The Next Generation at Esalen:
Reflections on a Living Organizational System
From Esalen President & CEO Gordon Wheeler's Blog
August 2009
We all know there are many Esalens—as many as there are experiences of Esalen, ways of being touched by this magic land, community, and the transformative programs. Each of us has our own experience of our time in Big Sur, and that too can be different each day, each visit. There's Esalen the place, where we walk along cliffs and through gardens, feel the ocean's power, slip into water heated directly from the earth's magma core. We have Esalen the programs, where experiential education itself was born and took shape as we know it. Skills are mastered in these seminars and other formats, and deeper changes stir as well: old blocks may be dissolved and new possibilities opened up to, lives may come out transformed. And then of course there's Esalen the people, a living community that is both here on campus, and also spread out around the world. We don't just visit that community when we come to Esalen: we become part of it, each in our own way, having encounters and often forming relationships with residents and teachers and other seminarians as well—in the courses, the open classes, in conversation in the lodge or down at the baths. Oftentimes these relationships last, as people come back again and again, becoming lifelong connections, perhaps life-changing in themselves.
Each of these dimensions in turn is an aspect of Esalen the idea: the radical notion that growth and transformation are our birthright, that the work we do serves the evolution of Consciousness and life itself—and that our personal transformation cannot be separated from the transformation of our culture and our shared world. Each dimension underlies all the others, and holds them together. The place, the people, the transformative ideas, the courses and internships and other programs, the social initiatives and research: each makes the whole work, and each serves to make Esalen what it is.
And then there's Esalen the organization, a living, functioning work system with some 200 employees, a $12 million annual budget, with payrolls to meet, bills to pay, income to generate to cover those costs. This is the Esalen of departments and teams and projects, jobs and roles and functions, deadlines and schedules and systems to maintain, both human and technical/mechanical. It's possible of course to come to Esalen and participate in a life-changing experience, and barely be aware of the organizational life that underlies and holds that experience—as long as everything is functioning reasonably well!
This organization functions, just like everything in our world today, in an environment that grows more complex and more challenging every year—economically, physically, legally. Long gone are the days when people just came to Esalen and pitched a tent or built a cabin where they wanted—in the streambed, right on the cliff edge, maybe smack in the middle of a rare species habitat, or taking down a prime butterfly tree (and never even knowing it, since the migration is only at very specific times of the year). Most of us were city kids in search of something more, back in the wild days of early Esalen; plenty of passion and spirit, but little or no awareness of the dense and delicate fabric of nature itself. Building codes? payrolls? environmental considerations? wastewater, energy use, footprint? None of those, for better or for worse were live factors in decisions just a generation or two ago; the shared field of human consciousness (and legal regulation!) simply hadn't evolved that far yet.
And audits, and nonprofit regulations, and labor protection laws, and the capital credit markets, and workmen's comp—the list of essential issues and factors we didn't used to deal with goes on and on. Take medical insurance for example: just a generation ago, when I was a young teacher, father, and grad student, my medical insurance expense was around $400 a year—for my family. Today our combined Esalen tab for employee medical insurance, workman's comp insurance, health care allowance, and medicare premium tax is up around $1million annually, with double-digit percentage increases coming in each year.
We have to meet those rising costs while keeping the base price of an Esalen experience affordable for you, the co-creators and vehicles of our shared mission of impacting our larger shared world. (Our prices have risen less than the rate of inflation, consistently for the past decade and more.)
Managing all that, and managing it strategically in expression of Esalen's vision and mission, is the task of the leadership team at Esalen (and by "leadership," I mean every single staff member and practitioner and intern at Esalen, along with donors, volunteers, and all of you as well). It all has to work out together, if we're to have the Esalen that sustains us and frames our experiences, functioning in the "real world" while continuing to explore and offer alternatives to that world around us, new possibilities for organizing and freeing ourselves together.
It's been my great honor and challenge to be invited into that organizational work over the years—first as a consultant back in 2000, and then as a Trustee eight years ago. The following year, 2002, George Leonard, one of the giants of our field of transformation, the man who joined Michael Murphy to coin the term "human potential movement," stepped down from his longterm tenure as President of Esalen. George was kind enough to say he was doing that to make room for me in particular, representing a new generation of leadership at Esalen (New—barely; I'm only 20 or so years younger than George!). The larger truth was that his gesture was also part of a larger transition, from the founders, to a new generation of leaders at Esalen, inspired and animated by the same founding vision, and applying it to a new century, a new world.
The following year, in 2004, co-founder Michael Murphy was ready to hand on the CEO title to me as well, pulling back from the strategic, day-to-day management to focus on his visionary leadership of the Esalen Center for Theory and Research. (Last year, after 45 years at the helm, Michael turned over the Board direction as well, to our indefatigable new Board Chair Sam Yau).
What followed Michael's decision to relinquish the role of CEO has been nearly six years of education and stimulation for me, with and from the creative management, staff, and community of Esalen. These years have been among the great personal and learning adventures of my life—right up there with the adventures of parenthood, love and relationships and marriage, spiritual practice, my life's work as an educator and healer, my engagement with the world of ideas, the transformational experience of life-threatening illness, and more).
I can honestly say I'm a different person now from who and what I was six years ago. And Esalen? well, Esalen is different too, and then again, it's not different. My understanding of the task facing us six years ago was how to navigate a double sea change in the lifecycle of this precious Institute while not losing that spark of wild magic that has been Esalen's deepest secret over the years, the very spirit of the land, the mission, and the Institute itself.
On the one hand, we're dealing with a different world today from our Twentieth Century beginnings, a more real place. A place, where we have to take care of our shared earth, take care of our beloved community, serve all who come here and serve the world beyond, all have to be held together in one integral vision, one holistic arc that sustains all of them together. This is nothing less than an evolution of complexity in human consciousness itself -- just as in the original inspiration from Aurobindo, as channeled to us through Michael Murphy and the founding generation of Esalen.
And at the same time, we have to manage all that change while the founding generation continues to pull back, handing on this precious legacy of creativity, commitment, and evolving capacity to do the work. We are blessed to have Michael still at the visionary helm of Esalen, still fully active as the inspirational compass of our work, and the inextinguishable font of ever-new ideas for initiatives, programs, research. But we're the ones that have to make it all work here on the ground.
Today as I write this, the Esalen Board is announcing the appointment of a new CEO, Tricia McEntee, who will take office on January 1 of 2010 and lead us into the next iteration of this vision, at the organizational level. It will be my great privilege to continue supporting Tricia and Esalen in the future from my old position as President of the Institute, focusing on communications, publications, and all the forums available to us today to take the mission and message of Esalen out into the world.
The Board has chosen well. In Tricia, the Institute has found a leader who not only knows financial and technical systems inside and out, but also brings a deep and personal understanding to the transformational side of Esalen's work, the reason we all work so hard and care so much. Congratulations and deep thanks to Esalen, to the Board, and to Tricia herself for stepping up to this unique challenge. And blessings on us all, for the adventures and the great work ahead.