Esalen Archives
photographs from Esalen in the 1960s
by Pam Portugal Walatka
My Esalen Story, in a Nutshell
© Pam Portugal Walatka
Other work by the author of this page
A long time ago when I was 24 I was dis-integrated. I could not get healthy. My mind was at war with my body. I had been writing papers about meditation and expanded consciousness, but did not actually know how to meditate, and my daily consciousness was stuck in retro.
On May 8th, 1967, the spring leading into the Summer of Love, I moved to Esalen, and started to learn about breathing, emotional honesty, meditation, and awareness.
I remember taking a Bio-energetics class outside on the deck that spring. The teacher had us doing the cobra pose--lying face down on the deck, then pushing up with our arms while bending back, stretching in front. I noticed that I could bend back more than anybody else. When the teacher came around, I expected to be complimented on my flexibility. Instead, he said, "You are not breathing."
Not breathing! What? He said, "You are holding your breath." Sure enough, I was. For years I had had a vague sense of suffocating, without knowing I could change my breathing. I had been holding my torso frozen tight. That moment of the teacher telling me to take a deep breath was a pivotal point in my life. I turned myself around.
Esalen taught me how to thrive. My health has been excellent since I learned how to pay attention to current reality, inside and out.
Stretching helped too. My flexibility led to a job as Esalen�s first yoga teacher in 1968. I was just a side-show; yoga had not yet become central to the curriculum. For me, the physical work of yoga got my mind, body, and spirit yoked together.
I felt at home on Esalen's amazing grounds and put down roots. I planted the organic garden that inspired Dick Horan to start the Esalen kitchen garden.
I lived at Esalen for three years, with Will Schutz, as part of the Flying Circus, a team of group leaders. In 1970, I left Esalen to get away from Will, worked for San Francisco Esalen for a while, then dropped out to finish writing my book, A Place for Human Beings, and became a wandering hippie named RainBear. In the 70s I wandered in and out of Esalen but did not take root again (nor did I shoot any pictures). In the 1980s I settled down in the San Francisco Bay Area, got married, had a kid, and returned to nearly-normal life.
I still practice my Esalen lessons daily.
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