I first began to suspect I was out of my depth just off Highway 1, when our car was body-blocked by a gigantic Swedish masseuse. My sister and I were on our way to Esalen, the legendary retreat that helped to put California at the sharp end of the counterculture revolution, and the Swede was there at the tyre pump, fresh from her own stay at Esalen, where, she told us, she had both thrived at Kundalini yoga and discovered her “power animal” (a Gentoo penguin). But when the conversation was over, instead of leaving like a normal person, she remained standing in front of our car, beaming with aggressive friendliness.
“She’s annoying,” I said. “Can we run her over?”
But my sister, who has lived in California for ten years and has a deeper understanding of West Coast etiquette, inferred from her body language an implicit demand. The Swede wanted a hug. A handshake, a kiss on the cheek, a wince, even - these are the British farewell gestures of choice.
“I cannot hug a person,” I said, “who thinks a giant penguin in the sky is looking out for her.” So my sibling did the deed while I pleaded greasy hands from a phantom take-out. Back on the road, my sister warned me about the journey ahead. At Esalen, hugging is where the esoteric journey begins.
Oh Christ, I’ve never felt so hopelessly, parochially, autistically British. When we finally arrived that evening, I felt great pangs of relief when a man in a yellow beret told us that we were too late for didgeridoo meditation.
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A spectacular crimson sun was just sinking behind the Pacific and it seemed to me that Esalen, which sits on the edge of a cliff in a nature reserve miles away from anywhere, was one of the most idyllic places I’d ever been. Except for the man playing a lute on the lawn. And the three women so ecstatically hula-hooping on the terrace that they risked hip dislocation. And the former architect who told us that a heart attack had forced him to give up his lucrative career and retrain as a yoga instructor. Only he didn’t call it a heart attack. He called it a “health opportunity”.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Esalen’s centrepiece, its “optionally” nudist baths crawling with pink bodies. I asked my sister if she thought the baths were also crawling with VD, and she asked me whether I’d considered “chilling the f*** out”.
I suppose the baths stuck in my mind because of a story I’d read about Jack Kerouac, who had complained bitterly in the early 1960s about the appearance of sperm and a dead otter in Esalen’s healing waters. Things had begun to drift since the Beat poets, then the hippies, then the Tao-lovers and the Deadheads, began to congregate in this area of Big Sur, hoping to escape what the banned author Henry Miller, a resident of Esalen, called the “air-conditioned nightmare” of 1950s America.
A then unknown Hunter S. Thompson was employed as the “executive caretaker” at Esalen at about the time of the dead-otter incident and took to firing angry gunshots through his window pane after he was beaten up by participants of the gay orgies that were monopolising the hot springs. In a fit of radical pique, the folk singer Joan Baez, her entourage and two attack dogs eventually chased out the fornicators: this historic turning point is still referred to with some reverence at Esalen as “the night of the Dobermans”.
The institute was founded in 1961 by two Stanford University classmates, Michael Murphy and Dick Price. Murphy, who was born in Salinas in 1930, inherited the land through a trust from his grandmother. His grandfather, Dr Henry Murphy, the man who delivered John Steinbeck and the model for a character in East of Eden, had bought the 300-acre property in 1910 because of its hot spring. The Esselen Indians had long ago discovered its charm.
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Dr Murphy had planned to establish a European-style healing spa, but his grandson had in mind a hybrid ashram and think-tank where Eastern philosophy, science and progressive mind-body therapies could interact. Price was keen to find alternative treatments for mental illness: he had suffered permanent damage from electro-convulsive therapy after bouts of psychosis - so Esalen was conceived as, in their words, “an alternative educational centre devoted to the exploration of the human potential”. The New Age was born.
To transport you from the no-nonsense UK to a more Californian, radically compassionate head-space, I will quote a tall man with a countercultural hairstyle who wanted to know what a Times journalist was doing at the world’s most infamous retreat. “You here to blow the lid off Esalen?” he asked me over a bowl of Ashram cereal. Then he remembered: “Oh yeah, there is no lid.”
Because it was 1960s California and because Murphy and Price were in awe of Aldous Huxley, who was busy opening the “doors of perception” with heavy doses of mescaline, Esalen quickly became all sorts of things besides a holistic retreat: a psychotropic laboratory, a testing-ground for radical psycho-therapeutic techniques and body work - it was anti-theistic but any sort of mysticism was explored with uncynical seriousness. Gestalt therapy, Rolfing, the Feldenkrais method and most of the stuff now tacked on the pinboard of every healthfood shop and yoga centre in the world has its roots here.
Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, R.D.Laing, Susan Sontag, the Beatles and Ravi Shankar lectured, workshopped, sang here. The Harvard professor-turned-guru Timothy Leary reigned briefly at Esalen and raised false hopes among readers of Playboy when he told the magazine that a woman could orgasm hundreds of times during intercourse, provided she was tripping. Sharon Tate was at Esalen the night before she was murdered, and the Nixon Administration tried to claim that Charles Manson had been indoctrinated at the institute.
At the heady height of its notoriety there were workshops on “The Value of Psychotic Experience” or “Supernaturalism and Hallucinogenic Drugs”. Participants would hug, cry, heal and find themselves. When things went wrong they would occasionally lob themselves off the edge of the cliff.
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The centre gained a certain level of legitimacy when a sceptical New York Times journalist wrote about how he had been transformed by an Esalen workshop. It garnered intellectual integrity in the 1970s, when its leaders began visiting the Soviet Union to investigate psychical research, auras and healing, which the Soviets studied. Somehow, Esalen sponsored Boris Yeltsin’s first visit to the States in 1989.
Meanwhile, the charismatic therapists, intellectuals and masseuses jostled with one another to reach the final frontier of the mind-body experience. They called themselves “psycho-nauts”. If you were the kind of woman who hoped to work through her “fear” of her genitals by exposing her vagina to other members of a group workshop and together “processing” your feelings, Esalen was the place for you.
No vagina workshops when we were there. Drugs, too, are strictly off-campus these days, and the only narcotics we came across had been ingested by a DJ down the road who had swallowed acid that morning and asked us not to tell his girlfriend. Indeed, for a long while now there have been question marks about what Esalen is for, now that so many of its principles have been hijacked by the mainstream.
In 1998 El Niño almost blew the whole structure into the sea but, after a $5 million (£2.5m) renovation and the publication of a fat book on the place (The Religion of No Religion), “everybody is going back to Esalen”. This last sentence is from an e-mail sent to me by a highly intelligent and charming British friend of mine who is stratospherically successful in Hollywood. My friend, a normal person, met her husband in one of Esalen’s inner-child workshops.
Who, in 2008, is “everybody”? A yoga teacher called Johanna pointed me sadly in the direction of the Esalen brochure, where I discovered a workshop entitled Coaching Skills for Leaders and Managers. A jaded masseuse complained about the installation of WiFi on the premises. Among far-out traditionalists there is a fear that the birthplace of New Age has grasped the corporate nettle. Recently, the staff of Wired magazine spent an optionally naked awayday here. I know, I know. We are so behind at The Times.
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Over a delicious communal supper, I witnessed the amount of body contact that I would be expected to give and receive over the next few days - mostly variations on the standard hug: the prolonged pendulum hug (hugging someone while rocking from side to side); the group hug; the friendly back-slap; the reassuring arm-stroke.
By the end of the first evening I had
familiarised myself with Sylvia Guerzenzwaig’s thoughts on Biodanza, and talked to a woman in a convertible Porsche about why exactly her car constituted “a healing present to myself”. My sister, meanwhile, had hugged one wry auditor, one traumatised Silicon-valley entrepreneur, one startlingly attractive and once-cocaine-addicted drummer and a whole bunch of naturopaths. She had gleaned that Pen?lope Cruz and Javier Bardem were here but that Pen?lope had tragically kept her swimsuit on in the baths; that Daniel Craig had visited some time ago and that, it’s true, clingy baby-blue trunks never lie; that during Orlando Bloom’s brief sojourn he had behaved either very furtively or very Britishly, it was hard to tell; and that the skinny guy by the cinnamon coffee dispenser was the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright.
Everyone was “hot”, my sister had registered the moment we walked in, and she would exuberantly strike up conversations, introducing me as “the one who has issues with body contact”. And, like tanned and better-looking versions of the zombies in Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, they would come at me, their arms outstretched while I flinched.
Patiently, they instructed me in the ways of Esalen: I was to expand my horizons and my vocabulary accordingly. I was to get my head around the concept of “atunement”, in which co-workers begin their working day by airing their moods and grievances, and share with their colleagues such thoughts as “you ignored me by the photocopier on Tuesday; it hurt”. I was to know what was meant by “somatic experience” and steer away from the film student who told me, a touch cruelly, that “I think it’s kind of beautiful when people do absurd things to try to cope”. I was to understand that the whole point of Esalen is that “all bullshit counts” but that, notwithstanding the fine line between fraud and breaking new esoteric ground, I had to open my chakra four.
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We didn’t have time for a five-day workshop. But I was coping. Already I had employed the verb “to heal” in reference to somebody else’s broken relationship. I empathised with the computer technician who had returned to the real world afer six months at Esalen and thus “learnt the meaning of culture shock”. I met a charming engineer who had lost 4st (25kg), weaned herself off antidepressants and designed the centre’s environmentally friendly sewerage works since she checked out of her unfulfilling former life.
Over breakfast the next day, I shared. Things are so wide open at Esalen that while your neighbour tells you “my mom’s a bitch” or “I am a child of a Holocaust survivor” or “I was raped in 1978” it gradually dawns on you that soon it will be your turn, and either you’ll end up a bawling mess or the mundane truth will kill people with its conventionality. And how bad is good enough for Esalen? I settled on “I have a problem being hugged by strangers”.
I’d been invited by a photographer to participate in the tail end of a workshop: Dangerous Writing. I felt safe. They’ll be writers, I thought, and writers are by instinct introverted, cynical and uptight, like me.
Correction. British writers are uptight. American, Canadian and Austrian writers can strum moving cover versions of John Mellencamp songs on the guitar. They can sing Je Ne Regrette Rien in French with a German accent and reduce their fellow writers to tears. They can talk about where they’re from without a class war ensuing. Tom Spanbauer, the American novelist in charge, recalled his experience at a writer’s workshop at the Ted Hughes Avon Foundation (Shropshire): “You get a bunch of people sitting in a room talking about their feelings, it’s not the British cup of tea. They didn’t know what the f*** to do with that.”
I didn’t know what to do with it when Spanbauer suggested that we dance. Oh no, a woman in her sixties was asking me to waltz. Was I leading? “My daughter lives in Fulham,” she said, while I trod on a poem dedicated to the first gay president of the United States. Somebody started filming. “Hey, guys,” she said. “I’ll put this on YouTube,” but nobody threatened to destroy the camera. A screenwriter talked movingly about his brain surgery. And, not for the first time, I felt the tears well up. Every time this happened, an American would watch my face contort itself into a parody of self-control and say: “You know who you remind me of? Hugh Grant.” John Cleese, they told me meaningfully, comes to Esalen. And soon I began thinking, we all need to go to Esalen. To have our chakras realigned and have a bloke in a Native American headdress rebirth us under a blanket. In the back of my mind I still doubted that touchy-feeliness is the key to writing great fiction. But I was starting to dread leaving.
It’s true that around midnight that night, under the stars in Esalen’s hot tubs, I witnessed the inadvertent “is that your foot?” underwater caress; true, too, that the preamble to this manoeuvre consisted of a conversation with an osteopath who told me that animal magnetism was so much more than the name of a middling Scorpions album; that everything is electricity and that I could decontaminate a bottle of water simply by passing it from left hand to right.
Esalen has changed since the days when you’d find hippies “hyperventilating for 20 minutes and that kind of stuff,” a prominent psychologist and trauma expert, Peter Levine, told me on our last day. Today it’s more tranquil, safer for the mainstream: a place to recover from whatever bad things have happened to you, even in the boardroom. But at an all-inclusive $150 (£75) a night, it holds to the principle of being accessible.
Is there anything less British than talking about your feelings with strangers? Back in a London pub but still under the influence of Esalen, I told a friend that by sitting with his arms folded he was crippling his selfexpression, but stopped when I saw the look on his face. We resumed our conversation about house prices.
ESALEN THEN
Dennis Hopper
Ravi Shankar
Hunter S. Thompson Henry Miller
Paul Simon
Art Garfunkel
Joan Baez
Susan Sontag
ESALEN NOW
John Cleese
Javier Bardem
Pen?lope Cruz
Daniel Craig
Orlando Bloom
Staff of Wired magazine