Staff Week is traditionally a time for the Esalen community to reflect. Esalen executives and administrators have largely dismissed the role of community process as an adjunct to decision making. But as these leaders sadly lose sight of what makes Esalen truly unique and sacred, the wisdom of the broad community is more crucial to the institute’s progress than perhaps ever before.

It is sometimes noted that Michael Murphy’s philosophies gained a critical foothold on the printed page, while Dick Price’s mostly unwritten wisdom relied on attentive and active listening in the moment to be received. Esalen’s decision makers have exhibited deepening deficits in hearing the broader community’s voice for years. Thus, Staff Week 2011 must be a time not only for direct communication like Dick, but for writing like Michael.

Please consider writing for Esaleaks during this Staff Week. Written words that transcend the speaker, and build a bridge to many readers, become durable monuments and guideposts, to be read and re-visited in many different moments, as we attempt to plot a sacred and successful path for our beloved Esalen. We call on you — erudite staff, rebellious trustees, worldwide adepts — to write! In gratitude,

The Nine

Esaleaks welcomes all types of raw data that might assist in understanding Esalen’s inner business workings. On that note, we present Esalen’s complete 2009 tax return, with thanks to our contributors.

Esaleaks now offers a web-based file upload page here.

It can be accessed using the Anonymouse anonymizer here.

Esaleaks invites for publication a copy of the new Esalen Employee Manual.

Esaleaks.org would like to publish the results of the Esalen Spring 2011 Leadership Survey. As you may know, the survey results reflected poorly on management and morale. To protect the status quo, the results were suppressed by management. If you have access to these documents, we invite you to leak them anonymously to Esaleaks for the benefit of all.

Several potential contributors have expressed concerns about our trustworthiness. You needn’t trust us in order to protect your anonymity. When emailing Esaleaks, consider using an anonymizer such as Anonymouse. There are many ways to protect your identity when contacting us. We encourage you to research and choose your own.

A reader asks:

“Will you be filtering and editing contributions?”

We hope to take a mainly passive approach to editorship, while preventing a total degeneration into strings of reactionary rebuttals (as many online forums become), perverse trifling (as many Esalen Community Meetings become), and politicking which masquerades grotesquely as news or intelligent argument (as most authoritarians, including The Nine, are prone to compulsively utter).

We eagerly await your contribution.

The Nine

Esalen Institute is dear to us. It is sadly in the midst of a decline brought about by the high-handed imposition of deeply flawed new doctrine. The Nine and Esaleaks.org invite you to contribute your anonymous voice to our web site — in describing the current situation at Esalen, offering ways to honor and restore Esalen’s true value, uncovering the negative forces currently at work, and organizing real action to place Esalen back in the hands of true seekers.

Please read our first article, Speak Without Fear, and then contribute your own words to this chorus of voices campaigning for the soul of Esalen.

Esalen Institute is in a time of crisis. Those who know the Institute’s legacy of transformation — who have experienced it and transformed themselves — see the power of the land turning barren under the heavy hand of flawed new business and social ideologies. The result has been an Esalen which is losing its meaning — less experimental, less tolerant, less able to stir the pond of new visions that has been its life blood.

The great language of Gestalt has itself been subverted to quell those who question, a communications off-switch masquerading cynically as supposed hearing. The magnetism of the Esselen land itself is abused by the powerful, who threaten to swiftly replace those who take our traditions of experimention seriously. We see a community of seekers, with great wisdom and desire, afraid to express themselves fully, lest they be forced prematurely from their Esalen path by powerful outsiders. This situation cannot continue.

The Nine are a group of thriving disembodied souls who love Esalen and enjoy it in eternity. The Nine once held sway over the Institute, and are compelled once again to offer their wisdom and beneficial perturbations. The Nine offers through Esaleaks.org an anonymous voice for Esalen seekers, to do what Community Meetings cannot — create a place of spoken truth without fear, honoring of the great and wild Esalen spirit.

The Nine invites you to contribute your voice in describing the current situation at Esalen and offering ways to honor and restore its true value.

The Nine invites you to expose the hidden agendas, double standards, corporate conformity, wasteful spending, misinformation, and cynical management which are destroying Esalen Institute.

The Nine invites you to propose action to place Esalen back into the hands of genuine seekers before 2013.

To learn how to speak anonymously through the voice of Esaleaks.org, while minimizing your personal risk, please read How to Contribute.

And please spread the word.

Thank you.

The Nine