At the end of the millennium, there is a search for self-awareness. Personal development courses are in vogue. An assistant editor of The Tablet tried one out. (All names relating to friends have been changed). I WENT round for dinner with some friends a couple of years ago, and was introduced to a big, confident man who happened to live near me. I asked him how he had met my friend Laura, who was giving the dinner party. We were on the Insight course together, he told me. I had never heard of Insight, so he explained that it was a personal development course which enables people to review their personal and professional lives in an intense way over a few days. I was amazed, as Laura was the very last person I would expect to do such a course. She appears very confident, is happily married and a successful writer. I was also surprised that she did not mind people knowing she had been on the course, as I assumed it was a kind of therapy for people in crisis.

On the way home, I told another friend what I had discovered and she told me that she been on an Insight course too. Soon afterwards, my friend Sarah returned from a two-week personal development holiday on the Greek island of Skyros, looking radiant. Then three other friends did the Landmark Forum course, which is similar to Insight, and another did a weekend called The Life Training.

All of this began to add up to something in my mind: here was a significant movement among the people I knew ? educated, broad-minded, mainly non-Catholic women and men in their thirties. Although apparently happy, they felt that a different outlook could make them happier. They were hoping to change something inside themselves, and were open to suggestions from other people. They were not looking to the Churches or other established religions for this help.

This fascinated me. I had already sensed that my generation was at sea without a compass, partly because it had far more freedom than the one which went before, and partly because it had largely dispensed with religion and many traditional codes of behaviour. Did these courses reveal what people were looking for? And did they have anything to teach the Churches?

I decided to go on a course myself, and chose the Landmark Forum, which originated in the United States and is now based in San Francisco. It is proving popular in London and many other parts of the world, from India to Australia.

Of all the courses I had heard about, Landmark gave me the most suspicions. It grew out of est (Erhard Seminar Training), which was founded in 1971 by Werner Erhard. Est took place over two weekends and three evenings, with the full-day sessions running from 9 in the morning to 2 at night. I remember hearing scare stories about est, that it involved being shut in a white room and brainwashed. People said it was a dangerous American cult and no one should go near it.

Publicity material sent out by Landmark includes a case study from the Harvard Business School which summarises the criticisms made of est and of Werner Erhard, who was accused of leading a cult, evading taxes and abusing his children. But Erhard was cleared of the charges against him, successfully suing the tax authorities, and the Harvard writers point out that he has no association with the Landmark Education Corporation. In 1991 Erhard sold the est method to former employees who turned it into Landmark.

Arriving at the Landmark centre near London?s Euston Station on a Friday morning for the first session of my three-day Forum course, I was prepared to meet a bunch of impressionable, New Agey types who spent their lives engaged in personal growth. Instead I found a mixed group of more than 200 people, ranging from beautiful, well-dressed youths to a dignified, grey-haired male academic, most of them appearing sane, successful and ready to ask the same questions as I was.

The first thing we all wanted to know was why we had to stay so late (sessions finished after 11 p.m.). We were told that there was a lot of material to cover in a short space of time, but I suspected that the tiring regime had more to do with getting people to absorb the process emotionally as well as mentally. We were not allowed to take notes, and great emphasis was placed on arriving on time.

At first, these rules seemed petty, but then I began to see the point. If you consistently say you will be on time and you are late, your life is out of control. In a nutshell, the Forum is about regaining control of your life.

I had expected the leaders to tell us what we wanted to hear; that we were wonderful people and that all our dreams were going to come true. Instead, it was like an emotional boot-camp led by a tough-talking Italian-American called Angelo d?Amelio. He challenged us on the stories we tell ourselves about how people see us and about the way our lives are heading. He lambasted us about living in the past, so turning our past into our future. When people stood up and tearfully told the group how parents or partners had hurt them, Angelo declined to share their pain. You?ve got a choice, he would say. You can carry on making them wrong and yourself right. Or you can call them up, say you are sorry you made them wrong, and build a new relationship. Your choice. Hearing him say that, in no uncertain terms, to someone who had been abused by one of her parents, had me quaking in my seat. I felt he was playing with fire, and felt like phoning Camden Social Services. But at the end of the conversation, the woman was laughing. Later she told me she felt so much better. Two days later, she still felt better.

So did I, and I had only gone along to write a story. I felt I had become much more aware of the way my mind works, and better able to master myself. I was worried, however, by the effect the course might have on those who were emotionally fragile.

Landmark did not work for everyone. One woman I sat next to for a few sessions said she felt it was a waste of time. She was depressed by hearing so many sad stories, and left at the end of the second day. But on the whole, the other people on my course were happy they had done it. A few appeared euphoric, which was worrying, and made grandiose statements about what they were going to do with what they had learned. Angelo tried gently to bring them down to earth. As the course progressed, I had tried to compare its message with that of Christianity. There were some striking parallels: the outrageous demand that people drop grievances against others could be simply translated into Christian forgiveness. The call to live in the present was one I had heard declaimed from pulpits. The only point where my Christianity tripped up was at a session where we were asked to consider the statement, Life is empty and meaningless. My faith made me reject the statement, but others found it liberating. I asked Angelo, a Catholic, how he understood it. I say things dramatically in the Forum to get people to think, he said. I cannot discover what God truly has planned for me until I let go of all the meaning I have put in place, especially as a child and young adult. Several Catholic priests and religious sisters have endorsed Landmark. The Trappist monk Basil Pennington has praised the Forum for bringing about a full human enlivenment which make people more lively in the practice of whatever faith they have.

Other personal development courses which are proving popular in London at the moment include Insight, made famous by its adherents Bernard Levin and Arianna Stassinopoulos, and The Life Training. Each is unique, but they seem to share common themes such as expanding horizons, taking risks, keeping commitments and living in the present.

The Life Training, a course which takes place over a weekend, was founded by two Anglican priests, Brad Brown and Roy Whitten. It is advertised as a synthesis of contemporary psychology and traditional spiritual teachings, and one of those to endorse it publicly is Patrick Reyntiens, the stained-glass artist who is a Catholic. He describes the course as a critical response to the self-indulgent me-generation. It demonstrates how much we excuse ourselves, he says, and how much we tell ourselves lies.

When I began looking into these courses, one of the questions I had was whether they actually help people or just pander, expensively, to the self-obsession of the over-privileged people who grew up in that me-generation. The only answer is to look at the fruits. I can say, with no doubt, that I felt happier after I had done the Landmark Forum course. Not because I had indulged or flattered myself. On the contrary, the Forum was tough and challenging, and I had been made to confront the apathy and weakness which had made me depressed. The course gave me tools which I am still using to fight paranoia and laziness. Friends who have done Landmark, Insight and The Life Training give positive reports.

But not everyone does. My friend Naomi did a personal development course (not Landmark, but somewhat similar) and hated it. She thought it was dangerous, because it opened deep emotional wounds in people. She felt it massaged people?s egos and left them with an artificial high. Another acquaintance did not like The Life Training. I understand these criticisms completely, and would not be surprised to find that these courses have serious casualties. I have, however, to go back to the fact that the Forum worked for me. I saw no marks of a cult.

Do these courses have anything to teach the Churches? Not in terms of answers, because the answers on offer seem remarkably similar to the ones the Churches have been promoting for 2,000 years, only expressed in a different language. What the courses do reveal is that many people are desperate for individual guidance about their relationships with other people and with themselves. Reading books and hearing sermons is not enough; they need to sit down with other people and focus for a few days on the games their minds play and how that affects their lives. The Churches could provide an opportunity for that in parishes. I believe they should do so, because people who believe in God and want to reassess their lives need to make that assessment in a spiritual context. We cannot wait for priests to set this up, they have enough to do. It is a job for lay people.

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