Visitors are now able to access Esalen as well as other businesses and trails in northern Big Sur via twice-daily convoys on Highway 1 operated by Caltrans.
Convoys run only at 7:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. each day. These are the only opportunities to travel into and out of Big Sur, so visitors must plan accordingly.
Esalen is a creative laboratory, an incubator of human potential asking the daring and curious questions that traditional university and religious institutions can’t and/or won’t. 1962 marked the beginning of this extraordinary journey — an adventure of minds, bodies, spirits and souls — where Michael Murphy and Richard Price, young Stanford graduates who were inspired by the ideas of Abraham Maslow and Aldous Huxley, together founded Esalen, the birthplace of the human potential movement.
Today, more than six decades later, Esalen is a world renowned holistic learning and leading global retreat center for guests and faculty to explore and realize their human potential through experience, education, and research. Public workshop and private conference programming pushes our growth edges closer toward collectively living in a more just, creative, and sustainable world.
Esalen Institute sponsors pioneering initiatives and offers personal, spiritual, and social transformation programs for residents, interns, and workshop participants.
Our Big Sur campus is a community-created space that resides on land that was historically inhabited by the Esselen Tribe and is currently co-stewarded with the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County.
Esalen is a major catalyst in the transformation of humankind, working with individuals and institutions to integrate body, mind, heart, spirit, and community in a nurturing relationship with the environment.
Esalen as both an idea and as a place provides a nourishing container for visitors, guests, and faculty — curious to explore some of what works and what doesn’t in the ongoing search for individual and collective growth, transformation, and healing.
Forged in the literary and mythical leanings of the Beat Generation, inspired in the lecture halls of Stanford by radical scholars of comparative religion, Esalen Institute was the remarkable brainchild of Michael Murphy and Richard Price. In concert with the heady backdrop of California during the revolutionary 1960s, these two maverick thinkers sought to fuse the spiritual revelations of the East with the scientific revolutions of the West, or to combine the very best elements of Zen Buddhism, Western psychology, and Indian yoga into a decidedly utopian vision that rejected the dogmas of conventional religion. In Big Sur, California, at Esalen, the natural world is just as crucial as the spiritual one, science and faith not only commingle but are staunch allies.
—Jeffrey Kripal from Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion
Michael Murphy is co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Board of the Esalen Institute, and directs the Institute’s think tank operations through its Center for Theory & Research (CTR).
He is also the author of four novels: Golf in the Kingdom, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons, Jacob Atabet, and An End to Ordinary History.
Richard Price was co-founder of Esalen Institute with Michael Murphy.
From a Chicago family of business men and women, Dick graduated from Stanford University the same year as Michael (although the two did not meet at that time).
The goals of the Esalen Center for Theory & Research (CTR) span a wide range of commitments, projects, and passions. One of these is the development of a new worldview that can make sense of all of this and a transformative practice that can embody it, since vision without action is lame and action without vision is blind. Under the banner of “Toward a New Worldview,” CTR seeks to nourish and support an emerging 'school' in which theory, research, and practice will co-evolve to embody our latent supernature.
Learn MoreEsalen offers an exciting array of opportunities for learning massage and healing arts through our massage school, ranging from weekend workshops to 100- and 250-hour massage practitioner certification programs. Approved Esalen Massage training programs are also offered at certain locations beyond our campus in Big Sur.
Photos: Q Stern Photography, Doug Ellis, Brody Q Scotland.
A compendium of resources from Esalen’s rich history, including videos, photos, catalogs, and audio experiences.
Esalen Institute
55000 Highway 1
Big Sur, CA 93920
US: 1-831-667-3000
info@esalen.org
