Soul Training (another Landmark experince)

Boston Globe, March 3, 1999
by Alison Bass

They have come from all over New England, from as far away as Vermont's Canadian border to nearby South Boston. But the 132 souls huddling on chairs in a windowless conference room in Dorchester don't look particularly lost. They are physicians, engineers, software consultants, house painters, store owners, lawyers, students, single mothers, and an Episcopal priest, and they belong to a group sociologists might call "the worried well."

They have come to the Forum because they sense something is amiss in their lives, and they've heard that the program's 3½ days of intense self-examination might help them smooth out the cracks in their relationships with families, friends, and co-workers.

They are people like Paula Houghton, 50, who runs a gift shop on the coast of Maine and says she "hasn't touched" her husband in years, even though they run the business together.

Or Marisa Reilly, 39, who owns a body spa in Waltham and is struggling to raise a 4-year-old daughter amid the turmoil of a difficult divorce.

Or Ray Barrieau, 42, a general contractor from Rockland, who lost the will to love when his teenage son died in a car accident in 1997.

Many in this mostly white and middle-class group had heard about the Forum from someone in their lives who had already taken the program. (In Houghton's case, it was her daughter; in Barrieau's, several friends.)

But quite a few had also heard about the controversial roots of the Forum, which reached about 68,000 people worldwide in 1998. Indeed, the very first question asked by a plaid-shirted woman in the audience is: "Is this a cult?"

"No, we're not a cult," replies the Forum leader, a 39-year-old former New Yorker named Beth Handel, who addresses the concern head-on. Handel explains that the Forum is the reincarnation of est, the self-help movement started in 1971 by a former car salesman from Philadelphia who left his family and changed his name from John Paul Rosenberg to Werner Erhard. In 1985, Handel says, Erhard "retired" est and retooled it as the Forum.

Before leaving the United States for parts unknown, he sold the "technology" of the Forum in 1991 to his employees, who formed a new company known as the Landmark Education Co., headquartered in San Francisco, with Erhard's younger brother, Harry Rosenberg, as its president. What Handel leaves out is that est was widely criticized in its heyday for fostering an authoritarian atmosphere, with reports of est leaders humiliating participants and refusing to let them go to the bathroom.

The Forum, one participant later jokes, seems to be a "kinder, gentler est." Anyone can leave at any time, and if people leave before midafternoon on the first day of the workshop (which takes place over three 14-hour days and one evening), they get their $325 entrance fee back.

Two people actually take advantage of that offer. The rest stay planted in their chairs, waiting impatiently for the "transformation" that Handel says she has "produced ... in thousands and thousands of people's lives." (Among the attendees is a Globe reporter whom Forum officials and participants know is there).