By Jill P. Capuzzo
For the Inquirer

Workshops come in various forms, from the small and intensely personal to the large-lecture format, from secular to spiritual, psychological to intellectual, some confrontational and others warm and fuzzy.

If you think you may be interested in signing up, call first for more information and see if you can talk with one of the workshop leaders. Ask around: many people have had the experience, and they can tell you more about formats, philosophies and personalities.

Below are summaries of what's available in this region. We've limited the list to programs with general goals and to those that work more with the mind than with the body. Most are intended for people who are well: they may not be staffed by fully credentialed professionals equipped to handle a full range of psychological problems. They also are demanding of participants' time - hours are long, breaks are short, and often there's homework - and require an intense commitment.

While you may approach this whole subject with a healthy amount of skepticism or even fear (plumbing the depths of one's soul can be a terrifying prospect), the workshop leaders say there is no such thing as failure - and that what you'll get out of a weekend depends almost entirely on what you put into it.

Landmark Education Corp.'s basic seminar, generally called "The Forum," is given to about 60,000 people a year at 37 sites worldwide. The workshops are large - 100 to 150 people - so individual attention is mostly available to those who speak up; there are plenty of opportunities to do so. The goal of the program is to break people out of their ruts, to teach them to design their own futures regardless of their past experiences; it is intellectually rather than psychologically based.

The program was developed by Werner Erhard as a successor to his est training, which was often criticized for the tight controls imposed on participants. He sold the concepts and format for what was to become The Forum to the organization's employees in 1991. People who have done both describe The Forum as "more humane."

More than three dozen leaders, each with his or her own style, now teach the workshop throughout the world, traveling to a different city virtually every week; Philadelphia hosts a weekend once every six to eight weeks. The Forum is unique in offering a sort of continuing education consisting of seminars, weekends, and even year-long programs on topics ranging from communication to money to accomplishments, all of them built on the practices introduced in The Forum.

Excerpted from The Philadelphia Inquirer, Weekend,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 22, 1996.