Anne L. Peterson
Appearances
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
My name is Anne L. Peterson, and I am a former Landmark, worldwide Landmark education. I've had different names kind of over the years. Graduate, program leader, program manager, assisting program manager, kind of all the key roles that you can hold inside of the Landmark ecosystem. And I'm the first insider of any position to actually speak up. I started that. I came about that when I was 20.
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
I think I was 29, maybe even younger than that, 27. So 95, 96, somewhere in there. And my husband was going to leave me. And it was the biggest crisis in my life. And my best girlfriend in the world said, nope, you got to do the Landmark Forum. Because if you do the Landmark Forum, then even if you guys decide to split up, we had a two-year-old at the time, it'll be a choice, not a decision.
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
And I didn't even know really what that meant, but I'm like, okay, fine. And so I literally wrote a bad check, registered for the landmark forum, get myself in the next program three days in an evening. It's going to sort out life. My husband does it with me and it definitely sorted out life. By the end of the forum, I was like, yeah, you should move out.
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
But that's kind of the way the Landmark Forum goes actually for a lot of people. It's a really pivotal moment in your life because it's a very intense program. It's officially a large group awareness training would be its classification in the world of personal development programs. What that means is it's intense, right?
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
So it's three days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, from like nine in the morning to 10, 11 at night. Basically, in the landmark forum, you find out your blind spots. And the joke used to be you find out you're an asshole and your life doesn't work. Like that's kind of the thing.
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
And, you know, and then you take responsibility for where you've been a jerk in life and you start cleaning up things with people in your family, et cetera. And sometimes cleaning up looks like breaking up those relationships. And sometimes it looks like making up in those relationships. And it's a really impactful experience. It's this amazing community. People are up to stuff.
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
When you sit around with landmark graduates, you're like talking about like important, serious difference. Maybe we're going to change the world. You know, we're transforming life itself. These are the kinds of things you're talking about. What does that mean? That means, you know, here's all the cliches, a world that works for everyone with no one and nothing left out.
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
And that's what we're doing day in and day out. And every person we register in the landmark forum is one more transformed person for a transformed planet. That's the narrative. So people in the forum, and this is the tough part about it. This is why a lot of people want to protect it. So in the forum and in programs like that,
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
you open up, the space is created in a way like that you can kind of go deep into your soul and like open up anything that you consider to maybe have been a barrier. So here's how they would say it. It's a barrier to your full participation and expression in life. But you're always encouraged to look in, in, in, in, and deeper, deeper, deeper.
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
You're not forced, but this is where the group environment means a lot. So the person who sort of is the most popular in the forum is the one who unconceals the biggest, hairiest, scariest thing. Oh, I can see my sex life isn't working because it turns out I was raped. So from 2001 to 2012, I'm a wisdom course leader. Traveling all over the US every weekend, I'm leading a course somewhere.
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
Just one, each weekend is 40 hours. You fly out on Thursday. You have your first meeting Thursday night with your team. You lead Friday, Saturday, Sunday. You meet with your team Sunday night. You got on an airplane on Monday. You come home. My daughter, my family always knew, don't talk to mom on Mondays because I like talked out. You know, and then you get up and do it again.
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
You do that three weekends a month was my schedule. And then I'd have one weekend a month to myself. But in between the weekends, you fill those programs to train the volunteer teams. I had just over 200 people volunteering on my teams. And my job was to ensure they got 10 times the value of their time out of their assisting.
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
People get to go in the forum and they can work on whatever they want to work on. But Chip's idea, as with many of these other people, is like, well, if people take on being a more integrous person, a person who exercises responsibility, and you want to know in that circle, responsibility is you are the source of everything that is happening.
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
Well, what employer wouldn't want somebody that thinks like that? You know, there you are, you're a clerk in a Lulu store, but you're owning every aspect of the business and its success. Because who you are, because you've done this program, is a person of responsibility. and integrity as identified in this particular model of integrity. So he was really like gangbusters.
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
And literally hundreds of people are now going through the forum on Lulu's dime. Well, that's, you know, that's a big deal to landmark. It is secular spirituality, I would say. You don't need religion in order to Be a good person, you know, to be an ethical person, to be a person of integrity, to be a person who is responsible, has personal responsibility and authenticity.
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
These are all the, like, hallmarks of the landmark programming. That bucket is called human potential programs, right? Personal growth and development becomes... a both secular and commercialized endeavor. My take on Chip always was, like I said, he was big-hearted, he was sincere, and very blind to his own fallacies, as most middle-aged white men can be.
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
When I met him, I was very struck by he's just kind of this Jock that made good, you know, did want to do good, but he got, like many of us, he kind of got pulled into the personal development world without realizing that's what was happening. It's a high and then you want like the whole world to have it.
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
So you start, whatever your resources are, you start committing that into the organization, the apparatus, the process. You are indoctrinated is the word we now understand, right? You're kind of sucked into this secular ideology that is now the way, the truth, and the light. Like that happens very slowly. You don't realize that's really what's happening.