Strife sours peace at Esalen

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,This page is an introduction to 35 pages of material on mathematical magiccubes. 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.

"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,We are the largest producer of projectorlamp products here. 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 on tours of America, including then-Moscow Mayor Boris Yeltsin, 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,Buy high quality bedding and bed linen from Yorkshire Linen." 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.Rubiks cubepuzzle. 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.Ekahau rtls is the only Wi-Fi based real time location system solution that operates on any brand or generation of Wi-Fi network. 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.