George Leonard was considered a leading voice in shaping midcentury American culture. He coined the term “human potential movement” and was often called the “third founder” of Esalen.
Together with Michael Murphy, George co-founded Integral Transformative Practice (ITP) and authored numerous books on human possibilities and social change. He held a 5th-degree black belt in Aikido, and created Leonard Energy Training (LET), a practice inspired by Aikido offering alternative ways of dealing with everyday life situations.
As Leonard put it, “every idea, every intention, every new thought is a new generative form in the universe,” and that as human creators, we are tapping into and manifesting only a small part of an unlimited potential for imagination, transformation, and social progress.
His special issue for Look magazine in September 1962 on California was the first to put forth the thesis that what was happening in the state would spread throughout the nation. Michael Murphy recalls George Leonard in an interview from November 2022:
“George Leonard and I met in February of 1965. He was the West Coast editor for Look and was doing a major piece on human potential. We started talking one night, and we basically kept talking until he died forty years later. It was an immediate close friendship.
"Through me, he got to know about Indian philosophy, my evolutionary vision of life, the cosmos, our human nature, a conviction that had been growing in me for years. I learned through George about transformative practices. Through him, I got deeply acquainted with the American political scene and some of the important players. We would go to New York with George and, oh god, the adventures! George was my Dharma Buddy, my soul buddy, my thought partner. George was my Virgil of the Divine Comedy.
“George became a fifth-degree black belt in Aikido and helped popularize Aikido across the United States. This led him to conceive what we came to call Integral Transformative Practice. Leonard Energy Training made fundamental modalities of practice into games, to make them a sport. He brought a prismatic intelligence to how much of our common life is hiding in plain sight, a multi-dimensional perceptual ability that great writers often have.
“The emotional contest can be an intellectual contest; it doesn’t have to be physical. This comes up in couples psychotherapy. How to learn how to disagree without hurting one another. George put it in this game situation, and it’s amazing how you can transform your own emotions. You can transform your heart by your actions.
“If you’re having a conceptual fight or an emotional fight or some disagreement with someone, there’s a move in Aikido called “the blend.” You blend with your opponent. Instead of slugging them or hitting one another, you dance with them. You have to have a lot of strength and a lot of flexibility to take a punch and make it into a love move. It becomes love play and is extraordinarily seductive but also dominant. It starts out as a fight and ends up as a dance. Another move that he would teach is a fade where you disappear magically. It is an amazing learning technique for those encounters we have in life where we want to step aside from something, someone, and we don’t want to make an issue of it. The technique ends so that the opponent hardly even knows it happened — a hypnotic effect.”
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