Reflections on Community
Esalen President & CEO Gordon Wheeler's Blog
October 2009
What is Community? What do we mean by that word, which is so much tossed around these days, and so often regarded as something long lost and much lamented? What is it exactly? How would we know it if we saw it? And then if we do have it, how does it feel? Is it a support or a straitjacket? Does it buoy you up—or hem you in? (I remember the mother of a school friend, years ago, who had grown up in a tiny town in the Old South, telling me in such a heartfelt way that "the great thing about a big city is that nobody cares what you do." Just the thing that people lament about cities—but she lived it as a liberation. I remember thinking at the time that Sartre—all the rage among us lefty students in those days—would have agreed. Probably Fritz Perls would too, one of the founders of the Gestalt movement, who lived here at Esalen back in the late 60's. Perls said he would finish out his days at Esalen, but in fact, no sooner was he ensconced here, writing about how this was the this perfect lab setting for his work, than he was off on the road again, escaping one community in search of another.
Most of all, how do you do it? If you think of community as a verb, not just an abstraction, then it becomes a set of actions, with a toolkit of skills to be learned and practiced. But what are these skills, and can they really be taught? Where would we go to learn them, in this fragmented world where we live in one place, work in another, socialize or study or gather for worship or meditation or some other fellowship someplace else? Ivan Ilich, the radical community theorist of a generation ago, called this kind of thing "network redundancy"—or in this case, network fragmentation. You don't have real community, Ilich maintained, unless you meet the same people repeatedly, in more than one context—just what we most often don't have, nowadays, when our seven or eight most key networks—say, work, friends, family, political group, neighborhood, maybe PTA, etc—are all separate circles, with little or no overlap. Each one may be a community, of a sort—but they're thin communities, bound in a single dimension so to speak, without the rich texturing Ilich was talking about.
And then there's online. Most of us nowadays are part of any number of online "communities"—many of them actually no more than mailing lists, or else bulletin boards (which could be tools toward building community). Or blogs—like this one! If you're reading this, that probably means that we—you and I and almost all the other readers—share some level of interest and identification with Esalen. I get a lot of feedback on these blogs, which I value enormously, with people often telling me they like hearing about Esalen, staying in touch—and hearing it from a point of view that is personal, but also distinctively "Esalen." Sharing a common interest, and especially sharing a common concern (the welfare and direction of Esalen) is for sure a main hallmark of community—or at least of identification, which as a strong element of meaningful community. But is it enough? How much does a community have to include an element of face to face, to be "real?" This is a key question at Esalen nowadays, as we explore ways to enrich and expand our on-site offerings with online components—but without losing the face to face, fully embodied experiences, that are so life-changing for so many. How much of each kind do you need, to become or stay fully connected, fully alive?
Here at Esalen these are all issues we live with all the time, and that live through us. I think of "the Esalen community," in the widest sense, as a sort of set of great turning wheels within wheels. Some of the wheels are neatly contained in a serial, concentric fashion; others roll around more eccentrically, in wide-ranging orbits like comets you only see at occasional intervals when they swim back into our neck of the universe.
At the center we could locate the wheel of the longer-term, residential staff here at Esalen, the core contributors who have elected to dedicate some significant portion of our lives to this community, this Institute, and Esalen's mission of transformation of culture and consciousness. For some of us that might be five or six or seven years; for others, such as my wife Nancy, longtime head of public programming, it's decades and counting. These are the people you'll see (among others!) in their offices or out working on the property early in the morning and late at night. It's our life, at least for a portion of years, and we don't count hours or days, because with an open-ended mission commitment, an aging, quirky physical plant, nearly 20,000 guests a year and some 200 co-workers to take care of, all of it in an ever-more challenging legal and economic and technological environment—well, you get the idea. Let me just tell you, these people are the salt of the earth; we live together (on property or in the area), we eat together, we study and recreate together—we work in teams, we differ, we feud, we fight, we recommit to each other and to Esalen and our own growth and learning. And we do it again and again, over a period of years (there's one learning I've logged: every sustained commitment, over years, is actually an ongoing series of recommitments, a living process always to be renewed). This is community in its daily, face-to-face, full-capacity, full-nourishment, full living sense. As Zorba says, the full catastrophe.
Immediately around this core, which revolves and changes slowly, are two large and more rapidly rotating circles: first the 38 or so "Extended Students" and other long-term interns, mostly here for a year or so, studying and working hard, and also intent on the experiences here that most of them will say have changed their lives. Just outside that circle are the Work Scholars, here for just a month or more, but also very much part of us, also working hard, and very many of them having life-changing learnings and experiences of their own. These interns are part of the lifeblood of this place, bringing in new energy every month and year; they keep us refreshed and recommitted, and they also serve as the entry stage, for those who stay on, to the longer term regular staff community.
At a swifter pace, in and out, but still very much part of our community, are all the group we call the "seminarians"—which sounds a good deal more monkish than it is, for most. Seminarians are with us here on property for a couple of nights, a week, a month at a time—over 10,000 strong each year. But here's the thing: you come back! At Easlen nearly everybody comes back, sooner or later—and if they don't, or can't for years at a stretch, then often they come back in their thoughts and dreams, and all the while carry Esalen and something they've learned here out with them into the world. I know, because people stop me and tell me about it literally every day. And write about it in their books, and blog about it. You—the folks who catch an insight, a method, a life-changing connection made here at Esalen—and take it out into the world in the countless amazing ways that you do: you are the mission impact of Esalen. You're the reason we're here, through firestorms and winter storms, mudslides and countless days of glorious, soul-drenching weather, in this magic spot at the edge of a continent, where so many life-changing and culture-shifting events and initiatives large and small have been nurtured or born.
Faculty come in and out with the students, for the most part—nearly 1,000 of them each year, as many as a quarter of them new in each catalog. And faculty come back as well, after a few years or every year, creating lasting relationships here that carry across time and distance, and may often lead to career paths for their students here—staff and interns and seminarians alike.
At Esalen our model is seekers serving seekers. What this means is that when you take a course at Esalen, most likely you'll meet one or more like-minded staff and interns in your course with you, along with many others. You may meet more in the lodge at meals, down at the baths, out in the gardens or while volunteering a shift in the kitchen. And given the built-in transience of our intern-based community here, some of these staff/seminarian relationships, and staff/teacher relationships, may last for years, take on a life of their own outside Esalen as well as here, and be some of the most stable, enduring links in our worldwide, living community.
And here's another thing: people at Esalen change their community category. They do it all the time. An intern becomes a staff member. A staff member moves on—but comes back as a seminarian. Or a teacher. Or a trustee. Or a donor. Or all of these categories and more. (Have I mentioned Conferees, Massage practitioners, hourlies, consultants, Visiting Teachers, Visiting Scholars, volunteers, assistants—and for those who can't coordinate their schedule with a course but can't stay away any longer, Personal Retreatants?) To continue with the image, there are wheels turning within wheels, or maybe currents swirling within currents, but at the same time individual people are wandering at their own sweet will among the different currents, wheels, now in this one, now in that one, now teaching, now studying, now working in the garden, now off in New York or Washington or LA or maybe Asia or the Middle East, maybe for years—and then coming back again.
We love it when you come back. I love to be stopped by somebody who says (as somebody says to me just about every week), "I was here in 1978, or 88, or whatever—and I've always been meaning to come back." (Of course I love it even more if you actually do come back, a little more often than that!) I love hearing from a couple, "We met at Esalen, in 19___, and we're back for our ___th anniversary!" (You might be surprised how often I hear that one. I think it's something in the water here—literally!)
As for how we do it, how we actually do community, here in the ongoing, living, day-in day-out core community in residence here on the cliffs? Well, amazingly, really incredibly well. Also unbelievably clumsily. With grace, imagination, commitment—and also awkwardness, unnecessary hurt, wasted energy. All of that, and more. Commitments are important; also second chances with each other, and third, and maybe fourth. Recommitments are even more important—because any commitment that is real and ongoing, in the real world of living and growing over time, is of the nature of an aspiration, a practice. Something we come back to again and again, knowing that it's that coming back, that return to the core value and the shared direction, that contains the creativity and the new life.
Our commitments here at Esalen include, first and centrally, the idea of co-responsibility. We're each responsible for ourselves and our own actions, true; but more than just that, we don't live in a vacuum, we're not cocoons. This means we're co-responsible for the kind of world we are cocreating and offering to each other, right here, right now. I owe you my truth, and you owe me yours (and we each owe that to ourselves). And—each of us is also responsible for the kind of receptivity to others' truths that we extend and communicate. We act, and our actions cocreate a shared field. And in that field, depending on our actions, it's either easier or harder to live together, to feel affirmed and received, to share our most creative thoughts (and indeed to have those thoughts in the first place, which also depends partly on the receptivity of the field we find ourselves in).
This means respect for the other point of view—which it turns out is not something that can be faked. Either you're genuinely interested in why the other person sees and thinks what they see and think, you genuinely need to know that—or it just rings false. It also means not "projecting" what you imagine is the other person's motivation (often something selfish or bad, as we imagine it)—again, a question of genuine interest in the other. It means "de-centering" your point of view, to take in the welfare of the whole organization, the whole community. And with it, to take in the shared ground, the place of deep meeting, where a real difference of perspective can start, be meaningfully understood, and feed into the creative learning of each person.
All these things and much, much more are part of the skill set, the living practices of a rich and nourishing community. Do we do these things? Yes, much, much of the time. Do we pull them off all the time? Nope—far from it. That's where recommitment comes in—just like in marriage, or friendship, or child raising, or career, or political change, or any other meaningful project or relationship we commit to over time. Are we making progress? Well, considering that of our most central say 150 in residence here or nearby at any given time, we have maybe as much as a fifth of that that may change every month, and as many as half that will change every year, I'd say again that we "do community" amazingly well—and understandably clumsily. Thanks to providence and to all of you, many of this group, like so many of all of you, come back again and again. And when you do come back, you bring all that you've experienced and learned out there with you, and we nourish ourselves from that, and from you, as well.
Next month (barring the unexpected), I'll write about the conversation about community back when I first came to Esalen to work with the staff a little over a decade ago, and how that conversation has changed, as the world has changed, since that time.
Meantime—see you soon at Esalen!