Han Dana
USA
See what other graduates are up to:
Read about Grads' Breakthrough Stories
See profiles of Grads Making a Difference
Featured Grad Site:
Visit a site created by
graduates*:
ILovePossibility.info
*Landmark may link to sites that graduates have and will rotate the sites that we link to from time to time.
Bridging East and West, Grassroot Efforts Take Hold
How the heck did Landmark Education get introduced so successfully in countries as far-flung as Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand? Talk to people from these countries, and you'll hear one name over and over again: Han Dana.
Who exactly is Han Dana? Besides being a 50-year-old Indonesian man who spent his early years in Jakarta but now lives in Fort Mill, South Carolina, he is someone who knows first-hand the transformative powers of The Landmark Forum. Before he enrolled in Landmark, Dana says, he sometimes lived his life out of regret—specifically, the pain of his parents' divorce when he was five years old.
"Every time I failed, I said, 'Well, it's because of that incident,'" Dana says. "What happened in The Landmark Forum is I started to see myself and what I could be in a whole new light—I saw myself as the determiner of my fate, not as a person defined by my circumstances."
Now that he has learned to live his life from possibility, Dana wants nothing more than to share his heart, vision, commitment, and the Landmark experience with others, so that they might have the same opportunity. And, it's important to point out that no one at Landmark asked Dana to spearhead a grassroots effort to bring The Landmark Forum to these countries—or even knew about it. He simply recognized the power these emerging cultures might gain in the world scene if they were introduced to the Landmark philosophy. "The people of these countries are shifting from agricultural societies into global ones as they enter the 21st century, and I knew the Landmark technology would make an enormous difference on economic, social, and personal levels as the transition occurs," Dana says.
This isn't just an opinion or a passing comment—Dana walks his talk. An Indonesian who has been living in the USA for the past 20 years, Dana is the perfect ambassador for bridging Eastern and Western society. He can make what he sees possible heard and understood in both cultures. In bringing The Landmark Forum to these countries, Dana has started a grassroots conversation that expands by leaps and bounds the perspectives of people in Hong Kong, Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand. He also creates the possibility that these Landmark programs can hopscotch to other Asian cities with a life all their own. For Dana, this is a dream come true. He wants people in these countries to find their voices, stop limiting themselves, and have the courage to step beyond their current views—beyond the status quo. Visit www.ilovepossibility.info to see what they're up to.
It's striking that when you ask people in these countries how this all happened—how the Landmark Forum ended up at their doorsteps—they mention with reverence Dana's name, and yet Dana himself, a highly modest man, takes no credit. Instead, Dana credits Landmark and one Landmark Forum leader in particular, Jerome Downes, and sees his own grassroots effort simply as an expression of the possibility that the Landmark programs ignited.
"I'm so completely grateful to Landmark Education for the kind of life that I've been living in the last 20 years," he says. "I can be playing with my cat, Natasha, or shopping, or gardening, and suddenly, whatever it is I'm dealing with stops, and I'm just so present to how great life is - and the quality of being free.
