA had the support of a solid sex-positive, spiritual growth-oriented community, or group of friends back home where the real, less-sexy work actually happens. Peak experiences often get the credit because they are good stories, but it’s the integration work that actually makes a difference, and I’m not just talking about a sharing circle the morning after or an online course, I’m talking about something where you are held in a community over many months and years.
But Dave! ISTA is also a community!
I heard some of you think this, so let’s talk about it. Are the people that gather in the name of ISTA a community, or just a group of customers? They’re both, but as someone who has spent time in and around the ISTA community for years, and as someone who has lived in several intentional communities and cares deeply about what is possible when humans work together — I will say that ISTA’s community leaves a lot to be desired.
First off, a community is a reflection of the culture it was born from, and while ISTA communities are full of wonderful people having genuine, loving connections with each other, they also reflect the culty aspects of ISTA as a whole. There is a kind of fealty inside the community that reflects the nepotism present inside the organization. Loyalty gets rewarded, and since there are no formal qualifications for becoming a facilitator or organizer, new opportunities often go to people who are the most “bought in” to the system. Like many groups, this creates a culture that at best just feels “icky” but at worst will gaslight participants who speak up about something not feeling good. Since speaking publicly about my criticisms of ISTA I’ve had many, many people within the ISTA community approach me privately (including faculty), saying “thank you for saying something, I saw that too.”
But now let’s talk about the online reality. It mostly exists on WhatsApp, Signal or Facebook groups, and in my experience, the chatter is mostly full of people selling things. ISTA organizers selling trainings, coaches selling services, and people selling their events. For me and my tastes, it’s far too much capitalism to call it a “community” or to derive a sense of belonging from it.
While it’s not black or white, here’s one way to tell if you are in a community or a group of customers. If you didn’t show up to the group for a while, would anyone notice? Would anyone care that you were gone? Would someone reach out to you and ask how you’re doing? If someone reaches out to you, are they doing it to sell you something or do they genuinely care about your well-being?
There’s nothing wrong with being in a group of customers, but I believe leaders and organizations have a responsibility to be aware of the ways dangling carrots like “community”, “family” and “transformation” in front of the noses of participants can be used to benefit their bottom line at the expense of their customers.
Final Thoughts
In closing, I’ll share a story from the ISTA training I went to. After the training, one of the men in my pod, who also happens to be one of the sweetest, heart-centered men I’ve ever met, asked me what he should do after ISTA. He knew I had been around the sacred sexuality community for a while, so he was curious what I would recommend as a follow up.
I told him that if he really wanted this work to stick and become embodied, and for his life to actually benefit, he shouldn’t fly across the world for level two, or re-do level one, he should do the thing that’s effective, but not always sexy. I told him this.
Find a few people from this training that live near you, and that you feel a vibe with. Then, get together in person at least every two weeks (ideally every week) for intentional time where you can share your hearts, your journeys and support each other. Light a candle, do a group meditation, appoint a facilitator, and don’t be afraid to make the space sacred, because it absolutely is. This is where the real magic is, in the simplicity of being together, open-hearted with other humans.
Invite a few more people in if it feels right, but keep the group size under eight. Do this for at least two years, and your life and relationship to your sexuality will be measurably better and you’ll have cultivated the kind of close, intimate friendships that will become a bedrock for your mental and emotional health.
Recover the lost art of local community. You don’t have to pay thousands of dollars, or be beholden to or associated with a group, or a religion, or a self-help company, or anything that you think you need to access the beauty and the depth of connection you seek.
Transformational work usually isn’t sexy, and if it is — if you’re excited to fly across the world and spend thousands of dollars so you can brag to your friends that you’re changing your life, you might just be feeding an addiction to intensity, versus doing the actual work needed to grow. Most people don’t have sex-positive communities where they can feel celebrated in all their weirdness, so organizations like ISTA are more than happy to sell that to you, but it’s just another way that capitalism has scooped up something we should be getting on a peer-to-peer local level, and sold it back to us.
Is it possible to have intense, boot camp-like experiences that are ethical and done inside the context of a community? Yes. Do those experiences have value above and beyond a weekly group? Absolutely.
We need things like rites of passage and initiation rituals because sometimes our lives need to get shaken up and “cracked open”. My experience in the military fundamentally changed me, and it was no walk in the park. I was a sarcastic kid from Boston and a pain-in-the-ass to my drill instructors, so my plebe summer (boot camp) at the Naval Academy was rough! I was what was called a “shit screen” because the upperclass were so busy yelling at me, that I drew the attention away from my other classmates (which they were grateful for). I was also known as a “sea lawyer” for all the excuses I had for not doing what I was told. My point is I needed transformation, and I got it.3I mean… I’m still a sarcastic kid from Boston, but some things you just can’t change.
I left my four years at Annapolis with a set of real, honest values that aren’t just ideas in my head, they’re baked into me on a core level — thanks to the same techniques and initiation that are found at ISTA, yet under totally different conditions. It’s not what ISTA does that’s the problem, it’s the context with which they do it. That’s why it’s so hard to pin down why ISTA and other LGATs are a problem, because on the surface you could look at what’s happening and see it simply as personal growth, or “tough love”, but it’s only when you look deeper that you see the fault lines. It’s the framing that’s important, not just the content. I can’t emphasize that last sentence enough.
The work of sacred sexuality is just that — it’s sacred, and it doesn’t deserve the kind of sloppy, greedy treatment that organizations like ISTA (and many others) give it. I know, I sound like Bernie Sanders over here with my anti-capitalism rhetoric but aren’t we dealing with the most sensitive of sensitive topics? We’re talking about people’s deep sexual trauma. We’re dangling carrots like belonging, sex and love, then pretending like we’ve become this person’s new family at the end of five days and that’s somehow okay? That’s not what a family is, and if our concepts of things like community and family have become so corrupted, or were so broken to begin with that we can’t tell the difference between a group of customers and a community, then maybe we have no choice but to dive in and learn that lesson the hard way.
Or maybe it’s just that deception and companies replacing communities is part and parcel of our lives now, and an organization like ISTA is what we expect in the self-help industry. I don’t know. I don’t expect ISTA to stop, especially given how good it is for the few people at the top who actually benefit, both financially and with the status and power that comes with their positions. In a pay-to-play system ISTA will only listen when their customers demand better, and they will only change when their lack of integrity starts to affect their bottom line.
While ISTA has implemented a lot of the suggestions we (3SC) made, and I truly believe the harm has been reduced, there is still so much work to be done, and to be honest, having now seen and understood the fundamental flaws in their system (namely the LGAT model as it’s associated characteristics), I’m less hopeful than I was two years ago. Changing their model would mean rebuilding the house, not just painting the walls — but after actually attending a training and seeing how much of the house would have to be torn apart to fix the foundation — I’m not holding my breath for any of it.
ISTA is currently the trendsetter and biggest player in the sacred sexuality community, so while at this point I don’t have hope that ISTA will fundamentally change, I do hope we can use them as a cautionary tale and not repeat their mistakes.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed,
but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
~ James Baldwin
Related essay: Ethical Ecstasy: Can We Combine Intensity and Integrity?
If you want a better understanding of LGATs, John Hunter’s work is essential. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Start with this podcast interview, then browse his website. Or you could just go big and read his 500-page thesis — Stress-Induced Hypomania in Healthy Participants: The Allostatic “Manic Defense Hypothesis.”
John also just published a book called
For a detailed outline of what 3SC asked ISTA to change and what they have, and have not changed, see this useful PDF by Cara Cordoni (3SC member). Cara also runs a free monthly support group for folks who are unwinding their experience in ISTA, for more information on that, send her an email.
If questioning the American self-help industry is new to you, or you want to dive deeper, I recommend Ruth Whippman’s book America the Anxious.
If you’d like to understand more about Landmark and Werner Erhard, I highly recommend Anne Peterson’s new book “Is This a Cult?” She worked for Landmark almost twenty years and brings some important and bold insights to this conversation about LGATs.
Zsolt Hummel generously provided a Hungarian translation of this essay.
- 1I explain what I mean by “pseudo-consultant” more in the next section.
- 2I don’t believe ISTA directly copied the LGAT model, but rather arrived at it through a series of values and incentives that were put in place, both consciously and unconsciously. This essay will explore those values and incentives.
- 3I mean… I’m still a sarcastic kid from Boston, but some things you just can’t change.
