Michael Murphy, Co-Founder of the Esalen Institute
Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais
Dr. Michael Gervais
4.6 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 3 October 2018
⏱️ 135 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week’s conversation is with Michael Murphy, co-founder and chairman emeritus of the board of the world famous Esalen Institute, tucked away on the coast of Big Sur, in California.
Michael and Esalen have been ground zero for the human potential movement: exploring everything from consciousness, Eastern philosophies meeting Western frameworks, the birth place of Gestalt therapy, to generating scores of mind body interventions.
In 1950, Michael was a premed student at Stanford and wandered into a class discussing Eastern and Western philosophies and religions.
The miscue changed his life.
Soon he was meditating and, after earning a bachelor of arts in psychology and serving in the U.S. Army, he lived on an ashram in India for 18 months.
Upon returning to the United States, he and the late Richard Price started Esalen on property the Murphy family owned.
Over its 50-plus years of existence, it has been described as a “personal growth think tank.”
The organization is focused on personal growth, meditation, massage, ecology, yoga, psychology, spirituality — there was nothing quite like it at the time.
Michael is also an author.
His work includes:
· The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature, Golf in the Kingdom
· The Life We Are Given: A Long-Term Program for Realizing the Potential of Body, Mind, Heart, and Soul
· In the Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports
· An End to Ordinary History
It's a gift to laugh with him and learn from Michael, and I'm honored to share our conversation.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We have to respect the need in all of us at times for a time out. |
| 0:06.4 | Whether it's during the day or it's for on weekends or it's for sabbaticals, we have to learn to be skillful in living in the two worlds, |
| 0:19.8 | the world of being and the world of becoming. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I'm Michael Jervay and by Trade and Training, |
| 0:37.7 | I'm a Sport and Performance Psychologist and the co-founder of Compete to Create. |
| 0:43.0 | And the whole idea behind these conversations, |
| 0:44.8 | behind this podcast, is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery. |
| 0:48.8 | To better understand what they're searching for, |
| 0:51.9 | the deep stuff, the true stuff, their authentic path. |
| 0:55.6 | We want to understand their psychological framework, which is how they make sense of themselves |
| 0:59.2 | in the world and explain events, and then we also want to dig to understand the mental skills that they've used to build and refine their craft. |
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