28 Days by the Sea

In November 2010, I embarked on a journey of studying bodywork at the Esalen Institute. My training began with a 28 day intensive in Esalen Massage.

This 3 minute video offers a small glimpse of the best month of my life:

Or watch in high definition on youtube: 28 Days by the Sea

Burning Man 2010

A six minute film capturing my experience at the festival:

Or watch it in high definition on youtube: Welcome Home?

Dust to Dust

Dust to Dust

Or

"Welcome Home"

“It is not when a part of the self is inhibited and restrained, but when a part of the self is given away, that community appears”

- The Gift by Lewis Hyde

“Welcome Home!” says a tall, tan, middle-aged man in a cowboy hat, one of the greeters at the gates of Black Rock City. This man and I embrace, though he is a stranger. As is tradition for first-time visitors to the Burning Man Project, I am invited to lay down and roll around in the powdery, alkaline dust of the desert playa, which for the next eight days will be my home, and then ring a large metal bell, announcing to the city that another virgin has arrived.

Welcome Home? I’d just spent over two hours in a line of cars waiting to enter the festival – after turning off the paved desert road into the dust, we were corralled into several lanes crawling forward at snails pace. Slowly, the burners began to filter through from the city – all shapes and sizes, on foot and on bike, wearing the strangest costumes or wearing nothing at all. They peer into the waiting cars with curiosity while proudly presenting their freedom – a taste of what awaits us on the other side of the gate.

Coming into the city my stomach begins to tie in knots – campers and tents seem to choke the horizon. I knew it was big, but this is far beyond what my brain had projected – a temporary city of 50,000 humans on a dry dusty lake bed, arranged in a semi-circle around an enormous art esplanade, at the center of which towers the Man, who in six days time will be ritually burned to ashes. Absorbing all of this I am immediately disoriented – What the hell is this? What the hell is happening here? – and my heart sinks in correct anticipation of my one great regret for the week:

I didn’t bring a bicycle.

For a person like me, mobility would be key – I’m the kind of guy who wants to see and do everything, and not having a bicycle was going to limit my explorations considerably. It takes an hour by foot to cross from one end of the city to the other. Veteran burners warn that one can only hope to participate in 10% of what’s going on, and let the rest go – but that’s nonsense. I don’t see how anyone could hope to experience more than 1% of Black Rock City in a given year. The ‘catalog’ handed out at the gate is almost a cruel joke – with a dozen different events taking place at any given time around the city – yoga, meditation, dance parties, free food, open bars, games, healings and massages, discussions of philosophy, spirituality, art, politics, sustainability, an entire ‘university’ devoted to ‘pleasures of the flesh’, workshops on propane in live-flame art, workshops on lesbian fisting and erotic rope bondage and sex toy creation, workshops on shamanism and buddhism – this is only what I can remember off the top of my head – and that’s to say nothing of the informal gatherings and unlisted events – the hundreds of pieces of painstakingly crafted art decorating the playa, including the ones that have wheels and are often covered with dancing humans as they drive around the city streets – not to mention the simple pleasures of relaxing with friends in the shade under the hot desert sun and appreciating the unprecedented and unparalleled magic of one of the most incredible places on earth.

What I hope to express in the above is the overwhelming diversity of the Burning Man Project. No doubt many readers are still stuck on the sex stuff mentioned above (shocking!) but in so doing it is very easy to miss the point. Yes, some people come to Burning Man only for sex, or only for drugs – there are certainly some who come only to get shit-faced and act belligerently crazy for a week to counter feelings of being overwhelmingly oppressed in the ‘default’ world – but then there’s the other 40,000 people who come to Burning Man. For them, what’s happening here is nothing less than the experimental co-creation of a new kind of Utopia – an intentional community which is not only an escape from the ‘default’ world, but a powerful weapon for modeling a radically better way of life.

So what do classes on sadomasochistic sex have to do with Utopia? And what the hell do they mean by “welcome home?”

Implicit in any event that truly celebrates and revels in diversity is the acknowledgement that one person's experience is likely to be different from the person standing next to them. The 1% of the festival that I experience is not going to be the same 1% as anyone else in my camp – or anyone else on the playa! Before arriving I had two people say to me, “whatever it is you’re looking for, you’ll find it there” and another said, “it will be whatever you want it to be” – these predictions did not quite come true in the literal sense, but they carried a seed of truth that I can only imagine will grow as I continue to “come home” in the years to follow.

This year I camped with a tribe called “Debase Camp” – a group of close-knit friends who come home to each other – more concerned with time spent together than exploring the festival, some of them have been coming to Burning Man for a decade. Other camps have other goals in the fore – devoted to dance, or spirituality, or healing, gay pride, or sexual liberation – I won’t repeat the events list again – while others cluster together into whole villages built around similar values. One of the many villages I regret not visiting is Kidsville – an enormous aggregate of camps for families with children of all ages. It’s true, at Burning Man, one can find open sexuality, and one can find children running the streets. The sexuality isn’t judged or shamed, and the children are still somehow protected and respected. The goal here is to seek balance and coexistance – so far, it works.

Still! There must be some common principles to which all this diversity agrees to adhere. The first two principles of Burning Man are radical self-reliance and radical self-expression. Black Rock City is built on a desolate, arid desert, and nobody is let through the gate unless they have brought food, water and shelter to care for themselves. Self-care is the beginning of responsible participation in community (and all the more necessary as the gift economy unfolds – but more on that in a moment). The radical self-expression comes into play as each member of the community is invited to become fully theselves – no matter how strange, wild, ridiculous, or conventionally ‘shameful’ – as long as nobody is getting hurt, everyone is encouraged to let themselves unfold fully, freely, and naturally, in a way that mainstream American culture often abhors. For some, this means dressing up as robots, or bunny rabbits, or balarenas (this list goes on an on), for others it means letting go sexually or experimenting with drugs – or having beer for breakfast after a year of nine-to-five-drudgery. For me, among other things, it involved declaring myself a “playa shaman” and spending the week communing with the land, making clay figures out of the playa, and dancing ecstatically. For many, it means letting down their armor and loving their neighbor – strangers though they be – and allowing themselves to be loved, unconditionally, by the humans who have gathered here.

It’s a sort of corollary of the radical self-expression principle that one must not interfere with a fellow burner’s experience – to each his or her own. Don’t destroy the art or the experience another person is trying to have. Let each go their own way – whether that’s attending a 12 step meeting on the playa or attending a class on lesbian fisting.

And it should be no surprise, given that Burning Man was born out of San Francisco and is largely attended by liberals and so called “hippies” – that another key principle of Burning Man is leave no trace. Get as drunk as you want, but crush your beer can and pack it out. Digging holes is forbidden – even dumping grey water is forbidden; huge evaporation trays are constructed to steam under the hot sun and burn away dirty dishwater and toothpaste spittle. In theory, we leave the playa as we found it – and dedicated volunteers stay for weeks after, clearing away every stray piece of mis-placed matter.

If all the self-reliance and self-expression sounds very libertarian, it is! Burning Man is (perhaps unwittingly) probably the greatest libertarian event on the planet. People take care of themselves, and express themselves in full freedom and without shame – philosophically speaking, that’s what libertarianism is.

And, in brilliant counterpoint to the libertarianism, there is perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the Burning Man Project: the Gift Economy.

Picture this: you are walking along a bustling desert village at night, and turn into a courtyard with a sign, “Galactica Ashram” which sports an exquisite, almost life-sized statue of the Buddha and a stage on which is being projected footage of strange animals. At the far side of the courtyard you pass under an awning and into a plush and expansive tent, decked out in extravagant reds and earth tones, ringed by soft couches, filled with a hundred souls dancing in the most outlandish costumes, and in the center of all this is a bar, where after a short wait you are given exactly the drink of your choosing – free of charge. Want another? Ask for another – still no money will pass hands. “If you can believe it,” the bartender says,” everyone in our camp fights over who gets to be bartender. We just love making people happy!” Want another drink? Ask.

Commerce is forbidden in Black Rock City. With the sole exception of ice and coffee sales at Center Camp, nothing on the playa is bought or sold. On the contrary, everything is given away. At Burning Man, the mark of the great man or woman is not one who acquires much, but one who gives much. Generosity is the currency of this tribe. Drinks, music, art, food, water, knowledge, wisdom, inspiration, healing – everything is given – nothing is sold. Bringing and giving gifts is a key part of participating in the festival. In Lews Hyde's The Gift - a study of gift economies in tribal societies - he argues that individuals always giving to each other - and always giving back to the greater whole - creates constant reinforcement of community bonds, and in many cases a connection to a higher power.

So yes, the beginning of responsible participation in this community is self-care. Before you can start giving to others, you have to be able to care for yourself. The purpose of self-reliance is not to isolate the individual as a self-serving island, but to create a foundation by which the individual can become a fountainhead of generosity. No one could ever go cold, hungry or thirsty in Black Rock City – under any circumstances – except perhaps that rare individual who simply doesn’t know how to ask.

In my opinion, those who leave Black Rock City without giving deeply of themselves may have missed the point entirely.

Saturday night is the Burn, and I get things off to an exciting start by busting my head open on an exposed, empty shade-pole socket, and bleeding profusely as my camp-mates look on in horror. After days of searching for a community bike (these circulate the city, but finding one is entirely a matter of serendipity), I’ve finally gotten my hands on one, and with a bicycle in hand at last, the city has opened like a flowering lotus: I've managed to have dinner with friends, drop off a love note, and make it back to Debase Camp to watch the Burn in under two hours – in fact I am moving so fast on the bike that I overshoot my camp by over three long city blocks before realizing I’ve gone too far. High on life and (almost) completely sober, I rush excitedly into camp – and into an exposed, sharp metal lip which pierces my scalp and leaves me lying on my back, clutching my head. When I pull my hand away, it is covered with blood. I stand and watch blood spattering on the playa around my feet.

“Guys, I need help.”

Debase Camp crowds around me, and I fall into their arms. They clean and dress my wound, re-assure me, take care of me. For someone like me – so used to going it alone, so sure that I have to do everything for myself – it is profoundly moving to be held and cared for by this group of relative strangers. I have only to relax and let them tend to me. In this sense, bashing open my head is a wholly positive experience. I would rather be wounded and held than invincible and alone.

An hour later, with a thick bandage around my scalp, we make our way through the growing throng, beyond the ring of art cars, out to the center of the Esplanade, to watch the Man burn. The emotional and spiritual energy that has built up over the course of the week is almost indescribable. I haven’t gotten a consistent answer as to what the burning of the Man “means” – I can’t help but suspect that the Burn holds multiple meanings simultaneously, and that they are all true on their own level. Only at the Parliament of World Religions in Australia this past December have I felt the presence of such a dynamic, multi-dimensional spirituality. After wave after wave of fireworks and cheering, and a dramatic fireball, at last the Man begins to burn, arms rising to the sky as he is consumed and topples to the desert floor amidst ecstatic cheering, and then dancing. What does it mean? Ashes to ashes? Effigy? Impermanence? Catharsis? Mortality? Crucifixion? Transcendence? Rebirth? I couldn’t possibly tell you.

Your Burn is your own.

I stay up all night. Talking, wandering, dancing, sculpting, filming, dreaming. The night is thick with magic. And when the day breaks, it is time to begin taking things down. I’m staying until Tuesday, but Debase Camp is going home now. So I help break down the camp (Burning Man is, among other things, a lot of work!) - I stay up all day on no sleep, and that night, a second pilgrimage is made out to the playa, to watch the Temple burn.

And that’s another story altogether.

Is Burning Man everything I’m making it out to be? Remember, I only claim to have experienced 1% of the festival, and of course, nothing on this earth is perfect. Bikes get stolen all the time, as do other valuables. The porta-potties are routinely vandalized, locks broken off etc…. Hundreds of thousands of environmentally-unfriendly neon glow lights are consumed by the event - even if they don't end up on the playa, they're still damaging the planet. ‘Leave No Trace’ is a constant struggle – I personally spent several hours on the last day picking up MOOP (Matter Out Of Place) – and that effort will be ongoing for weeks after this essay is published. Even if 90% of the people who attend Burning Man ‘get it’ on some level, the other 10% create a whole lot of destruction and misery for the rest of us in the short time they are here. I sometimes think that’s the tragic story of humanity – one person ruining it for everyone else. And then there are the dust storms. They rage for hours at a time and cover everything. I have never been so dirty in my life! If I hadn’t declared myself a playa shaman, it might have gotten to me.

My one major criticism is the noise pollution – apparently there are many who have mistaken Burning Man for a non-stop techno dance party. I remember waking up one morning at sunrise to the sound of blaring techno and finding myself deeply disturbed – going to sleep to pulse pounding unst, unst, unst is one thing, but waking up to it? I felt a strong conviction that sunrise, if no other time, should be a period of reverent silence. It’s a matter of balance – yes – loud music and dancing! Fun! – and then yes! Silence and reverence! If Burning Man is truly a place that celebrates diversity – that welcomes everyone – that makes pretence at being “home” to everyone – then there must be a container within it to appreciate the beauty of silence too.

Nevertheless, after eight days, upon finally hitting Reno on the return trip, I find my eyes welling up with tears. I had thought my emotional experience at the festival to be thoroughly mixed - but with some distance and upon return to 'civilization' I find myself overwhelmed by the beauty of what I just experienced - vandalism, noise pollution, dust storms and all.

But that’s what co-creation is all about – showing up and asking for what you need – and doing whatever it takes to make it happen, even when it isn't easy. In this sense, I don’t think that “home” is necessarily something one will find at Burning Man.

Home is something we make there.

Next: Who knows!

Lost in the Waters at Esalen

Lost in the Waters at Esalen

(The California Dreamtime Part III)

“If I may gloss all of this with a modern American Mythology, we might better speak here not of a Superman but of the X-men, those gifted mutants whom evolution has graced with supernormal powers that need to be affirmed, nurtured, and trained…”

- Jeffrey J. Kripal

Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion

“I feel like I’m dreaming,” I say to Sarah. We lay sprawled on a cushion of plush African kikuya grass, overlooking the yawning waters of the pacific: the front lawn of the Esalen Institute. The sun has made a show of burning off the fog today, but enough ethereal mist remains to cast the afternoon in a bright, mystical glow.

“The only way I know I’m not dreaming right now is by the complexity of visceral sensation going on in my body,” I continue. “My body is never this complicated when I dream!”

“It’s great that you can be so aware of what’s happening in your body,” Sarah replies. She a child therapist from London with a refined British accent – we’ve grown close planting seeds and harvesting vegetables on the farm.

“That’s why this place feels like home,” I say. “I can talk about the complexity of visceral sensation in my body, and everybody knows what I’m talking about.”

*

I’ve heard it referred to as the ‘soulful water’ – hot mineral springs churning out their contents over and into the ocean at combined rate as high as 600 gallons per minute. The Esselen Indians held these to be holy, healing waters – another outlet for the same deep spring that feeds the baths at Tassajara in the mountains above. These hot springs, as well as the creeks that rush through Tassajara and Esalen, belong to a water system which holds rainwater some 300 years before it pushes back up to the Earth's surface; the waters we bathe in here are older than the American Constitution. The Esselen Tribe lived on this land as long as 6000 years ago, when the last California Mastodons still roamed the plains. It was a holy place, where the three waters met – the healing hot springs and the rushing creek mingling with the waves of the Pacific. They named this land, where mountain meets ocean, the ‘spirit window’, and they were her stewards. When the Spanish came to colonize and decimate the Esselen, they followed suite and named the land Ventana – the Spanish word for ‘window’ – a name which remains to this day. And to this day, this land is a place of healing, and a place that reverberates with spirit.

The Esalen Institute is another story. Founded in the early 1960s as part of the Human Potential Movement, the Institute came into being as a place where humanity could evolve beyond the cultural constraints of its time. Fusing science and spirit, eastern and western philosophy, mind and body, Esalen was a place for great minds to gather, and for humans to heal and transform. Every decade has seen a new Esalen Institute – from the academic rigor of the early days to the use of open sexuality and hallucinogens as a means to enlightenment some years later – to the transformation of the institute into a kind of resort by Steve Donnovan (the man behind the curtain for both Starbucks and Peets coffee) – who grew it into the $12 million dollar non-profit business it is today, solving it’s financial crisis at what some consider great cost to it’s purported mission to discover and model a better way of life. To this day, Esalen exists as a decentralized conversation between several tribes – psychologists, bodyworkers & healers, farmers and sustainability advocates, spiritual seekers, artists, businessmen & businesswomen, community residents (I think of them as ‘villagers’) and the 12 thousand visitors who pass through the gates every year, seeking to be transformed.

I came to live at Esalen for 8 weeks as part of their 'work scholar' program – at the cost of $2200 and 32 hours of work per week, first in the kitchen, then on the farm, I would participate in two month-long workshops and invite the elusive ‘personal transformation’ alluded to in their mission statement. I had previously never spent more than 48 hours at the Institute – I came for a series of personal retreats over the Winter, first for my 30th birthday, and later because I had fallen in love with the place and what it seemed to be doing for me. Actually coming to live at Esalen for two months sounded like a dream – and now a week after departing, it seems like a dream in retrospect. A very long, very complicated, very intense, and very transformative dream.

I am both frustrated and amused at the difficulty I find in describing my experience at Esalen without resorting to mystical terms. It certainly wasn’t easy. Much like New York City, it’s a fantastic place to visit, but one would do well to think long and hard before going to live there. In fact, New York City is the only reference point I have to the effect that Esalen had on me – never, anywhere else on the planet, have I felt so continuously assaulted by the energy of a place. As though the towering mountains and the sprawling ocean were the arms of a vice in which I squirmed, my self relentlessly reflected back at me, and some merciless angel hovering above, whispering “grow, grow!”

In any case, that’s what it was like. I balk somewhat at the extremity of my own rhetoric, especially because it is so difficult to gauge so soon after leaving to what degree I feel a truly changed man by my time at the Institute. There is a strong temptation to express the process through the lens of ‘the power of the land’ – but I have always been unusually sensitive to my environment and cannot say with certainty that my experience of the ’energy’ at Esalen will speak to anything but my own unique subjectivity.

I can however attempt to describe this transformative process in purely social terms. The community at Esalen is both intensely insular and intensely porous. On a typical day the land holds space for 150 visitors who will be gone within the week, and another 150 residents who are staying for terms from several weeks to a decade or more. The longer one stays, the more enmeshed in the community one becomes. But this isn’t a typical seaside village. People come to Esalen to work on themselves, to process pain and trauma and limitation, and to grow. Every week there are ‘open seats’ available to anyone on the property who wants to emotionally process with a trained facilitator. But that’s really only the beginning – every work department has weekly process, and almost every department has a daily ‘check-in’ in which each member of the community practices both self-awareness and communication of that awareness to their fellow workers. Work scholars have their own open seat process gatherings, and extended students have theirs. Very much like a Zen center, each member of the community is encouraged to take increasingly deeper looks at themselves and the way they lead their lives, and the things that get in their way – and somewhat unique to Esalen, each community member is then asked to practice conscious communication about that process, in a way that tends to diffuse conflict and projection and open the way for social cooperation and strong bonds of trust and mutual support.

That all sounds rosy, until you consider the fact that this is not your typical American Therapy process with its hyperactive boundaries and complimentary social anonymity. In typical Esalen fashion, I’ll go to an open seat, end up spilling my guts about my most buried shames and traumas, cry in front of everyone, feel this cathartic transformation … and then: dinner time! All those people who just witnessed you coming unhinged will be with you in the lodge at every meal for the remainder of your stay. This is what I mean when I say that at Esalen, the individual is constantly reflected or mirrored back to oneself. If I’m brave enough to do ‘my work’ here, it will be with me for the duration of my stay – I can’t hide from my own shit here. Of course, the open seats and process sessions are confidential and very nurturing, but after a few weeks (much less a few months) you find you haven’t just opened to this group or that group – you’ve opened. On most days, between work, process, and socializing, I find myself to be overstimulated to the point of exhaustion. And this of course doesn’t take into account the fact that all those same people you’re processing with and emoting with are people whmo you are inevitably going to be naked with at the baths.

Ah yes, naked at the baths. Perhaps the most notorious and immediately button-pushing issue to the uninitiated – these soulful, healing hot springs are channeled into an elegant bathhouse on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Bathing is clothing optional (read: nude) and entirely coed. The biggest surprise though, is that none of this nudity feels particularly sexual. True, there are some bodies that want to be admired (part of their process), and both sexual partners and life partners are from time to time discovered at the baths – but the vast majority of bodies at the baths aren’t there to play our culture’s weird sexual games – they’ve come to be nourished and healed. Coming to Esalan has been compared to returning to Eden – taking off the proverbial fig leaf and returning to innocence. Coming home to a place where the body is nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide. Bodies of all shapes and sizes and ages, no longer hidden away, exposed to light and air and good intention. The healing power of the baths may be a self-fulfilling prophecy – but they are nevertheless a prophecy fulfilled. I was publicly naked at least once a day every day for eight weeks – as a man who has spent his entire adult life ashamed of his body, I cannot imagine a more potent medicine.

‘Gestalt’ is a german word for ‘whole’ and ‘Gestalt Therapy’ is a psychological practice developed at Esalen which attempts to look at the whole human being in the present moment – mind, body, emotion, and spirit. All of the ‘process’ to which I’ve alluded is grounded in this practice. Heavily influenced by Zen, a gestalt therapy session involves coming fully into the present moment and coming to terms with what is happening right now. Like sitting Zazen for an hour at 6 AM, this can be intensely uncomfortable – but if we always push away those aspects of ourselves that are uncomfortable, how will we ever deal with them? “It’s like Zen with talking,” as described by Christine Price, one of the Institute’s gurus of gestalt awareness practice. I would take it a bit further say it’s like Zen plus psychodynamics. As we go deep and give breath and attention to those bits and pieces of ourselves which have previously been too painful to face, those pieces begin to transform, and we begin to evolve. “The organism unfolds,” as Christine puts it. The whole organism.

And yet all this psychology is also held in firm compliment to a practice of deep body-awareness (visceral complexity) and body-work. Regardless of everything else I’ve mentioned, Esalen is also a world-famous massage school. The bathhouse isn’t just a place for bathing – a dedicated and immensely talented massage crew practices here day in and day out, working with and nurturing bodies and spirits, to the rhythm of the ocean waves. “I don’t know what we are before we’re born, and I don’t know what we are after we die,” Christine Price says to my work scholar group on our last night together, “but I know that while we are here, the body is where it’s at.” That’s one of the most extraordinary things about Esalen – it remains wide open to the spiritual without abandoning the deep existential truth that we humans are by nature embodied beings – and the body, regardless of one's conception of immortality or lack thereof, is where our spirit is taking form. The inner work that results is grounded, in the body, here, and now.

As this piece of prose stretches on, I am increasingly aware that I cannot possibly do this place justice in the span of these words - because the mission of Esalen isn’t just personal transformation, but social transformation as well. The communication practice speaks to this, but nothing speaks to it more directly than the farm & garden. As an organization seeking to model a better way of life, sustainability is Esalen’s most worthy goal, and in many ways, its most obvious failing. What they are doing is extraordinary – the 30 year-old farm and garden provides bins of food for the lodge on a daily basis – the garden is spectacular and the farm is expansive – row after row of food grown organically in the here and now – working with the land instead of against it. The compost system they’ve adopted seeks to waste nothing – uneaten food from the lodge becomes immensely rich soil in 8 to 12 weeks – and everything returns to the earth, carrying on the tradition of the Esselen Tribe, thousands of years before. In a time where most Americans gorge themselves on industrial foods without know what's in them or where they came from, Esalen is modeling the other extreme - grow your own! At the same time, the Esalen Institute as an organization, like the rest of American Culture, is not environmentally sustainable. We still live in an era where sustainability is a flirtation with financial suicide. I find it deeply Ironic – American Culture shows the worst of the human species’ tendency towards suicide and self destruction, in that we live a lifestyle which leaves nothing behind for our great-grandchildren – and yet any business or intentional community that seeks to reverse this course of self-destruction is threatened with immediate self-annihilation.

Or is it?

What I find most heartening about Esalen, above all, are the free-for-all community meetings. They remind me somewhat of my community-oriented high-school in Los Angeles (Oakwood), which held town-meetings twice a week with an open microphone, and to this day pledges to give every student a voice. At Esalen's meetings, the CEO of this $12 million corporation sits on the floor with the people who wash the dishes in the lodge, and they face off about where the Institute is going. At one meeting I attend, a student kitchen-worker refers to the recent purchase of additional land bordering the Institute as a capital investment (as opposed to raising the notoriously low salaries of the staff) being “tricky” – and the President responds by saying he isn’t comfortable with the use of that word, which he feels connotes ‘deception.’ The brilliant Berkeley-educated kitchen-worker is quick to reply, “I think ‘tricky has two definitions, one being ‘deceptive’ the other being ‘hard to grasp’ – I meant it in the second sense.” – to which the President immediately concedes the point, and someone else in the room loudly proclaimes, “I love this place!” I honestly believe that if humans around the world practiced communication this consciously, there would never be another war.

But the thing about Esalen is that the person washing the dishes in the kitchen (which on average serves 300 people every meal) might very well have a PHD in Philosophy or Physics. But even saying that somehow misses the point, by subscribing to conventional definitions of social status. Because at Esalen, in theory, that PHD dish-washer could be working with a high-school drop-out from Germany, and the two of them would, in theory, still be able to sit down to dinner together and learn something from each other. Esalen, in potential, breaks all the social rules, and suggests in their stead a social order held together by the conscious practice of self-awareness, communication, and above and below it all, a shared humanity – inotherwords, love.

Still, nothing and nobody on this earth is perfect. Esalen has a shadow as surely as you or I or President Obama does. The danger in so much inner work is the possibility of narcicism. And as much as it purports an enlightened and community-oriented way of life, I’ve seen that community take a firm back seat to financial concerns. For anyone in the ailing middle-class, Esalen's programs are all quite expensive, raising the uncomfortable question - do only the rich deserve to be healed and liberated? Meanwhile, I’ve watched more than one person apply for the extended student program only to be ‘voted out’ by the department, not unlike an episode of Survivor. In their final week, work scholars actually find eviction notices pinned to their doors (eviction notices that 'wish them well on their journey', but even so!) – guests are expected to be off property by 2 PM sharp once their workshops are ended. Resources are limited. Agape love works in theory, and perhaps perpetually in the spiritual realm – but here on earth things are harder and firmer, and Esalen has firm limits to what it can provide. The most heart-breaking moment for me is when a fellow work scholar leaves the program ten days early – he’s the only one in my group who has experienced trauma similar to mine – he is leaving, he says, because he finds the kitchen (which, without management, has grown lax in it’s communication practice) to be a toxic environment – but I can’t help but wonder if, like me, he has found that our workshop isn’t really addressing his trauma in the way he had hoped. Who knows? When he goes, I am unexpectedly devastated, moreso by this than by anything else that has come up in my time here. I have to stop working, and sit and let irrational tears flow for a while – something has been lost, that didn’t need to be. That’s what grief is, I guess. And Esalen is not free from grief, nor trauma, nor disappointment, nor sadness.

But even in the turmoil of it’s own shadow, the Esalen Institute is a road through and away from those things, a road of potential into a more aware and integrated life.

And then there's everything I'm not mentioning: Yoga classes are offered to the community most days, as well ecstatic expressive dance classes and the occasional evening dance party; most weeks will see gatherings for singing or writing; the Art Barn is open to all every day with space and free supplies for creative exploration; the grounds are breathtaking and teeming with life - from the baths one can often watch otters splashing in the surf below, or catch a glimpse of california condors soaring above, and from the farm one might look up from tilling or weeding to spot a massive pod of dolphins passing, or - as I finally experienced after 7 weeks - the full-bodied breeching of enormous whales a mile off shore; on clear nights the milky way is a glittering band stretched across the sky; from time to time a shaman from the Esselen Tribe will come to offer a sweat lodge to a group of students or the community (I was blessed to participate in two); and day by day the whole community pulses with an acquired language of generous physical affection and conscious touch...

*

Driving away from the Esalen Institute after eight weeks, I find myself wondering vaguely, what the hell just happened? I find myself trying gauge who I am now – so much talk about personal transformation, unfolding, growth – I feel transformed, but is there more to it than just a feeling?

Personal growth is by nature an intangible affair. Not so easy to quantify as say an improved quarterly report or basketball shot, or stronger muscles after a couple months dedication to the gym. As the days pass and I move on to new familiar places - Tassajara and Berkeley - I watch my own behavior and reactions carefully. Do I have a stronger sense of who I am and where I’m going? Am I less reactive and more discerning? Do I indeed have better boundaries while at the same time an increased capacity for communication? Are these newly developed social and relational skills actually going to stick? Have I actually enlightened these buried traumas I came to Esalen to work through - or is it just a dream?

“I feel like I’m dreaming,” I say to Sarah, on the front lawn, cushioned by African kikuya grass and lulled by the ocean waves. “The only way I know this isn’t a dream is by the complexity of visceral sensation going on in my body. My body is never this complicated when I dream.”

That's why this feels like home.

Next: Burning Man!

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The Treacherous Road to Tassajara

The only constant in Tassajara is change. Perhaps the most pervasive feature of the settlement is the river running along the canyon floor, from the beautifully crafted bathhouse on one end to the run-down student housing on the other. Past the office and the student eating area, the Zendo towering over the courtyard, where aggressive blue-jays steal fresh-baked bread out of people’s hands, past the fancy guest dining room and hotel-like accommodations – a world apart from the students’ meager abodes – past the pool and on into the wilderness, the river runs.

Tassajara is the oldest Zen monastery outside of Asia. It is known for being hot and bright, beautiful, severe. It rests in a canyon in the Ventana Wilderness of California, far away from the buzz of modern life, a private world of bells and bird song, drums and chants and Buddhist silence forever interrupted by the din of rushing water, flowing out of impassable mountains, and returning to them.

One may reach Tassajara one of two ways: a three day hike inland from the Big Sur coast, or a treacherous 14 mile dirt road which passes over a mountain ridge before descending steeply into a secluded canyon. As do most visitors, I took the later route, a journey of at least an hour, navigating jagged rocks and sheer drops into breathtaking oblivion. During the final five miles of descent, the disconcerting smell of burnt rubber fills the nostrils as the car’s breaks palpably soften from over-use. On hot days, one has no choice but to pull over and let the breaks cool – the alternative is a quick ride over the edge.

For half of the year – the colder half – Tassajara closes its doors to outsiders and becomes a place of intense monastic Zen practice. But as the weather warms the monastery opens – to paying guests who come to unwind at this mountain resort and natural hot springs – and to students who pay nothing, but work hard in exchange for food, lodging, and stoic zen practice. The student schedule is intense: the wakeup bell sounds just past 5 AM, morning meditation lasts one hour, followed by thirty minutes of bows and chanting, then soji (temple cleaning), and after breakfast, work begins – and there is no shortage of it. There is work to be done for the monastery, and there is work to be done for the guests. They call it work practice – because the dedicated Zen student practices mindfulness in everything he or she does – chopping vegetables, cleaning rooms, tending garden, serving guests – each moment is an opportunity for meditation, awareness, growth, glimmers of enlightenment. At the end of the day another hour of sitting zazen ensues. One emerges from the zendo in the dark of night and a reverential hush falls over the grounds; the wakeup bell sounds in less than eight hours.

I am placed in the dining room, serving the guests, much to my horror. After the years spent trying to “be zen” about waiting tables in New York City, the idea of waiting tables at a zen center feels like a cruel joke. But in the spirit of service, and with a mindful eye to the emphasis in the Soto Zen school for being with discomfort (rather than living under its thumb), I smile and go to work. It is an opportunity to recapitulate my negative experience as a restaurant server – here I am a monk attending to the guests who make my education possible, and more often than not, they are gracious. Nevertheless the work is exhausting, and ironic in that Zen places such emphasis in doing one thing at a time with full attention, whereas waiting tables more or less requires constant multi-tasking. In my bolder moments, I think of writing a book – The Zen of Multi-Tasking – and smile at the great number of people that this would piss off.

There are a lot of rules here: no running, no reading while eating, no eating or drinking while standing, no humming whistling or singing, keeping silent during plentiful silent periods, bow to the Buddha every time you enter a bathroom (there are Buddha alters basically in every room), be in your seat in the Zendo five minutes before meditation begins, do not leave the zendo during meditation except in emergency, no alcohol, no sex (unless you have been there at least six months, and then, only sex in committed relationships is condoned – though interestingly they pride themselves on being very gay friendly.) If this sounds like a lot, it is – and the list goes on. At times, Tassajara can feel oppressive; between the heat and the sheer canyon walls, one may begin to feel closed in.

But at once there is a way of life here that is deeply satisfying. Among my favorite rules: anytime any student or practitioner passes another on the path, both stop and bow. No matter what is going on, who is rushing where (but not running!), whether the participants know each other, whether they get along or don’t, every time, we stop, we bow, and then we make our way. In this manner, dozens of times throughout the day, we honor one another, we give our respect, and we are respected. From this practice alone a community bond is slowly built and daily recreated.

From the end of evening meditation silence is held, through morning meditation, soji, and into the first 15 minutes of breakfast; nobody speaks. A kind of sublime peace descends on the settlement as we file out of the zendo into the cool night, as we quietly throng around the samovar to make our evening tea, and then step lightly along the dark, lantern-lit path to our beds, as the stars shine above us.

And sometimes Tassajara is just a tribe of mismatched people who have come together with a common interest, who need to joke around, blow off steam, have fun, break the rules, complain about their lives. The other side of the stoic dedication to the Buddha Way and the Bodhisattva Vows is a everyday humanity that suffers and strives like the rest of us.

Before it was a monastery, this place was sacred to the Esselen tribe, the Native Americans who lived in these mountains before the white man came. The waters of the hot springs were believed to have sacred healing powers. And when the treacherous road was first carved out of the mountain in 20th century, it was a road for the sick to come and take the cure.

There are many stories here of students who came to spend a few months during the summer and ended up staying for years. I feel the pull myself. There is such a sense of safety here, an honesty, a clarity of purpose, and of course, the rich tradition of Japanese Buddhism and the rewards of its daily practice. I am comforted to know that this place exists. However hard my life becomes, however traumatically my hopes and plans fall apart, there will always be Tassajara.

And it will always be changing. The only constant in Tassajara is change. Students and clergy come and go, the river runs high with the rains and shrinks to a trickle in the heat of summer. Every day brings new visitors, new weather, new bugs, new relationships, new concerns, new insights, new struggles, new enlightenments. Amdist the change the community renews itself, the morning bell rings, the zendo is filled with students. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

That's a little Zen for you.

The Bodhisattva Vows

Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them all

Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them

The Dharma Gates are boundless; I vow to enter them

The Buddha Way is unsurpassable; I vow to attain it

Next: the Esalen Institute!

Avatar: Reintegrating Shamanism in the Modern Psyche

I’ll be honest: I find some of the current reactionary hatred toward Jim Cameron’s film Avatar to be as disturbing as anything that’s happened on the political scene over the last year. I would expect outrage at this film from neo-cons and Christian conservatives – and of course, we all have our own tastes and are entitled to our opinions. What gives me heartache in this case, I think, is a particular snap judgment amongst certain liberal circles that Avatar is somehow a film about Native Americans, or Africans, or Australian Aboriginals – i.e. that the film is a historical allegory with offensively blue aliens and mind-blowing special effects - a feel-good revisionary look at the horrors of colonialism on Earth.

Watching the film, this pseudo-historical reading didn’t even occur to me. Perhaps because I know something about tribal/pagan spirituality across cultures, and the history of shamanism (I’ve even made my own feature film "Tale of the Tribe" on this theme) it doesn’t make any sense to me, to think of these blue skinned Na’vi as having anything to do with the specific shamanic tribes of our own history – except for the singular fact that they are also a shamanic tribe. But guess what: almost all pre-modern tribes are shamanic - even the Caucasian ones.

Allow me to clarify – if there is a universal religion on earth, historically speaking it would be tribal shamanism. In Europe, the indigenous peoples were called ‘pagans’ – and before they were wiped out by Christianity*, there were a lot of them. Go back far enough, any of us, and we will discover that our ancestors belonged to shamanic tribes. Now I appreciate that specific surviving tribes don’t want their own specific traditions to be ‘appropriated’ or stolen by new age moderns or exploited by Hollywood – I agree with that – but shamanism itself belongs to no tribe. Having a spiritual connection to the earth, being part of a community that lives in harmony with nature, is our birthright as human beings.

That Avatar's Na'vi share certain shamanic cultural traits with all the original tribal cultures of earth doesn't make them allegories for the Navajo or the Aborigines or the African tribes - it merely makes them somewhat human. And, I think the film argues, it is the kind of humanity that we as a civilization would do well to listen to. They are our ancestors, and they might be our future.

In this context of shamanic history, Avatar did not for a moment appear to me as a revisionist feel-good allegory about white colonialism. It has nothing to do with white colonialism – it has to do with modern human military-industrial greed, intolerance, and violence. These are issues we face in the present and in the future, not in the past.

Avatar immediately struck me a much needed modern myth about how the reclaiming of shamanistic values and earth-based spirituality is vital to the health and prosperity of our entire species, and the survival of our own planet. To this end, it is also a film about seeing through the eyes of "the other" - whether that other is a person, an alien, a lover, an animal, a tribe, or an entire ecosystem. The phrase "I see you" is repeated a dozen times throughout the film, in english and in the alien language - explicitly characterized as a spiritual seeing, a looking "into" and recognizing the other person, as in the familiar sanskrit "Namaste". When I look at the blue skinned Na’vi, I do not see a distant tribal culture – I see a part of myself. A part which has been taken from me, along with all the other ravages of modernity; it is a part which I desperately want back.

Avatar is a very simple story – all myth is simple – about a modern military man who infiltrates, and ultimately embraces “the other". At the end, this brought tears to my eyes – that he actually becomes ‘the other’: he literally casts off his own human body to be one with his true people. To call him a white man at this juncture is quite frankly racist, as it completely ignores the somatic and spiritual transformation that has taken place - he isn’t a "white man". He is initiated Omaticaya. He is Na'vi.

On close examination, the Na'vi appear consistently culturally and spiritually superior to the planet-raping humans who have invaded their world. Their culture is rich, dynamic, and full of wisdom and balance. "Why would they trade what they have for beer and blue jeans?" Jake asks. "We have nothing that they want." Meanwhile, they have everything that we need - community, authenticity, consciousness. The humans are by contrast presented as greedy, small-minded, immoral, violent, self-blind, and heartless. If the film is racist, it is racist against the human species altogether. The Na'vi are portrayed as a light in our modern darkness, our better selves. This is not to advocate a romantic (and probably impossible) casting-off of civilization or mass return to tribal life in the forest - for even as it advocates respect for natural rhythms, the film is itself a miracle and testament to modern technology. Rather, the Na'vi suggest to us a necessary rebalancing of a world gone awry. It is not a question of replacing civilization with tribalism, or monotheism with shamanism. Culturally and psychologically, it is a question of reintegration.

This is to say nothing of the fact that the film is aesthetically stunning and visually beautiful - having seen it four times, I believe it might be the most visually detailed film ever made, perhaps impossible to take in all at once (one example, I watched the movie twice without noticing the Na'vi have four fingers, while the human-avatars have five). Nor do I forget that the innovative technical film-making skill required to generate and move within these astounding three dimensional environments is anything less than a marvel of human engineering. The artistic effect of these elements in tandem is meant to re-create the experience of truly being immersed in an alien world - to become literally embodied in the breathtaking world of 'the other' - but these elements and this aesthetic immersion are not the sole value of the film. The myth and the message stand with or without them.

Now I am certainly not going to argue that the film is perfect. It’s full of all sorts of silly Hollywood conventions – just like every other Hollywood adventure film ever made. I personally find extended action/war sequences boring, but one doesn’t get to make a film with the scope of Avatar without such a sequence – our culture doesn’t permit it. (I have heard a compelling argument, however, that this battle sequence performs a much needed catharsis in seeing the invading rapists taken down - something which has happened only rarely in our own history). Nor do I really understand some criticisms I’ve heard on how the dialog is unrealistic or 'pedestrian' – because no big Hollywood studio film has ever had realistic dialog. Studio movies consistently present a skewed picture of human behavior and speech (and image – nobody looks like Holywood stars in real life, not even the stars!) – movies with realistic dialog always fail at the box office. Culturally, we disdain realistic films as boring. I personally tend to find studio films maddening for the above reasons – but one area they work for me is when they don’t shy away from the heightened reality of myth itself.

Some of us just hate studio films altogether – bravo! Most of the time I agree with you – Studio films are usually contrived, often horrifically violent, and habitually give no value to human life beyond the protagonist and his kin. But when I do go to see a studio film and have the rare experience of taking in not only a mythic story, but one with a message of hope, healing, and evolving consciousness, I don’t know what to feel except gratitude and renewed faith in mankind. We live in a sleeping civilization that is decimating our planet and its people. You ask how America could commit the moral atrocity of invading Iraq – and yet when a film-maker puts all the might of Hollywood into a mainstream film which asks Americans to identify with “the other” – you go on the attack and rip it to shreds. This I do not understand.

Myth isn’t realistic, but it is true. The notion that a planet itself could fight back against the military-industrial complex is a fairy tale – we all know Earth isn’t going to come to life and suddenly defend herself – that’s our job as awakened humans. But this concept – this numinous archetype of the mother planet who fights back against her rapists – it is a story of hope, it is a story that catalyzes the minds of Earth’s defenders, and it is a call to action. Avatar is only a myth, but it does what myth has always sought to do – to enlighten and enliven us.

My utmost thanks to James Cameron for making the effort. I believe he is a good man.

* I want to be perfectly clear: I do not seen any necessary conflict between Christianity and Shamanic connection to Earth. I am in general a big fan of coexistence.