Back in the Day with Perry Holloman

Perry Holloman, a practitioner of Esalen massage, deep bodywork, and body-oriented approaches to relational Gestalt process work for more than 30 years, takes us back to the early 1980s, when the Ivy League undergrad held court as Esalen’s resident dishwasher, chess player, dancer, and preschool teacher.

‍

“I got to Esalen in March of 1979. I had been going to school on the East Coast and preparing myself for a professional life, most likely as a lawyer. But my soul was screaming: This is not my path in this life. And so I talked with my parents and told them I would like to take some time off to sort of figure out what my direction was going to be.

They said, “Well, how would you like to start out with a five-day stay with David Schiffman at the Esalen Institute?” 

I said, “That sounds good to me.”  I came to Esalen, and my mind was so blown by what I experienced.

‍Becoming Aware

David Schiffman introduced me to the world of Gestalt. The idea in Gestalt is, the more aware we are, the greater the potential to learn and grow and develop through our experience. Awareness is the factor which illuminates experience in such a way that we can see things and experience things from different perspectives. Like Esalen massage, if you watch ten different Gestalt practitioners work, it will seem like they're doing ten very different things. However, what one will notice looking more deeply is all of the approaches have a focus upon the development of awareness in common.

Dick Price, for example, was the purest. He called himself a “reflector.” He liked to describe himself as something like a Native American tracker who would follow in the footprints of the person he was facilitating — to the point where their awareness combined with his support would have an illuminating effect on their ability to gather information about their experience.

Somatics & Spirituality

Soon I started studying deep tissue work with a man named Al Drucker who came to Esalen himself in a healing crisis. He had been working for the Pentagon, designing weapons and bombs. He was a high-level, very talented engineer, and in the course of his work for the Pentagon, he developed liver cancer. He came to Esalen in 1968, looking to heal himself. He healed himself in the roundhouse, what's now called the Meditation Hut, down by Hot Springs Creek. He had an insight that if he took any pain medication to deal with his cancer, it was going to interfere with the process of healing. He described a process of about two weeks where he was going through a healing crisis, where he said it felt like someone had his liver in a vice and was slowly turning it each minute tighter and tighter. Suddenly, he realized he was on the ceiling of the roundhouse, looking down at his body writhing in pain, and he knew that it was over. At a certain point, he dropped back into his body and the pain went away. The cancer went away. And that was in 1969.

In any case, Al was a brilliant teacher, and he used the somatic discipline of deep tissue work to basically give spiritual teachings about non-dual reality. These were the types of things when I first got here that were available — just the most fantastic teachers, including Dick and Stanislav Grof and the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. My mother, who was a college professor, an anthropologist, came and visited, and when she saw Gregory Bateson sitting out on the deck, she asked, “Do you know who that is?”

And I said, “Yeah, that's Gregory Bateson. He and I play chess sometimes. He’s kind of the old grandpa of the place.”

“No, do you know who that is?” she said. She proceeded to let me know that he was one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century and that his work in cybernetics had been very influential in many different disciplines, from sociology to anthropology and various branches of psychology.

It was similar with Stan Grof. I really had no idea who he was. Yet I had the benefit with 14 other people of having this man for a full weekend just beginning to do his holotropic breathwork. It wasn't even called holotropic breathwork at that point in time. We just laid down on mats and he played this music, and we started breathing heavily, and we talked about our experiences afterward. And I just thought, “Well, this is interesting stuff …”

Dancing & Drumming

It felt like Esalen, the Esalen community, was tribal in nature at the time. Nobody worked more than four days a week, and a lot of people tried to get away with three and a half. And so what that led to was a great deal of unstructured time for their own self-exploration and hanging out together. There was a great deal of music back in the day. On warm, sunny summer days, it was very rare not to hear really good drumming happening. There were world-class musicians and drummers living in Big Sur, like Charles Lloyd, the great jazz musician. He had a place up on Partington Ridge, and he would often come down to Esalen and play the saxophone. There was a kind of pulsing, visceral quality to the place that still does live on. I have a feeling it's waiting to reemerge in some way, shape, or form. I can still feel the pulse of it present here.

Teaching Children

I worked as a “duck,” as a dishwasher, for two years. After my “baptism” in the duck pond, Janet Lederman hired me to be a teacher at the Gazebo preschool, which is what I did for the next three years, from 1981 to 1984. That was an extremely rich experience. I think Janet Lederman remains an underappreciated contributor to the importance of Gestalt awareness practice.

Janet told me this story about her first meeting with Fritz, that she watched Fritz's work and immediately recognized that what Fritz was doing with adults, she wanted to be doing with children. She said, “I have no patience with adults. I'm not interested in that. I'll let Fritz do that part. I want to work with the kids.” And so, she set up an environment based upon the principles of Gestalt awareness practice.

There is a great deal of potential in children: If we give them an environment through which they can make real contact with each other relationally as well as with the environment, there is a potential acceleration of the development and actualization that can happen, particularly if we create an environment that's both challenging yet safe.  

Teaching children turned out to be challenging in a much different way than dishwashing. But I discovered that I had a very natural ability to do it. Being with kids in that way required me to learn and grow and develop as an individual because of the impact of my behavior — the stakes were so much higher. If I break a dish, that's one thing, but if I do something that acts as a source of confusion in some way for a kid, that's a lot more complex to unwind.

We would have weekly meetings with Janet and we would talk about the challenges of having such an open environment and keeping it safely structured. She was just an incredible source of information and wisdom about the nature of young developing human organisms. I will treasure those three years that I was able to spend in the Gazebo School and directly with Janet Lederman for the rest of my life. She is a master teacher in the history of this place.