Ellen Watson: My Esalen Was A Graduate School of Universal Consciousness

When Ellen Watson first arrived at Esalen in the summer of 1984, she expected to stay for a few months. Instead, she remained onsite for more than two decades, engaging in an immersion in the practices, teachers, and experiments that helped define Esalen during one of its most fertile eras. She has remained associated with Esalen, teaching programs and training bodyworkers and teachers of bodywork. In this episode, Ellen remembers studying Holotropic Breathwork with Stanislav Grof, Gestalt practice, Continuum with Emily Conrad, Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms, singing Gestalt, yoga, massage, hands-on healing, and a range of spiritual and psychological traditions. Ellen also recalls her friendships and encounters with figures including Terence McKenna and Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast, and speaks candidly about her experiences with psychedelics during a period when these substances remained closely connected to a larger culture of inquiry into consciousness, healing, and transformation. Throughout the conversation, Ellen describes Esalen as a kind of “unaccredited graduate school”, a place where psychology, spirituality, movement, breath, touch, music, and altered or “non-ordinary” states of consciousness were allowed to inform one another.