Securing the Future of Esalen
Esalen President Gordon Wheeler's Blog
April, 2010
Esalen is a set of ideas, a living legacy of programs and initiatives - and a campus, a magic strip of land between ocean, sky, and hills, washed by the waters of the river, the tides, and the deep springs heated from the earth's core. Together with the people - all of you who visit and all of us who live and work here - these dimensions compose this Institute we cherish, which has made such a vital difference in our lives and our world across the past five decades.
All of us together are the stewards of this legacy, this unique mission of transformation, and this precious, irreplaceable ecosystem. And all of us together are joined, each with our own role and our own unique creativity, in carrying this remarkable heritage forward in a world that grows more challenging - and needs Esalen all the more - from year to year.
This past month Esalen took a giant step in securing that legacy and that future, by purchasing the 5-acre property lying immediately to the north of the Esalen main campus. This is the next-door coastal point known on the old maps as “Abalone Gulch” - but better known to most of us in recent years as “The Growing Edge,” or “Cormorant Cove.”
This unique, spectacular lot, with a number of buildings on it, has a long and complex history intertwined with Esalen. The main house was built some forty years ago by the well-known Gestaltist Jim Simkin, a prominent student of the legendary Esalen teacher Fritz Perls. Jim and his wife Anne settled in the area to be in close proximity with Fritz and Esalen; but Fritz soon left Big Sur (and died shortly thereafter), and somehow Esalen and Simkin had one of those epic battles whose cause nobody can remember, but whose bitter after-effects lasted for years.
Simkin built the house for training groups, which he conducted there regularly over those years, while the students and other visitors passed semi-surreptitiously back and forth between the two adjacent properties. Longtime Big Sur community leaders and River Inn owners Alan and Nancy Perlmutter tell of driving down the coast from Big Sur Village, sometime around 1980, to pick up Lore Perls (Fritz's widow, and an equally prominent Gestalt founder], who was visiting Simkin but wanted to pay a call on Dick Price next door at Esalen. Apparently relations between the two adjacent properties were so strained by this time that no one ever even called ahead to arrange the visit. As it happened, Dick wasn't home, so the reunion between these two pioneering Gestalt teachers never happened.
After Jim Simkin's death, the property, in new hands, later resumed its activity as a sort of “mini-Esalen,” offering occasional small courses, practitioner sessions, and retreats, as well as lodging for a number of Esalen community members over the years.
Some five years ago, happily for Esalen, the property passed into the hands of Randall Wallace, a creative musician and a passionate environmentalist and philanthropist, who soon became a generous benefactor of Esalen and of the Gazebo School, where his younger children were enrolled. When the Wallace family's life and work took them to San Francisco, the property again went on the market. Alas, the appraisal, the Wallace's own investment, and the market price were far out of Esalen's reach.
This changed over the course of last fall, through a combination of a softening market, together with the openness of the Wallace family to exploring creative, flexible, and generous terms whereby it might become possible for this breathtaking, right-next-door coastal point to become part of Esalen in perpetuity.
The more we explored and spun out scenarios and options, the more it became clear to all of us that this joining was simply meant to be. It was up to us to find the creative way to make it happen, and to make that work for everybody. This meant taking not only the Institute and the Wallaces into account, but also the neighbors, the Big Sur community, and the County as well. In the end we worked through more than seven different scenarios for purchase agreement, over the course of nearly six months, before settling on the particular combination that could work for all involved.
Our immediate plans for the property are to use it for staff/intern housing, thus freeing up more space on the main campus to continue doing what Esalen does so creatively and so well: offering our unique program of transformational experiences and initiatives at the evolving edge of human creativity, to an ever-growing world community of empowered agents for personal and cultural evolution.
At every step and stage, we are committed to working within the spirit and letter of all regulations and all Esalen's commitments to the County, all relevant Boards, the Big Sur community and our other partners and providers (including the Murphy Family Trust, who continue to provide a portion of the main campus under a very longterm, generous lease).
Even at generous, favorable rates and terms, of course we all know this unique new opportunity has to be paid for! Thus you'll be hearing from us in the months ahead, about ways you can help.
Meanwhile, we celebrate this important step for Esalen, which serves to anchor and sustain the Institute's dynamic mission and lasting presence in our world, and in Big Sur. Our sacred trust is our shared commitment to stewarding - all of us together - this unique mission of transformation, and this breathtaking strip of precious land - a uniquely beautiful part of our shared, threatened, and achingly beautiful planet.
See you soon at Esalen!
Gordon Wheeler, President, Esalen Institute