Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA (June 26-28)

Esalen Institute

Back in the 60s, Esalen was a hub for experimental education and exploration. The founders Michael Murphy and Dick Price envisioned a space that welcomed the wisdom of East and West and that honored, respected, and sought to develop body, mind, and spirit. The utopian retreat center runs around its workshops: weekend, weeklong, or monthlong explorations on the widest range of subjects I’ve ever seen an institution entertain. The categories include: visual arts, writing, music/rhythm/dance, creative expression/theater, bodywork/somatic practices, psychological/transpersonal process, relationship/sexuality/gender, myth/ritual/shamanism, children/families/education, neuropsychology, social/political issues, professional growth/training, nature/ecology/sustainability, contemplative/spiritual studies, yoga, ceconomics/business/workplace, health/healing, and integral practices. You could take a workshop on permaculture or gestalt therapy, sustainable cooking or insight meditation, “Writing Your Life” or “Mindful Motherhood”.

Esalen has a history of bringing in cutting edge thinkers to talk, teach, and lead others on fringe subjects within the academic world. Workshop leaders range from academics and activists to non-profit leaders and spiritual contemplatives. The likely profile of a workshop leader is someone who has published or developed a unique approach or style to familiar traditions. For example, from November 1-6, Esalen will host a workshop called “Moving Into Meditation: A Silent Yoga and Meditation Retreat”, hosted by four experienced meditators. The most famous is probably Sarah Powers: a yoga, tai chi, and Buddhist meditation teacher, who has blended styles of yin and yang tai chi with vinayasa, Iyengar, and Ashtanga yoga to create a physical mindfulness practice that compliments a blending of vipassana and Dzogchen mediation practices. She has written a book called Yin/Yang Yoga: Integrating Yin/Yang Yoga and Buddhist Meditation. Workshop leaders often bring such a unique synthesis or style, often catalyzed into published work.

When I was at Esalen I did a workshop called "When the Past is Present". The workshop leader David Richo, a well-publshed psychologist and spiritual teacher, focused specifically on the topic of transference, the psychological phenomena of carrying over the model relationships of our past onto relationships in the present. The major area of focus was how our parental relationships and formative romantic relationships shape how we experience relationships now. Richo, himself, fits the model of an integral teacher working from his own published material. A former Catholic priest and present Buddhist meditator, Richo has integrated a unique style of mindfulness and loving-kindness meditations with the wisdom of Catholicism and Jungian psychology. This simple weekend workshop was truly transformative, especially for its brevity. I got a lot out of it personally and in exploring the possibilities of group therapy.

Esalen has hosted these leading, eclectic thinkers for the past 5 decades. Notable visitors or long-time residents include Aldous Huxley, Fritz Perls, Abraham Maslow, Alan Watts, Gregory Bateson, Arnold Toynbee, Paul Tillich, Stanislav Grof, Joseph Campbell, Buckminster Fuller, Timothy Leary, Albert Hoffman, R.D. Laing, Terence McKenna, and Gary Snyder. Arts events have hosted everyone from Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel to George Harrison and Ravi Shankar. Scholar Jeffrey Kripal recently published a definitive history on Esalen called "Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion", a thorough investigation of the place's complicated history.

The physicality of the place itself was quite stunning. The Big Sur coastline gets really temperate, breezy weather. June is 60s and 70s with a frequent, big fog that rolls off the ocean. Much of the coast is rock. Esalen hangs over the sea on a cliff. They have a lot of gardening space, and a small organic farm. The cabin dorm I stayed in was pretty typical for retreat centers. They had many other buildings for workshops as well as an “art barn” (art studio for people to use), dance dome, elementary children’s school, offices, and dining hall. The dining hall was also pretty typical in structure with a beautiful patio for eating outside. The food, however, was really tasty. They always had a densely abundant salad bar, along with multiple grains, various dishes, and all kinds of teas, coffees, juices, and alcoholic drinks (the alcohol was for sale).

The most distinguishing feature of the Esalen ‘campus’ were its hot mineral spring baths. Esalen used to have hot spring tubs until a fire a few years ago destroyed them. They put forth a multi-million dollar effort to rebuild newer and better baths, and did they . . . The building doubles as a massage parlor and hot tub spa with almost a dozen hot tubs or single bath tubs. It was clothing optional, which practically means dozens of naked, middle-aged Californians, most of whom were somewhere between relaxed and self-conscious. It’d be fair to say that you oscillate between the two states when you first arrive, but the first dip into the soothing tea kettle, the first rush of warmth up, around, and inside one’s genitalia melts away any doubt or self-consciousness! One’s mind wafts away in the mist of the ocean as it carries up and off the beating waves below. The tubs practically dangle on the cliff’s edge. You can lean your elbow’s on the tub’s rim and gaze off into the infinite gray sky, gray sea . . . Or you can turn around and stare into the infinite gray hair of your baby boomer compatriots, aging but grinning – finally at rest from their busy, likely successful, lives. The major shadow of Esalen, however, is its echelon.

This utopian paradise is only affordable for a minority of the world, a minority of Americans, a minority of wealthy Americans. A weekend workshop could cost anywhere from $400 - $2,100, a weeklong workshop could cost $900 - $6,200 depending on whether you’re on the floor in a sleeping bag or cooped up in a deluxe suite. Esalen also offers monthlong work studies where you work 32 hours per week while doing a daily workshop for a month. But even to do that, you have to pay a $1000 entrance fee on top of working! As the founding boomer generation has aged from hippy idealism to even more idealistic, post-modern silicon suburbia, Esalen seems to have paralleled in its own shift toward a new age vision for all . . . to be experienced by few.

However, the place isn’t without consciousness of this problem, and I would have to spend much more time at a place like Esalen to label it as classist. Indeed, classism has been a defining feature of higher education since its inception, and it is perhaps too much to reasonably expect an institution to reverse such a tendency. It would be interesting to research what initiatives Esalen is taking to provide scholarships and programs or workshops for the underprivileged (not just about the underprivileged). All I know of is the $50 work discount I got. A lot of its workshops are also on niche subjects; so one would have to know if a workshop on tai chi and yoga integration is of interest to people without access or if it is such a niche subject that only those who could afford to have learned about it could afford it anyway. I know at least, that I personally, would love more access to what Esalen offers but can’t afford it. Students may be the group most interested in Esalen with the most difficulty getting in. One can’t even look around Esalen Institute without a reservation, an indication of the price it costs to build an American dreamland.