The following is excerpted from an article that appeared in The New York Times on November 28, 2010.

Youre O.K., but Im Not. Lets Share.

By HENRY ALFORD f, like me, you are not in the .habit of sharing highly per.sonal tidbits of your life with 148 strangers for 13 hours a day, three days in a row, then let me, uh, share with you what that experience feels like. Though Landmark is viewed by some as an incubator for overly assertive or blissed-out automatons who bear a strange predilection for the phrase got it, the eight-time Oscar-winning composer Alan Menken, the Boston Philharmonic conductor Benjamin Zander and Paul Fireman, the former Reebok chief executive, are all Landmark graduates, as are employees of Exxon Mobil, JPMorgan Chase, NASA and the Pentagon, who have been coached by the companys consulting firm, the Vanto Group. Just then we were each sharing with the person sitting next to us the previous nights homework write a letter to someone youve been inauthentic with, to tell about the possibility you have invented for yourself, and then extend an invitation. I was sharing with Loretta a 40-something former standup comic who thought she might have to end her 13-year relationship with the father of her two children because she had had an affair with a 19-year-old. Gulp. Meanwhile, Id written my letter to all the people in my life who dumped on my writing without front-loading any praise first. The possibility Ive created for my life, I read, is that other peoples opinions are not everything. I invite these people to zip their proverbial it. Roger, our Forum leader 66, voluble, a more vehement Sam Waterston chose that moment to reiterate that were meant to tell our partner how generous or stingy at reconciliation his letter was. When Loretta looked down at my letter and simply cocked her head, I realized Id had my first breakthrough of the weekend Old Me might have been mildly offended, but New Me redirected

Wesley Bedrosian

the pain by imagining members of the Pentagon doing this exercise. New Me wonders, did Robert Gates extend an invitation to Osama? Sometimes Im like, Thats garbage, said Natalie Cook, the Australian beach volleyball player who attended the Forum in 2007 and who is set to go to her fifth Olympic Games in 2012 in London. Indeed, its hard not to smirk at a philosophy at least one of whose main tenets (You can have any result for yourself or your life that you invent as a possibility and enroll others in your having gotten) is a copy editors nightmare. But Cook credited Landmark with helping her to complete relationships Id ignored or walked out on. One was with my volleyball coach whod taken me to two Olympic medals. The actor and singer Anthony Rapp (Rent) added in an interview that Landmark can be explosively powerful at reconciling families. The gist is that humans tend to collapse what happened in their past with the story that they tell

about what happened in the past. Forgive and forget; if you cling to your story that your father was a mean drunk who beat you, youll get trapped in that wordpicture, and never open up any possibility in your life. Though Id written in my application that my current malaise was a mostly self-imposed social brownout (I quoted the Sartre line Hell is other people), my class hours unbosomed in me the anxiety that Id abandoned my 82year-old mother in the independent-living facility she entered in North Carolina three years ago. In my Forum, class members engaged in even more mothertalk when Roger introduced a beguiling if facile concept called strong suits. He asked us to think back to early childhood, to any vivid incidents that caused us to think, Im on my own, I dont belong or Somethings wrong here. The way we dealt with these incidents is a defense mechanism, or problem-solving technique, that we use throughout our lives, but which will not

bring happiness. Since then, I have twice introduced friends at gatherings to the concept of strong suits; it is a limited vehicle for psychoanalysis, but a fabulous party game. By weekends end, many of us seemed to have struck an uneasy peace with our individual conflicts. Loretta had come to the mic to recount a heart-to-heart with the father of her children, to whom she promised fidelity; tall and commanding Rob Dennis Haysbert in a navy suit had scheduled a dinner with his daughters, had a long conversation with his boss about time management, and upped his involvement in Easter Seals. I had told my boyfriend, Greg for the fifth time in seven years that I love him, and had said I hugely admire you to a poet friend beset by his obscurity. Before our Tuesday graduation, I sent my mom an e-mail our mutually preferred form of communication and invited her on a trip to Charleston in October. She was thrilled. Three days after the Forum, I finally reached my mother by phone. I stammeringly told her that I love her (the second time Id said this to her as an adult). This excited her. I told her about the Forum; when she heard that wed spent a lot of time asking one another Whats possible now?, she enthused that she was going to start asking this at the dinner table at her retirement home; I refrained from pointing out that asking the elderly Whats possible now? might yield a frank discussion of motor skills. Two months after the Forum, Id rate my success at 84 percent. Im more prone to telling loved ones and colleagues, in person and without glibness, that I love or admire them. But I still operate from a base position that people are a lot of effort. I know in my heart that hell is other people. But now Im open to the possibility that heaven is, too. Click here to read full article.