The Vision and Mission of Esalen
Esalen President Gordon Wheeler's Blog
January, 2011
What are the Vision and Mission commitments of Esalen? What are our most basic values, our fundamental stakes in the ground? What enduring goals help us know what Esalen is, and then guide us in making those necessary choices between one direction and another?
With Esalen these questions can be trickier to address than with many other mission-oriented organizations. After all, we know that Esalen is so many things to so many people; and our collective Esalen family is worldwide, intensely creative - and always vocal with opinions! What's more, the evolution of consciousness and the creation of new cultural forms are deep in the spirit of Esalen, and integral to our founding intentions. We're just not like a single issue or mainstream organization such as a hospital, arts center, or a more typical educational institute. More than anything, Esalen is an experiment, a process grounded in an idea (and a place), a process always in search of new forms that open new pathways for human experience, individual and social. So how do we take hold of these basic values questions at this level, without limiting our own creativity and freedom?
On the other hand, if we don't ask these questions, and thus avoid articulating committments to basic values and basic intentions we risk going in too many different directions at once, scattering our own creative energy and dissipating our best contributions, right at the time when our wider world needs those things most!
Luckily, as we turn to these questions, we don't have to start with a totally blank page. We know Esalen is blessed with a powerful legacy of Founder intentions and founding commitments that have set a high aspiration for us from the beginning, and still inspire us today. We know Michael Murphy and Richard Price founded Esalen, nearly 50 years ago, to open a new kind of experimental space, a platform, in Michael's words, for "everything excluded from the mainstream 'academy' of the day." This meant, and still means all those essential topics and experiments that are marginalized or ignored (or outright forbidden) by the established universities and research institutes of the times. Everything that was "off the page" of the cultural conversation, and thus blocking the exploration of new connections, new forms that open whole new potentials for human being and doing.
So to that extent we already know what we're here for, at the highest level. We're here to spark a new conversation, open an new exploration, and to do that wherever the culture of the day turns a blind eye, or won't act seriously, or actually prohibits exploration. Where human potential is blocked, that's where Esalen moves in; -- and in the process, over and over, we move the culture.
So this much is a given, from the living legacy of our founders we're open to the new, nobody "captures the flag," and we push and work and play at the edges of the evolving human potential. That's our birthright, and our temperamental nature; and it's why Esalen itself is ever-renewed, ever influential, and needed more today than ever on the wider human scene.
From this rich foundation we recognize the cultural blocks of one age are different from those of another. We cannot and must not just go on repeating ourselves, with battles that may long since have been won, things that may have long since entered the mainstream -- or else need a whole new approach now. What old barriers have we not dissolved, and still need attention? What new obstacles have been thrown up by new fears, new reactions to a changing world, that we need to be addressing? Most of all, where can Esalen make the most difference, in our ever-more complex, ever-more challenging world?
These questions demand still more of us operationally. What will be the interplay between community and "business" dimensions. Between workshops and other kinds of initiatives? What opportunities will we use for connection and creativity with our far-flung Esalen "family" around the world?
We take up these questions again periodically, to reset our compass, find balance and make choices that are often difficult (there are always so many things it would be great to be doing!). Some of those choices can be painful, and mean saying goodbye to some old, fond ways, adjusting to the new. Others are simply exhilarating, such as the new vision of our Farm and Garden as an enhanced teaching tool to all 17,000 or so folk who step on this property in the course of a year - through courses and internships, volunteer and other program opportunities, online and more.
As always with any important choice points in life, the work starts with going back to our basic values commitments and fundamental shared beliefs, exploring them anew in relation to a changing world, to yield the new applications of those values to the new world field, and the new issues and mandates that most need our attention.
Five years ago we convened a whole-Community process (including teachers, Trustees, seminarians as well as staff and interns here) to re-examine these basic values commitments, and articulate them in a way that would honor our deepest legacy of beliefs while also serving us better as a guide to action. Out of this work, which involved over a hundred people and thousands of hours of volunteer time, we looked to provide new answers for community and outreach impact, business and personal questing and support. We also expected - and got - a working guide or menu to the dozen most important areas for development and growth in our own organization, to fulfill the mission mandates and bring our work into new focus.
We organized the process using an "Open Space Meeting Technology," a form which allows for the emergence of any issue of concern, developing into a report, and its own committee for deeper study. After some weeks of this work, we elected process reps, not to advocate particular planks of the emergent platform, but to synthesize the work and submit it to the Esalen Board of Trustees for their review, input, and hopefully approval.
After several months of work, this "Synthesis Committee" submitted a series of brief documents to the Board, for review and approval (plus those hundreds of pages of back-up reports). These documents included:
- A statement of the Vision and Values of Esalen. This is our most fundamental set of shared assumptions and commitments, about human nature, human creativity, and the potential for creating together a new, humane, life-affirming and life-enhancing world for all.
- A new statement of Esalen's Mission. Mission means what it is we do, and how we go about it in the most basic sense. Mission core doesn't change; mission focus and means will evolve from one era, one set of circumstances and context to another, over time.
- Our first-ever statement of our Practices, as a community. What commitments, coming out of all the above, guide us as a staff community as we live and work together to realize that mission, and enact that Vision and those Values?
- And not least, we and the Board adopted a menu of nine "Strategic Issues" or mandates - specific areas where we knew we needed to develop as an organization, to raise our capacity level so as to achieve our newly-clarified goals.
What are the outcome and the effect of all this work? In a nutshell, our whole exercise of articulating and focusing on these things comes down to these core "take-aways":
- Esalen exists to serve the world - not as a refuge from it. We deeply believe in this magical space for healing and retreat, for our thousands of students and teachers and conferees, and also for ourselves - but - that retreat and that refuge must always be, ultimately, in the service of a larger impact in the world.
- This means that our public programs, and the public we serve directly through courses and conferences and retreats, can never be just the "means whereby" we support Esalen-the-place, and the small number who live and work here. Esalen is not just a "business or a community" either one. Our core identity at Esalen is as a mission-change organization, dedicated to transformation of our wider, shared world.
Community, in the sense of both our staff and residents and our wider world family of students and teachers and conferees who come and go, is the vital dimension of Esalen which enables us to enact that core identity, and deliver that core mission to the world. Community is the essential means for enacting our mission and achieving that mission impact.
Thus at Esalen, when we adopt a policy for support and benefit of our staff, it's never just like some organizations, where that may be done only pragmatically, in order to promote a productive workforce. Here, it's that and more. At Esalen all of us are seekers together — staff and seminarians and teachers alike. This means we value the growth and learning opportunities for our staff community as a mission goal in its own right, not just as an "employee benefit" (though it is that too!). - This is the conceptual shift from change to change agent. Today we understand that our own development, our own growth and healing, are not only for our sake alone, but ultimately for what we can do with those new tools, to give back to the world. The arc of healing is completed by the gesture of service. As we change our own lives, we change the world around us - our intimates, our family and immediate contacts, our community, and directly or indirectly, the world at large.
- The past fifty years at Esalen have seen many hundreds, perhaps many thousands of examples of individuals undergoing a transformation here, and taking that out in the form of a new teaching, a whole new methodology, a new organization or initiative, that directly shifts our wider culture. Each of us can do this in our own way, at our own scope and in our own expressions.
As part of those Strategic Mission Mandates for our own organization, every organizational capacity, course and practice has come under the lens for evaluation, values clarification, and reassessment in terms of mission impact. Here at Esalen, our first and foremost commitment is to Mission Impact - and then right along with that we underline human considerations, environmental considerations, and financial considerations as the co-equal criteria of everything we do.
These are aspirations. We fall short - and then our clarified commitments help us retrue our course, aligning again to our deepest values. The integration of all this into organizational initiatives and goals is an interesting story of its own for next time. For now, I'll close this long chapter by sharing with you the Mission, Vision and Values statements that grew out of this whole process, four years ago.
Thanks for sharing this review - if you've made it this far! And see you soon at Esalen.
Gordon Wheeler, President, Esalen Institute