Course Overview
The Lifespring trainings generally involved a three-level program starting with a "Basic" training, an "Advanced" breakthrough course, and a 3-month "Leadership Program" which taught the students how to implement what they learned from the training into their lives.
Studies commissioned by Lifespring in the 1980s by researchers at Berkeley, Stanford, and UCSF, including Lee Ross, Morton Lieberman, and Irvin Yalom, found that an overwhelming majority of participants in these trainings called them either "extremely valuable" or "valuable" (around 90%). Many participants of these trainings found them to be among the most profound experiences of their lives and claimed they were able to produce substantial results in their lives as a result of their participation. Less than 2% found them to be "of no value". Training graduates were often eager to share their own experiences in the Lifespring trainings with family, friends, and co-workers, although they were precluded from sharing fellow trainees experiences. There was never any compensation for assisting in enrolling others into the workshops. However, another, independent study found that, "The merging, grandiosity, and identity confusion that has been encouraged and then exploited in the training in order to control participants is now used to tie them to Vitality (Lifespring) in the future by enrolling them in new trainings and enlisting them as recruiters". More than 400,000 people worldwide participated in the Lifespring workshops.
The Lifespring training was composed of successive sessions on Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday day and night, Sunday day and night, a Tuesday night post-training session ten days after graduation, and a post-training interview. Evening sessions began at 6:30 pm and lasted until 11:30 or 12 or later. Saturday sessions started at 10 am and lasted until approximately midnight. Sunday sessions started at 9 am and lasted until approximately midnight. Initial Trainings were usually held in the convention facilities of large, expensive hotels. A training was usually composed of 250–300 participants, many volunteers, several official staff, an assistant trainer, and a head trainer.
The training itself consisted of a series of lectures and experiencial processes designed to show the participants a new manner of contending with life situations and concerns and how other possible explanations and interpretations may lead to different results. Some individuals complained that they felt harangued, embarrassed, or humiliated by the trainer during the trainings. Some few individuals choose not to complete the trainings. A preponderance of those that began the trainings found them life altering. Additionally, the trainer used many English words in a manner that was different than their usual meaning. "Commitment", for instance, was defined as "the willingness to do whatever it takes". "Conclusion" was defined as a belief. Also, words such as "responsibility", "space", "surrender", "experience", "trust", "consideration", "unreasonable", "righteous", "totally participate", "from your head", "openness", "letting go" were redefined or used so as to assign them a more specific meaning.
By the conclusion of the training, the Lifespring trainer and volunteers attempted to recruit participants for subsequent, advanced trainings, as well as encouraging them to invite guests to their post training. Participants have quoted the trainers as saying, "Share what you have found with your friends. I want each person here to bring friends to a guest event and to the post-training. Don't keep this to yourselves. Allow them to do the training by sharing with them." Some individuals felt uncomfortable and pressured, by what they considered this unreasonable request. Most, however, invited friends and family to the event.
At the post training, several days later, invited guests of the participants were brought to an adjacent room, and encouraged to commit financially to partake in a future training session. The participants that had just completed the training were also encouraged to enroll in future advanced trainings.
The book Evaluating a Large Group Awareness Training made comparisons between Lifespring and Werner Erhard's Est training.
Lifespring has been characterized as a form of "Large Group Awareness Training" in several sources.
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