Insight Seminars is an international non-profit organization headquartered in Santa Monica, California. The first seminar was led in 1978 by founders John-Roger and Russell Bishop under the name Insight Training Seminars. Insight has held seminars in 34 countries for adults, teens, and children, in addition to Business Insight corporate trainings. Seminars are primarily presented in English and Spanish, and have also been translated into Russian, Portuguese, Bulgarian, and Greek.
Arianna Huffington shared about her experience with Insight Seminars and how it transformed her life. [1]
The Insight Seminar series includes five core seminars, taken in sequence, and a variety of graduate and public events. In each seminar, facilitators lead groups of 40-200+ participants through group exercises, partner discussions, lectures, and guided visualization processes.
Insight I: The Awakening Heart Seminar is the introductory 4-day seminar. Topics include personal responsibility, choice, the power of commitment, and intention.
Insight II: The Opening Heart Seminar is a 5-day seminar that provides personal attention to each participant. The focus is personal expansion, taking risks and liberation from self-imposed limitations.
Insight III: The Centering in The Heart Seminar is held over 5-days in retreat, focusing on developing the capacity to observe and respond to life's challenges with balance and compassion.
Insight IV: Knowing the Purpose of your Heart Seminar is a 28-day professional seminar designed to develop self-facilitation and personal presentation style while identifying and manifesting goals.
Insight Masters Class is a 3-month program with a curriculum focus of Living Loving.
Insight also offers the Wisdom of the Heart program with Peace Theological Seminary & College of Philosophy, with education focusing on bringing the body, heart, mind, and soul into harmony. The Wisdom of the Heart program [2] is open to all and has no prerequisites.
Participants are introduced and asked to comply with the following concepts, for the duration of the seminar.
The Socratic method is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and underlying presuppositions. It is named after the Classical Greek philosopher Socrates and is introduced by him in Plato's Theaetetus as midwifery because it is employed to bring out definitions implicit in the interlocutors' beliefs, or to help them further their understanding.
Erhard Seminars Training was an organization, founded by Werner Erhard in 1971, that offered a two-weekend course known officially as "The est Standard Training". The seminar aimed to "transform one's ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with clear up just in the process of life itself". An est website claims that the training "brought to the forefront the ideas of transformation, personal responsibility, accountability, and possibility".
Landmark Worldwide, or simply Landmark, is a company, headquartered in San Francisco, that offers personal-development programs.
The term large-group awareness training (LGAT) refers to activities - usually offered by groups with links to the human potential movement - which claim to increase self-awareness and to bring about desirable transformations in individuals' personal lives. LGATs are unconventional; they often take place over several days, and may compromise participants' mental wellbeing.
Discipline is action or inaction that is regulated to be in accordance with a particular system of governance. Discipline is commonly applied to regulating human and animal behavior to its society or environment it belongs. In the academic and professional words a discipline is a specific branch of knowledge, learning, or practice. Discipline can be a set of expectations that are required by any governing entity including the self, groups, classes, fields, industries, or societies.
Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington is a Greek-American author, syndicated columnist and businesswoman. She is a co-founder of The Huffington Post, the founder and CEO of Thrive Global, and the author of fifteen books. She has been named to Time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people and the Forbes Most Powerful Women list.
Wayne Walter Dyer was an American self-help author and a motivational speaker. Dyer completed a Ed.D. in guidance and counseling at Wayne State University in 1970. Early in his career, he worked as a high school guidance counselor, and went on to run a successful private therapy practice. He became a popular professor of counselor education at St. John's University, where he was approached by a literary agent to put his ideas into book form. The result was his first book, Your Erroneous Zones (1976), one of the best-selling books of all time, with an estimated 100 million copies sold to date. This launched Dyer's career as a motivational speaker and self-help author, during which he published 20 more best-selling books and produced a number of popular specials for PBS. Influenced by thinkers such as Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis, Dyer's early work focused on psychological themes such as motivation, self actualization and assertiveness. By the 1990s, the focus of his work had shifted to spirituality. Inspired by Swami Muktananda and New Thought, he promoted themes such as the "power of intention," collaborated with alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra on a number of projects, and was a frequent guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
A drum circle is any group of people playing (usually) hand-drums and percussion in a circle. They are distinct from a drumming group or troupe in that the drum circle is an end in itself rather than preparation for a performance. They can range in size from a handful of players to circles with thousands of participants. Drum circles are related to other community-based music gatherings such as flute circles or vocal improvisation groups.
A T-group or training group is a form of group training where participants learn about themselves through their interaction with each other. They use feedback, problem solving, and role play to gain insights into themselves, others, and groups.
Sharon Salzberg is a New York Times bestselling author and teacher of Buddhist meditation practices in the West. In 1974, she co-founded the Insight Meditation Society at Barre, Massachusetts, with Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein. Her emphasis is on vipassanā (insight) and mettā (loving-kindness) methods, and has been leading meditation retreats around the world for over three decades. All of these methods have their origins in the Theravada Buddhist tradition. Her books include Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (1995), A Heart as Wide as the World (1999), Real Happiness - The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program (2010), which was on The New York Times Best Seller list in 2011, and the follow-up Real Happiness at Work (2013). She runs a Metta Hour podcast, and contributes monthly to a column On Being.
The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness is a 501(c)(3) non-profit religious corporation, incorporated in California on June 25, 1971. Before incorporation, the group was founded in California in 1968 by John-Roger. The church has about 5,000 active students in 32 countries, mainly the United States.
The Experiment in International Living, or The Experiment, is a worldwide program offering homestays, language, arts, community service, ecological adventure, culinary, and regional and cultural exploration programs of international cross-cultural education for high school students. It is administered by World Learning, a non-profit, international development and education organization based in Brattleboro, Vermont, in the United States.
Lojong is a contemplative practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition which makes use of various lists of aphorisms or slogans which are used for contemplative practice. The practice involves refining and purifying one's motivations and attitudes. There are various sets of lojong aphorisms, the most widespread text in the Sarma traditions is that of Chekawa Yeshe Dorje. There is also another set of eight lojong slogans by Langri Tangpa. In the Nyingma tradition, there is a list of 7 lojong slogans which are part of the Dzogchen Nyingthig lineage.
Personal development or self improvement consists of activities that develop a person's capabilities and potential, build human capital, facilitate employability, and enhance quality of life and the realization of dreams and aspirations. Personal development may take place over the course of an individual's entire lifespan and is not limited to one stage of a person's life. It can include official and informal actions for developing others in roles such as teacher, guide, counselor, manager, coach, or mentor, and it is not restricted to self-help. When personal development takes place in the context of institutions, it refers to the methods, programs, tools, techniques, and assessment systems offered to support positive adult development at the individual level in organizations.
John-Roger Hinkins was an American author, public speaker, and founder of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA), as well as several other New Age, spiritual, and self-help organizations.
Werner Erhard and his courses have been referenced in popular culture in various forms of fictional media including literature, film, television and theatre. The original course, known as est, was delivered by the company Erhard Seminars Training (est). Under the name The Forum, they were delivered by Werner Erhard and Associates. Also, the Landmark Forum, a program created by Erhard's former employees after purchasing his intellectual property, has had an influence on popular culture. Some of these works have taken a comedic tack, parodying Erhard and satirizing the methodology used in these courses.
Torkom Saraydarian (1917–1997) was an Armenian prolific writer, author, poet, and musician. He was born in Sevas, Turkey to Armenian parents. He was trained in The Ageless Wisdom Teachings under the guidance of his father, Monasteries, Arcane School.
Health coaching is the use of evidence-based skillful conversation, clinical interventions and strategies to actively and safely engage client/patients in health behavior change. Health coaches are certified or credentialed to safely guide clients and patients who may have chronic conditions or those at moderate to high risk for chronic conditions.
John Selby is an American psychologist and author. Other professional titles include executive counselor, videographer, and meditation innovator. He is the author of over two dozen self-help, spiritual-growth, business-success. and psychology books published in 14 languages, with half a million books in print, published during the last 35 years by New World Library, Warner Books, Bantam Books, Doubleday (publisher), Dell, Random House, Harper San Francisco, Droemer Knaur Verlag, DTV Verlag, Rowohlt Verlag, and Sterling Books.