Center for Theory & Research

During the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, Michael and Dulce Murphy launched a series of Soviet-American citizen diplomacy gatherings at Esalen. Joseph Montville coined the phrase "track-two diplomacy" at these meetings, which is now a well-recognized diplomatic method. This work led to the first spacebridges, which enabled Soviet and American citizens to speak directly with one another via satelliteCTR communication. One set of conferences focused on the political psychology of Soviet-American relations, resulting in Sam Keen’s classic book Faces of the Enemy. Lastly, as the culmination of many years of diplomatic work, Esalen sponsored Boris Yeltsin’s first trip to the United States in 1989, at which time he had a transformative experience witnessing the contrast between the prosperity of the US and the poverty of Soviet Communism.

Read this New York Times article from 1989 about Yeltsin's visit and Esalen's role.

In 1992 Michael Murphy and George Leonard launched Integral Transformative Practice (ITP), which became a leading form of long-term transformative practice. Stanford University has conducted research on the overall health and lifestyle benefits of ITP, resulting in some outstanding findings, such as a marked increase in cognitive skills after participation in the program. ITP is now popular worldwide.

When Esalen was founded in 1962, the eminent psychologist Abraham Maslow influenced our vision of positive human values and potentials. Inspired by his own experiences at Esalen in the 1960s, Maslow founded the fields of humanistic and transpersonal psychology.

Through a series of Esalen conferences in 1993-94, Theodore Roszak created the field of ecopsychology. Roszak’s Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind was published in 1995.

In 1964, Esalen provided Fritz Perls, co-founder of Gestalt Therapy, a public platform for his method. By 1970, several Gestalt training centers had become a central feature of the psychotherapeutic field.

In 1976 Esalen began a 12-year series on the interface between quantum physics and consciousness. Fritjof Capra was a frequent participant and Nick Herbert’s Quantum Reality grew directly from these gatherings.

Starting in the early 1970s, Sukie Miller led conferences that in 1976 would result in the first federal legislation on Humanistic Medicine in the United States. Dr. Wayne Jonas’s experiences at Esalen in the 1970s led to his work as the head of the National Institutes of Health's Office of Alternative Medicine.

In 1976 Michael Murphy started compiling a research database of humanity’s extraordinary capacities in a variety of areas of human experience, ranging from meditation and yoga to sports and love-making. This is the only such database in the world and is now housed at UC Santa Barbara’s library. It is a testament to the full range of the human capacity to transform and evolve new forms of body, mind, and spirit. Murphy’s research on this database led to the groundbreaking books The Future of the Body and The Life We Are Given. The central finding stemming from his research is that most human attributes have extraordinary expressions, in which those capacities are taken to new levels of experience and sophistication. This suggests a larger purpose for the continued evolution of human embodiment, which is a central premise in Esalen’s vision and programs.

From 1988 to 1995 Esalen hosted conferences on New Directions in Meditation Research, resulting in Michael Murphy and Steven Donovan's The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation.

Throughout the 1980s Professor Michael Harner facilitated conferences and trainings that led to the rediscovery of shamanism as a valid method for psychological healing and spiritual growth.

In the 1970s and 80s, while living at Esalen, Stan and Christina Grof created the transformative healing method of Holotropic Breathwork. They also founded the Spiritual Emergence Network as a referral and information source that now has a worldwide presence.

From 1987 to 1989, Don Hanlon Johnson convened several somatics conferences, which led to a new series of books, including Bone, Breath, & Gesture: Practices of Embodiment. These conferences included leaders in the somatics field, such as Emilie Conrad and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen.

Starting in the early 1960s, Esalen helped launch a revolutionary view of the transformative capacity of the human body by providing a place for Charlotte Selver’s Sensory Awareness, Ida Rolf’s Structural Integration (now known as Rolfing), and Alexander Lowen’s and John Pierrakos’ Bioenergetics. Today, these approaches have been integrated into Esalen’s massage and bodywork practices, which are considered world class.

In 1967 a Ford Foundation grant led to the creation of the Ford/Esalen Project in Confluent Education, joining affective and cognitive learning. Dr. George Brown of UC Santa Barbara spearheaded this program. His work was summarized in Human Teaching for Human Learning, which sold more than 50,000 copies in the education field and was republished in 1990 as a Penguin paperback.

In the late 1960s Look magazine editor George Leonard and psychiatrist Price Cobbs led a series of powerful events called Racial Confrontation as Transcendental Experience, which contributed to racial awareness and healing at a crucial time in American history.