Word: esalen
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Dates: during 1967-1967
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...call Esalen President Michael Murphy "no far out cultist"; yet his "sensitivity training," aimed at getting people to "let go of an excessively verbal image of themselves" [Sept. 29], appears to be merely a rationalization of the hippie syndrome tidied up a little to make it acceptable to middle-class escapists. This technique relegates the mind to second place and glorifies "feelings," the most primitive standard for reacting to others. Perhaps cuddling in "hero sandwiches" 35 people deep sounds appetizing to you; it seems like a lot of baloney...
...curious lesson in feeling took place at California's Esalen Institute, 35 miles south of Carmel in the Big Sur country, where a staff of uninhibited social scientists are engaged in the new technique of "sensitivity training." Their aim is to make business executives, doctors, lawyers, Peace Corpsmen and assorted self-searching women more aware of themselves and of their "authentic" relations with others through sensual and physical rather than verbal experience. Such sensitivity training is suddenly in vogue across the nation to help community leaders, clergymen and businessmen in their dealings with people. Some 350 officials...
Listen to the Body. As practiced at Esalen (named after an extinct Indian tribe), sensitivity training draws upon elements of the inner-directed meditation of Eastern religions and the interaction emphasis of Gestalt psychology. On the theory that modern urban man smothers his feelings under layers of intellectual abstractions and thus loses his sense of wholeness, Esalen President Michael Murphy, 37, a Stanford psychology graduate, also accents emotional release and an awareness of the body. "We have to learn to listen to our bodies if we are ever to enrich and expand our life of feeling," he says...
...group of 20 business executives recently attended a two-day workshop at Esalen in which they played "blindman's buff," one man with eyes open leading another who shut his eyes and contacted his surroundings through touch and smell. At one session, an apparel manufacturer hinted that he really resented his business, wanted to leave it. An Esalen girl staffer then sat opposite him, coaxed him into pretending that she was his business, finally got him to tell her "Go to hell!" He smiled broadly, conceded that he was "proud I could say it." "I am proud...
...five years old, Esalen's appeal is so broad that a Jesuit moral theologian from Loyola University of Los Angeles and a curriculum expert for the State University of New York are among its 21 resident fellows, who pay $3,000 for nine months of study. Most Esalen students attend short-term workshops and seminars. More than 1,000 people heard a lecture this month by Maslow at the First Unitarian Society Church in San Francisco, where Esalen has just started a branch program. Also intrigued by the institute is the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Advancement...