The Panda’s Werner Erhard Woo-Fest
The Panda Restaurant chain consumes much of the the Woo-woo, and in this article you see them moving from pop spiritualism and Deepak Chopra to the harder edged pop psychology of Woo meister Werner Erhard’s EST movement with the Landmark Foundation.
Cherng is an avid consumer of self-improvement programs. He urges his Pandas to maintain healthy lifestyles and eat a well-rounded diet; he recently challenged the Pandas to run three miles in under 36 minutes. He has since 2003 been a participant in Life Academy, a Taiwanese organization that follows a “life manual” dedicated to the “advancement of the human spirit.” He is a devotee of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Deepak Chopra’s The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, and Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements. Recently, Cherng has become passionate about the Landmark Forum, a program that utilizes Werner Erhard’s EST methodology, which Psychology Today described as one that, “tore you down and put you back together.”
According to the group’s literature, Landmark improves everything from personal relationships to business performance. It is a kind of program Cherng has been relying on for almost a decade. “I see the benefit of Landmark to the human race,” he says. “If you quit Panda tomorrow, I still want you to go to Landmark.”