BIG SUR — The world-famous Esalen Institute hasn’t seen this much controversy since a psychic was hired in 1979 to contact extraterrestrials for advice on reorganizing management. Now, as Esalen marks its 50th anniversary, veterans of the New Age retreat center best known for massages, self-awareness and naked hot-tubbing say a new crisis has emerged: a corporate philosophy bent on making money and turning the institute into a boutique-style spa.
“Esalen now emulates the worst of corporate America,” one employee posted on esaleaks.org, a website modeled on WikiLeaks that gives voice to the Esalen community of workers and workshop leaders that is suddenly feeling more fear and intimidation than peace and love.
“We’ve lost sight of what this place was founded for,” said Bill Herr, who has been connected with Esalen for two decades and is now the director of its art center.
The controversy comes at a time when the institute is striving to maintain its identity, relevance and bottom line — long after its pioneering achievements have gone mainstream: yoga classes at the YMCA, massages at the mall, organic food at Walmart.
Tensions reached a boiling point last month when three beloved midlevel managers were abruptly laid off as part of a “restructuring.” The widow of one of the two co-founders as well as an Esalen board member resigned in protest. A son of one founder and a nephew of another worry about Esalen’s legacy. And every day at 1 p.m., a defiant group — sometimes as many as 70 people — gather in a silent “circle of honor” to mourn the loss of the laid-off co-workers.
“It’s been a bloodbath in ways as the old school has met the new,” said David Schiffman, 69, who has led “vision quests” and workshops at Esalen for 43 years. He recently decided to stop singing and drumming at the “spirit calling and purification” ceremonies on a deck overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
“I didn’t want to be fiddling while Rome burned,” Schiffman said. “I couldn’t imagine playing music in a place where people were having the music squeezed out of them.”
Founded by Michael Murphy and Dick Price in 1962, Esalen quickly became a symbol of California’s hippie counterculture, attracting the music and pop psychology icons of the day — from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to Timothy Leary, Fritz Perls and Abraham Maslow, whose “hierarchy of needs” became required college reading.
In the 1970s, Murphy’s “Golf in the Kingdom” became a best-seller. And in the ’80s, Esalen became known for “hot tub diplomacy” when it tried to play a role in easing Cold War tensions by hosting Soviet diplomats, including then-Moscow Mayor Boris Yeltsin, on tours of America and meetings with their U.S. counterparts.
“In its day, Esalen was the TED Talks and Burning Man all rolled into one,” said David Price, general manager from 1995 to 2003 and son of co-founder Dick Price, who died when he was crushed by a Big Sur boulder in 1985. “I just don’t see it as having that level of impact right now. To me, it’s a shame.”
And while the current strife “looks like a management vs. labor kind of dispute,” said the art center’s Herr, “what’s really going on is a kind of cultural assault.”
But Esalen President Gordon Wheeler and board member Bill James say Esalen remains a vibrant place where for the past eight years — many of those recessionary years — it has welcomed record numbers of guests to sex and marriage sessions, organic farming seminars, human potential workshops and leadership conferences.
Still, Wheeler said, “it is true we have to have more emphasis on accountability and job effectiveness than we used to. We’re a nonprofit. We do need to break even. The pressures for that are greater than they used to be, for sure.”
The controversy has been made all the more painful and intense, he said, by the isolation of the institute 45 miles down the rocky coastline from Monterey — and the fact that about 100 employees live on the property and feel as close as family. Many participate in the “work/study” program, living on the property, doing housekeeping or working in the garden and kitchen, as well as joining groups of stocking-feet workshop guests in meditation and other self-help seminars.
The recent changes have been especially difficult for those who go back decades. Like most companies, James said, Esalen employees now must log their hours and explain overtime — which to old-timers “smacks of not being trusted.” And after a recent incident in which a busy, exasperated kitchen employee refused to make a birthday cake for a guest, James said, employees were encouraged to “smile and nod” at guests as they pass them along the dirt pathways.
“You would have thought we ordered them to wear a uniform,” James said. “Something like this is a revolution to them.”
The nonprofit corporation that owns Esalen has healthy reserves and is embarking on an ambitious long-term plan to renovate nearly every yurt, cottage and barn on the property. But Esalen officials say they have no intention of turning the place into a luxury resort like Post Ranch and Ventana just up Highway 1.
“To become a high-end spa would be too dull for us,” Wheeler said. “We’d like to serve our guests a little better. But that’s it.”
While Esalen may have a five-star view, recent upgrades to some guest units raised them closer to Holiday Inn status, James said.
He and Wheeler say they want to keep the institute focused on the “cutting edge” of thought, on personal and social transformations and helping mold leaders through “conscious business” seminars. Earlier this month, executives from Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Nordstrom and IDEO gathered for one of them.
The irony isn’t lost on Esalen managers, who know they sometimes appear to have missed some of their own workshops — “Enlightened Leadership in Challenging Times,” for instance.
“We’re trying to do the best we can, and we don’t always get it right,” Wheeler said. “Could we have handled it better? I think we could have, yes.”
The institute has certainly gone through tough times before. In 1998, El Niño storms destroyed the legendary open-air mineral baths fed by hot springs jetting out of the cliffs. Cost overruns to rebuild the bathhouse and tubs plunged the institute deeply into debt and forced managers to rethink operations. More people with more business backgrounds and fewer with psychology credentials were invited to join the board. And conflicts with staff became more common as more basic business practices were implemented.
The Esaleaks website was created a year before the recent layoffs as an anonymous forum for employees to air their gripes. Posted documents, from staff salaries to tax returns, have been uploaded to the site.
On the website, the writers sardonically refer to themselves as “The Nine,” a reference to the so-called nine extraterrestrials from the star Sirius that British psychic Jenny O’Connor said she “channeled” to help her decide how to shake-up management in the late 1970s. At the time, some in the community referred to “The Nine” as “extraterrestrial hatchet men.” O’Connor was hired by Dick Price.
“I think he may have used her to enact things he wanted to do anyway,” said his son David, who lives in Poland but returns to Esalen every year. “There was a level of absurdity to the whole thing.”
The current management crisis, however, seems to cut deeper. Several recent meetings and letters back and forth have so far failed to ease the tensions.
“The realities that sober you up, that make you feel the weight of things, the responsibility to be serious, not dreamy or childish, have come home to roost,” Schiffman said. “The struggle has been to keep the soul of Esalen intact.”
Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at 408-278-3409.
