Transitions
From Esalen President & CEO Gordon Wheeler's Blog
July 2009
Why do so many people come to Esalen for help with transitions, or just to contemplate, explore, or digest a coming change in their lives? Well, the first reason must be that our lives are so filled with transitions these days. Begin with all the timeless ones that are part of the human condition—births, deaths, comings of age, ripening into adulthood and prime years and later stages of life, and then all the other losses and gains that have always marked conscious life. Add to that the frenetic pace of change in today's culture: technology transforms our work and social lives every few years. Most of us go through changes in career, state, or even country of residence and in many cases marriage. It goes on and on. Old securities gone and old skill sets needing renewal or just no longer seeming so relevant to our work and our lives. What do we keep and build on, what do we transform to meet new openings and new challenges. All that change, all those questions bring us to Esalen.
And then there's the fact that our active, creative/productive lives are maybe a full generationlonger than in our grandparents' day, giving us more decades of living, learning, and adjusting to all that transformational change. At seventy years old, back around midcentury, both my grandfathers were dead, and my two grandmothers were basically little old ladies baking cookies and playing cards with their friends. (Nothing wrong with that, but that was their lives). Today my wife Nancy, now entering her 70th year, is hiking and kayaking and planning her next career stage as she goes through her own transition following 30 years of directing Esalen Programs. Now she is transforming herself into a senior consultant role along with new activities in her old fields of psychology and music. Plus some cookies—she's been famous for years for her desserts, her first, brief job at Esalen back in the 70's. People who were there still talk about those desserts, and none of us will let her give that up entirely!
We know that our culture doesn't offer much in the way of initiation in and out of these life stages and changes with their rich gains, necessary losses, and new challenges of adventure and service. Thus many, many of us look to Esalen at these times of life maybe consciously/intentionally, through a workshop, a retreat program, an internship or other immersion experience. Or maybe we just instinctively, head for Esalen as a ritual or sacred ground where we know we can sum up, heal and integrate our losses and gains, transform and vision the future, and then add to our skills and capacities for getting there.
Many of the workshops and other programs offer direct stimulus and input for these life challenges—specific skills and practices of course, but also a deeper transformation of our underlying beliefs and attitudes about ourselves, our lives and relationships, our place in the world and the universe
And then there's the potency of the place itself. This liminal band between mountains, sky, and sea is itself transitional in an elemental way. Ocean and cliff are inseparable and also utterly discontinuous—like certain life shifts and stages. To sit in the baths, in the mineral water of the deep earth, and open ourselves to the surge and sound of the surf just below is to participate in something larger, something both eternal and at the same time ever changing. This is the very flow of life and time, and we come to find a new relationship, a new dynamic belonging, in this larger web of being. We leave refreshed, renewed, often full of new ideas and directions, simultaneously strengthened and softened.
I first came to Esalen 15 years ago during a transition time of my own, out of a long and challenging divorce following a marriage that was both rich and creative—and also just too difficult for us to support and sustain any longer. As is often the case with transition, I thought I knew what that change meant, for me, my life, my work, my relationships, and my family. But actually most of it only became clear over time, in the living and then in retrospect.
I came to talk about working with the Esalen staff, maybe offering a public workshop as well, all growing out of some of my writings. I was flattered to be asked down, a little intoxicated from the drive, the stunning impact of the campus itself, plus the feeling of being courted by the Mecca of my own field, contemporary psychology and transformational learning (then as now, every pathway in it marked by initiatives and contributions coming out of Esalen). What I didn't know at the time was that that's how Esalen recruits many of its amazing roster of teachers when they aren't already in our direct ambit: just get 'em on the property, goes our strategy, and the combined magic of the place and the people will do the rest. That's our little secret, but don't worry, now that I've exposed it, it will go right on working, just the same.
What I didn't know then of course was that my time at Esalen, which began in earnest a couple of years later, was at the beginning of a much larger arc of transition in my own life—out of decades of one-on-one clinical work, hands-on primary parenting, and the extended-family, three-generation caretaking stage of midlife and into a decade where Esalen itself would be at the center of my professional life and learning and my personal life and learning too as I soon embarked on a relationship and then a bicoastal marriage with Nancy Lunney, who predated me here at Esalen by about 20 years
The only two things I was certain of 12 years ago were that after my divorce I would never leave Cambridge where all my kids were, and I would never remarry. Nancy and I have now been married for almost 11 years, and we split our time these days between Esalen and Santa Cruz, where two of our grown children and two of our grandchildren now live as well. But then there you are, that's how it is with transitions—you tend to think the tip of the iceberg you see is the whole mountain, when actually most of what matters is going on under the surface, out of sight.
The first six years of that time were bicoastal, still split between Big Sur and Boston where the younger ones of my five were still at home. The last six years have been full-on here at Esalen, living and learning and serving and contributing where I could, first as teacher, then as in-house program consultant and facilitator, then an Esalen trustee, and now for the past five and a half years in a dual role as president and CEO of the Institute.
As CEO, it's been my privilege and my enormous learning opportunity to serve and contribute to the strategic direction, administration, and leadership of the Institute. As President I take the message and the mission of Esalen out into the world through talks, presentations, books, articles, and other writing and media. Of course, there's some overlap, and each of those—CEO and president—alone is more than a full-time job, and two somewhat different job profiles as well. The stretch between them can be everything from exhilarating to exhausting.
At the end of this year I'll be stepping into yet another transition, out of the CEO title and concentrating more fully on the president role. I'll still be around, still committed to serving Esalen and the great work all of us are part of, but from a different role and with more time for other long-deferred projects in teaching, writing, and personal practice (including grandparenting, a high spiritual practice consisting mostly of a lot of running around on the hills and beaches of Santa Cruz).
Malcolm Gladwell writes that it takes 10,000 hours to begin to gain mastery of any practice. Based on that, you could say that I brought much of that practice history to the president role. (I continue to learn and add to it.) In the CEO role, I've amassed some of those learning hours in the aspects of management on the job. Where and when I've been able to make an effective contribution through that learning, it has always been thanks to all the wide Esalen community I've worked and learned with over these years. And by that I mean everyone working and living and studying here at Esalen itself, all of you who come here to teach and learn together, all those who have stepped up to share their resources and their expertise, and the context of the worldwide Esalen community committed to the great evolutionary transformations of our world and humankind today. My gratefulness goes to all of you, for all this generosity of presence and contribution.
One thing I feel I've brought to this work is a clear commitment to Esalen's visionary role and mission. That vision is grounded in the integral, evolutionary perspective laid out by Aurobindo, Michael Murphy's inspirational source, in the first half of the last century. That vision has the remarkable property of constantly updating itself by virtue the evolutionary process and values at the center of that teaching itself. In this way—whether we're even aware of the lineage or link ourselves with some other gem in the whole mosaic of progressive, transformational perspectives in our shared world—we stay aligned together with eternal truths of our nature and our place in the universe. And still we open to the new, through the core idea of transformation of consciousness that Esalen and the great changes in our world today rest on. Thus we have an eye always on the eternal and at the same time on the now, and the next, and sometimes the next after that.
Each of us counts in this great work of transforming our minds and our world; each doing the part that comes to us, and supporting one another so that each contribution is multiplied, and nobody has to see and do it all. We live in the age of networks and multiple perspectives, not linear visions and lone individuals. Each of us is a unique node in a living fabric of consciousness and evolution. Each of us contributes something unique and essential to the great transformational transition we're all linked into. It's been part of the genius of Michael Murphy and of Esalen to see that and move to create those transformational networks, long before the world of technology began to notice and catch up.
As Deepak Chopra has often said—and has repeated here at Esalen—transforming our world starts with and depends on a transformation of consciousness. This is the transition we're all part of at the largest and deepest level. We come to Esalen and other centers of consciousness to gain focus, inspiration, renewal, and skills. We take that out, create, and evolve it further and then bring it back and take it back out again. This is the great adventure we're all part of as we cycle through different roles, different stages, all the various transitions of our lives, and in some sense beyond.
Blessings for your own path and transformations—see you soon at Esalen.