My Esalen Story Plus my reaction to Jeff Kripal's book © Pam Portugal Walatka My life has spanned 65% of a century. I’ve seen a lot of things change, especially the role of the human body. Mind, body and spirit used to be considered entirely separate entities. Mind was considered to be irrelevant to health unless you had a psychosomatic illness, which was a bad thing to have. Saying an illness was psychosomatic meant, “Stop whining, it’s all in your head. You are making this up.” When I was in the Peace Corps in Nepal, in the mid-1960s, I got very sick and had to be shipped back to San Francisco where I was hospitalized, and subsequently hospitalized four more times over the course of two years. I just couldn’t get well. On May 8th, 1967, I moved to Esalen Institute. Esalen is a spa-retreat on the cliffs over the ocean in Big Sur, offering seminars related to mind, body, and spirit. When I arrived at Esalen I was a mind suspended in mid air by an invisible body—I rarely thought about my body unless I was in pain. Perhaps that’s why the pain was so intense and persistent, to get my attention. Esalen cured me. I attended numerous workshops that taught me how to breathe, how to recognize and express my emotions, and how to find my own integration of mind, body and spirit. I became Esalen’s first yoga teacher and lived there for three years. I still have some internal scar tissue from my Peace Corps travails, but my health has been excellent ever since my experience at Esalen. Esalen had a lot of publicity in the 1960s; when I was there, my friends and I were a little bit famous. Longtime Esalen teacher Seymour Carter said later, “A wave of publicity picked us up, gave us a ride, and then set us down.” Esalen has continued to operate in relative obscurity, although the ideas it initiated have spread throughout the world. For example, bestselling author Andrew Weil, M.D., who has taught at Esalen, advocates the integration of mind, body, and spirit. Now there is a big new book about Esalen. Jeffrey Kripal, Professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University, has written a very scholarly history of Esalen ideas, “Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion” (University of Chicago Press, 2007). Kripal’s themes include “the enlightenment of the body.” With remarkable clarity, Kripal details the intellectual underpinnings of Esalen. People who have heard of Esalen but have not been there might be surprised to know that serious intellectual underpinnings of Esalen even exist. Kripal gives us 575 pages of scholarly but readable delineations of Esalen thought, which is too diverse to simplify. Fortunately, Kripal is a good storyteller. I met Kripal at his recent book signing at Kepler’s. His combination of academic credibility with a relaxed sense of humor will help bring Esalen back into public awareness. Kripal’s book is for and about people who love to read. He even suggests that reading itself can be a transformative experience. He doesn’t tell you how to do any of the Esalen practices; for that, I recommend “The Life We Are Given” (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1995) by George Leonard and Michael Murphy, or “Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment” by George Leonard (Plume; Reissued 1992), or my own "A Place for Human Beings". See also: My photographs from Esalen in the 1960s. Esalen--What Is Was and What It Is.

 

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