Big Sur & Santa Cruz

The Esalen Institute, commonly just called Esalen, is a retreat center and intentional community in Big Sur, California, which focuses upon humanistic alternative education. Esalen is a nonprofit organization devoted to activities such as personal growth, meditation, massage, Gestalt, yoga, psychology, ecology, spirituality, and organic food. The institute offers more than 500 public workshops a year, in addition to conferences, research initiatives, residential work-study programs, and internships.

Esalen was founded by Michael Murphy and Dick Price in 1962. Their goal was to explore work in the humanities and sciences, in order to fully realize what Aldous Huxley had called the "human potentialities".

Esalen is located about 45 miles south of Monterey and nine miles north of Lucia.  Esalen is situated on 120 acres of Big Sur coast.  The grounds were once home to a Native American tribe known as the Esselen, from which the institute got its name.

Gestalt Practice is a contemporary form of personal exploration and integration developed by Dick Price at Esalen Institute.  The objective of the practice is to become more fully aware of the process of living within a unified field of body, mind, relationship, earth and spirit.

The "Gestalt prayer" is a 56-word statement by psychotherapist Fritz Perls that is taken as a classic expression of Gestalt therapy as way of life model of which Dr. Perls was a founder.

I do my thing and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you, and I am I,

and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.

If not, it can't be helped.

(Fritz Perls, "Gestalt Therapy Verbatim", 1969)