Ken Keyes Jr. (January 19, 1921 – December 20, 1995) was an American personal growth author and lecturer, and the creator of the Living Love method, a self-help system.
Keyes wrote fifteen books on personal growth and social consciousness issues, representing about four million copies distributed overall.
He suffered from chronic bronchitis and croup in his infant years, and in 1925 his family moved to Miami Beach, Florida, in hopes of his benefiting from its sunny climate.
His father, Kenneth Keyes Sr., became successful in real estate development there and active in the conservative evangelical wing of the Presbyterian Church.
Keyes attributed the seeds of the personal growth system he would later develop to an experience he had with a stern English teacher in ninth grade.
Despite her reputation as a strict teacher and hard grader, he made an effort to be personally caring toward her, which led to her giving him a slight break in grading.
"Upon completion of therapy in 1949, Keyes returned to South Miami, Florida, where he resumed work in real estate and bought a specially equipped speedboat for racing.
His second book, on the topic of nutrition and entitled, How to Live Longer–Stronger–Slimmer (later to be retitled, Loving Your Body), was published by Fredrick Fell during this period.
Over the next year, Keyes lived with a small group of people on his yacht, and prepared to turn his business over to an employee and found a nonprofit organization with his other assets.
According to Keyes, during this period he used his new learning to cope more successfully with issues of jealousy and deception in his romantic relationship with a woman named Jane.
During an episode in which Jane brought another lover onto his yacht, he used a form of mental reprogramming process that, he says, alleviated his jealously without repressing it, a method he would later teach.
[6][7] In mid-1972, Keyes outfitted a bus for living, sold his yacht, disposed of most of his possessions, and began traveling west with a group of other people, visiting places such as Taos, New Mexico, and the Rainbow Gathering at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.
He settled in Berkeley, California, in 1973 and began giving regular workshops, establishing the Living Love Center there in June 1973 in a former fraternity house.
Keyes recruited a staff from the streets of Berkeley at essentially volunteer wages to support the workshops, which he also began giving in Los Angeles.
At this time, the Handbook to Higher Consciousness was selling about fifty thousand copies a year, and his workshops attracted students from all over the country.
His staff, which included Shakti Gawain, Tolly Burkan, and Summer Raven, worked on the workshops and activities such as writing songs to go along with them.
The three week-long retreats during this time without Ken included such things as eating vegetarian meals, doing "karma yoga" work (chores) around the grounds, daily workshops based on The Handbook to Higher Consciousness principles, and watching the Franco Zeffirelli film, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, about the life of St. Francis of Assisi.
Adding to the "we are all brothers and sisters" theme was the fact that all the bathrooms and showers at Cornucopia were co-ed, though the expectation was for there to be no sexual contact, unless one was in a pre-existing relationship.
During these Marathons there was usually a "Talent Show" with each group member do a bit or with another group member or two.The idea of these various processes---"The String Game" or "The Marathon" was to bring up and trigger security, sensation or power needs/addictions that participants had about the way a particular thing "should/ought" to be, or how it "shouldn't" be for them to work on for their growth of being liberated from past "conditioning" about the way things should or shouldn't be in the world, or in ones' life.
Additionally, near the end of the workshop, all people participated in an exercise requiring them to take off all their clothes, stand before the group naked, and share honestly what they did not like about their body.
When Keyes left on a live-in bus with some staff that volunteered in March 1978, he had them go through a 'growth process' where they all had to shave their heads, and if male, their facial hair too.
On a visit back to Cornucopia in November 1978, Keyes became involved with Penny Hannig, an acquaintance of several years and a main workshop leader at the center, and she joined him in Santa Cruz in 1979.
Bouts of depression and hostility Penny experienced over a period of about two years during this time were initially mysterious, but the couple eventually diagnosed these symptoms as being the result of food allergies.
The organization sold the Cornucopia property and relocated along with Keyes to [Coos Bay, Oregon], in an old four-story hospital building.
There they continued to give workshops and write books for about four years, before deciding to open a formal training school for the Living Love method, which they called the Ken Keyes College.
He credited his use of the Living Love methods with enabling him to summon the strength and serenity to remain calm and upbeat about his situation and to visualize healing for his lungs.
He established the Caring Rapid Healing Center in Coos Bay to do private multi-day counseling workshops in this area, and wrote his final book, Your Road Map to Lifelong Happiness, on these topics.