Healing Across Divides: A Tradition of Backchannel Diplomacy at Esalen

On Wednesday, September 10, Esalen hosted Healing Across Divides in Huxley, an evening of dialogue, storytelling, and embodied practice. This Wednesday Evening Program was facilitated by Nitsan Joy Gordon, a Jewish Israeli, and Jawdat Kasab, a Palestinian citizen of Israel. Together, they shared their courageous reconciliation work through the nonprofit initiative The Army of Healers.

This program continues a long tradition at Esalen of convening conversations across some of the world’s most painful divides. Since the early 2000s, the Institute has welcomed reconciliation dialogue and embodiment practices between Israelis and Palestinians, offering a safe and neutral space for encounters that seldom occur elsewhere. These efforts expanded during the era of Nancy Lunney-Wheeler, Esalen’s longtime former head of programming. Under her leadership of public-facing programming — alongside the invitational conferences led by Dulce and Michael Murphy through Track II and Esalen’s Center for Theory & Research — Esalen also became a hub for backchannel diplomacy, drawing together Russians, Ukrainians, Americans, and leaders from across the Pacific Rim. Esalen helped pioneer  people-to-people exchanges that carried quiet but lasting impact. With such programming, politics fell away and human connection took center stage.

“My life’s work through Esalen was to offer people possibilities — possibilities for change, for hope, for healing, for meaning. This was an intimate exploration of how we can support each other. I was behind the scenes, looking for ways to offer these possibilities. It was my goal to get teachers to cross-pollinate with one another here and then go off and continue those relationships and conversations in other places and environments to continue that work and exploration. Those conversations expanded what they were doing in the world and extended their social impact. They opened up each other’s thinking.”

For Nitsan, the work of healing divides has been a lifelong calling. “When I was growing up, I spent five years in the US and experienced a lot of prejudice against me as a Jew,” she recalls. “When I started dancing, it helped me connect and dance out my feelings. Later I studied dance movement therapy and wrote my thesis on how dance therapy can heal prejudice. That became my path.” In 2005 she wrote to Nancy about bringing this work to Esalen. Since then, Nitsan has returned many times, helping groups hold space for pain that is centuries deep. “Pain that is not transformed is transmitted,” she says. “That is the essence of the destruction and suffering in the world. When there’s no space to feel and heal, people act it out.”

Jawdat’s journey began in Nazareth, with a family history rooted in displacement. His grandfather’s village was expelled, and he grew up in a family of lawyers (himself included) committed to reclaiming land and justice through the courts. “At some point,” he reflects, “I lost hope in the legal system. I was drawn into grassroots activism—spaces where people could actually meet, be vulnerable, and connect.” Through his work in nonviolent communication, participatory leadership, and storytelling, he found his way to the Army of Healers. “My pain doesn’t cancel your pain,” he says. “There’s space for both. If I was in somebody else’s shoes, maybe I would’ve acted the same way. Creating a space where each person’s narrative can be acknowledged—without guilt, shame, or negating the other’s reality—that’s the healing part. That’s what allows us to touch a shared humanity.”

Both Nitsan and Jawdat emphasized that the trauma carried into these circles is profound and generational. As Nitsan explained, “For Jews, the pain we carry reaches far beyond the past two years — it holds echoes of centuries of struggle and persecution. For Palestinians, the weight of history is also immense, rooted in generations of displacement and loss. In our workshops, people don’t only bring their own voices, they carry the legacy burdens of their ancestors. The room fills with this epigenetic memory.”

For Jawdat, this intergenerational wound points to a universal call: “Palestinian liberation is intertwined with Jewish well-being. My loyalty stands with that universal value more than with any single trauma story. Out beyond ideas of right and wrong, as Rumi wrote, there is a field. That’s where I want us to meet.”

In today’s climate, with violence and polarization more entrenched than ever, this history matters profoundly. The revival of such dialogues to Esalen affirms a founding spirit: that personal growth and global healing are inseparable.

In a fractured world, it is no small thing that Esalen continues to be a sanctuary for dialogue, a crossroads of cultures, and a beacon for those who believe that healing — both personal and collective — remains possible.