Hell and Heaven Boot Camp

 "The person who raises his voice first has lost the argument."

So a Japanese proverb goes. So what on earth is this 1980's Japanese Hell Camp Business School about? Shouting and screaming is all they seemed to do there.

It was 5 am that June morning in the Lake District, and there was a mild mist that obscured the top of the steep hills around camp.

"I had only made it back to camp at 1am from the precious night's last exercise, namely a 10 mile hike, equipped with just a torch and a highly misleading map."

In the clearing in front of a line of yurts, I was with a group of men and women in our 30s and 40s, going through yoga stretches. It was an odd picture. We were all wearing linen tunics over our T-shirts. On the tunic, we we adorned with a mass of ribbons with labels like 'Sincerity' and Persuasion' written on them. As the master shouted yogic positions, we tried to follow. The yoga itself wasn't particularly taxing, but I was exhausted doing it anyway: I had only made it back to camp at 1am from the precious night's last exercise, namely a 10 mile hike, equipped with just a torch and a highly misleading map.

I was grateful for one thing: we had to be absolutely silent. After two days of intense shouting and expression, my voice was cackly and hoarse. It was now Day Three of Heaven and Hell Camp, and today was the first day of Vipassana: observation of complete silence.

'Triangle! Triangle! Triangle! Warrior One! Warrior One! Warrior One!' We followed the master's instructions, folding and holding as best we could mimic the master. Yogesh Chopra is a tightly bound stack of a man; an ex British Army commander. Silver, in his late 60s, he shouted his commands and bounded through the positions with the fluidity of an origami swan.

The four day course borrowed from two completely opposed cultures of development: the Japanese Business School (Kanrisha Yosei Gakko), and the Indian practice of Vipassana, or silent meditation.

Jigoku Gashuku is the Japanese name for its famed 'Hell Camp' business school; on the outskirts of Tokyo, it is an emotionally and physically overwhelming experience, notorious for exhorting its grateful hoards of recruits into shouting their every message, over-expressing every single word they speak, exhausting their normally tightly wound emotional vocabulary. Students learn to apologise, assert, persuade and thank by experiencing the extremes of these transactions. You must be convincing: if you don't, you fail the test and return to your employer and family in shame. Interest in it peaked in the 1980s, when Japanese business culture was at the peak of its zeitgeist powers. They kept doing it all the time in between- it's still going strong today, being the most popular business school in Japan- and it is enjoying a second resurgence worldwide.

Vipassana means 'to see things as they are', and requires maximum self control: no talking, no reading or writing, not even eye contact with your fellow meditators. In various guises, from the starving ascetic cults in the remote hills of Gujarat to the watered down spa retreats of California, Vipassana has become massively popular in the last ten years.

Two days of Hyogen, and two of Vipassana: learning from Expression, and then from its opposite, Restraint.

The course was a bespoke commission, organised on behalf of an IT firm with a large (150 people) operation in Manchester. The attendees, 15 in total, were a mixture of middle and senior managers. They has been selected and invited to go along by their team superiors, and fell into to different categories: promising leaders who were being groomed for the next promotion, and struggling managers who demonstrated talent originally but somehow had lost their way in terms of performance of late.

The first two days had been a heady and disorientating adventure. Lining up on the first day, we were given our tunics in a very ceremonious, ritualised fashion, and told very clearly about what was expected: this was a cultural shock, and we needed to let go of absolutely every inch of our personal hangups if we were to succeed. The Japanese business culture focusses on completion, not competition: if one of us failed, we all did. Some exercises were exceedingly simple, even boring- one hour saw us going round the assembled circle, repeatedly extending our hands to show warmth in greeting the other. Others were impossible to decipher, and maddening to decode: we had to memorise a three page speech and deliver it to the masters perfectly, getting marks out of 100, and even those of us who recited it perfectly got no more than 48 points. The insight only came later when we discovered that it was about delivery and humility, not content.

Now into the Indian phase, we had a completely different remit. This third day saw us learning a set of rules about conduct in Vipassana. One of them was not to kill any living thing. Only the most astute among us noted that this meant walking only on the paths, not the grass, reducing the chances of squashing an insect.

The impositions of restraint were further underlined in the day's intense sensory isolation. In contrast to days one and two, we were expressly forbidden to communicate verbally, and to minimise our gestures and limb movements when moving about. Eye contact was taboo, as was coughing loudly, spitting, and any facial expression other than that conveying neutrality and introspection. Then there were extended periods of sitting, holding breath, and focussing on our sensations: the basics of mindfulness.

The basis of all this drama are sound enough from a psychological standpoint.

In most Western models of growth, learning is followed by behaviour. You learn about something, buy into its reasoning, then you go out and implement it. In Eastern ones, this model is reversed. All of us could already feel this happening on day one. The apparent meaninglessness of repeatedly greeting one another got us to focus on the gestural and non-verbal elements of it: a state of semantic satiation in neuroscientific terms: where words lose their meaning and become utterances and noises, leaving one to fathom what is going on through much more primal, emotionally intelligent routes. We became, in that one hour, far more adept at expressing sincerity. Like Bob Monkhouse said, 'If you can do sincerity, you can do anything'.

Interpreting the course.

The course was all about behavioural and emotional learning. The two cultures approached the issue with equal wisdom, but from opposite standpoints.

Japanese: Hyogen: DOING: You learn about yourself through exaggerating your behaviour, forcing your intellectual and emotional self into the open. You become better integrated once you see how they can both be of use.

Indian: Vipassana: SENSING: You learn by shutting down your mind, restricting your behaviour. Your intellectual and emotional selves become more distinct and apparent, giving you clarity and precision in understanding and controlling your faculties.

In either case, you become more composed as a person because you have learned to become consciously attentive to yourself and the world around you.

Being attentive and in command of ourselves is the basis of emotional intelligence and success in human endeavours: people respond far more to the wish to protect their family, to earn loyalty and favour from those they respect, and to feel masterful over their destiny, than they do to paper achievements. Even if they mostly don't know it: which is the point here: understanding our primal, emotional needs is not achieved when we ave been taught that success comes from intellectual and practical efforts alone. The reality at home and at work is far different from that: we are far more driven to succeed by our wish to protect, acquire and prove, than we are to complete a paper plan.

"It's like your body has learned something new, but it's actually happened in your head."

We started out with 20 ribbons each, pinned to our tops; the master would take one off as the course went on if we passed a test of come kind, formal or otherwise. Once I had two plucked from me while I was meditating: I only became aware of it afterwards when I opened my eyes.

The aim was to have none left at the end. Only five of us passed, out of the fifteen who attended. It would be impossible to tell you whether I made it through without sounding like gloating if I passed, or describing some cringeworthy experience of learning through failure if I failed. This distracts from the main outcome: all of us, without exception, were bonded and united with a degree of depth and unity that came from having dragged ourselves, and each other, through some difficult but very worthy territory, literally and otherwise.

More than this, though, people were genuinely emotional and appreciative. The moment came when we were told that we could exit the course, and it was a bit like that moment from the film Awakenings: we started looking at each other, now back to our everyday selves for the first time in several days, with a sense of fresh illumination on how we interact. Matt Garner, my walking partner on the second night hike, described it thus: "Like when you learn how to ride a bike. First, you fall off all the time. You don't get it. Then it just clicks, and you can't fall off even when you try. It's like your body has learned something new, but it's actually happened in your head."

The aim of any good course for grown-ups is in how it is immediately useful: does it demystify something that is persistent but evasive? I had some hand in designing the course, but this time I actually went participated in it, leaving the delivery to the team at Ingrams at the time, and with the immense help and consult we got from Yogesh.