In the days after the training, I continued to communicate with my small group and other participants from the course. The collective high was initially palpable. Everyone was going to achieve it all. But as the days passed, the general mood drifted back down to earth, and gradually these channels fell silent.

Keen to understand what I had just gone through, I reached out to John Hunter, a research psychologist at Varsity College in South Africa, who studies what’s known as large group awareness trainings (LGATs), such as MITT.

Hunter maintains that even though there are “hundreds” of LGATs around the world, “most can be traced back to Lifespring” and its contemporaries. They hinge, he says, on significant stress followed by a social reward, and it is this process that generates the “transient experience of transformation”.

While most studies of LGATs suggest there are no long-term benefits derived from such trainings, I spoke with several graduates of MITT who felt they had reaped lasting rewards. Many of the benefits they described were intangibles, like confidence and positivity. But they also shared achievements that they linked directly to the training: getting a promotion, leaving an unsatisfying marriage, reconnecting with an estranged sibling.