Leaders and Programs
In the early days, many of the seminars challenged the status quo - such as "The Value of Psychotic Experience". There were even programs that questioned the movement of which Esalen was a part - for instance, "Spiritual and Therapeutic Tyranny: The Willingness To Submit". And there was a series of encounter groups focused on racial prejudice.
Early leaders included:
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Rather than merely lecturing, many leaders began to experiment with what Huxley called the non-verbal humanities: the education of the body, the senses, and the emotions. The intention of this work was to suggest a new ethic - to develop awareness of one’s present flow of experience, to express this fully and accurately, and to listen to feedback. These "experiential" workshops were particularly well attended and did much to shape Esalen’s future course.
Read more about this topic: Esalen Institute
Famous quotes containing the words leaders and, leaders and/or programs:
“Unless the people can choose their leaders and rulers, and can revoke their choice at intervals long enough to test their measures by results, the government will be a tyranny exercised in the interests of whatever classes or castes or mobs or cliques have this choice.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Whether in the field of health, education or welfare, I have put my emphasis on preventive rather than curative programs and tried to influence our elaborate, costly and ill- co-ordinated welfare organizations in that direction. Unfortunately the momentum of social work is still directed toward compensating the victims of our society for its injustices rather than eliminating those injustices.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)