Community, Business—and the
Mission of Esalen
Esalen President & CEO Gordon Wheeler's Blog
June 2009
Where is Esalen going these days? What are the choice points—and then which are the choices? Have they changed over time? And perhaps most of all, in this time of leadership transition at Esalen: How do these things get decided, anyway? Who gets to say which kinds of programs get offered, which pro bono initiatives and projects get the nod, and which don't? Who gets a voice?
This year is my sixth in the double role of President and CEO at Esalen; and at the end of this year, half of that double portfolio—in many ways the heavier half, the strategic management/CEO role—will pass officially from me to our incoming CEO Tricia McEntee, who is already in place, actively building the staffing and the initiatives that will take Esalen on into the second decade of the new millennium, and the sixth of Esalen's transformational presence and impact on US and world culture.
What principles, what strategic mandates guide Tricia as she works with the teams here to realize this next phase in Esalen's creative history? Esalen is famously open, fertile, and curious-minded: are there any limits or channels to that creative openness? And if so, what basic beliefs, what core values and principles do those boundaries rest on and grow out of? And again—who gets to decide these things?
Like nearly everything at Esalen, the answers to these questions have a history to them. Esalen was founded, nearly 50 years ago now, by two restless and incredibly creative young spirits, Michael Murphy and Dick Price. And for the first quarter century or so of Esalen's existence—a period that can be regarded in the life of most visionary organizations as the first generation "Founder Era,"—the answers to questions of basic values and basic directions could remain largely implicit. That is, the boundaries or limits, if any, on the activities of the Institute could be held in the sensibilities of the Founders.
To be sure, there were many eloquent statements of faith in the human spirit and human creativity, many of them beautifully authored by Michael Murphy and by our "third Founder" George Leonard (who was honored in our recent annual Benefit Weekend). But these texts tended to be wonderfully open-ended, steering clear of limits or boundary-commitments, in keeping with a founding vision of "fostering human potential" and creating a space for "the exploration of everything excluded" from the mainstream universities and research institutes of the day.
This made for an agenda that could remain marvelously open to new creative streams and ferments, as the cultural trance of the immediate post-War era began to break up, with new possibilities, new channels for exploring consciousness and human relations and creativity seemed to open explosively nearly every day. The approach often seemed to be "let 1000 flowers bloom"—or at any rate, let 1000 seeds scatter, and see which ones of them sprout and manage to garner some sunshine. To be sure, there were always basic principles and limits, often unstated. But the limits became visible, oftentimes, when one or both of the Founders simply said Enough, or No, or No More, to this or that program, conference series, project, teacher, community member or practice, and so forth. If anything, there was a definite reluctance to get more specific than that. There were idols and icons everywhere in the culture that needed to be smashed—and even the smashing could be a necessary test of which ones were hollow, and which ones could resist a few blows!
As a curriculum approach, this was both wonderfully fertile and productive—and of course at times could be a bit wasteful, or redundant, or just too random. It also opened a space, at times, for the element of self-focus or self-indulgence that you could find, way beyond the confines of Esalen, in the "Culture of Narcissism" often critiqued as typifying much of the "Age of Reagan" in the 80s. Concern for the good of the whole, in those years, often seemed to fade, as the heady new voyages into subjectivity and consciousness in the 60s and 70s seemed to give way to the "'Me' Decade" of those go-go years in the wider culture (and note that it was under the tax reforms favoring the wealthy in the Reagan years that the middle class in the US began to lose ground, while the rich grew richer and the extremes of society grew ever further apart, as they continue to do today, reversing a 50-year trend since the time of the New Deal).
Under Co-Founder Dick Price there was no question that the living, learning residential community of Esalen was one of the most vibrant "programs" of the Institute, a hotbed of energy and transformation. But Dick died, tragically, in the mid-80s, while Mike's amazing creative energies were always turned outward from Esalen itself, toward the worlds of consciousness exploration, spiritual depth, and social action on a world stage. For many at Esalen itself, it was a time of confusion of purpose. Remarkable, cutting-edge, unique work continued to go on, changing lives by the thousands and reaching out to impact the larger culture as ever, both directly and indirectly. Still, without Dick's guiding presence in the years that followed, I'm told by many that there was a kind of turning inward by the community here—a feeling, by some anyway, that rather than our being here to serve Esalen, the seminarians, and the society at large, Esalen was here "for" the residential community. If our purpose as an Institute wasn't clear, then maybe we were the purpose. After all, as many have noted, it was still undeniable that the largest single program at Esalen, the one that has gone on the longest and has undoubtedly changed countless lives, and through them reached out to impact the wider culture as well—is the Esalen community itself!
It was a time, for example, noted then and remembered now for an air of cronyism and exclusivity. Many seminarians and staff members commented on this at the time, and reminisce about it now—often recounting how they or others could feel excluded, not part of the "in-crowd" at Esalen. "I'm here for me, and the seminarians are the necessary price, for me to be here," I was told by more than one community member, back in the 90s when I first began hanging out and doing some consulting and group facilitation at Esalen. Not the purpose—the price! (Not everybody felt that way by any means, I hasten to add. But it was widespread).
I'll always remember Tony, a wonderful Esalen devotee and frequent seminarian with whom I shared a course sometime in the late 90s. Tony loved Esalen, he told us, had taken a number of courses over the past ten years, felt like he was coming home whenever he got here, loved that people knew him, and he had many friends among the staff. "Of course," he mused further, "that took some time. At the beginning I didn't know anybody. The first six years were hard…" Six years!!
When I first came to Esalen, in the mid-90s, I remember so clearly a kind of dominant conversation around the question: "Are we a Community, or are we (just) a Business? This would be asked in a challenging, resentful sort of tone; and under it seemed to be a couple of assumptions. One, that you could only be one or the other, and that there was a zero sum between them: whichever one you emphasized, the other one necessarily suffered. And second, one was good and the other was bad: we used to be the a Community, but now, because of all the financial pressure (or just lack of firm commitments), we were only a Business.
This would come up in Community meetings, which I used to facilitate back in those days (that was one of my "space-mate" jobs whenever I was spending a week or more here, during the years when Nancy and I were in a bi-coastal marriage). If I ventured to suggest that the answer to both those terms could be no, that neither of them was the core identity of Esalen; that Esalen was actually neither a business nor a community as a primary identity, an end in its own right. Rather, what if we thought of Esalen as a visionary change organization with a transformational cultural mission—which also had both business and community dimensions required for delivering that mission? You'd definitely get some nods of recognition if you said this back in that period, but mostly what you'd get was blank stares, that feeling that you were "speaking Greek." And then folks would get back to the argument, and the lament.
Nearly a decade later, when I was first working with Esalen evaluating the intern programs and doing team development with the Board, the climate had shifted. The heady, largely peaceful ending to the Cold War (a sort of miraculous evolution in which Esalen had actually had a significant catalytic, structuring role in the early building of alternative networks that cut across monolithic structures of East and West), had given way to a new mood, fearful and thus warlike, and the provocation or cultivation (in the view of many) of new enemies. America, again in the view of many (including many at Esalen), had lost the way and was doing many things that were making the world a worse, not a better place for humanity at large, and for the flowering of consciousness, creativity, and the evolution of human potential that Esalen had always stood for. If there had been an inward focus, at Esalen as at many other places a decade earlier, that complacency was gone now, replaced by the refrain I began to hear often: "We're so blessed to be here—now, what are we doing for the rest of the world?
It was in this spirit that we convened, soon after I came in as CEO, a whole-organizational process, undertaking the serious, thrilling, and creative hard-work project of clarifying shared values and core beliefs, articulating mission and vision, and moving from there to lay out an agenda for the next stage of Esalen. The idea was not that we would "invent" new values that had never been heard before at Esalen! Rather, out of our rich living tradition and astonishingly creative legacy, what commitments, what shared beliefs would stand out, as we went through this collective self-inquiry, as the guiding core principles that would help us make choices and use this richness most effectively, in darkening (and exciting) times?
In the end over a hundred people at Esalen were centrally involved in this process, including all the Board, the staff, many of the interns, plus a number of teachers, core volunteers, and others of the Esalen community—distributed through more than twenty working action committees and teams, an elected community/Board synthesis team, many many hundreds of person-hours, and more than six months of hard work, all of it on a volunteer basis. Clearly the opening of this process had touched a spark, and tapped a great reserve of creative energy waiting to be focused and used!
The product of all this creative labor was a massive document detailing Esalen's status, capacities, challenges, and opportunities in some two dozen key areas (from Programs to Sustainability to Diversity to Community itself at Esalen, and more), amounting to over 200 pages of reports. All of this was then summarized in a few key pages—one page for our basic core beliefs, vision and the mission of Esalen; one for our core practices and living aspirations as an organization and a community; and one for the Strategic Mandates outlining key areas for attention and development now at Esalen. (You can read these key values and vision statements on our website. The entire document in hard copy is available as well, for deeper study here on request).
The gist of all that work can be paraphrased very simply (my words here, drawn from the core statements themselves):
- We share the deep conviction that human beings hold an enormous untapped potential for expanding creativity and consciousness, and the evolution of a just, humane, and sustainable world.
- Esalen exists to foster and promote that transformational change and evolution in the world, at both the individual and the societal level.
- And finally: that those levels—the individual and the social—cannot ultimately be separated; each is necessary, each depends on and fulfills the other.
To deliver this mission of personal and societal transformation, Esalen offers public programs, residential internships and education, plus "think tank" activities including invitational conferences, publications, model projects, social initiatives, and research. Realizing these programs and projects means complex, multi-dimensional attention to our mission activities, and the health and development of our staff community, and financial well-being, and model sustainability initiatives and practices. Only when all four of these levels are vibrant and robust can the first one7mdash;delivery of our mission programs and activities—reach its potential for positive impact in the world.
Our public programs are our core activity for delivering that mission, both to the students (including ourselves!) who profit from them, the teachers who get the chance to experiment with new forms in this magic learning environment—and the many thousands around the world who are then impacted by those courses and programs. Thus all of our programs have to be selected reexamined continually, to be sure they are fulfilling the above core goals. In particular, spiritual depth, social action, and sustainability have to be deeply and intentionally integrated into programs of personal growth, somatics, and the mind-body-social-spiritual continuum of human development.
"Residential Education" (our term for the in-house programs for staff and interns that have impacted so many thousands living and working here and then moving back out into the world over the years) are also a core mode for delivering that mission. Thus these programs too have to be reevaluated continuously, upgraded where they need it, monitored for impact, with the same integrative philosophy.
Our many pro bono initiatives also have to be evaluated for impact and productivity: the Center for Theory and Research with its astonishingly productive invitational Conference series, research programs, publication, social action initiatives, and more; our Sustainability programs and initiatives, including model green campus renewal, teaching programs, and our jewel program, the Farm and Garden; our landmark pioneering Gazebo early childhood eco-education program; our subsidized internships themselves, and other programs on the books to come. These programs are all donor-supported, as they do not and should not support themselves directly.
And our community itself, both as a model program for the world, and as the key to delivering all the other programs, has to be evaluated on-going for support (including compensation!), capacities for meeting today's increasing pressures and skill requirements coming from the world, and living practices and living conditions (like housing, diet, job stress and conditions, educational offerings, and key, tough mundane nuts-and-bolts like medical insurance).
All our systems at Esalen also had to be evaluated for technological upgrade and support, making our work lives flow more easily, and keeping Esalen current with today's opportunities for communications, online teaching venues, and tech support for everything we do in this ever-more complex and demanding world.
Finally, our business model itself had to be looked at. Esalen's operations are tuition-supported. And there is simply no way, in today's world, that some 80 seminarians per night could possibly support our community (of perhaps four times that number, at an average dinner). Our precious limiting resources is of course a bed on property! Plus, we are completely committed to not increasing the total "footprint" of the numbers of people using and living on this precious, magic site. But by shifting some functions off-site (the Finance Department, for example, actually works better in town for many reasons, now that we have full online connectivity), we are able to make space for a moderate increase in seminarians while actually lessening total numbers on property—and increasing our mission impact and our "bottom line" revenues, enabling more staff/community support.
Integrated, complex strategies like this, which enhance mission impact, community support, financial health, and sustainability, are the criteria for our adjusted Business Model—growing in turn out of the work of the Strategic Planning initiative.
I'm thrilled and proud to be able to say, as I transition out of an active management role, that all the core commitments and strategic mandates of the Plan have been significantly advanced over these past four or five years—thanks to the limitless measures of imagination, dedication, and sheer hard work of our creative staff team here at Esalen, along with Board, donors, teachers, volunteers, and more. A few things I'm particularly proud of, as I move out of strategic leadership: our exponential growth in creative programming and on-property initiatives in Sustainability; the fact that lowest-tier salaries at Esalen are up over 60% over these few years, while the top-to-bottom full-compensation ratio (ie, salary plus all benefits) has shrunk to a figure almost unheard of even in the non-profit world, of less than 4 to 1 (ie, the top exec at Esalen, in salary plus benefits, is compensated at less than four times the value amount of the least-paid intern); the ferment and creative flowering of integrated offerings in Residential Education; the capacity, quality, and commitment of the staff and interns who are drawn now to Esalen; the full commitment to almost-always organic menus at Esalen, and our zero participation in the standard American "factory" industrial sourcing of meat, poultry and dairy products; the expansion and even greater flowering of CTR programs and initiatives and publications (I don't even mention public programs, only because they were always so strong and mission-aligned); our revolution in technological connectivity and all the support systems that enables; and much more. And of course, none of these things were done by me!—all of them are the products of teams of dedicated staff, interns, teachers, students, volunteers, donors together.
Most of all it's these people I'm honored to be associated with, and warmed beyond measure to be in lifelong association with. I'm not planning on going very far in this transition: only back to the President role I held before, of public communications, conferencing, publications, media and other cultivation work at and for Esalen. If you know Esalen, then you know as I do that some of the most interesting, creative, dedicated, heartfully, imaginative people in our world stream through our gate—and/or pause to live here for some amount of time. Not just the teachers and "thought leaders" who give and stimulate us so much: the students and staff are just as stimulating, just as creative and innovative, just as dedicated to the transformation of the world.
None of these evolutionary advances is complete at Esalen—or ever will be. A "Plan," if it means anything, is a living document: in not that many years, it will be time to do that activity over, or something like it, realigning the Institute and its mission for new conditions, new dangers challenges, new opportunities. Meantime, are we a Community or a Business? Yes, we are. And both live in the organizing context of our mission on impacting our shared world—including ourselves and all those we touch—in the directions of our core values and beliefs. This core has to evolve too, in its articulation and its emphases, as the world changes. And yet, it still inspires us, with the same key spark of illumination that has animated Esalen for almost 50 years now. (and think of it, Michael Murphy is still with us, 50 years on, still at the visionary helm, still evolving and still undiminished, exploring the outer reaches of that vision, and feeding the results of that lifelong exploration into our living fabric here).
See you soon at Esalen!
Gordon Wheeler, President/CEO (but soon to be President, without the other tag)