Learning Esalen Massage By Carl Nelson

Massage can be easily learned by anyone. The best training in massage can be obtained by following instructions from just three sources:

George Downing and Anne Kent Rush, The Massage Book (Berkeley, CA: The Bookworks, and New York: Random House) First printing, January 1972. The first manual on massage written for the layperson. Massage, as developed and practiced at the world-renowned Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and in San Francisco, is described by the authors who were members of the teaching staff.

With a first printing of only 30,000 copies, this classic text for Esalen Massage became a huge bestseller with two million copies having been sold. This book remains in print and remains my favorite for learning Esalen Massage. The Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition, 1998, has an added introduction by Anne Kent Rush; it’s priced at $14.95.

Anne Kent Rush in her most recent book, Massage for Total Well-Being: Massage and Meditation for the Seven Centers of Health, with photographs by Victoria Rauhofer, (New York: A Byron Preiss Book, Universe Publishing, Rizzoli International Publications) Nov 2000, describes the inception of The Massage Book:

As of 1970, medical texts provided the only information on massage. . . . As both a massage enthusiast and a writer, I was inspired to produce a massage manual for the layperson. . . . I began teaching at the Esalen Institute in California and worked often with George Downing. . . . I led training groups for health professionals on how to integrate body-therapy techniques into traditional medical practice. I suggested my idea to George. . . . Don Gerard, managing editor of The Bookworks in Berkeley, was adventurous enough to take on the project when nobody else thought the general public would be interested, and we co-published The Massage Book with Random House. The book caught on like wildfire and is still in print today, enjoying an exceptional publishing life. Having been a part of bringing massage into modern American living gives me great satisfaction.

Esalen Institute Presents Esalen Massage, 40th Anniversary Edition, DVD-Video format, At Peace Media, 2003. The Esalen Massage Video was filmed on location at the acclaimed Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. In this 85-minute presentation, in an idyllic spectacularly scenic setting, members of the Esalen Massage Crew demonstrate and teach their world-renowned techniques for the first time ever on video. Nearly all thirty-six members of the Esalen Massage Crew appear, if not as givers, then as receivers, with some as both. Twenty-two, as givers, appear with first names on the screen, with ten as commentators supplementing the mellifluous, informative voice-over that guides the viewer through the total body massage. The classic Esalen massage moves are demonstrated in stepwise fashion with amazing grace and beauty. This extraordinary creative production was released in May 1997. The Esalen 40th Anniversary Edition in the DVD format is available from the website: atpeacemedia.com, or from Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA 93920, as Catalog Item EM-DVD priced at $29.95.

Said of this award-winning best-selling video production – “gorgeous, wonderful, beautiful, enlightening, the next best thing to learning at Esalen, the best instructional video on the market, for beginners and professionals alike!”

Highly recommended for learning Esalen Massage is an additional recent source, the stunning video production by Ellen Watson released in May 2004:

The Art of Essential Touch with Ellen Watson, Volume 1, DVD Video, 2 hours 20 minutes, Moving Ventures School and Productions, Big Sur, CA 93920, and also available from the website: movingventures.org, priced at $30.00.

Ellen Watson served on the Esalen Massage Video Committee for the video Esalen Institute Presents Esalen Massage released in May 1997 and re-released as the Esalen 40th Anniversary Edition in the DVD format in 2003. As a member of the thirty-six-member Esalen Massage Crew she is among twenty-two massage givers whose first names appear on the screen, and is also among the ten commentators supplementing the mellifluous, informative voice-over that guides the viewer through the total body massage. Nearly all members appear, if not as givers, then as receivers, and some as both. Since 1984 Ellen has been practicing and teaching massage, meditation, and movement arts at the Esalen Institute. She, along with the faculty of Moving Ventures School, offers workshops, retreats, and trainings at Esalen and at other inspiring places around the globe.

In The Art of Essential Touch, filmed in Bali, Indonesia, the viewer is completely captivated by the beautiful presentation of Ellen Watson with her charming engaging manner. Ellen is a blessed spirit who truly deserves the name of teacher. Her elegant graceful movements inspire you to learn. Ellen’s massage recipient is Perry Holloman, a member of the Esalen Massage Crew since 1979. >From Ellen:

“Your body is a musical instrument. Keeping it tuned with breath, movement, and touch readies you for playing in the Divine’s holy band.”

“Most body parts we contact in Esalen Massage. One of my teachers taught me something that I use as my hallmark. I look at my work as helping people increase capacity to tolerate pleasure, pleasurable sensations in the body. So many people don’t have that permission. And so how can I help anyone who I touch enjoy that touch more, enjoy being touched more, and have that being okay, not only okay, health giving, life giving?”

“The overall intention is increasing capacity to tolerate pleasure. It’s a doorway, a doorway most people love going through if they have the courage to get there.”

“This massage was not rehearsed, though I have given thousands of massages and have a basic form. So give yourself permission, if you use this as a practice session, to add innovation, and add your imagination and what may inspire you at the moment. If you only stay with this for a few minutes and get into your own thing, that’s just fine, or you might follow every move and out of that learn a basic session. Thank you for playing with me today.”

Let’s hope for many more massage DVDs from Ellen.

Ellen’s DVD video production is available from the website: movingventures.org or from Moving Ventures School and Productions, PO Box 572, Big Sur, CA 93920; for further information: ellen@movingventures.org or info@movingventures.org

Thus the world’s best training is available for a total of $74.90.

Big Sur California Coast, DVD Video, Wilderness Video, 1996, Image Entertainment, 2001, 1 hour, priced at $19.95 (discount price $14.92). Big Sur is considered by many to be the most scenic stretch of coastline in America. You too can enjoy the Big Sur experience. Feel the excitement of passing storms and pounding waves crashing on the cliffs. Enjoy magnificent sunsets as you explore Big Sur from San Simeon to Monterey.

And a book confirming the above:

Gabrielle Roth, Maps to Ecstasy: A Healing Journey for the Untamed Spirit (Novato, CA: New World Library) 1998. In the 1960s, Gabrielle Roth, as the Movement-Specialist-in-Residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, became a member of the Esalen Massage Crew, was highly influential in the development of Esalen massage, and eventually led this massage team. The movement practice that she developed at Esalen is an integral part of Esalen massage training. Her five rhythms: stillness, lyrical, staccato, chaos, and especially flowing, with its round, open, integrating, long, continual moves, are incorporated in Esalen massage. In the Acknowledgments of this book, she wrote, “Along the way I have received unconditional support from Michael Murphy, Dick Price, and Nancy Lunney, who provided me with a laboratory at Esalen Institute in which my entire body of work was developed.” In 1961-62 Michael Murphy and Dick Price, on Michael’s family ocean-side property acquired in 1910, founded Esalen. Since 1984 Nancy Lunney has served as Director of Programming at Esalen.

Chapter One – feeling the body – the power of being – contains the section – Rhythm Massage – on pages 41 – 49. Here, Gabrielle Roth in her elegant poetic prose gives the reader an experience of receiving and giving an Esalen massage – the best description ever! A few paragraphs follow:

Massage is a wonderful opportunity for us to keep in touch – literally – with our self, our mates, lovers, friends, and children, to heal with our hands. Massage is a vital rhythmic interplay that should be part of everybody’s life.

Rhythmic massage releases the body – of both the giver and the recipient – into its essential energy flow. It reconnects us to our natural energy channels and unblocks what has been dammed up, both physically and psychologically. It engenders wholeness, ecstatic relaxation, and brings our consciousness out of our heads and into our whole body.

This massage involves atmosphere, attitude, and awareness. It can be practiced by anyone and requires no special training or techniques, just the willingness to give and to care for another (and correlatively, the willingness on the part of the recipient to receive and be nurtured).

. . . . .

Soon after I started giving massages at Esalen, I came to realize that massage was not simply a physical, sensory process but a religious experience. It involved loving my neighbor as myself in the most concrete way, giving these people an integrated experience of their own bodies. I eventually ran the massage team at Esalen, and increasingly saw our work as a kind of daily monastic prayer. I was always meeting new bodies, often never saying a word to them but having this deep encounter with each. It was wonderful training in “impersonal” love, love without attachment, strings, complications – just deep giving and receiving in a circle of sharing. In doing it I discovered a deep, divine part of myself, and a capacity for generosity and for connecting that I’d never glimpsed before. And the rhythmic body prayer of massaging proved as healing and integrating to me as the people being made whole under my touch. . . . . .

This dynamic touching is something to do with your babies, your children, your lover, your friends, your parents. Sometimes you might just do a foot or a hand or a face. It is a great way to be in touch with those who matter most to us. We tend to be a lonely society, out of touch with even those who seem closest to us. This is the way to “reach out and touch someone” – a practical, healing path of generous and rewarding intimacy.

Esalen Massage at the Esalen Institute

Nudity at Esalen

The Esalen Institute, in Big Sur, California, occupies a shelf of land of several hundred acres above the Pacific, its back snuggled against the hillside below California Coastal Route 1, above which the Santa Lucia Range abruptly rises to greater than 4000 feet. It is a strikingly beautiful place, with its trees and lawns and flowers and warm-toned redwood buildings and broad expanses of ocean and sky. If a place can have charisma, then this one has it. This awe-inspiring place is magical and a blessing to experience.

South of the lodge is a cliff-side trail that descends along a five-minute walk from about 100-feet elevation to the celebrated Esalen Hot Springs which issue from the rocky slope along 150 feet on a ledge at forty-feet elevation above the ocean surf. Here a bathhouse has been constructed which has become America’s best-known center of public and coeducational nudity. The changing room, the restrooms, the shower room, the tubs, and the massage areas are all communal and coed. You would be embarrassed to wear a swimsuit here. The bathhouse is a California landmark of sorts; some of Western civilization’s leading philosophers, theologians, educators, scientists, therapists, and artists have come to this place, have eased their eminent rears down into the hot water to sit, meditate, and renew body, mind, and spirit. The few rules are as follows: Please refrain from smoking, eating or drinking (other than water), or conducting loud conversations. Please do not bring glass here. Please shower with soap (natural castile soap is provided) before using the communal tubs.

At Esalen, massage workshops are taught with the instructors (any two or three from the forty-member Esalen Massage Crew) and the twenty to thirty participants (or seminarians in Esalen parlance) all in the nude. Massages, whether free of charge or for payment, are in the nude for both practitioner and client (or giver and receiver). For the occasional rare individual who is uncomfortable with nudity, the practitioner will be clothed and the client clothed or draped.

Clothing has always been optional at the Esalen Hot Springs (the Esalen baths), the swimming pool, and the wide expanse of thick, springy, grass lawn between the pool near the cliff edge and the dining room in the lodge overlooking this breathtaking, beautiful view, and the beach. In my numerous visits to Esalen for workshops, seminars, or as an invited guest over the years, I have never seen anyone with clothing at the baths or in the pool.

Any twelve or so massage therapists of the forty-member Esalen Massage Crew work together on the same deck and areas at the baths overlooking the ocean. Their close proximity allows each to see the work of others, making for a collaborative environment where everyone is learning from everyone else – truly a wonderful spirit of cooperation and mutual exchange. For me working in this environment, the person receives a better massage because I, from my observations of others, am reminded of movements I may have forgotten. Frequently, folks have complimented me by saying that she/he had just received the best massage ever in her/his experience. No other place has offered as much massage as has Esalen. No other place has as many massage practitioner-instructors. Massage is offered and practiced every day of the year.

Clothing is required in the dining room, office, bookstore, meeting rooms (except in cases of massage and bodywork seminars), and generally in all public areas except for those described above. The Esalen school for young children, the Gazebo, is clothing-optional for these children and their teachers.

A mother and daughter, Peggy Morrison Horan and Lucia Rose Horan, number among the forty-member Esalen Massage Crew. Lucia was born at Esalen and raised in the Esalen community. Peggy is also a home-birth midwife. Please refer to the following Websites for additional information about Peggy and Lucia:

www.atpeacevideo.com/interview.html

www.unitone.org/luciarose/esalenmsg.html

www.unitone.org/luciarose/gallery.htm

www.ravenrecording.com/Featured_Teachers_Dec_20000.htm#horan

Welcome to Esalen

Big Sur, California

The word itself summons up tantalizing visions of adventure, of unexplored frontiers, of human possibilities yet to be realized. There is the wonder of the place itself, 120 acres of fertile land carved out between mountain and ocean, blessed by a cascading canyon stream and hot mineral springs gushing out of a seaside cliff. There is the delicate and subtle Big Sur air of a late afternoon in May, the midnight mist of July, the drenching February rain. There are October nights so clear the Milky Way can light your walk along the darkened garden path. And always there is the sound of the sea.

And then there are the people —the people who live there and love the land, and the 300,000 more who have come from all over the world to participate in Esalen's forty-year-long Olympics of the body, mind, and spirit, committing themselves not so much to "stronger, faster, higher" as to deeper, richer, more enduring.

They come for the intellectual freedom to consider systems of thought and feeling that lie beyond the current constraints of mainstream academia. They come to discover ancient wisdom in the motion of the body, poetry in the pulsing of the blood. They come to rediscover the miracle of self-aware consciousness. At best, they come away inspired by the precision of a desire to learn and keep on learning through all of life, and beyond.

Esalen is a place with a global reach. It is a place, as Thomas Wolfe said about America, where miracles not only happen but where they happen all the time.

This new introduction appearing in the Esalen Catalog - September 2002 – February 2003 - is authored by George Leonard at 79 years, President of Esalen and Michael Murphy’s closest friend.

Esalen is a sacred space where we come not to rework our practical life, but to discover an inner life, to respond to a vocation, to find a calling. – Joseph Campbell

Esalen^® Massage

We are presently enjoying a renaissance in the art of touch in this country. Esalen massage practitioners have contributed considerably to the reinstatement of this delicate means of interfacing between human beings, in a flowing style that is a marriage between classical Swedish massage, with its precise manner of working with muscles and circulatory system, and the deeply personal sensing work brought from Germany by Charlotte Selver. We offer our clients what we have individually and collectively discovered and refined in our concentrated hands-on work in a variety of approaches over the past 40 years. Styles which may appear simple to the onlooker have many levels of conceptual understanding interwoven with tactile sensitivity, elegant awareness, and heartfelt communication. At times we find ourselves spontaneously touching levels of the emotional body and even spirit.

Our work began to ripen in the early 1960s. It was remarkably enhanced by the dynamic environmental elements unique to this small coastal experimental community. Gradually, individual styles began to expand and cross-pollinate, then become concise concepts, which still further expanded, until a larger picture of the physical/emotional/spiritual human began to emerge and be sung to through touch.

Massage is "structured touching" or touching with purpose. This purpose may be directed towards relieving muscle pain and stress, increasing body awareness, or bringing equilibrium to a life in crisis. Tangible outcomes can be experienced in the active stimulation of skin, lymph, and blood, relaxation of the muscles and nervous system, elimination of metabolic waste, stretching of connective tissues, and release of a tranquilizing effect into the entire organism through the parasympathetic nervous system. It is a healthy way of handling stress.

The recipient is gently urged to become an active participant through heightened awareness and surrendering to a deep sensing place. Long, lengthening strokes, with gentle rocking and stretching, passive joint movement, sculpting of deep musculature, delicate cranial balancing, subtle neural reeducation, and the precision of Chinese point work, are all part of the somatic offering. Personal attention takes precedence over technique; thus each massage session is unique in itself.

Bodywork happens any time you focus attention on the life of your body, whether while playing sports, working in your garden, or simply feeling your feet on the floor. Thus the meditation of receiving touch from another is part of a large picture of richness which can put you very firmly in touch with our more personal self, since sensation is our primary connection to reality.

We invite you to be with us.

Growth Rate of the Esalen Institute and the Beginning of Esalen Massage

Brian Coughlan in his very fine article in the Massage Therapy Journal, Millennium 2000 issue, with colorful photographs of Esalen Institute’s massage venues, “Esalen, Where It All Began in the Mid-20th Century, Looks to the 21st; Esalen had an important role in popularizing massage for health maintenance and stress reduction,” states that Esalen massage began there as early as 1963.

Esalen took ten years, from its founding in 1961-62 by Michael Murphy and Richard Price on Michael's family 375-acre property acquired in 1910, to reach the rate of three to five concurrently run workshops at all times, having begun with a single seminar or workshop each weekend as an addition to an ongoing everyday business entailing a resort at the coastal center of Big Sur, California. In place were a magnificent home, a farmhouse, other residences, rustic motel cabins, a restaurant lodge, the cliff-edge swimming pool 100 feet above the Pacific Ocean, the cliff-side hot-springs bathhouse 40 feet above the ocean surf, the cascading creek with waterfalls and hot springs, and the beach.

By September 1967, more than 650 seminars and workshops at Esalen Big Sur had been given since the first in January 1962 with Alan Watts. Through to mid-1965 a single seminar or workshop each weekend was the norm with an occasional five-day conference. Then the number increased to two each weekend. In January 1966 a single five-weekday seminar or workshop each week was added and each weekend the number was increased to three.

On my first visit to Esalen as a guest in April 1972 and seeing the Esalen Catalog for the first time, I observed that about 400 seminars and workshops were given annually in Big Sur and San Francisco. Since taking my first Esalen Big Sur workshop in February 1977 to learn Esalen Massage, the number of seminars and workshops given annually has remained unchanged at 450.

July 2002

New Book about Esalen

Jeffrey J. Kripal and Glenn W. Shuck, Editors and Contributors, On the Edge of the Future: Esalen and the Evolution of American Culture, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005.

"Esalen is on the edge. Located in Big Sur, California, Esalen is, geographically speaking, a literal cliff, hanging rather precariously over the Pacific Ocean. The Esselen Indians used the hot mineral springs here as healing baths for centuries before the European settlers arrived. . . . Today the place is adorned with a host of lush organic gardens; mountain streams; a cliff-edge swimming pool; an occasional Buddha or garden goddess; the same hot springs now embedded in a striking multimillion-dollar cliff-side stone, cement, and steel spa; and a small collection of meditation huts tucked away in the trees. These are grounds that both constitute the very edge of the American frontier and look due west to see the East. . . ." -- from the Introduction

The renowned Esalen Institute, founded in 1962 by Stanford graduates Michael Murphy and Richard Price, was created as a place "where the body can manifest the glories of the spirit." It offered guests a heady mixture of world mythology, hypnosis and psychic research, spiritual healing, sport mysticism, and Tantric eroticism. Among the notables who have spent time at the Institute are Abraham Maslow, Timothy Leary, Paul Tillich, Carlos Castaneda, B. F. Skinner, and former California governor Jerry Brown.

Despite its cultural significance, remarkably little has been written about Esalen itself. In On the Edge of the Future: Esalen and the Evolution of American Culture, eleven original essays, plus an Afterword by cofounder Michael Murphy, examine the Institute’s roots, the place of its beliefs in American religious history, and its influence. This lively volume will fascinate anyone interested in the history of American religion as well as those who regard this remarkable place as the epicenter of the human potential movement.

The contributors are Catherine L. Albanese, Barclay James Erickson, Robert Fuller, Marion S. Goldman, Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Don Hanlon Johnson, Jeffrey J. Kripal, Timothy Miller, Michael Murphy, Glenn W. Shuck, Ann Taves, and Gordon Wheeler.

Jeffrey J. Kripal in the Acknowledgments, October 1, 2004

Finally, we would like to thank one individual who – to my great regret and because of no fault but my own hopelessly lapsed memory – played no direct part in either our conference proceedings or the production of this volume but whose person and work nevertheless stand behind almost everything that is attempted here. That person is Walter Truett Anderson, and that work is The Upstart Spring: Esalen and the American Awakening, the first and to this date only substantive historical treatment of Esalen. If any of us see farther than Walt did back in 1983 – and that itself is debatable – it is not because we are somehow smarter or more farseeing; it is because we have the benefit of twenty more years of hindsight and are standing solidly on the broad shoulders of his generous book. So thank you, Walt, for beginning and then nurturing what we have attempted in our own small ways to develop, extend, and enrich in the following pages. We all stand in your debt.

Note: An Internet search, on Jan 21, 2005, of the Website: Amazon.com located for the subject ‘Esalen’ 1184 entries of books containing references to Esalen

Compiled by Carl W. Nelson

Esalen Institute Geothermal Data

Esalen Hot Springs

Location Big Sur, California

Latitude 36.123° N

Longitude 121.640° W

Temperature F 122°

Temperature C 50°

USGS Quad Lopez Point 7.5

URL1 http://www.esalen.org/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Temperature 120°F 49°C

Flow 75 gpm 284 L/min

Capacity/hour 0.6 x 10⁶ Btu 0.1758 MW-h

Annual Energy 5.26 x 10⁹ Btu 1.54 GW-h

Load Factor: 0.84 4.4 x 10⁹ Btu 1.29 GW-h

Delta T: 16°F

Date:

Contact Person:

Esalen Institute

Big Sur, CA 93920

(831) 667-3000

info@esalen.org