Carsick, find the entrance from Rt. 1. You’ve been winding around the curves and telling yourself it’s gorgeous, it’s gorgeous, but you feel like hurling, and you’re overwhelmed with gratitude to see the rectangular wooden sign: ESALEN INSTITUTE.

Wind down through the evergreens, tall and broad. There’s eucalyptus too. It’s lush and foggy. Drive down towards the ocean, which is dotted at the coastline with large craggy black rocks.

 Trees laden with flowers. Grassy expanses with soul-seekers lying about in various states of repose. All of it against the backdrop of the thundering Pacific. Along the edge of the cliffs, more evergreens. Young woman practicing chi gong at the fence, gazing over the sea. It’s about 2:00 and it’s time to check in. The lodge contains the main office/bookstore. You go inside and tell them what you’re here for. “You’re in the artist’s yurt,” they tell you. Lots of books about yoga, diet, right livelihood, psychology, and the arts, poetry, meditation, Being Here Now. Your son, almost four, takes a liking to a folding hairbrush, which he promptly takes apart, so you buy it for him, although he has a buzz cut, almost no hair.

You stroll down past the pool, the intricate ironwork of the fence around it, the gates. The lamps have shades that push up like flower petals around the large round bulb, with words cut out of them, names and words, interesting curvy latches on the fences. On the patio outside the lodge is a magnificent iron firescreen, obviously made by hand by an artist-in-residence.

 Down to the fence overlooking the cliffs. The coastline is jagged in both directions. Kelp waves back and forth, a dense kelp forest. Is that an otter? No…driftwood. Is that a whale? No, just a wave breaking over a massive boulder. Just? You do see one whale during your visit and a few otters playing. Later, a friend who was a work scholar for a year and a half tells you that she worked in the gardens, and they’d meet before dawn, when they often could hear the whales breaching and their tails smacking the water.

Look down to the left, down the coast towards home, and see the famous hot sulfur spring tubs, down a steep path, the tubs jutting out over the cliffs, special fences designed to catch anyone who falls over the edge. Worry about the fact that although the tubs are “clothing optional,” every single person you see down there is naked as a jaybird. Steel yourself to the idea that you will soon be joining them.

 On the roof of the tub area, massage tables, with massages being given around the clock. But before you go down there, you have to get back in the car and drive around to your room. So, off you go. The property spools along the space between Rt. 1 and the water. You drive down a one-lane road and park, grab your stuff. There’s the Creative Arts building where you can go paint and putter if the mood strikes. There’s the Dance Dome, a white puffball of a structure at the cliff’s edge. There’s the Gazebo School, with the farm yard on the Rt. 1 side of the lane and the farmhouse with its toys and office built into an ancient converted school bus, goats (nanny, pappa, baby) all tethered out under the arms of a wizened old oak tree to graze.

Wooden yurts are scattered along the hillside. The Artist’s Yurt is small but comfortable. Sitting on the patio you have a clear view of the ocean. You can hear it from the room. Those enlightened front-desk people forgot to give you your keys, though, so you leave your stuff in the car and walk down to the school. Your son says hi to the teachers and pokes around in the farm yard: mud pits, toy trucks, punching bags, dress-up theater, playhouses, Big Wheels, two pigs and a whole bunch of chickens in a fenced-in pen, vegetable gardens, flowers. The teachers are level, peaceful, calm, full of life and breath. They look the children in the eyes, talk to them in quiet voices. Your son is quickly mesmerized.

 You stroll down the lane, pass the Big House, which has more traditional architecture, less funky than the other structures on the property, with meeting rooms, big kitchen, and sleeping rooms, which you later find is built on a native American burial ground. Next to it, an open grassy yard, a steep trail down to the beach, which is mostly rocks and tidepools and piles of kelp. The Big House is where your workshop starts at 8:30 pm. Keep walking. All around you soar trees, the evergreens most striking…flowering trees…little cairns built on a broad tree stump. The lane becomes a trail, which becomes a narrow wooden bridge over a burbling creek that smells like sulfur, which dances back and forth in the rocky, mossy creek bed. The air is moist. Trails run down to the creek and off into the forest. Kelp, fog, sulfur. Your lungs open up. Look at that passionflower vine, dotted with vermilion flowers five inches across.

 Below, there’s the meditation room, a cylindrical hut with a great big window facing downstream towards the ocean. Later, when you cross the bridge again, you’ll see bats flitting back and forth above the stream’s water.

A steep hill to the lodge and gardens. The vegetable gardens cover an expanse of 50 yards, rows of lettuces, kale, herbs, chard. Lots of snails and slugs, but the plants seem to be doing just fine. More beautiful ironwork: gates and fences. It’s hidden here and there, peeking out from paths that disappear into the trees. Lovely petite chickens and a matching rooster peck and scratch beneath a movable coop. A statue of a woman’s torso, painted the same vermilion as the passionflowers, soars up out of one patch of garden.

 One chicken has escaped. A tall, lanky, beautiful 20-something man in a knit cap that doesn’t quite cover his curls slowly approaches the escapee, gazing down at it, his arms relaxed at his sides.

At the top of the lawn by the lodge, where you’ll have dinner, there is another sculpture: a hollow sphere about 20 feet in diameter and height made of intertwined tree branches, about 20 feet tall; a circular opening in its front lets through a ladder, painted brightly with stripes of many colors. Your son wants to climb the ladder, but it doesn’t look like it’s for climbing. You go into the lodge and grab a coffee and some bread and butter at the bread bar, stroll out and down the long, wide path to the tubs.

 The first time in, you leave your underwear on. The bathrooms and changing rooms are unisex, of course, and you’re expected to walk in there on the flagstones and drop trou and take a shower in a wide-open solarium, overlooking the ocean, cool breezes coming in as you scrub off in the hot spray. Your son says, “But I don’t have my bayding suit!” and you tell him, “You don’t have to wear one here,” and about four seconds later he’s nude, dashing around happily, his beautiful strong little body catching the kelp-scented breeze.

Soon it seems quite normal to have all the permutations of human nudity strolling by you, the breasts and nipples and bellies and butts and pubic hair and tattoos and cellulite and scars and fur and penises and testicles all melting together into a comforting easefulness. Everyone’s naked, everyone’s chatting, breathing, gazing at the sea, and you get the reason why it’s like this. It’s so NOT lascivious, so NOT sexual. It really does feel great to be naked and surrounded by naked. It’s…healthy. Everyone is respectful of everyone else. It brings out a respectfulness you haven’t seen before.

 And the tubs! The water. It’s 118 degrees as it comes out of the spigots, straight from the hot springs. It’s cooled to various degrees in different tubs. You can choose a clawfoot tub if you prefer your own space, or a communal tub, in the shade or in the sun. The water stinks, but in a good way; it makes your skin slippery and supple and immediately turns silver jewelry coal-black.

Once you’re thoroughly soaked and relaxed, it’s back on with your clothes. You take a cooling dip in the big pool – no underwear this time, swimming naked is really so superior to wearing a bathing suit – after hiking back up the long hill, which energizes you again, and you go in to dinner…yum, pizza. A long salad bar. Artichokes. The lodge is all dark wood inside. Your son eats two giant slices of pizza. You can buy wine and beer if you like but there’s no soda, no sweets. Coolers with iced herbal tea. All the milk your son can drink. They compost all the leftover food, the paper products. You eat too much and head to the workshop smelling like garlic. First you drop your son at Gazebo. You’re nervous about his willingness to stay there without you, anticipating a scene, but after a few minutes playing with Sam, a gentle quiet soul who’s into Gestalt therapy and letting children teach themselves, he looks up at you and his dad and says, “Okay…you can go now.” And you go and start your workshop.

There are 32 people there. Big pillows and floor-chairs for sitting on. People arrive and make nests for themselves. Couples and singles, ranging in age from mid-20s to 70s, mostly looking at each other with curiosity. The leader is a 60-something psychologist who you immediately judge for obviously having had extensive plastic surgery. You paid a lot of money to come here, though, so you decide to remain non-judgmental and hear her out.

 And when you do, she makes an enormous amount of sense, and you’re right in there, growing and having insights and feeling your pain and finding new ways to be happy and connected, watching others do the same, even though a part of you stands back and looks around and judges the whole process: “oooh, that guy’s a workshop junkie.” There’s the therapist matriarch from Watsonville and her two daughters and her husband. She knits nonstop through the whole workshop and wears a shirt that says, “Who would you be without your story?” and has a lot to say, many stories to tell, stories that define her, and you go from thinking she’s an opinionated loudmouth to respecting her for being a strong woman who knows herself well – flaws and strengths both.

A young couple in attendance raises your hackles. She has a really loud booming voice and she’s all hostile and keeps getting up and going out and coming back in, and he has this hick-ful accent and whenever he says something it’s followed by this “heh-heh, heh-heh” bit of breathy laughter. What are they doing here?  Are they high? They show up only sporadically and no one wants to sit next to them. There are new couples who rub each other a lot. One older couple has been married 40-plus years but live on opposite coasts.

At one point a man appears at the door. He’s wearing a sarong around his waist, a T-shirt, beads, a newsboy cap, white socks, and flip-flops, and his sarong has become tucked up into his brilliantly white jockey shorts in the front, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He spiels about the sweatlodge going on and the people are going to use the bathroom in the big house and he wants to make sure to respect your privacy and do you want to close the door? You and your fellow participants decide to leave it open.

Pick up your sleeping child at 11-something, stagger back to the yurt and fall asleep.

Saturday there are four workshop sessions, two-plus hours each. You buy the workshop leader’s book, drop the kid off, workshop, pick the kid up, eat, soak, drop the kid off, workshop again, eat again, soak again. You develop relationships in the workshop, based not on what people do for work or their socioeconomic standing or whether they have kids but on what you see of the deep open heartful core of them. People’s faces and bodies relax and open. They identify their defenses and have conversations with them. People start to glow. They cry. They express anger they didn’t know they had. Others hold them.

On Sunday you go to yoga early in the morning, before breakfast. It’s brilliantly sunny and cold as you pick your way down the trail. The teacher is British and tells you to “bloom your bottom” in down dog and does this great supported backbend with a block under the sacrum, feet and shoulders on the floor. She tells us she’s been married one month. Her husband, ponytailed, with two earrings in each ear, assists in the class. You purposefully put your mat where you can’t see the mirror.

The ocean’s always right there. Young people, work scholars who live and work there, are always right there. Massage therapists on the staff exchange massages, rubbing sunscreen on their naked selves with slow methodical strokes.

You have oatmeal and yogurt and more coffee. There’s one workshop session later in the morning. Three people have birthdays and the rest of you pick them up and rock them up in the air while singing the happy birthday song. One man, 50-something with an air of boyish wonder, a magnetic soul, is lifted to within six inches of the ceiling and everyone laughs. An estranged mother and daughter work on their issues in front of everyone and by the end of it half the room is crying and the tissue boxes are going around and at the end the two hug, both sobbing, every woman in there seeing herself and her mother or herself and her daughter up there, and the workshop leader says, “Come on, we need some mothers up here,” and ten or so women jump up and gather around in a big hug, all these mothers and daughters, you included, all this uterine gravity and its centrifugal force concentrated. You lean your head into the circle and hold on, laughing and crying.

Then, too soon, it’s time to go. You hug goodbye and exchange contact information with people you connected with the most. Your son says, “But this is better than home!” and you agree. In the dining hall there’s one more meal and you talk with a couple from LA who you plan to get together with, they have kids the same age as you, he’s a TV writer and she has worked at the Getty, and they’re just so open and relaxed and flawed and okay with it and nice together. One more soak in the tubs and a shower and it’s over.

You fantasize about living there; you wish you’d known about this place when you were 20, done the work scholar thing when you were still young enough and unencumbered enough.

On the way home it’s highways and fast food. You stop in Morro Bay and look around and decide that you like the people at Esalen better than regular people.