A Special Occasion
As I spend the next fifteen or so hours flying home to Brisbane from San Francisco, I am appreciative of the forced time to slow down once again and to reflect. I have been on an extraordinary journey these past thirty days (well, past ninety days…okay, past fifty years…). And for this particular trip I was usually aware of its extraordinariness daily and moment to moment. Meta-aware! I am Meta-aware-man, able to leap tall buildings with a single conscious thought… But now, to capture it in words, in a narrative, transforms my experience into more embodied meaning and then intentionality. I do not want to allow my experience to become just ordinary and slip out of consciousness, and so I create a container of specialness. I alchemise it into what I wish to manifest. I’m a wizard, a magician, a witch…take your pick…playing with the power invested and inherent in this extraordinary life and in me. It sometimes takes a very special occasion to awaken my whole being!
It’s been a journey that continually surprised me more than I could have imagined. It is like I keep cracking something open inside of me that allows more light in. And more space, to move, to allow, to see. And this special occasion has been no exception. I set out to get closer to myself and the divine, within and without, whatever that looked like. I wanted to learn some deeper breathing practices and to become more embodied. And to explore a land I’d only read about, witnessed through multiple media channels and that had been instilled in my psyche in both true and distorted ways since my birth. I was following the white rabbit, curiouser and curiouser about my inner world and the mystical, and about this land with seemingly magical properties.
After two months of inner work in Bali I was drawn to the West Coast of the U.S. I set out on a spiritual pilgrimage guided by my body’s very subtle signaling (of which I listened) and by trusting in my super-sensory intelligence (that I have been learning to better decipher). It’s akin to that sense of being in the flow of one’s life. I was able to do this because I created space and stillness and silence for an intentional little while.
I found or created a Mecca and invented a Hajj for myself, to borrow some resonant lingua franca from Islamic lore. In Islam, those who have the financial and physical capacity to do so are obliged or required or compelled…I’m not sure what the right terminology is…to go on pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetime, and annually if possible. It is a religious duty, a stipulation of their socio-religious contract. I love the idea and function and sentiment of this. I do not warm, however, to the sense of institutional duty, the dogma, the lack of direct and individually inspired divine direction and the, from my outside perspective, contrivance and staleness of any closed off religiosity. My body, mind and spirit…my whole system…resists absolutisms, any fixed systems. But I am very much drawn to spiritual guidance, ritual, mystic enquiry and pilgrimage. And there is something powerful about a shared experience. And so, for us spiritual secularists, where is the holy land? Where do we pilgrims on our quests of discovery and development journey to, to be side by side with fellow seekers?
Pilgrimages are vestibules to the inner world and our inner divinity. It is an important ritual in probably most religions and in some secular oriented groups too. Christians have made this journey for thousands of years, to various locations, with Jerusalem, Rome and Canterbury being some of the most well known destinations. It is usually where there are relics of saints, other holy figures and of course the dude himself, Jesus. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written in the fourteenth century, a group of pilgrims from diverse stations in life tell their stories while thrown together on pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. The book reflects the Church of Chaucer’s England’s loosening moral and social grip, its natural authority being challenged and declining in the minds of the congregation. It also painted a picture of the transformational power of the sharing of stories on a unified quest, albeit one of religious imperative.
I spent two weeks journeying to my Mecca, on plane and in SUV, instead of on foot or horseback as was the way of my Chaucerian fellows. I set out alone, also finding companionship and connection in some contemporary fellows along the way, each of us on our own individual pilgrimages. Yet for a moment or two we journeyed together, providing energy and sustenance to keep spirits in good health. Kind of like the accumulation of loot in a computer game that repairs damage to, and increases the vitality of, one’s avatar after taking some hits. Often, for me, conscious connection to self, other, place and thing is my loot and a means to thrive.
The U.S. has been for much of my life a kind of fantasy island with dreamlike qualities, mostly subconsciously though. Dreamlike insofar as there has been a whole lifetime of mythologising and indoctrination transmitted to me. This nation and its cultural signifiers and tropes have been foundational and influential in my mindset and experience of the world and of my world, largely through the omnipresence of U.S. shaped mass media and also through legal, social, institutional, economic and cultural ideology. And then I got to experience the essence of the U.S. firsthand, well a small piece of it anyhow: the land, the people, the culture, its technological and natural greatness and its blindspots and lack of collective awareness too. The energy and majesty of the mountains and waterways, the exhilarating energy of the terrain and how the people integrate with the land is stunning…the historical treatment of its Indigenous custodians of the land, racism and disadvantage is heartbreaking and dispiriting…the attitudes and friendliness of the vast majority of people I encountered…the crippling consumer culture… Leonard Cohen kind of captures this sentiment in the track, Democracy:
It's coming to America first
The cradle of the best and of the worst
It's here they got the range
And the machinery for change
And it's here they got the spiritual thirst
It's here the family's broken
And it's here the lonely say
That the heart has got to open In a fundamental way
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
I now have this intriguing sense of myself and the world making a little more sense, things fitting better. Kind of like the sensation of someone being angry and reactive and dickish toward me, and then the inner transformation I get after discovering some of the backstory and what is going on for them…hearing their story firsthand. My reactivity softens and my nervous system quietens. It’s in the lack of vulnerability and communication and humility and curiosity that problems seem to occur and reify.
And then I arrived at Esalen. The first thing I noticed was the landscape, an elysium field of natural grandeur and beauty nestled between the mountain ranges of Big Sur and the cliff edges of the North Pacific Ocean. Then, a sense of sacred specialness and a powerful energy as I edged further into the space. Sure I could have been primed by my knowledge of what has taken place here before and what was ahead of me and by the spiritual high I had been on…either way, it doesn't matter. And even before arriving, the road to Esalen at Big Sur, Highway 1, from the north was itself a vestibule into a sacred space. Majestic, wild, and seemingly infused with powerful energy. Which is what Esalen sits in and on. Esalen exists on the sacred Native American land of the Esalen Tribe (who the current Esalen Institute custodians have been in healing reconciliation with, I believe). For thousands of years prior to the establishment of the Esalen Institute in 1962, the Esalen Tribe would…
“...send people to these lands to heal. It was like sending someone to the hospital. The people would go through ceremony and cleanse themselves in the hot springs waters. Those who were healed would leave, and those who could not heal were buried on the land. This is still the place they call home.” (Esalen web page)
It continues to be a place of sacred ceremony and healing. And I’m sure much is buried here, left for the land to take care of finished business.
Since its inception the Esalen Institute has been an experimental ground for the human potential movement inspired by the musings of the Beat Generation and the awakenings of 60s counterculture. Esalen…
“...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.” (Esalen web page)
And it has evolved from there. So much powerful inner and outer work has happened here and continues to so that the magical energy is palpable and, for me, inescapable.
At Esalen, one can be on self-guided retreat or attending workshops, bodywork sessions or other therapies. My particular experience at Esalen was primarily the twelve day Integrative Gestalt and Hologenic Connected Breathwork Immersion Training with Perry and Johanna Holloman. It was masterly structured and facilitated. I know this not only intellectually, but experientially, for I experienced significant movement in my system, insight, healing and embodied corrective experience. And I learned some more about the language of breath. Then there is the bonding and connection that takes place when a group of seekers come together who are willing and able to be vulnerable with each other and supportive of one another through practice and the inner work. This, complemented by the sharing of space, of meals, of hot mineral baths and ice cold plunging, of laughs, our (at least, my) all too human humanness at times, the telling of our stories to one another and the holding of space for one another is a powerful experience. It is family. And I suspect, like it or not, these kinds of experiences bind people’s energies together infinitely. I am definitely more awakened and in myself. It was the Mecca this human potential needs to be more his whole human self.
The telling of stories, being courageous enough to say ‘this is who I am right now’, ‘this is where I have been’, is an amazing catalyst for connection, greater harmony and depth of this unique and singular living experience. During a moment of group sharing a fellow pilgrim spoke some wise words that resonated with me about the power of sharing our stories. The quote goes, 'There isn't anyone you couldn't love once you've heard their story.’ Of course, it requires some vulnerability and risk-taking and often stepping into the scary unknown. And it doesn't always turn out exactly how we imagined it might. And so safety, whether within oneself or having a safe container or space is an important consideration I think.
Esalen is a type of Mecca, I reckon, for the seeker, whether secularist, religious or otherwise. I think this place encapsulates the often missed essence of American ingenuity and soul. Maybe because it's quieter and less garish. Esalen doesn’t actively exclude or prescribe, yet cost could be prohibitive for some (although they do have work programs and a scholarship system, I understand). Still, it was money very well spent and invested. Esalen is non-dogmatic, while still intentional about its ethos and values. There’s a freedom to explore oneself, one’s divine connection, or whatever is calling, directly and organically. Often the calling can be sparked by a crisis, an impulse or need that doesn't necessarily make sense, or a conscious decision. I wish a pilgrimage to Esalen for every living soul, to spend a little time there and see what emerges. I have a strong feeling it will be a destination of annual pilgrimage for me.
