Wade’s Weekly: Nov. 24, 2010

Contents:
--"Esalen Celebrates Dick Price"
--Frankly Quoted
--Editor's Note

Esalen Celebrates Dick Price
By Wade Hudson
On the evening of November 17, an overflow crowd of 150 people crammed into a meeting hall at Esalen Institute, the fountainhead of the human potential movement, to celebrate the life and work of its publicity-shy co-founder, Dick Price, twenty-five years after his sudden death. Former friends and colleagues from as far away as Germany came to participate in the event at “God’s Little Half-Acre” on the Big Sur Coast.

As the only person to have recorded an interview with Dick about himself for publication (an excerpt was published in the Esalen catalog), I was a featured speaker. Presenting my remarks proved to be more difficult than I expected. Two or three times I broke down crying. At one point, I wondered if I could finish.

When Chris Price, his former partner, introduced me, she described the abuse that Dick had received while locked up in a mental hospital in the 1950s, when he was subjected to electroshock and insulin coma treatments five days a week for twelve weeks. She then explained that he and I held a common interest in alternatives to psychiatry and referred to my interview.

I began by saying that since “Dick didn’t do publicity” I felt deeply honored that he had allowed me to interview him and hoped that some day his thoughts would gain wider distribution. I then said:

Concerning his experience in the institution, he told me:

Rather than seeing someone through a particular type of experience, [those treatments] were an effort to suppress and negate in every possible way what I was going through. There was a fundamental mistake being made and that mistake was supposing that the healing process was the disease, rather than the process whereby the disease is healed. The disease, if any, was the state previous to the “psychosis.” The so-called psychosis was an attempt toward spontaneous healing, and it was a movement toward health, not a movement toward disease. (It was the power of those words that prompted me to crack up.)

His experience led him to co-found Esalen with a strong personal commitment to finding alternative ways to respond to altered states of consciousness.

When I asked him, “What would have been helpful for you at that time?” he replied:

Well, a space like Esalen, where it’s possible to be outside and not locked up, a place where it's possible to get a good diet, a place where it's possible to live through experience rather than having it blotted out, a place where there aren't the same negative self-definitions of someone going through this type of experience. Also, people available who are not doing what psychiatrists, or at least many of them, characteristically do.

In 1968, Dick’s dedication led Esalen to convene a series of workshops and seminars entitled “The Value of Psychotic Experience” that were designed to integrate and extend the theories of John Perry, R. D. Laing, Fritz Perls, and others.

The next year, in a nearby California State mental hospital, Esalen launched the Agnews Project, a three-year study of drug-free alternative approaches.

Two years later, Loren Mosher launched the Soteria Research Project, also in San Jose, an alternative, drug-free residential community for individuals who would have otherwise been institutionalized.

These efforts likely helped John Perry obtain city funding for Diabysis House in San Francisco, another psychosocial rehabilitation community.

In 1973, Esalen convened in San Francisco a remarkable conference titled “Spiritual and Therapeutic Tyranny: The Willingness to Submit.”

In 1976, Stan Grof and Joan Halifax-Grof with many prominent faculty led a month-long seminar at Esalen on "Schizophrenia and the Visionary Mind."

In 1980, Stan and Christina Grof founded the Spiritual Emergence Network, with Esalen sponsorship, and developed a referral and information network with a worldwide presence and thousands of members.

From 1981-88, Larry Telles convened seven invitational conferences at Esalen on "Alternatives to Institutional Psychiatric Treatment.”

In the mid-1980s, some associates and I obtained a half-million dollar contract for the Tenderloin Self-Help Center in San Francisco. Esalen helped train the staff for that program.

And from the time that Dick and I first met in 1973 at the Network Against Psychiatric Assault, my colleagues and I many times accepted his invitation to visit Esalen and participate in workshops free of charge at any time.

In all of these ways, Dick pursued his original mission with remarkable vigor and great impact.

While preparing these remarks, I discovered in the Schizophrenia Bulletin a review of studies on the Soteria method. That report concludes: “Interest in this approach is growing in the United Kingdom, several European countries, North America, and Australasia…. The studies included in this review suggest that the Soteria paradigm yields equal, and in certain specific areas, better results….”

This instance and the workshop that our friends from Contra Costa County will hold here in December are only some of the many ways that the work of Dick Price lives on.

As I left the microphone, Chris tapped me on the shoulder and we embraced for a long time, with me sobbing in her arms. Afterward, numerous people approached me, expressed their appreciation for what I had to say, and discussed related issues.

My presentation was only one of many emotional moments during the celebration, which began at 2 pm with early arrivals joining a weeklong Gestalt Practice workshop led by Chris Price and two associates. This group of thirty or so introduced themselves by recalling special moments with Dick.

One such report was by Rick Tarnas, who talked about when R.D. Laing turned up for his Esalen workshop on an alcoholic binge. Once, when Laing was very late for a session, Dick invited two of my associates and me to join him at the front of the room to lead a discussion. While Dick was talking, Laing walked behind him and poured champagne on his head. Without moving, Dick responded, “John the Baptist,” which reflected not only his quick wit but also his ability to stay centered.

After a break, we gathered on the lawn in front of the office, where some other members of the Esalen community joined us to walk down to the meditation house by the creek where a bronze plaque reads:

Tao follows the Way of the Watercourse
As the Heart Mind through Meditation
Returns to the Sea
In Memory of Richard Price
Behind the house, there is a Chinese ting, a large brass bowl, which is a sacred vessel used to cook food for offering to the spirits and ancestors. Symbolically it is created to contain a process of transformation and refinement. One by one, we lit candles and placed them to float on the water in the ting.

The participants were then invited to share tea and socialize in the nearby house where Dick and Chris had lived, after which we gathered in the front yard to witness Chris rededicate a long wooden staff onto which she and others had attached items of symbolic significance. The erect staff was secured with a piece of the large rock that had apparently killed Dick in an avalanche while he was hiking in the mountains nearby.

During the evening presentations, Steve Harper spoke vividly about his many hikes with Dick in the Big Sur wilderness. Steve reported that Dick was fearless, often darting off the trail into unknown territory to lead them into fascinating new regions. In combination with soil erosion from a recent major fire, this audacity likely contributed to his death when a falling boulder hit him.

Esalen had barely escaped the fire, but the water line had been damaged and Dick became immersed in the messy repair of the line. One speaker voiced his belief that Dick had gone into the mountains to check on the water line.

Many speakers told touching stories of their encounters with Dick. Some of those accounts particularly stick with me.

Michael Murphy, Esalen’s other co-founder, described Dick as “free from status” and reported on his long, unbroken partnership with Dick. “Over the years, many people tried to get between Dick and me,” he said. “One thing stands out about those people. No one remembers their names, because Dick and I took care of the family business.” Murphy then told the crowd that the governing board had decided to rename the house where Dick and Chris had lived and presented Chris with a sign pointing to the “Price House.”

Another former staff person reflected on how during budgeting sessions, Dick, who inherited some money, always placed zero in the space for his salary. Numerous others commented on his generosity. And many individuals, including the Governor-elect of Minnesota, Mark Dayton, who sent a touching letter that Chris read, reflected on the joy and benefit they experienced working with him in Gestalt Practice sessions.

One aspect of his life not addressed at the celebration was that he was keenly interested in politics, which we often discussed. He (and Chris) very much enjoyed the audiotapes of contemporary acoustic music, much of which contained social commentary, that I would bring or mail to them. .

The one thing about Dick that most amazes me, however, is that never once did he mention to me that he conducted Gestalt workshops, much less that he was Esalen’s principal Gestalt teacher. During my visits, Dick and I would engage in long, energizing conversations, usually over a meal, but it took me at least a few years to discover that Gestalt Practice, as he named it, was a major part of his life. I assume he just didn’t care to evangelize.

I had observed the founder of Gestalt Therapy, Fritz Perls, conduct “open seat” sessions and respected his basic methodology. And having participated in Esalen workshops in San Francisco, I greatly appreciated Esalen’s many innovations in bodywork, meditation, sensory awareness, spirituality, group dynamics, and many other fields.

But when I started visiting Esalen as Dick’s guest, I hardly glanced at the catalog of workshops. Soaking in the tubs on top of the cliff, eating their marvelous food, reading, socializing, and just relaxing was all I needed. As soon as I found out, however, that he led Gestalt groups, I began participating and found them to be immensely valuable.

I suspect that Dick’s extensive, deep work with Gestalt probably helped him become remarkably free of bitterness and anger about his encounters with psychiatry. One of the features of Gestalt Practice is role-playing that involves imaginatively sitting in the other person’s seat and articulating that person’s thoughts and feelings. Getting more deeply into that person’s reality in that way often results in a new understanding that dissolves resentment. Regardless, as a speaker at the celebration commented on, his lack of bitterness was remarkable.

In our time of great social discord, I suspect there is much we could learn from Dick Price. Maybe I should go find an “open seat” and dialogue with him.

+++

Frankly Quoted

Net domestic profits earned by U.S. corporations since the fourth quarter of 2008: $609,000,000,000. Net decrease since then in the amount these companies spent on wages and benefits: -$171,000,000,000.
--Harper’s Index
(From Leonard Roy Frank’s monthly column. To subscribe, email <lfrank AT igc DOT org>.)

Editor’s Note

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