Esalen: An Evolutionary Vision

In the fall of 1962 a nascent center called Big Sur Hot Springs issued a pamphlet
announcing four weekend workshops and a lecture. Who could have imagined that from this modest
beginning would grow a world-renowned institute annually offering nearly 500 workshops plus a variety of residential work-study programs, invitational conferences, and research projects? In this essay, the last
in a series by Esalen president George Leonard and cofounder Michael Murphy, the authors
take a look at where we’ve come from and where we may be headed.

An Evolutionary Vision
A Personal Statement by George Leonard and Michael Murphy
Part 3.

The future rarely comes to us down a major boulevard, heralded by the blare of a marching band. It’s far more likely to slip in by way of a side street we never noticed. Many of our most important scientific and technological breakthroughs—nuclear energy, X rays, radio and television, sound and image recording, and the Internet, to name a few—have taken us by surprise, altering our lives in ways we never imagined. And in the flow of history, there are those startling punctuation marks that leave things never quite the same.

Esalen was founded in 1962 (itself a surprising, unanticipated event) at the leading edge of historic transformations. Who would have imagined, for example, the profound changes in American mores, manners, and dress starting shortly after Esalen’s birth, the expression of thoughts and feelings never before so openly revealed? Consider, too, the many liberation movements of the Sixties and Seventies, with some Americans walking on the moon while others walked city streets demanding new rights. Who would have predicted the assassinations of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy? And then a President driven from office by the threat of impeachment, another impeached but not convicted, the Berlin Wall torn down, the Soviet empire collapsing, the Federal Building in Oklahoma City blown up by an American terrorist—all unexpected. And who would have thought in 1962 that Islamic terrorists would someday use our own civilian airliners as missiles to bring down the very buildings that symbolized our global reach?

Before we try to glimpse the four decades yet to come, let’s look at those just past and seek to understand how Esalen has not only survived but flourished. Coping with cataclysmic shifts in the outside world was challenging enough, yet the institute has also managed to deal with disasters on the very land it occupies. Esalen has withstood forest fires, torrential rains, landslides, 100-mile-an-hour winds. The El Niño storm of February 1998 totaled our hot baths, damaged buildings, downed trees, and closed the road both north and south for three months. As usual, restoring Esalen was a community effort. Within two months of reopening, visitors were enjoying Esalen’s temporary baths, and we were drawing up plans not only for our spectacular new baths but also for an ambitious long-term redevelopment program.

Clearly, the journey through our first forty years has not always been smooth. Esalen was something new under the sun; precedents were few and fragmentary. Some seemingly promising programs moved toward self-caricature while certain charismatic practitioners tried to remake the institute as a vehicle for their own practices. In every case, however, Esalen managed to maintain the integrity of its founding mission.

What can explain this extraordinary resilience? First, consider the sacred beauty of the land itself. Simply to visit the property—to breathe the air, to take the pulse of the sea, the mountain stream, the waterfall, to stroll along the garden path, to enter steaming mineral water bubbling up from deep within the earth—is itself transformative. And the people who live and work on this lovely stretch of land between mountain and sea contribute greatly, day after day, year after year, to the institute’s power and charm, its very soul.

But Esalen is more than a physical place. It is a unique vision, a confluence of ideas that have stood the test of time, a series of initiatives that have touched individuals and organizations all across the world. The institute was founded on the thesis that each of us possesses a deep reservoir of untapped capabilities, and that ways can be found to tap much more of this incomparable resource than is now the case. This thesis has inspired those who attend our Big Sur programs and informed our outreach to the world community.

The human potential, as we see it, is by no means limited to any one aspect of our being. The current educational system emphasizes verbal/mathematical skills, generally at the expense of all else. But much more is involved in being human. From the beginning, the institute’s programs have included the education of the body, spirit, and emotions as well as the mind. Esalen was investigating and teaching “emotional intelligence” decades before the term became popular.

To treat these various aspects of our being as separate entities, however, is far from the answer. What we call “body” and what we call “mind” are not separate from and opposed to one another, and only mischief and grief can accompany such a way of seeing them. Healthy development requires that differentiation be matched with integration. Thus, the integration of seeming opposites has played a major role in Esalen’s vision and mission, not just in terms of being but across the board—between mind and body, spirit and emotion, East and West, sports and yoga, the U.S. and the USSR. From its inception, Esalen has worked to take down fences and build bridges.

In 1987, Esalen held an invited conference on “The Biological, Psychological, and Cultural Body: Methods of Transformation.” Over the next eleven years, Esalen continued to sponsor such gatherings, most of them convened by Don Hanlon Johnson. This series and the books that evolved from it helped shape the development of Somatics, a discipline that views the body not as an object, but as a subject, integrating the whole person.

Beginning in 1980, at the height of the Cold War, Esalen’s Soviet-American Exchange Program set a new standard in citizen diplomacy. In 1989, the institute was host to Boris Yeltsin on his first trip to the United States. Esalen arranged meetings between Yeltsin and government and business leaders, including then-President George Bush and former president Ronald Reagan, took him to cities and towns across the country, arranged lectures and television appearances, and—in a move that was to be immensely significant—took him to U.S. supermarkets. It was in such a place in Houston that Yeltsin experienced a transformative, Road-to-Damascus experience. Seeing the seemingly endless rows of fresh produce and meat open to casual shoppers with none of the long waiting lines common in the Soviet Union, he realized beyond all doubt that he had been lied to by the Communist bosses about poverty and discord in America. He reportedly raged, wept, and sat with head in hands during the flight to his next destination. Yeltsin returned to Moscow determined to end communism in Russia. As scholar Leon Aron wrote in his magisterial biography of Yeltsin, “Little, if anything, could match for Yeltsin the trip’s sense of discovery or the impact it would have on him in
the long run.”

But the Yeltsin trip was only one among several Esalen initiatives that helped to catalyze changes in the Soviet Union that would lead to better Russian-American relations. With the leadership of Dulce Murphy, we brokered the entrance of the Soviet Writers’ Union into PEN, the international organization that promotes freedom of written expression around the world, and thereby helped to further glasnost; we initiated a groundbreaking agreement with the Soviet Ministry of Health to encourage programs in mind-body health; and we brought future Russian leaders to America so that they, like Yeltsin, could have a first-hand experience of democratic and free enterprise institutions.

In addition to these initiatives in Somatics and Soviet-American relations, Esalen has taken its work into the world at large in surprising ways. The institute’s Program for Humanistic Medicine helped shape the first Congressional legislation to support what came to be called “relationship medicine” and holistic health. Esalen catalyzed the formation of the Program for Confluent Education at the University of California at Santa Barbara, which for thirty years has joined the cognitive, emotional, and somatic dimensions of learning and has awarded more than 300 graduate degrees in education. And Esalen has stimulated research programs in many fields, ranging from quantum physics to ecology to governance to the beneficial results of meditation and prayer. You can find a list of such initiatives on the website for Esalen’s Center for Theory and Research (www.esalenctr.org).

What we see in our first forty years, then, is a guide to what Esalen can do in the decades ahead. Though we can’t predict the future, we can remain true to our founding vision. We can build on our successful programs, continue to initiate pioneering work, and seize creative opportunities as they arise with a freedom that mainstream institutions do not typically enjoy. In all of this, we can draw upon the orienting mission, the faith in human greatness, and the resilience that have sustained us since 1962.

A new era for Esalen has begun. Our long-term development plans and capital campaign reflect this. Here are some examples of what we are doing to shape our future now:

Though most of these initiatives are rooted in Esalen’s past activities, they have novel features and sometimes reveal unexpected possibilities. For an analogy, think of the newly refurbished Hubble telescope: Not only does it sharpen images of what it has already revealed, but it shows us ever more distant and wondrous celestial bodies. Similarly, as we continue to improve our past work, we are extending it to embrace possibilities we had only glimpsed or did not recognize at all. Each program at Esalen adds something new and something more promising to our work.

Current programs, as well as initiatives yet to be foreseen, are guided by these core principles: first, that personal and social development are inextricably wedded; second, that lasting human betterment is best fostered by the simultaneous embrace of body, mind, heart, and soul; third, that the institute’s creativity depends on its being an open system, free from dogma of any sort, whether religious, scientific, therapeutic, or political; and fourth, that we do not know the limits of the human potential.

As in the past, Esalen Institute will confront unexpected challenges and difficulties in the decades ahead. But as our properties and facilities grow in beauty and sustainability, and as our innovative programs develop, there will be happy surprises too, bringing new opportunities, new breakthroughs, and new frontiers for us to explore.