Esalen Origin Stories: The Baths

“Esalen is the land of the three waters. There’s the ocean. There’s the Hot Springs Creek, which carries the fresh water from the mountains. Then there are the hot springs that come from the rocks through the mountains and pour into fresh water. The hot springs and freshwater come together with the ocean. You can sit and look at the ocean — at the interplay between the ocean and the mountain — how they are carving into each other and clashing, creating a confluence. The three waters can be a metaphor: blending of different energies, different religions, different spiritualities. These different flags are coming together to make this big quilt of unity,” Mac Murphy, workshop leader and son of founder Michael Murphy, explains. 

Those who visited Esalen prior to 1998 had a different Esalen bath experience than what we have today. That version was destroyed by the El Niño storms. The new baths are pillars of cliff-side stability made from concrete and sandstone with clearstory windows. Mickey Muennig, Big Sur’s preeminent architect was enlisted to erect their current structure.

Look around now and you’ll notice newer details, like the mosaic relief tile that hot spring water flows over. The design, created by artist Elle Terry Leonard, was chosen to represent peaceful recollection along a journey. The yellow calcite butterfly was sculpted by former Gazebo school staffer Sydelle Foreman.

The bath’s storytelling spans 62 years and continues to grow. The Hunter S. Thompson stories are dramatic — and mostly true. Andy Warhol had his 15 minutes here. You’ve seen the Steve McQueen and Neile Adams tub pics replete with wine and cigarettes. (No smoking or alcohol there now, please.) Once upon a time, Robin Williams gave an impromptu stand-up performance under the stars in his birthday suit. There are plenty more tales, we’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

Until 1966, Esalen Institute was still known as the Big Sur Hot Springs, before it was purchased by Michael Murphy’s grandfather, Henry Murphy. It was known locally as “Slates Hot Springs.” The healing waters have been used by Indigenous tribes, specifically the Esselen, and generations of their ancestors for over 6,000 years. The Tribe continues to use these waters today.

Esalen’s influence has long reached beyond Big Sur. Through the US-Soviet Exchange program, Dulce Murphy and the Track II team fostered dialogues and collaborations between American and Soviet thinkers, artists, and scientists, creating a bridge between the two cultures. These meetings often migrated to the tubs, blending profound discussions with the healing waters of Esalen. In 1983, a Newsweek writer dubbed these efforts "hot tub diplomacy."

In February 2024, Michael Murphy recalled that consequential period: 

“In the 1980s, Esalen hosted a conference where we were studying how individuals look at the world, and looking for similarities in Russia. Among this group, we had an idea of who were intelligence officers and who weren’t. This was after the Moscow Olympic Games. I remember this guy stands up, an American intelligence officer, and says to me, ‘I have something urgent to talk to you about.’

“I went outside with him and he says, ‘Do you see that guy over there?’ I turn and I recognize this person; he’s a Russian guy. This American intelligence guy continues, ‘You see that guy?! He’s an actual human.’ This American intelligence guy was trying to tell me the Russian guy is a good guy. So I said, ‘You’re absolutely right, he is a good guy.’ But that wasn’t enough. The American intelligence guy persisted, ‘No, no, Murphy, he's an actual human!’

“That’s what happens here when you bring people together in this way to talk about the things they otherwise never could. They experience a primal recognition of seeing the other as a friend. When you have a recognition like this you have to make existential decisions about what you’re going to do, who you’re going to be moving forward.

“That was just one paradigm of the whole thing, the recognition of these friendships having revolutionary implications for the individual person and potentially and ultimately the collective whole world.”

In February 2024, Dulce Murphy echoed and amplified the sentiment: 

“With these conferences, we would all come from different worlds and end up becoming close friends. Russians love baths. They love water. They were the first to take off their clothes and jump into the ocean, so going into the baths after a long day of a conference to close the evening was de rigueur. After you finished all these hard, challenging conversations, you'd break bread in the Lodge over other conversations, you’d go to the baths and relax and new conversations would surface. Yes, that’s human potential. It did not matter who they were — KGB, not KGB, CIA, not CIA, Russians or Americans. It didn't matter — we were all friends. That’s the whole point of Esalen.”