EP#26- The Esalen Institute: Human Potential Movement & Holistic Wellness with Esalen Co-Founder Michael Murphy

[MUSIC] Humanistic psychology fundamentally renounced that world view. But neither were we at Tabula Rasa, a blank, you know, something. >> Thanks, Lee. >> John Locke, you know, we were, we came in pre-wired for growth, self-actualization, transcendence, transformation. [MUSIC] Welcome back to another episode of Everyday in Dorfins. You just heard from Michael Murphy. Michael is the co-founder of the Esselin Institute, a nonprofit American retreat center in Big Sur, California, which focuses on humanistic alternative education. Esselin really is a major catalyst in the transformation of humankind, and they focus really on integrating the body, mind, heart, and spirit and community, and nurturing a relationship with the environment. In this episode, we talk about the history of the Esselin Institute, the roles that it's played in the humanistic psychology, holistic wellness, and alternative medicine. Michael is, you know, well into his 90s, so it was an incredible opportunity to be able to sit with him virtually, and talk about his experience growing up, founding the Esselin Institute, and how Esselin really was this catalyst for holistic wellness. Michael graduated from Stanford University and lived for a year and a half in an Aashram in India. It was in 1962 when he started the Esselin Institute in Big Sur. During his 42-year involvement in the human potential movement, Michael and his work has been profiled in the New Yorker. He's been featured in many magazines and journals, and he's spoken at many conferences and other very important large events. Michael is very, very accomplished, and it was kind of mind-blowing to be able to have this conversation with him. He's also the author of Four Nobles, one of which is called Golf in the K-Dum, and I had the opportunity to meet Michael almost over 10 years ago now, because my dad was working on the adaptation of Golf in the Kingdom into a film. So my mom and I flew out to Bandit Dunes in Oregon and got to visit the set, and I got to meet Michael when I was just a kid. Obviously then, I had no idea the incredible influence that he holds within the community of psychology and holistic wellness and politics, but now it's just absolutely insane that I had the opportunity to talk with him, so I'm really excited for everyone to listen. You are all very much in for a treat with Michael during this episode, but before we get into it, I have a brief message from my sponsor, anchor. Hi, Michael. Thank you so much for coming on to Everyday Endorphins. Stella, it's wonderful to see you again after all these years. I know. It's been over a decade, and now we're recording virtually, but the last time I saw you was at the Bandit Dunes Golf Course in, you know, on the West Coast for Golf in the Kingdom. That's right. Your father was helping make a movie of my novel. I have to go back and I have to really sit with that and watch the film and read the book, because now as I'm getting older, I'm sure there's just so many mind-breaking revelations I'm going to come to from hearing and seeing all of your wisdom adapted into a movie. But, you know, today we're here to talk about the Esselin Institute and how you've pioneered the human potential movement, which I'm not sure if a lot of people on my age group are that familiar of, but I'd love to start off by talking about the origin story of Esselin. Okay. Well, first I think, Stella, we've got to be careful about using this term, the human potential movement. You know, it's a journalistic term, and journalists are forever trying to arrange this messy world of ours into packages they can talk about. And sometimes it's easy to do. I mean, we can say the civil rights movement, and it's pretty clear what that is. There's not much ambiguity. I mean, there can be all sorts of discussions about what, who started it, et cetera, et cetera. It's different with the human potential movement. So we should be careful with that term. And in any case, Esselin started before there was anything called the human potential movement. It was on a beautiful piece of land that was owned by my family on the Big Sir Coast, a couple of miles of coast, really. I had been introduced to a world view when I was an undergraduate at Stanford University, Desta Sofmar, that was largely shaped by an Indian teacher, known commonly as Sri, S-R-I Sri, Arabindo. Generally considered the greatest Indian philosopher of the 20th century. He'd been an Indian independence leader in jailed by the British. And like Gandhi and like others had this set of mystical experiences while in jail, but in any case he then developed an evolutionary worldview. And for those of your listeners who want a little fancy theology, we could, the term I often use is evolutionary pan-enthyism, where pan-enthyism is used commonly in theology and philosophy for a worldview that says everything here that our sense is reveals, everything. That's God's pan-enthyism. Okay, theism is the doctrine in most of the Judeo-Christian Islamic heritage. The God's upstairs. And when we're kids, you know, he's an old man with a beard and telling us how to behave. And then as we grow in sophistication, it morphs into a more sophisticated view. But in any case, divinity is located beyond the earth. That's theism. So you have pan-theism and you have theism. Pan-enthyism says that the divine is eternal. However it's named, God Yahweh, Allah, you can say Brahmun with the Indians. You can say some other name. But in any case, the divinity is what William James the Great, the father of our psychology, called the Moore, the transcendent Moore. But the divine is also in this world. That this world arises directly from the divine. So it's a both-and, both beyond the world and within the world. That's the worldview with which I started Esselin. We also, I also, and my partner, wanted a place that was free from dogma and where no one could capture the flag, that a guru couldn't take over. But that we would start a global conversation about what, most basically, what's up? Who are we? Where are we going? And so forth. And so we invited, and you know, everybody's, we could, whose books we'd read. And here we were, both 30 years old. We had a field day. It was a fantastic coming together of minds exploring the most basic questions. And we were something new under the sun when we started. There were all sorts of seminar centers, you know, and retreat centers. But ours was open to a variety of viewpoints. And people came from different parts of the world. That's when we started. And a lot of amazing coincidences, synchronicities happened. We were now getting ready for our first programs. And I had bought a dozen copies of Abraham Maslow's Tority Psychology of Being and passed them out to the staff. So one night, two months before our program started in the dark, he and his wife drove down into our property. Not no, they were looking for an in. They were looking for an in Abraham Maslow's, Abraham Maslow and his wife came to property. Yes, looking for a place to stay. So later when we would discuss it, they were a little creeped out by it because it reminded them of the Bates Motel in Psycho. If you've ever seen the movie, you know, Alfred Hitchcock's movie, Psycho. Here they were dark driving in there. And lo and behold, they get into a place where everybody's reading the book. I passed out a dozen copies of his book to the staff. So I took this as an enormous sign from above that we were on the right path. And we became great friends. Now Maslow's work, the hierarchy of needs. Self-actualization, peak experience. These are terms straight out of his thinking, his writing. And he, at that moment, was starting the association of humanistic psychology and the journal, of humanistic psychology, and launching a major new movement in psychology. They called the third force to go beyond psychoanalysis and behaviorism, the two great schools of psychology. For your listeners, and so on. Now, this is 1962, 1962, as we were getting started. He was a first influence, and he brought a bridge for us from this eastern thought that had inspired me. I was also inspired by William James and other Western thinkers, but directly into the American Psychological Association. Because a couple years later, he became president of the APA, and there he was. The four day one with us. And this happened quite a bit. We had a wild, but very exciting, and happy birth. If you want to use a metaphor, it was like a rocket. It went straight up. We became famous overnight, and we couldn't-- we had to program to match the market. In other words, people wanted us, even though they didn't know we were going to come into being. We fit a need at that moment in 1962. So let's pause before we get right into 1962 when Essela and essentially was blowing up. I want to go back to how Maslow is now emerging in humanistic psychology, breaking away from behaviorism and psychoanalysis. That was previously existing. Can you talk a little bit about how humanistic psychology was very integral to the foundation of Essela and how that differs from the previous types of psychological theories that were out there. Well, we came into it, and virtually all the leaders. Although we had psychoanalytically oriented people coming and behaviorists, we have skinner, came to us in a few times. So in other words-- These are the people, just quick pause, that students are learning about in their psychology textbooks. This is incredible. These are Maslow, Skinner, famous experiments that have been done, classical conditioning, behavioral operating conditioning. These are everything that we've been learning in school. So to have this firsthand experience-- Right. --and all these-- That's insane, Michael. I know. Now, of course, Dick Price and I knew about these people. I had a BA in psychology of it. Stanford-- I did a couple of quarters at Stanford in graduate school in philosophy and then went to live in India for a year and a half at the Arbidou Astralum. So I was steeped in a lot of this stuff. But to get to be buddies with the founders, the key people, right from the get-go, it was something. So now with humanistic psychology, what do we share? First, that we're not born rotten. Like a lot of us have learned in church, original sin. Humanistic psychology fundamentally renounced that worldview. But neither were we a tabula rasa, a blank-- Thanks, Slate. John Locke, you know, we came in pre-wired for growth, self-actualization, transcendence, transformation. So it was an evolutionary worldview. Now, if you want philosophers who carry this worldview one way or another, you could think of T.R. Deshar Dan. Henri Bergson, who won the Nobel Prize, you know, and was famous for saying that the universe is a machine for the creation of gods. Or Alfred North Whitehead, I could go on. We all believed then that was a new worldview in the making. Coming up over the horizon, even I used to talk about this, that we were midwives to this giant new way of seeing this world. That to this day, that worldview still is on the margins of academia, the media. Although it pops in through myth and say science fiction, sometimes superheroes, you know, you can say there are premonitions of our next step in evolution all around this. But it's not what you're going to mainly learn in school. Our parents don't tell us about these things typically. If you read the newspapers, if you watch the storming of the capital, you know, if you are engrossed in the everyday revelations of the media, this stuff gets shoved way over into the background and for a lot of people disappears entirely. In any case, Esselen was born to light a torch to keep this conversation, the ideas around it, and mainly the practices by which we can actualize this. Now going back to Maslow, its self-actualization implies there's something in us that wants to go forth into a greater life. There's a greater life, Stella, a greater life, pressing to be born in us. But we have to learn more about it and how to midwife it. So that's the basic idea behind Esselen then and today, 60 years now. And it's still pressing to be born. So that's a quick summary of where we were and how we started. A brief synopsis of the past 60 years, in 10 minutes. And the goal seems to really promote these types of conversations based off of the foundations of humanistic psychology and self-actualization and continuously going through that process of self-discovery. And so I would love for you to talk more about the types of activities that are offered at Esselen and how they really fit into that model of holistic wellness and into that model. Well, we became then a great brokering house for all sorts of practices, many of which we'd never heard of when we started. Now, I had lived in India for a year and a half in our windows ashram. And of course, I knew about meditation. I was a genuine religious nut in those days. I mean, I was bested in six to eight hours every day. And that started when I was 20. And now starting Esselen, by that time I was 30. I was by then, and Dick Price, my partner, we were equated with a wide range of transformative practices. OK? But once we started inviting these high-powered teachers, somewhere intellectuals, somewhere down on the ground, somatics teachers and yoga teachers, et cetera, one person would lead to another. So now, for example, Fritz Purls, the principal founder really of Gestalt Therapy, not Gestalt Psychology, but Gestalt Therapy moved to Esselen and lived there on the property for five years. And from there, he launched hundreds of Gestalt therapists out into the world. And he brought someone named Eiter Rolf. Now, maybe you've heard of Rolfing. If you've heard of it, it's a form of very deep massage. And behind it was a philosophy. And it has now spread around the world. Eiter Rolf, when she came to Esselen, had trained one person. After five or six years, she trained 100 people. They started their own institute in Colorado, and it spread. The same with-- maybe you don't know some of these people, but these were the founders of what has been called somatics, which is an immense family of transformative practices that start with the body itself, but implicitly implicitly aimed towards body, mind, heart, and soul. That was another guiding principle of Esselen. For me, it started with our window that we are obviously psychophysical. There's never a moment Stella when we're not both a body and an interior that we would say is a mind, a soul. It depends what your view is and what your experience is. But we are always psychophysical. And in the beginning, at the very beginning, another one who was right there at the beginning where this was all this Huxley. And he gave us the language of human potential. human potentialities. That language comes out of Huxley primarily. And what he had was this brilliant lucid writing. He was a world famous writer, essayist from English intellectual royalty. His great uncle was Matthew Arnold, the great critic. His grandfather was Thomas Huxley, Charles Darwin's great bulldog. And he came to Aslan like Abe before the program started. We have a building of rooms and buildings on the property there named after Huxley and after Maslow. So he was writing a lot about the inescapability of our psychophysical nature. No matter how acidic you are, no matter how phobic, how repressed you're a body. And that body is having its life. And as Freud helped teach us, if you treated badly, it will have its revenge on you. That body, that body wants to live. But many transformative practices which are highly acidic beat the hell out of this body. And you can beat it up in very subtle mean ways. You don't have to just be like a religious ascetic and whip yourself for whatever. So the body came forward in these practices and the somatics teachers, people who were teaching us how to be better bodies migrated toward Aslan. So we brokered. We helped to broker that as a worldwide movement. We really were a prime catalytic, etc. Okay. The same with interaction, emotional interaction, personal interaction. We became a gathering place for processes that broke loose from the medical we thought tyranny that said you have to do it this way or that way. And of course you had these two great schools. I mean here's psychoanalysis saying you do it here, almost diametrically opposed to Skinner saying, you know, become a better pigeon and then operant conditioning and make a better pigeon out of you. And it's kind of essentially demeaning, but also operant conditioning can be very useful. If you, you with all your uniqueness are in charge of it. You know, you can have a helper rewarding you every time you have a good habit. So instead of a pigeon being given a, you know, a little breadcrumb, you know, to get a pigeon to change his behavior, you become your own pigeon and then you're reinforced. Well, of course this doesn't satisfy a lot of people in terms of a world view obviously. But as a practice, it's interesting and it has this little place. By 1970, we had been asked by the Ford Foundation to bring this stuff into education kindergarten through 12th grade and they gave us money for a pilot program. It was very successful where teachers came and experimented with using all these things. We were bringing into focus in classrooms and then it morphed into a major program at the University of California, Santa Barbara funded by the Ford Foundation and eventually has led to, but maybe 500 graduate degrees and is spread to 25 countries. People in Finland still talk about this. It was a major attempt to broaden education to include not only how we think, but our senses. And are they that somatic awareness essentially? Yes, well, this whole multi-dimensional integral approach, body, okay, mind, heart, and soul. So that broadening of the curriculum, now that's, you know, Teachers College at Columbia was famous for that in John Dewey. So again, it's America, once again, renewing its education. Now I use that as an example because we've done this in a number of fields. Estlans been a broker of this set of ideas and practices. Let's start with medicine. Members of our staff were the first to write the first legislation in Congress that named something they called Holistic Health, which is now morphed into wellness and health promotion. And there are a lot of labels now and a lot of flags that flies under, but then it was Holistic Health. We're talking now the late 60s, early 70s. And what was Holistic Health labeled as back then? Like what was that kind of legislation like? That was the first term. That was in the legislation, Holistic Health. And meaning the same thing, body, mind, heart, and soul on the integral. If you want to call it that, see, this language has slowly developed in conjunction with the expansion of these practices. But they can fly under different flags. So in America, let's say, and in Europe, now all around the world, you have this explosion of practices. There's a huge Buddhist influence, mindfulness. You know, the Buddhist more than anyone brought us mindfulness. And it was translated by various people, you know, John Kabat-Zinn. He now has a master class, John Kabat-Zinn, on mindfulness and meditation. Oh, you know, he's been hugely influential. And there have been a number of people like that. Now, in the early days of Estonia, you know, Alan Watts, again, with somebody we knew before we started the incident. He was another one like Maslow and like Huxley. So Alan Watts and DT Suzuki and others were bringing Zan into Estonia in the early 60s. Before there was anything called a human potential moment, that Asian influence has spread all around the world too. So it's very much a global phenomenon. And Estonian being American, we were privileged to have this freedom. And particularly in California, you can get away with all sorts of things in California. So we had that freedom. And those influences were, I would have to say, coming from all over the world. So I like to argue very much that what we, for lack of a better name, we may call it the human potential moment, is essentially a global phenomenon. And Eston's had a role, a catalytic role for 60 years in it now. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's very fascinating to hear how there's so many global perspectives that have helped shape the foundation in the future of Estonian. But especially how the birth of Estonian actually arose out of counterculture. And in that time period as well, back in the 60s, I would say, in California. So I think maybe people back then would think of Estonia as kind of like this hippie, hippie place when you're exploring humanistic psychology and transcendentalism and meditation and yoga. But as now we've seen, holistic wellness is super popular these days. Almost kind of like a buzzword. And yes, the roots are pretty much the same. But I feel like it's also transformed and people are now more receptive to this idea of the body, mind, heart, and soul. Yes. That's very true. I grew up in Selina, California. You know, there out on the west coast, John Steinbeck was born there. My grandfather actually delivered John Steinbeck. And he was like a member of our extended family. And believe me, when we started Eston, there were no yoga schools in Selenius. But now several yoga schools, when I turned to all this, when I was just a sophomore, it's several, it was a terrible shock to my family because I was supposed to be a doctor. My grandfather was a doctor. And my brother was going to be a writer. The role was assigned to us. When I flipped and became a certified religious nutcase, and it was a devastating blow. And later they became our greatest supporters. The fantastic. I was so lucky with the parents I had. But you know, back in 1950, what was then a culture shock is now widely accepted. As you said, you know, wellness, it's everywhere. All these ads, you know, you can't, you watch a Super Bowl, you get a lesson in wellness. It's a damn dis thing. But you know, some of it is not particularly attractive. But anyway, you know, now my philosophy around wellness or what I've been learning more recently through this podcast and through conversations with people I've had is really understanding holistic wellness from the perspective on decision making and taking into factor the different aspects of your body, mind and soul and your heart and how that fits into one human being. And what kinds of decisions can you make that are the best for you and for your overall wellbeing and health rather than hopping on the latest fitness trend or diet training. or those kind of buzzwordy type of things that are happening in society and pop culture around wellness. But it's more a philosophy rather than anything you may see in the media. And that's what I love about Esselin and the human potential movement and theory about human potentialities and the goal of life ultimately is to maximize your human potential and what can you do to get there. And so one question I would love to ask you, especially for people my age, young adults, is how can we get people interested in this concept around human potentialities, self-actualization? And what are some steps we can take to engage in this self-exploration? I know it's so much easier said than done and oftentimes these things happen without you realizing it. It's more of them after the fact you can reflect on those transformative experiences but how can we get people excited? Well you know it's happening now on many fronts. So it's almost we don't need to push the river. The river is flowing and it has many rivolts of many sources. First of all there's an immense literature say you start with yoga with these postures and these positions and you're bound something opens up in you that will lead you to something else. At the very least you will hear in your yoga class from someone else, "older's a better way to do this one." So we're prompted now. This is a culture-wide self-actualization process is underway. We become contagious to one another in ways of growth and we already recognize it. America is behind and I think you're up to but you know the most dramatic story out of Estonia in terms of cultural spread was our work with the Russians. You know. And being the Cold War. Well we were the only place we had KGB and CIA guys together in those hot tubs. It's unbelievable. I mean and um uh Dolce you know you remember Dolce? Yes I do. Has her own institute now? Track two. It got spun out of Estonia. Estonia spun off five or six other five or one C-three institutes. You know the way Silicon Valley does it. So it goes on now and it's morphed from just Russia to well say Middle East. I mean particularly in Israel and Israelis and Palestinians. You know Estonia has had so many Jewish leaders. I mean starting with a Maslow and Fritz pearls and everything else and it's just the way the ball bounced and that has led us off into Israel and people from Israel are coming to Estonia. So this teaches us how global this movement is. Now with the Russians it's particularly interesting because I went there first in 71. This book, "Syke Discovery's Behind the Iron Curtain" and we met these shamans and gurus over in Russia and we conducted the first telepathy experiment between Moscow and the West. And the most famous telepathy in Russia was the um receiver and I was the sender. If you can believe this 1971 and he actually got this stuff we were standing. I you know um either have to believe this or not still but in any case one thing led to another. Here's the communist regime. Which essentially says this is against the law but underneath all these experiments say answers and what they call hidden human reserves. It's the same as our idea of human potential. Hidden human reserves and it was like the marriage of these two enormous nations with all these atomic weapons aimed at each other as they still are today. In spite of the end of the Cold War we're still in this strange relationship it's the most confounding thing in my life is that we haven't really solved this yet. Got in past this these two overblown adolescent nations trying to who's the toughest one on the block. It's a kind of it's cultural ego involved partly in all sorts of circumstances. Nevertheless this taught us 40 years ago how deep this river runs. How deep this river runs. It's everywhere. It's modern people trying to come to terms with the deepest questions of our existence. Who the hell are we anyway? I mean where are we going? What about all these weird things that happen? These mystical experiences in which we think we're outside our body. There's something new that happened since that's when started. These near death experiences you know because you know humans until our century until the 20th century couldn't come back from these some of these surgeries and some of the accidents but we can resuscitate people now more than they ever could and you come back and they've had these experience outside their body floating around looking and a big blockbuster books coming out next month still I called After. This is his 40 years being editor of the Journal of Near Death Studies. Now this is something new they've collected well tens of thousands of case studies. When you've had an out of when you're up there floating around watching the surgery going on and you've read about this I'm sure I mean there are articles about this in Vanity Fair. I mean you can find this stuff anywhere and so that's a big new something and there are these new somethings that come online to disclose this river running under everything but not yet fully described by major sociologists or cultural anthropologists or historians. One of the best books is the book by our former chairman my very very close deep friend Jeff Kriple called Esselin. It's a big book it's in a class by itself describing not only Esselin Stella but the larger context of it and I would say that's the best account we've had yet of the big picture. We're all parts of this culture that's trying to give birth to its greater self you know but the newspapers you think we're going backwards I mean it's you know on most days it doesn't look good but nevertheless you cannot keep it down. There's no doubt that Esselin is really the the catalyst and the cultural epicenter of these conversations and these talks and really setting the foundation for holistic wellness and the future of holistic medicine. So it's just mind blowing everything that you've done with Esselin everything that you've done in your teachings and your writings and so it's an absolute honor Michael to have you on the podcast and you know I my hope is that my generation can get excited about these questions and about this adopting this type of philosophy in life and my my whole goal with everyday endorphins you know is sparking happiness in day to day endorphins are the happiness hormone that are released and so one question that I ask every guest that comes on to the podcast is what is something that brings you a bit of endorphins every day? Well I have to this this might sound awfully self-serving but when I step on that Esselin property without doing anything I get a huge lift now I can explain that that I would go down there as a kid and have happy times there but it's much more than that and so we've studied that and a lot of people have that feeling. Number one breaking water all of these waves these big breakers come rolling in on the cliffs then they have the hot springs so we can if you just want to get endorphins for free you go to a place that charges you up it might be hiking in the hills or the mountains it might be going to the beach it might be taking a shower you know a shower pips most people up why those negative ions are blowing off you know the water and they naturally trigger endorphins they do go take a good shower and of course one way is just what I call prong yoga just lay down to me lying down is the surest sign of God's mercy no matter how bad you feel just lie down okay so all these simple things we do stretching you know all sorts of stretching actually releases endorphins people don't know this and that's why you do yoga but you don't need to do yoga just learn to do a few simple stretches okay jogging now I you know running with it became my number one sport for a long time now I walk I'm 90 now but I walk three miles a day at least good thing Michael it's good to keep physically active especially oh yeah Yeah, and even if you can't walk, let's say you're in a wheelchair, do stretches. You can get your heart going. Be a body. Be a body. Right. And you know, creating space and through stretching and yoga, it's really, it creates space in your body and you're able to breathe into areas where there's tension. So that's one way. Another way to call up a good friend. Call them up. Say, "Hi, all I'm thinking of you and get one laugh out of them. I guarantee you you will have a door. Just get one laugh for a friend. Tell them a joke, make a wise crack, whatever." Or call up someone who's always going to get you to laugh. We know. I mean, there's certain happy people, you know. They seem to have an extra spigot of endorphins going. But you look at their behaviors. They all laugh a lot, look to the happiest points in our common life and you get a lot of clues on how to get your endorphins going. It doesn't have to be some exotic yoga, although some of them really do work. It's all the, it's the small, the small simple acts. It's all the little things, absolutely. And that's where, you know, the, those things. It does help to fly under a flag that declares us to be secretly much more than we are, human potential or divine, and built for happiness. I think this is all incredible advice that you've given, Michael. And I absolutely agree. It's very much in the little things and definitely surrounding yourself in nature is a huge endorphin boost. Thank you again so much for coming on to the podcast. And it's just been an absolute honor to have you. I'm so inspired by the work that you're doing and everything that you've done. And hopefully, one day out of this COVID-19 pandemic, we can meet again in person and big sir and I can come visit Eslan and I hope all my listeners are able to come and visit the property as well because it's really incredible what you're doing with it. Well, thank you, sir. Thank you for listening. If you liked what you heard, please follow rate review every day endorphins on whichever listening platform that you use to stream my episodes. Thanks again and I'll see you next time. (upbeat music)