New Directions : Sales Talk in Esalen’s Hot Tubs?

They pause at the door of the small cabin, take off their shoes, sit cross-legged on the large pillows and wait for the Friday night session to begin.

When the cabin is full, the teacher turns down the soothing meditation music and asks participants what they want to learn from their weekend class at Esalen Institute, the human potential movement mecca in Big Sur. The first few answers sound anachronistic--cliched fragments from the 1960s.

“I want to get in touch with myself. . . .” “If there are any other realities out there, I’d like to experience them. . . .” “I’m interested in different states of consciousness. . . .”

Help in Business

The teacher smiles beatifically after each answer and then turns to the next participant, a woman in neatly pressed black slacks and a sweater.

“I’m in sales,” said Susan Skelton, “and I’m hoping this will help me with business.”

This is not an answer you would have heard at Esalen in the 1960s. This is not an answer you would have heard at Esalen in the 1970s. But the psychological imperatives of the times have changed.

Many of the concepts pioneered at Esalen--considered experimental and outrageous at the time--are now accepted elements of suburban living. Local YMCAs offer yoga and massage classes. Churches sponsor marriage-encounter programs. College extension programs include classes in Eastern religion. Hot tubs, once the most publicized part of Esalen, have evolved into backyard spas.

And executives like Susan Skelton are learning that human potential movement concepts are helpful sales tools. Skelton, 40, does not fit the stereotypical image of the ethereal Esalen seeker. The sales manager for a computerized tax service, she lives in a tract home in San Jose and has three children. Her husband, Stan, is an accountant.

Idyllic Setting

But Skelton discovered that many sales seminars include techniques from the field of neurolinguistics--a theory of how people influence one another on subconscious levels. She learned that Esalen was offering a weekend workshop on the subject, and she signed up. And because the institute’s Big Sur setting is so idyllic, Skelton also viewed the course as an opportunity to unwind during the “peak selling season.”

“I’m always striving to be a better salesperson and a better manager,” she said. “And if Esalen can help me in those areas--despite what a lot of people think the place represents--I’ll give it a try.”

Esalen leaders take satisfaction in the knowledge that many of their ideas that once were ridiculed now are widely accepted. But with acceptance can come complacency and stagnation. And many at Esalen are worried that unless the institute successfully charts a new direction, it no longer will be in the vanguard, but a tired refrain from the 1960s.

Twenty years ago Esalen was known as a wild frontier at the edge of the continent where sensuality and self-expression were the experience, encounter groups and confrontational psychology the method, and self-revelation the goal. It was a place where the novel and futuristic were embraced and explored, a place where the great humanistic and Gestalt psychologists held court. But it also was a place where the line dividing the significant and the silly often was blurred.

Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy calls the 1960s a “period of innovation” and the 1970s a “period of consolidation,” a time to balance the books and create a strong financial base at the institute. But at the beginning of the 1980s, there was an uncertainty about the direction Esalen should take. Esalen, which will be 25 years old next year, had an identity crisis.

‘Came Down to a Balance’

“A structural-spiritual crisis was going on,” Murphy said. “There was an internal clogging of the arteries and decisions needed to be made about changes in directions. It came down to the balance of preserving the old and letting in the new.”

Esalen leaders say they are attempting to strike that balance. Still, many of the workshops in the Esalen catalogue seem time-worn: “Feeling and Relating,” “The Feeling Process,” “The Power of Love,” “On Being a Man,” “Deepening the Connection Between Men & Women,” “Returning to the Wisdom of Our Earth/Bodies,” “Burnout in Relationships,” “Living Hypnotically,” “Transformation Within and Without,” “Sound and the Exploration of Consciousness.”

Murphy acknowledged that Esalen needs to “push the edge of the envelope,” to more aggressively pursue social and psychological frontiers. But, he said, what will never change is the institute’s commitment to five basic programs: meditation, Eastern religion, Gestalt psychology, interpersonal relations, massage and body work.

“You can change some things for the better, but others you just have to leave as is,” he said. “Like Buddhism. It’s been successful for thousands of years. You don’t change or improve something like that.”

The 500 workshops in the catalogue, which constitute the financial foundation of the institute, are still extremely popular. They attract more than 5,000 people a year, and Esalen is almost at 90% capacity year-round. A weeklong seminar costs $490, and a weekend workshop costs $250.

Criticisms and Risks

Esalen has been criticized in the past for being philosophically lightweight and for catering exclusively to the self-absorbed. And now, with the expanding clientele of older professional people, it runs the risk of being viewed as a tax-deductible resort for the upwardly mobile.

But in the last few years, Esalen has gone beyond the visitor seminars and has instituted a number of political and scholarly programs--including scientific conferences and educational exchanges with the Soviet Union--programs that Murphy hopes will define the institute for the 1980s.

There also has been a recent change in leadership. When Esalen was founded, it probably seemed inconceivable that a businessman would be president one day. But the current head of the institute, Steve Donovan, has a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia and is the owner of an executive search consulting firm.

During the 1970s, after the first frenetic decade of Esalen, the institute was in financial trouble, and the leaders realized that efficient business practices had to be established. So Donovan, who had been involved with Esalen programs since 1972 and had extensive managerial experience, was appointed. And while some are defensive about the claims that Esalen is too Establishment, Donovan discusses with pride the institute’s stable economic base.

“Esalen is not some flaky little place,” Donovan said. “It’s as solid as a rock, financially, and the cast of characters who teach here would be the envy of any large academic institution.”

First and Best-Known

In the late 1960s there were about 200 centers modeled after Esalen; only a handful remain. But Esalen was the first and the best-known and still attracts people from all over the world. More than a quarter of the visitors are from outside the United States.

Esalen’s greatest asset may be its location. Cut off from the world by the Santa Lucia Mountains just to the east and the dramatic Big Sur coastline to the west, Esalen appears to be an island upon the land, a grassy promontory between two forces of nature that gives the institute an air of splendid isolation. The setting has a meditative quality and is perfect for seekers of all kinds. From almost anywhere on Esalen’s 30 acres of gardens, wind-swept cypress trees and stands of redwood one can hear the crashing surf.

Murphy’s family had bought the land in 1910 and when the idea for Esalen germinated, his grandmother gave him a long-term lease. Like so many others who have participated at Esalen, Murphy had been on a spiritual journey. He had lived in an Indian ashram for almost two years after college and then moved to a meditation center in San Francisco, where he met Richard Price. They shared an interest in areas of psychology, philosophy and spirituality that were being ignored by universities, and together they founded Esalen.

Price was killed in a hiking accident in Big Sur last year when he was struck by a boulder, and Murphy, who has been named chairman of Esalen, is no longer involved in the day-to-day operation. While Donovan is reserved and business-like, Murphy, at 55, still seems almost boyish, a dreamer who has not grown cynical in middle age.

Combining Sports, Spirituality

Dressed in jeans, argyle socks and a sweat shirt, Murphy has the ruddy complexion and vigorous air of a country club golf pro. He is, in fact, a fanatic golfer, jogger and San Francisco 49er football fan, and he does not find sports and spirituality--the quintessential California combination--incompatible. Esalen has sponsored a sports center in San Francisco to explore innovative approaches to training and is funding a project to study exceptional performance in several areas, including sports.

In 1982, when the 49ers were playing in the Super Bowl, Murphy affixed a sign outside his Marin County home, paraphrasing the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo: The Super Bowl Is the Supermind.

When Murphy and Price first opened Esalen in 1962, they were able to attract some of the preeminent scholars of the time and the early sessions resembled serious academic seminars. Participants included writers Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts, historian Arnold Toynbee, chemist Linus Pauling, psychologists Abraham Maslow and B. F. Skinner and architect R. Buckminster Fuller.

As Esalen grew in popularity, its focus began to shift and programs were instituted that were less scholarly and more experimental. Nudity and sexuality were explored in some workshops, and an increasing number of people became more interested in the individual, rather than the idea.

“You had people standing around in a circle holding each other’s genitals,” recalled Don Johnson, an Antioch University psychology professor who has been visiting Esalen for 20 years. “People were trying different styles of sexual contact, seeing what the fear of sexuality had on group experience. . . . Those were the most outlandish kinds of things. And they got the most publicity and gave Esalen a certain reputation.”

Esalen also was known for popularizing the hot tub. Natural hot springs flow from the nearby mountains, and the baths overlooking the rocky beaches always have been a popular gathering spot. People still flock to the candlelit baths at night after seminars. But, Murphy said, when Esalen was founded he did not intend the baths to be co-ed.

“I grew up there, and my family never conceived of men and women going in together,” he said. “We had it separated at first, but then we didn’t want to be like the Gestapo, separating people. People bathe together in hot springs all over the world. But at the time, it was a big deal to the American Puritan sensibility.”

The encounter group was another concept that was refined and gained momentum at Esalen. The groups became a national fad, and people all over the country began gathering in circles to insult one another. Many in the Hollywood community were enamored of the encounter group, and Murphy recalled a pool-side session held at actress Jennifer Jones’ mansion in Bel-Air. She had visited Esalen a number of times and decided to throw a party to introduce to her friends some of the institute’s new ideas.

Psychoanalyst Frederick (Fritz) Perls offered to demonstrate Gestalt therapy, which he developed, to anyone who was interested, and Natalie Wood volunteered to “sit on the hot seat.” But the session turned confrontational, and Perls called Wood a “spoiled brat.”

“He put her over his lap and began spanking her, and she began kicking and carrying on. So Roddy McDowall challenged Fritz to a fight.” Murphy laughed at the ludicrous image of the old German therapist whacking the young actress.

”. . . At the end of the party Fritz and (philosopher) Abraham Kaplan had it out. Both of them looked like Biblical characters as they sat, inches apart, beard to beard, yelling at each other.”

Some of the encounter groups at Esalen were so abusive and destructive that people were emotionally damaged, Murphy said. As a result, encounter groups no longer are permitted at the institute.

“One leader had a session he called ‘psychological karate.’ You’d hear blood-curdling screams, someone would then come running out and then they’d drag him back in.” Murphy sipped a Perrier and studied the light streaming through a window. “Sure there were excesses in the past, but you have to live up to your mistakes.

“You have to remember, Esalen has been an experiment. And the ‘60s were a stupendously exciting time. People walking around in the lodge having illuminations. Great pronouncements being made.” He smiled at the memory and then shrugged. “You just have to preserve and develop the good and cull out the things that fail.”

One of the early Esalen experiments that is thriving today is the program on confluent education--”putting feeling and thinking together”--that was founded by George Brown and moved to UC Santa Barbara in 1969. Today’s graduates in the program, Brown said, have less social conscience, and about a third enter the business world. More firms are discovering, he said, that when people communicate and work better together and interpersonal skills are improved, productivity is increased.

“When we started, nobody was interested in industry,” said Brown, who heads the program and also works as a consultant to businesses. “But values are changing. The old self-actualization from the ‘60s has been translated into the ‘80s world of work and industry.”

Last year one of his students titled her master’s thesis: “Using Confluent Techniques in the Orientation Program of McDonald’s Restaurant Trainees.”