Weekend Escape: Big Sur : The ‘60s-flavored Esalen Institute is both primal preen and search for the truth

In the ‘60s, I grew to manhood, moved to California and learned what my sign is.

I picked up new words, such as karma, mantra, chakra and ashram. I heard wondrous tales of a magical retreat on a bluff over the Pacific, a place where I might find George and Ringo and Ravi and the Maharishi.

And then I heard something just awful, just disgusting. There were middle-age people there, and they ran around naked. Turned my stomach.

Now, many wrinkles later, on a crisply clear December afternoon, I was checking into the Esalen Institute for the first time, with my wife, Bobbie. Bobbie had just celebrated her 50th birthday, we had just become empty-nesters, and it seemed the perfect time and place to reflect on our lives.

We had signed up for a seminar called “Experiencing Esalen,” available about 10 times a year for newcomers. It offered a combination plate of therapies using games, massage and free-form dancing based on the Gestalt psychology of Fritz Perls. Perls was one of many ‘60s psychotherapists--Abraham Maslow, Alan Watts and Carl Rogers were others--who worked and experimented at Esalen during its heyday. Simplistically put, Gestalt psychology is based on the theory that the whole personality is more than the sum of its identifiable parts.

Bobbie and I had driven up on a nippy day, followed the soaring curves of Highway 1, and taken a dirt road on our left to Esalen. We checked in by picking up two towels at the gate and pulled up in front of our assigned room in Maslow, one of two dozen weathered brown wood buildings scattered over Esalen’s 53 acres.

We loved our room. Through a huge picture window, we saw the surf crashing below us. Out front a romantic balcony beckoned. Our furniture, in wicker and Danish modern, took us back to the ‘60s. Through a skylight in the angled knotty pine ceiling, our room was bathed in light. I put a bottle of Chardonnay on the balcony to chill. “What is it out there, 50 degrees?” my wife asked. “I’m not going outside with no clothes on.”

Thus I headed down the dirt path to the legendary hot tubs alone. The very public changing room was packed, and no hooks were left for my clothes. I left them on a bench. As I marched out to the tubs, no drums rolled. No one even looked up. I had worked out for nothing. Now I faced a bigger problem. Every inch of space in both pools was taken.

And then, silently, without looking up, two teen-age girls, one with a bird of paradise tattooed on her thigh, moved apart and let me in. For the rest of my sojourn in the tub, my goal was to avoid rubbing my body against anyone else’s, but it was hopeless. A very hairy man was shoved into my lap. And still they kept coming. More and more people kept entering the tubs, and no one left. I was reminded of a horrid ferry ride I had once taken in India.

No one else in the tubs showed any sign of discomfort. The others were visibly serene and blissed out. Even I, after half an hour, began to relax, and I was so warm that for the rest of the chilly weekend I wandered around without a jacket.

Nudity is at the heart of the Esalen experience, a local folkway, a tradition rather than a therapy. Esalen’s chief executive officer, Sharon Thom, explained it simply: “Being naked is a leveler.” Nudity is not required anywhere at Esalen, but it is the norm at the swimming pool, the hot tubs and the massage area.

After sundown, dressed in sweats, Bobbie and I strolled the lushly green grounds, down a path past the eucalyptus trees, ferns and redwoods, and opened the door to the lodge. Close to 100 people (Esalen accommodates 220) had gathered for dinner. It was a friendly crowd. In the buffet line, everybody talked to us. We learned that as a couple we were an anomaly at Esalen. Everyone we met had come by themselves. Most were prosperous and radiated self-confidence.

The most popular line for hitting on someone: “Have you been to the baths?”

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As we approached the buffet table, I asked one of the two giggling teen-age girls who posed as servers to identify the vegetables in front of us. “These are greens,” she said, “and these are, uh, reds.”

We sat with Richard, an investment broker and Esalen regular who had been away for a while. “I was improperly Rolfed,” he explained. Elizabeth, a motivational consultant, joined us. Elizabeth didn’t much care for Esalen’s home-grown organic vegetables and its whole-grain breads baked on the grounds. It was more fiber than she was used to, and next time she would remember the Beano.

Elizabeth got up to buy a glass of wine, $3.50 for a good Merlot, and offered to treat anyone else who wanted one. Esalen sold wine only at dinner and only in the lodge, for very practical reasons: bare feet, broken glass. Many visitors drink their own wine on their own balcony, as we did.

At 8:30 p.m., our group met for the first time. There were 11 of us, seven women and four men. We ranged in age from 30-plus to 60. My wife and I were the only couple. The women in our group were more professionally oriented than the men, being, for the most part, lawyers and high-ranking business executives. The men included Dennis, who worked in a prison, and Andre, a hunk and suspected airhead whose occupation we never figured out. Gordon was a newspaper reporter.

Our leader for the weekend was Eduardo Eizner, a dark, good-looking Argentine psychotherapist who appeared to be in his mid-30s. Eizner led us in hours of games designed to get us to understand ourselves better by first understanding others.

Gestalt, as practiced at Esalen these days, has lost its hard edge. In the ‘60s, if you believe Esalen legends, Perls publicly spanked Natalie Wood. But our therapy groups were not encounter groups. The games we played were not confrontational. Nearly everyone had something nice to say. The old game that began, “Something I dislike about you is . . . “ seems to have been banished from the repertoire.

Saturday afternoon was rainy and time for our massage training. Three of the seven women did not show up. My wife showed up fully dressed--for the Yukon. That left three naked women, four of us naked men, and Brita, our masseuse. She was naked too. Brita had a bit of a tummy. In fact, all of our bellies were now protruding. I, for one, was vegetabled out.

Brita asked for a volunteer, and Barbara dashed to the massage table. Suddenly the rules changed. It was not cool at the hot tubs to stare. Here it was our duty. Barbara hadn’t been in the sun for a long time. Brita gave Barbara a very thorough massage, rubbing Barbara’s body in long, continuous strokes, digging her fingertips deeply into Barbara’s muscle tissue, pushing hard on the flesh, avoiding Barbara’s spine. Then she rolled Barbara over and massaged her front.

After the demonstration, I asked Brita what kind of oil she used. “Mazola is fine,” she said.

Now it was time to massage each other. My wife massaged me, but the real action was at the other tables. Gordon, always the dedicated reporter, massaged Dennis. Barbara massaged Pearl. Tammy massaged Andre, with extraordinary vigor.

After a while, Gordon had to leave. He later said, “I never thought I’d ever be giving a full-body massage to a man .”

Esalen was born in 1962, shortly after a Stanford philosophy major named Michael Murphy inherited the land from his grandmother. Murphy launched Esalen with a Harvard psychology dropout named Dick Price. They created the concept of “therapy for the well” and established traditions that put Esalen into books and movies and into the lives of everybody who was anybody in the ‘60s, from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to Paul Simon to Jerry Brown.

Esalen’s philosophy of do your own thing and let it all hang out led to a tolerance for drug use and, eventually, many of the people who wanted to go there were people Murphy and Price didn’t want to have. Esalen was losing money. Murphy and Price hired Steven Donovan, a Columbia University M.B.A., to clean house.

Esalen today appears to be shrewdly managed, a tight ship. There are four or five workshops each week and four or five more each weekend. You can learn how to build a clay pot or how to write a screenplay. The resident psychotherapists are not household words, but they don’t spank people either.

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Budget for Two

Gas: $37.91

Lunches, Highway 1: 48.82

Two nights, meals at Esalen: 740.00

FINAL TAB: $826.73

Esalen Institute information, (408) 667-3000 .