Located at one of the most beautiful spots on California's wild Big Sur coast, Esalen Institute is a center designed to foster personal and social transformation. Its activities include public seminars, residential work-study programs, invitational conferences, and research.

Esalen was founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Richard Price. It was something new in the culture: an institute based on an abiding faith in the untapped potential of all people to learn, to love, to feel deeply, and to create. Rather than seeking to know the world by breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces, this institute has sought knowledge through the integration of seeming opposites--mind and body, East and West, action and meditation, the US and the USSR.

Many new practices, new ways of thinking and being, have been either created or brought to wider public attention by Esalen. These include gestalt awareness training, Rolfing, Esalen massage, Psychosynthesis, open encounter, interracial encounter, somatics, confluent education, and Integral Transformative Practice. Esalen's Soviet-American Exchange Program served as one of the more hopeful initiatives of the Cold War period and played a small but not inconsequential role in ending it. Its Institute for the Study of Humanistic Medicine, active in the early 1970s, presaged much of what is now known as alternative or complementary medicine. There's no doubt that a a number of the positive features of daily life that we now take for granted were first nurtured at Esalen. With all that, it remains a place of renewal or transformation for the thousands of people who visit it every year to enjoy its programs, its hot mineral baths, and its spectacular beauty.

Michael Murphy serves as Chairman of Esalen's Board of Trustees, George Leonard as its President. For further information, visit Esalen's Website at www.esalen.org or phone at 831-667-3000.