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You are a subscriber but you have not yet set up your account for premium online access. Add your preferred email address and password to your account. You forgot your password and you need to retrieve it. Click here to access the password we have on file for you. Customer Service If you have questions: The Esalen Institute , commonly called Esalen , is a non-profit American retreat center and intentional community in Big Sur, California , which focuses on humanistic alternative education.
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Its innovative use of encounter groups, a focus on the mind-body connection, and their ongoing experimentation in personal awareness introduced many ideas that later became mainstream. Their intention was to support alternative methods for exploring human consciousness, what Aldous Huxley described as "human potentialities". Price ran the Institute until he was killed in a hiking accident in In , the board hired professional executives to help raise money and keep the Institute profitable.
Until , Esalen offered over workshops yearly [7] in areas including personal growth , meditation , massage , Gestalt Practice , yoga , psychology , ecology , spirituality , and organic food. In February , the Institute was cut off when Highway 1 was closed on either side of the hot springs. It also decided to revamp its offerings to include topics more relevant to a younger generation. As of July , due to the limited access resulting from the road closures, the hot springs are only open to Esalen guests. The grounds of the Esalen Institute were first home to a Native American tribe known as the Esselen , from whom the institute adopted its name.
The location was homesteaded by Thomas Slate on September 9, , when he filed a land patent under the Homestead Act of It was the first tourist-oriented business in Big Sur, frequented by people seeking relief from physical ailments. In , the land was purchased by Henry Murphy, [13] a Salinas, California , physician.
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After graduating from Stanford, Price attended Harvard University to continue studying psychology. Murphy, meanwhile, traveled to Sri Aurobindo 's ashram in India where he resided for several months [17] before returning to San Francisco. They met in San Francisco at the suggestion of Frederic Spiegelberg , a Stanford professor of comparative religion and Indic studies, with whom both had studied. After Price was hospitalized for eighteen months he was inspired to change the way people could experience a new way to live their life and experience new ideas and thoughts without judgment and influence from the outside world.
He was inspired by his own interest in Buddhist practices and along with his own understanding of Taoism, he formed his teachings. He then took what Fritz Perls had taught him and created a process that is still taught and followed today. Today students all over the world follow the practices set up by Price in guidance, healing and the process and principles.
Chasin' the Wind
Price and Murphy wanted to create a venue where non-traditional workshops and lecturers could present their ideas free of the dogma associated with traditional education. The two began drawing up plans for a forum that would be open to ways of thinking beyond the constraints of mainstream academia while avoiding the dogma so often seen in groups organized around a single idea promoted by a charismatic leader.
They envisioned offering a wide range of philosophies, religious disciplines and psychological techniques. Gay men from San Francisco filled the baths on the weekends. She had previously refused to lease the property to anyone, even turning down an earlier request from Michael. She was afraid her grandson was going to "give the hotel to the Hindus," Murphy later said.
Not long after, Thompson attempted to visit the baths with friends and got into a fistfight when some of the gay men jumped him. The men almost tossed him over the cliff. Murphy's father, a lawyer, finally persuaded his mother to allow her grandson to take over [22] and she agreed to lease the property to them in They modeled the concept of Esalen partially upon Trabuco College , founded by Heard as a quasi-monastic experiment in the mountains east of Irvine, California , and later donated to the Vedanta Society.
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The philosophy of Esalen lies in the idea that "the cosmos, the universe itself, the whole evolutionary unfoldment is what a lot of philosophers call slumbering spirit. The divine is incarnate in the world and is present in us and is trying to manifest," according to Murphy.
Alan Watts gave the first lecture at Esalen in January In , Fritz Perls began what became a five-year long residency at Esalen, leaving a lasting influence. Perls offered many Gestalt therapy seminars at the institute until he left in July When Perls left Esalen he considered it to be "in crisis again". He saw young people without any training leading encounter groups. And he feared that charlatans would take the lead. Dick Price became one of Perls' closest students. Price managed the Institute and developed his own form he called Gestalt Practice , [42] which he taught at Esalen until his death in a hiking accident in Esalen gained popularity quickly and started to regularly publish catalogs full of programs.
The facility was large enough to run multiple programs simultaneously, so Esalen created numerous resident teacher positions. The institute gained increased attention in when several magazines wrote about it. George Leonard published an article in Look magazine about the California scene which mentioned Esalen and included a picture of Murphy. Litwak in late December. Esalen responded by holding large-scale conferences in Midwestern and East Coast cities, [52] as well as in Europe.
Esalen opened a satellite center in San Francisco that offered extensive programming until it closed in the mids for financial reasons. The institute continues to offer workshops about humanistic psychology , physical wellness , and spiritual awareness. The institute has also added workshops on permaculture and ecological sustainability. The Institute was closed for the first half of and forced to drastically reduce staff. They also decided to revamp their offerings upon reopening to include topics more relevant to a younger generation.
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In , Esalen launched the Center for Theory and Research to initiate new areas of practice and action which foster social change and realization of the human potential. He was inviting leaders in the field of psychosis treatment to attend the workshops. Esalen has been making changes to respond to internal and external factors.
The baths were destroyed in by severe weather and were rebuilt at great expense, but this caused severe institutional stress. In , the Institute commissioned the company Beyond the Leading Edge to conduct a Leadership Culture Survey to assess the quality of its leadership culture. The results were negative. The survey measured how well the leadership "builds quality relationships, fosters teamwork, collaborates, develops people, involves people in decision making and planning, and demonstrates a high level of interpersonal skill.
It also produced strongly dissonant scores in measures of community welfare, relating with interpersonal intelligence , clearly communicating vision, and building a sense of personal worth within the community. It ranked management as overly compliant and lacking authenticity. However, the survey found that Esalen closely matched its overall goal for customer focus.
Gordon Wheeler dramatically restructured Esalen management. In the few years after its founding, many of the seminars [71] like "The Value of Psychotic Experience" attempted to challenge the status quo. There were even Esalen programs that questioned the movement of which Esalen itself was a part—for instance, "Spiritual and Therapeutic Tyranny: The Willingness To Submit".
There were also a series of encounter groups focused on racial prejudice. F Skinner , and Arnold Toynbee. Rather than merely lecturing, many leaders experimented with what Huxley called the non-verbal humanities: Their intention was to help individuals develop awareness of their present flow of experience, to express this fully and accurately, and to listen to feedback.
These "experiential" workshops were particularly well attended and were influential in shaping Esalen's future course. Because of Esalen's isolated location, its operational staff members have lived on site from the beginning and for many years collectively contributed to the character of the institute. Bodywork has always been a significant part of the Esalen experience. In the late s, the "EMBA" was organized as a semi-autonomous Esalen association for the regulation of Esalen massage practitioners.
Esalen Institute has sponsored many research initiatives, educational projects, and invitational conferences. The Big Sur facility has been used for these events, as well as other locations, including international sites. This was the first of seven "Big Sur Folk Festivals" featuring many of the era's music legends.
The concert included musicians who had just come from the Woodstock Festival. This event was featured in a documentary movie, Celebration at Big Sur , which was released in John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg performed together at Esalen. In , President and CEO Sharon Thom [79] created an artist-in-residence program to provide artists with a two-week retreat in which to focus upon works in progress.
These artists interacted with the staff, offered informal gatherings, and staged performances on the newly created dance platform. Located next to the Art Barn, the dance platform was used by Esalen teachers for dance and martial arts. The platform was later covered by a dome and renamed the Leonard Pavilion after deceased Esalen past president and board member, George Leonard. In and , Esalen hosted two arts festivals which gathered together artists, poets, musicians, photographers and performers, including artist Margot McLean, psychotherapist James Hillman , guitarist Michael Hedges and Joan Baez.
All staff members were allowed to attend every class and performance that did not interfere with their schedules.