Since publishing My Thoughts on ISTA last fall, the most common follow-up question I got is some version of “Can these types of experiences be done in a healthy way?”
It’s an important question to consider, and a complicated question to answer. While ISTA (International School of Temple Arts) has many unique problems and harm magnifiers, what I’m going to look at here is less about them and more about the type of training they offer, which is referred to as a “Large Group Awareness Training” or LGAT for short.
The term Large Group Awareness Training (or LGAT for short) came from research done about a particular type of training that was developed in the early 1970s and continues in many forms today in seminars like The Landmark Forum. Most people in the personal growth space have encountered an “LGAT-style” training or weekend. They often consist of long, emotionally draining days, lots of “inner” work that has you confront deep patters and habits in your life, and they promise transformation. Tony Robbins is another example of this, and at this point there is a whole industry that uses this model.
Are all of these types of trainings ethical? Do they really work? Are there other good reasons for folks to attend these trainings that are legitimate? These are all good questions that will be addressed in this essay. The LGAT model as a whole is fundamentally flawed, but to understand why we need to break down three major reasons people go to LGATs, then show how all of those needs could be met in a healthy way, given the right context and care.
Attractor #1: Transformation
At the heart of every Large Group Awareness Training is the promise of transformation. Whether it’s Landmark, Tony Robbins or Lifespring, every LGAT revolves around the idea that you can achieve lasting life change in a weekend (LGATs are typically between 3-5 days long).
The way these programs work is they take participants through long, emotionally intense days that work in tandem with peer pressure and group dynamics to make people more open to behavior change and assimilation. Then, after several exhausting and stressful days, the facilitators ease up and embrace the participants like family (as do the abundance of assistants) to give the training a euphoric ending.
Chances are good that if you talk to a participant just after a training finishes, they’re on cloud nine. That’s because one of the results of this method is participants experience a temporary change in mood and behavior (sometimes lasting a week or two) that feels like transformation. They feel great about the experience, the facilitators collect a glowing testimonial and that person is on the way back to their normal life, believing they have finally overcome all those pesky issues they’ve been talking about for years with their therapist.
Note: This is not the case for all participants, many leave trainings far more damaged than when they came in due to the intense environment, lack of trauma awareness and often shame or cognitive dissonance around why is everyone so euphoric and they aren’t.
The problem is that for something to be called transformation it requires the change to last. The word that ought to be used instead of “transformation” is “insight”, because that’s something valuable people often get from these types of seminars.
Can a peak experience that “cracks you open” to a new understanding of the cause of your problems be the beginning of a journey that you might later look back on as transformational? Yes. But not only is it impossible to measure transformation at the end of a weekend, but this approach ignores the amount of work it takes to make lasting change in one’s life. LGATs will promise to “change your life” in a weekend, but what they don’t say (or in some cases even comprehend) is that actual life transformation requires commitment to the work, done over a long period of time. It involves integration that lasts many months, a community of peers who understand and celebrate the kind of change you are hoping to make and (in many cases) on-going support from a mentor, coach or mental health professional.
This gap between what is promised and what is delivered allows companies to string along participants, getting them to pay for training after training because it’s simply not possible to start and complete lasting life change in a weekend. From a perspective of honesty, transparency and delivering on their promises, this isn’t great — but from the perspective of what’s good for business (in the short term) this is profitable, which is why it persists.
But what of participants who challenge these companies on not fulfilling this lofty promise? The gaslighting script is practically already written. Your life hasn’t changed yet because of you, not us. You aren’t open enough. You must need another training, but this time be more “coach-able”. Or you may need the “next level” or more expensive training where the “real” work happens. With Large Group Awareness Trainings, the solution is always just around the corner.
Solution: Getting Honest with Transformation
The desire to change one’s life is a worthy pursuit, however if we’re planning to take that journey seriously, it must happen in a container that lasts more than a weekend. Or, we should just stop using the word transformation and making promises about lasting change and embrace the training as more of a “peak experience” (this is a valid option, discussed in the next section). We could also simply describe the result of an intense weekend as an opportunity to gather insights about your life. I believe that would be both a valuable proposition and an ethical one.
LGATs essentially boil down to a bait and switch that ends up misleading participants, often for years, and having them commit loads of time and pay many thousands of dollars into additional trainings, constantly chasing the thing they were promised.
Bait = Sign up for this training and it will change your life.
Switch = Oh, well that workshop was just the beginning, you really need to sign up for another, and another, and another to get the kind of results you want.
There are a lot of programs that last one or two years, and they are actually set up to be able to promise something like transformation. But we want our transformation fast and quick, so why would we want to sign up for a year-long program if someone else is promising the same thing in a weekend?
These programs are a longer commitment, and often have several in-person weekends and offer a type of container that serves as a pop-up community, or a cohort of folks going on the same journey and supporting each other month after month. They typically offer on-going support from the facilitators and teachers, and are focused on the students taking the lessons from the training and applying them to their life. The time to integrate the lessons, struggle with new ways of being, then come back to learn from the teachers is essential, and something that’s just not possible in one weekend.
Note: Since the COVID lockdown, more and more of these types of programs have moved completely online, and I’d like to emphatically state that I believe this severely weakens the potency of this work. When I refer to the value of longer transformational programs, I assume they include at least one multi-day, in-person retreat, ideally several.
Something I’ve witnessed in myself and others is that when people do have transformational experiences with LGATs, they did exactly what I suggested, but on their own. For example, someone might go to 3-4 different trainings in a year, join a community of people who like these kinds of trainings, and hire a coach or therapist to help integrate the work in between the trainings. They created their own year-long program, but done piecemeal.
In summary: If someone is attracted to an LGAT because they desire transformation or lasting life change, they would be better served by a program that lasts at least several months or ideally one or two years, because it would be set up to actually deliver transformation, not just the temporary feeling of it.
Attractor #2: Intensity & Peak Experiences
In the same way that extreme athletes enjoy sports like mountain biking, rock climbing and big wave surfing as a way to push their body and test physical boundaries, others enjoy emotional extremes as a way to challenge their mind, identity, and push their relational comfort zone. For some people, LGATs can scratch that itch.
Cara Cordoni has used the term “skydiving for personal development” to describe one particular LGAT, and that’s a good metaphor for what it could be, if done with enough transparency and care. LGATs challenge people’s minds by providing long, emotionally draining days, often combined with intense power dynamics and exercises designed to have you reveal the parts of you that you hide. It’s like an emotional marathon, but the question is — can this be done in a good way? The answer is yes, but it’s important to clarify something.
The concept of instant transformation is endemic to LGATs, and it’s a big reason why these organizations end up being deceptive, predatory and feel like a cult. To have an LGAT-like experience without the promise of transformation would be movement in the direction of making it viable, but it would also fundamentally change it. It would be like taking Jesus out of a Christian church. Instant transformation isn’t just a bullet point for LGATs, it’s their central doctrine.
To make an LGAT-like experience sustainable and safe, it would require a shift in context. Instead of promising transformation, organizations would be upfront and tell people that they’re creating an intense experience designed to push your buttons, test your sanity and give you insights into the nature of your experience. This kind of thing already exists, and is often referred to as “peak experience”.
Examples of peak experiences range from medicine ceremonies to mountain climbing to Burning Man. The key component that makes something a peak experience is it offers a type of “hero’s journey” for the participant, giving them a chance to overcome something difficult and make it through. While I don’t believe there is any way to promise life transformation and deliver it in a weekend, I do believe there is a way to promise and deliver a peak experience, given the right considerations.
Peak experiences have been an important part of the human experience for thousands of years, and they are worth doing, and worth doing right. Just as someone going skydiving would want to be sure the person packing their parachute knew what they were doing, folks going to peak experiences should be held by facilitators and space holders who understand the risks and aren’t driven by bad incentives.
As someone who has been in and around the world of multi-day group experiences and has led many retreats, here are some of my recommendations for other facilitators to ensure a peak experience delivers on it’s promise while maintaining a level of safety and care for everyone who participates.
Solution: Peak Experience Guidelines
1. Don’t promise life transformation.
I’ve practically beaten this point to death, but it needs to be said first because this one thing will lead to a whole host of downstream problems, but there is another benefit to not promising transformation. From my experience, the people you attract will be more resilient, more adventurous and will be more enjoyable to work with as a facilitator. They aren’t looking to you for healing, so they show up from a place of wholeness, not brokenness.
Transformation often gets promised because we think it attracts more customers, and maybe it does (or maybe we can justify charging more money), but my experience has been that the quality of people I bring in by not promising healing or transformation is much higher, which makes the event itself and the group that much better.
2. Treat participants with care similar to a psychedelic journey.
When people go through intense group experiences then pop out the other side having made it through, they are often in euphoric and elevated states. As a hypnotist would say, they are highly “suggestible”. Their guard is down.
Is this an appropriate time to register them for another retreat? Probably not. Should we encourage participants to call their families and make big life decisions? I don’t think so. If one of the facilitators found a participant attractive, would it be a good idea to ask them out on a date? I wouldn’t do that. And yes, I’ve learned all of those lessons the hard way.
If you want to pass around an email list signup that’s fine, but we as facilitators need to recognize that during and after these peak experiences, we have a significant power differential that can easily be exploited. If we don’t have a strong moral foundation and culture of ensuring the participants are fully cared for first, we will end up advantaging ourselves at their expense. My rule is to consider that people are in an altered state during a peak experience, and for at least two weeks (sometimes a month) after it ends. The aftercare and considerations for how we treat people should reflect this understanding, not take advantage of it.
3. Have a High-Touch Screening Process
If we recognize that these events contain substantial risk and aren’t for everyone, then we ought to take the screening process more seriously than having someone fill out a form or check a box that says “I understand the risk”. Even though it’s more work, having phone calls with each of the participants and the facilitator will make a huge difference in the quality of the event, and it will provide an important check in process prior to the event to screen for people who aren’t a good fit.
3a. Provide High-Touch Follow Ups
This is a very recent addition for me, but lately I’ve been scheduling phone calls with participants 1-2 months after an event to follow up and see how they’re doing. The last event I did this for was 20 people, so that’s definitely a good chunk of work, but there are so many benefits.
If the group size is bigger, it might be worth splitting the work up amongst other facilitators or event assistants, but there’s something important about the main facilitator checking in with everyone. It also shows a level of care that’s rare in the self-help industry. I recommend waiting at least 2-3 weeks after the event is done so that you can talk to people after they’ve come down from the post-event high.
4. Work with mental health professionals
In the same way that Tough Mudders and Spartan Races have Emergency Medical Services on hand, peak experiences that work with intense emotions and psychology should consider the importance of professional mental health providers. One of the trademarks of Large Group Awareness Trainings is they are rarely staffed by licensed mental health professionals.
Depending on the type of peak experience and it’s size, it would be prudent to have professionals either at the scene or on call, as well as having the curriculum reviewed by people smarter than you, to check for any potential pitfalls.
5. With great power comes great responsibility.
In LGATs and peak experiences there is a big gap between what first-time participants realize is happening in their emotional landscape, and what the facilitators understand is going on. While I was hanging around the Landmark community ten years ago (I did the Landmark Forum twice and the Advanced Course), I heard one of the assistants talk about how they could predict, sometimes down to the minute, the experience of the participants on the last day.
On the last day of the Landmark Forum, after a two and a half very full days of confronting all the difficulties in your life, the leader introduces the concept that life is inherently “empty and meaningless” and nothing really matters, which feels like a psychological full body massage after everything that came before it. It happens in the late afternoon on the Sunday of that 3-day weekend, and after that session participants go on a longer-than-usual meal break. I’ll tell you from experience that dinner break is full of joy, laughter and elation.
This was no surprise to the Landmark staff, because it happens like clockwork at every single Landmark Forum. Whether they realized it or not, they had set up a stress/euphoria combination and when it’s done right, it’s better than any drug. It gets you high for weeks.
With great power, comes great responsibility. As facilitators, we know (or should know) the journey our participants go on and we need to anticipate their needs, not exploit them. The participants weren’t given warning that they would likely be in an altered state and highly suggestible at the end of the weekend, so they just assume they’re in a good mood. Little do they know that their brain chemistry has been manipulated without their knowledge. Why don’t we inform them of the journey they are about to go on? Why don’t we prepare them for re-entering their lives by facilitating exercises that turn their brains back on instead of have them float away in bliss?
It’s easy for us as facilitators to take people through an experience, have them not realize we got them high, then shrug our shoulders when there are negative side-effects. If we were administering psychedelics it would be obvious that we had a role to play in their altered state. Not so with peak experiences. Facilitators too often hide behind feigned ignorance. Any experienced facilitator of peak experiences should understand the power they have, and that power should be matched with an equal amount of responsibility.
6. Be radically responsible for the experience of participants.
LGATs are famous for terrible customer service. If participants aren’t having a good experience, instead of addressing their needs, leaders will often tell them they simply aren’t “coach-able” or they will be given a series of reasons why their bad experience is 100% their fault. There are no refunds, and no apologies.
My approach to peak experiences (and hosting events in general) is simple, but radical when you consider what has become “normal” in many personal development retreats and peak experiences. If I am the primary organizer of an event, I am responsible for 100% of what happens at that event, or as a result of that event.
I can take every single thing that goes right or wrong and draw a line directly back to a decision I made, or a decision I failed to make. If I’ve delegated a task to someone else, everything they do and every decision they made is my responsibility, because I chose to delegate that task to them. If I’m in charge, it all lands on me.
If my tone here seems out-of-sorts for the kinds of communities I usually hang around, it’s because I didn’t learn this in Tantra class, I learned it from my experience in the military and at the Naval Academy. If you want to understand this better, I highly recommend Jocko Willink’s TEDx talk entitled Extreme Ownership.
Most people rarely come across great leadership, and I’ve been extremely lucky to be led by and learn from incredible leaders, mostly from my time in the military. The defining trait that all of those great leaders shared was the ability to see themselves at cause of all the problems that happened under their command.
7. Have real skin in the game regarding your participants’ outcomes.
At the end of the day, organizers can apologize all they want, but they often have no skin in the game so their words are meaningless. They still hold the power if something goes wrong.
As of 2024, I’ve created a 6-month post-event refund policy. Anyone can approach me during or after the event (for up to six months) if they feel dissatisfied or if their expectations weren’t met. It’s not a perfect system, but I believe it’s a step in the right direction.
My refund policy has two important side effects. One, it puts more power in the hands of the participants, and two, it motivates me as an organizer to ensure people understand what they are getting themselves in to. My copywriting becomes more precise, and my planning more rigorous because I know I have something real at stake if it doesn’t go well.
8. Who watches the watchers?
As they say, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. While it’s not always possible (or practical) to have a board of directors for every organization or event, it’s worth checking to make sure there are checks and balances of power.
For example, if someone has a problem with the person in charge, who can they talk to? Are there hidden power dynamics that participants aren’t aware of? Is there a way to submit an anonymous feedback form? Does that feedback form go to someone other than the group leader?
Even with the most well-meaning leaders, these kinds of checks and balances are useful to address unconscious power dynamics and keep people’s egos in check.
Attractor #3: Community
The third reason people are drawn to LGATs (and a big reason they come back) is the need for a community of like-minded, growth-oriented people who share your values. A sense of belonging is incredibly important in our lives, but also something that’s slowly eroding with hyper-individualism, capitalism and the way technology enables us to separate ourselves from friends and our local communities.
Groups that gather in the name of Large Group Awareness Trainings can meet some needs for community, but looking for a sense of belonging in a group centered around a for-profit business is a questionable idea at best. Communities associated with LGATs also tend to have a lot of in-group/out-group dynamics, secretive jargon and things you can’t question.
The health of a community should be judged on how much it’s serving it’s members, not the leadership or an organization, so here is a good way to assess a community for it’s health and sustainability — understand who benefits.
Solution: Cui bono? (Who Benefits?)
The first thing I look at in a community is the structure. If the community is centered around a company, a religion or an individual, what is the business model? If it’s a church, how much power and wealth do people accumulate at the top? If it’s a company, is the company using the community to serve the people or serve their bottom line? Which one is more important? If it’s an individual, is that person holding power in a way that serves the group or in a way that serves themselves? When push comes to shove, which is more of a priority?
To understand the value of a community to it’s members, we need to understand who benefits. When the community is in service of the leaders, that’s a bad sign. When the leadership is in service of the community, that’s a good sign.
As a rule (and there are exceptions), communities that are centered around a for-profit organization will tend to orient toward the benefit of that organization, versus the benefit of the members. The good news here, is that allegiance is often optional. What I mean by that, is if there is a community that was initially formed because the people had a certain religion or affinity for a company in common, they can simply split off and continue all the mutual aid, gathering together and support, but without strict allegiance to the ideology or benefit of the reason they first came together. One of the signs of a healthy community is that smaller groups splitting off and doing their own thing is encouraged, not shunned.
This happens all the time with religion, ex-member groups are often just as useful (if not more) than current member groups. When this kind of dropping of allegiance happens, communities often become healthier because they naturally refocus their energy on serving the needs of the people versus the needs of the parent organization or individual.
My current favorite model for clubs and community are groups like Rotary Club, Lions Clubs or Toastmasters. These groups have been around for a long time, and there’s a good reason why. Features like rotating leadership so no one person gets burned out, low dues that go to cover costs but not make anyone rich and local chapters supported by a national organization, all make for a healthy sense of belonging.
What Are You Seeking?
In conclusion, some people may read this essay as my attempt to save LGATs, or put a positive spin on them so we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, so let me be clear. The Large Group Awareness Training model is fundamentally deceptive, and it’s not worth saving. The notion that an intense weekend training will transform your life is a con that perpetuates because it’s a good business model, not because it’s effective. To understand LGATs, is to understand how central to their doctrine this bait and switch is.
The reason I felt like this piece was worth writing is I see people go to these events seeking many things (three of them I spoke to in this essay), and the things they are seeking are legitimate, and deserve to be taken seriously. There’s nothing wrong with someone wanting an intense peak experience to crack them open, there’s nothing wrong with someone seeking help in transforming their life for the better and there’s nothing wrong with seeking a community of your peers who share your values. Those things are great, but the LGAT model is making it harder for us to do those things in a legitimate way because peak experiences and the desire for transformation are too often co-oped by facilitators who knowingly and unknowingly exploit and deceive participants for their own personal gain.
My first question when someone asks me if they should go to a particular LGAT is “what are you seeking?” Chances are, whatever they are seeking, there are better, more sustainable and more direct ways of scratching that itch, but it starts with us understanding what we actually want. Once we do, then it’s a question of getting it without a bunch of negative side effects.
It is absolutely possible to have community without cult-dynamics. It is absolutely possible to have intense peak experiences with the appropriate care and supervision, and it’s absolutely possible to transform your life if you are willing to put in the work and not just look for short-cuts and quick fixes.
This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
In the section on peak experiences, when I was describing how some people like extreme sports, and some people like challenging their mind through extreme emotional and psychological experiences — I’m describing myself in the latter. I don’t love physical danger, but when it comes to emotional danger, sign me up. The crazier the better.
When I see groups use the LGAT format in a sloppy, haphazard way that ultimately does too much harm and deceives, manipulates and gaslights participants it pisses me off, because this is why we can’t have nice things. I want to do all the peak experiences, and I want to do them on LSD, in the dark, naked. Life is short, and I’m lucky enough to have a nervous system that can handle intensity, so let’s fucking go.
Many of my friends who see me criticizing organizations like ISTA and other LGATs mistakenly think I’m trying to take away the kinds of intense, mind-expanding peak experiences they love, but the opposite is true. I’m trying to protect them. Large Group Awareness Trainings are not a friend of those who love peak experiences, they are the enemy. They give intensity a bad name, and make it seem like anything overly risky is wrong, but that’s not true.
Humans can handle a lot, but no one likes to be conned, deceived and manipulated. If the best we can do is produce peak experiences with cult-dynamics that attract narcissistic facilitators, shirk responsibility and take advantage of students, then they will cease to exist, or we’ll be left with some vanilla, overly-produced garbage that’s one step away from corporate team building. That’s not a future I want.
Large Group Awareness Trainings came out of the Human Potential Movement in the early 1970s and from what I can tell we’ve come a long way, but we’re still clinging to the past. It’s time to apply what we know by having the courage to stop perpetuating methods rooted in deception and start treating people with the dignity, honesty and respect that might actually advance the understanding of our true potential.
Related essay: My Thoughts on ISTA
I owe a lot of what I know about Large Group Awareness Trainings to the work of John Hunter. If you’d like to dive deeper, 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 Manufacturing Mania: The Dopamine Hypothesis of Religious Experience, I think it’s an essential read for anyone holding multi-day group experiences to understand the inner journey of the participants.
If you’d like to continue learning about Landmark, 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. She also has a podcast called “Confronting the Line” which examines the often blurry line between transformation and exploitation.
