Before setting out on the journey around the world, I came across the work of Shinichi Yoshifuku (1943–2013). After returning to Japan, I looked for more of his writing and found two volumes at a bookshop in Jimbōchō. Since what I want to set down has grown longer than expected, I will divide it over several pieces. This first one is mainly about the Esalen Institute and the environment around it.
Yoshifuku studied music in the United States, later turned to Eastern philosophy and Sanskrit, and through the people around him in those years — many of whom were meditating or taking part in therapy workshops — made his way to the Esalen Institute.
Esalen is known as the place where Ida Rolf, who developed Rolfing, taught her work. That the person who brought Ida Rolf to Esalen was Fritz Perls — the founder of Gestalt therapy, and one of the figures modeled in the development of NLP — is something I wrote about in “[Modality (1) — What Modality Means, and How It Is Used in Rolfing]”. As for NLP, another of those figures, Virginia Satir, also spent time at Esalen and helped bring the Czech clinician Stanislav Grof there.
Seen this way, thinking about NLP or about Rolfing seems to call for some knowledge of Esalen and of what was in the air at that time.
At Esalen, as a base for the Human Potential Movement, a range of experimental workshops was held. Tibetan Buddhism, Eastern disciplines, Vipassanā, and Sufism were taken in; Gestalt therapy and transpersonal psychology both trace their beginnings here. Among these, Zen gained recognition in the United States earlier than any of the other traditions of practice known in the East, and it left a considerable mark on American intellectual life — Steve Jobs among others.
Within the drug culture of the 1960s, musicians including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison lost their lives one after another around 1970. For psychology, however, the influence was not simply negative. Stanislav Grof, for instance, worked with LSD produced by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz in cases of mental illness — more than three thousand of them — until its use was prohibited in the United States in the 1960s. After moving to Esalen, through contact with Rolfing and with Gestalt therapy, he came to hold, together with Maslow, that a person is integrated into something beyond the self. He went on to establish methods for that integration, and from there to transpersonal psychology.
The Esalen Institute stands in a town called Big Sur, some 200 km from San Francisco. The name Esalen comes from the Esselen, the Native American people whose sacred ground lies nearby. That techniques and methods such as NLP and Rolfing came to maturity within this range of intellectual currents, and reach the present in that form, is of considerable interest.
Yoshifuku returned to Japan in 1974 after ten years abroad. As a translator, he was among the first to introduce the books of Ken Wilber, Fritjof Capra, and Stanislav Grof, and he reported on the state of the counterculture in the United States. As a result, he came to influence a great many of the figures who, in the 1980s, stood at the forefront of psychotherapy, bodywork, spirituality, ecology, and holistic medicine in Japan. He remained active until his death in 2013.
This piece has been mainly about the Esalen Institute. Next time I would like to introduce Yoshifuku’s thinking on what a therapist is, which I find of great interest.
Note, August 2026
This piece was written in May 2015, just after returning from the journey around the world. It reads what had been written about the Esalen Institute and sets that material in order. The position I occupied at the time was that of a reader.
What becomes clear eleven years later is that this place would come back through three entirely separate entrances.
The first was as testimony from someone who had been there. In November 2016 in Tokyo and in January 2017 in Seattle, I took part in Sharon Wheeler’s workshops. Sharon is one of the few Rolfers who learned directly from Ida Rolf at Esalen from around 1970, and she reproduces what she heard word for word. The Esalen she described overlapped with what is written here, and diverged from it at a decisive point.
This piece states that Fritz Perls brought Ida to Esalen. That much can be read in what has been written. What Sharon added came after it. Ida was invited by Perls, but she never left New York to settle there. And it was Ida herself who brought Moshe Feldenkrais to Esalen; the two were not at odds, and each received the other’s work. Esalen was founded by Dick Price and Michael Murphy, and the Murphy family bought the land. Michael’s original interest, she said, was in running a bookshop, and memories of a severe upbringing had left him with an aversion to the place. In the 1970s Joseph Campbell was among those who came and went.
Ida as the one invited remains in the written record. Ida as the one who invited others comes only from a person who was in the room.
The second entrance was through another teacher. In March 2017 I took part in Gael Rosewood’s workshop. Gael met Ida at Esalen in 1969 and trained alongside Sharon — two years after this piece was written. The Esalen treated here as a place inside books was, in fact, the place where the two people who would later teach me were both present. At the time of writing, I did not know that.
The third entrance came from a wholly different lineage. From 2024 onward, while working through the history of psychoactive substances and psychedelics, Esalen appeared again. In 1994, a meeting at Esalen led Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University to plan clinical research using psilocybin. Research that had been cut off by the regulation of 1970 resumed from there. It is the starting point of what is now called the renaissance in psychiatry.
And Stanislav Grof, who appears in this piece, joins the two lineages. Here he is written about as a clinician who arrived at transpersonal psychology through contact with Rolfing and with Gestalt therapy. Seen from the side of the history of psychedelics, he is the figure who carried out more than three thousand LSD psychotherapy cases and who later founded Holotropic Breathwork, producing comparable states of consciousness through breathing. The same person stands on both the road that uses a substance and the road that enters through the body.
Set out in this way, the guess offered at the end of this piece — that NLP influenced Rolfing in some form — can be revised. It is not a transmission of influence. It is simultaneity. Perls, Virginia Satir, Ida Rolf, Feldenkrais, Grof, and Campbell were all on the same ground during a span of a few years from the late 1960s into the early 1970s. What came out of it was Gestalt therapy, and NLP, and Rolfing, and Rolf Movement, and transpersonal psychology, and the psychedelic research that followed. None of them gave birth to another. One place sent out several separate things.