Where Are We Headed?
Esalen President Gordon Wheeler's Blog
January 2010
What is Esalen? A place? a community? an idea, or set of ideas?—and if so, what are they? Here at Esalen we're just coming out of our annual Staff Week, the one five-day period in the year when we close our gates to the public, heave a deep and well-earned breath, kick back a bit—and also sit down together with just us, to talk about who we are, how we're doing, and where we're heading in the New Year.
Now I have to say that these questions—who are we, where are we going, what is Esalen exactly?—are way easier to answer in a few words when you're talking about a single-purpose, fixed-creed organization, such as an ashram, a guru- or single-teacher institute or community, or an ordinary, single-focus school or charity. And that's not Esalen.
Here at Esalen, by contrast, our mission, of "personal and social transformation," is clear and fresh after nearly a half-century—and it's complex. The complexity and the freshness are the same thing: Esalen is committed to exploration at the evolving edges of consciousness and culture—and that edge itself is always moving, always changing.
Esalen was founded, some 48 years ago, in a culture that was constricted in its imagination and expression, to a degree that is really almost inconceivable today. Those were the days of the Cold War, the nuclear shadow, the uncritiqued, Ayn Rand-version "high individualism" of the capitalist West, simplistically opposed to the mass tyranny of the Communist-dominated world. Meanwhile, the subtler oppressions of our own society—by race, class, politics, gender, sexual orientation, and really any other kind of "deviance" from an imaginary norm—all that for the most part hadn't even been raised up for question yet, on a societal level. We lived in a dulling trance—and those of us who knew we didn't fit those regimens were isolated in sub-communities or alone (we were a vast majority, of course, but without what the academics call a "discourse" to connect us).
Esalen broke that trance. It broke it big-time, by offering an open space for exploration of mind/body, of emotion/cognition, of science/religion, of "East"/"West" (in both the spiritual and the political sense), and so much more. In the process, Esalen led the "human potential movement," the cultural wave which challenged and even began to heal many of the worst splits in society, opening up new creativity, new vistas that were beyond imagination in an older, more frozen age.
This work is never done—because human potential and creative evolution themselves are never finished. Are mind and body really one?—but then that means that consciousness and "hard science" can be, and have to be, integrated and unified. And as that work, those courses and conversations begin to happen, here at Esalen and elsewhere, then it becomes more and more obvious that spirit and society are indivisible: and the movement of "spiritual activism" (or as Andrew Harvey puts it, "sacred service"), is renewed, reborn, and opens to whole new possibilities in our lives, and in society.
I'm a relational psychologist by training, pursuing for forty years now the once-marginal, now mainstream themes of how one mind affects and cocreates another—in childrearing, in intimacy, and in lifelong education. That was "fringey" and "soft-science" just a couple of decades ago, the work of clinicians and attachment theorists, not research institutes or public policy. But—fueled by the experiential explorations at Esalen and the other centers growing up in Esalen's image, those topics (which every parent, every teacher, every lover or meditator or clinician knew to be real) began to be researched seriously. The result: the burgeoning new field of "interpersonal neurobiology," the hottest part of today's explosion of cognitive science research; and everything the Gestalt and relational models have been teaching at Esalen over the decades is suddenly on the docket of major university research grants, and at the center of the Governor's Education Initiative.
And again, the growing edge moves on. Here in the rich conversations of Staff Week at Esalen, we tackle these issues and questions in real life, and others like them, ranging from macro to micro. What does it mean to live sustainability, bending our legacy of personal exploration and change to the community-wide (and world-wide) changes we need to commit to, to become a model sustainability, permaculture campus and teaching facility? What do we understand by a "human potential organization," one where we live holistically, sacrificing neither organizational effectiveness nor personal growth and "quality of life"? How do we actually move toward that, and become a model organizational community, in today's pressured world and stressed economy? How do we keep Esalen affordable, while still offering a living wage to our staff in this remote location, and rebuilding our aging facility at the same time? What does it take to be a teacher at Esalen—what are the standards for that, what are the "Esalen values" we believe an Esalen teacher needs to represent, while still preserving our legacy of open style and spirit?
Meanwhile, Big Sur is changing around us. Every year, it seems, the population of full-time residents goes down—and the number of young families with children goes down even faster. What does that mean for Gazebo Park, our landmark, pioneering pre-school which has led the child-centered, outdoor, ecological education movement for young children for a generation? Gazebo enjoys a significant Esalen subsidy, in addition to donor and grant support; what changes are needed, in the face of a declining local family population, to be sure we are having all the impact we can on the wider world of early childhood eco-education?
All these are examples of heartfelt, real issues that come up for discussion here at Esalen at Staff Week, and round the year. Each means a continuous move in the creative edge of the culture, that "sweet spot" where new creative thinking has the most impact, which has been Esalen's specialty over the years. We know that our challenges are world-wide now, nothing can be solved separately from everything else. That shift too, to holistic, complexity thinking, is part of that moving creative edge. All this means a change in Consciousness—in the way we relate to each other and our world (which in the end is what Consciousness is, and how it manifests).
Thus the mission of Esalen remains ever-green, ever-moving and new—and ever debated! Join us here at Esalen for this ongoing debate, in a course, a conference, over dinner, down at the baths or in your own meditation. You too are an essential part of this wider community, this living conversation.
See you soon at Esalen!
Gordon Wheeler, President, Esalen Institute—& CEO (but only till January 1, 2010!)