A woman sitting on a rock on the cliffs overlooking an ocean playing a wooden flute at the Esalen Institute in 1987. Photo by Matthew Naythons/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty.
With the discovery of penicillin and other antibiotics in the early 20th century, many illnesses that had been linked to retreats began to be treated medically. By World War II, Melzer explains, health-care sanatoriums all but vanished from the landscape. But with the growing interest in alternative wellness modalities in the 1970s, a new kind of sanatorium emerged: the holistic retreat. The Esalen Institute, founded in 1962, was at the vanguard of this movement, and now stands as one of the most renowned—and most expensive—wellness retreats in America.Esalen is located in Big Sur, on the site of hot springs where visitors can bathe overlooking magnificent Pacific shoreline cliffs. It was founded by Dick Price and Michael Murphy, two young Stanford graduates from wealthy families. In a recent article about Esalen in The New Yorker, Murphy (now 88) told journalist Andrew Marantz, “Our whole intention was, and still is, to allow people to get out of their inherited orthodoxies and into the business of discovering truth.”Esalen remains at the forefront of the wellness movement, incorporating programming that critically engages with technology use and progress. But this level of discourse isn’t for everyone—retreats at Esalen start at around $400 for a weekend (if you bring your own sleeping bag), and range up to around $10,000 for a week.As the “retreat” concept has extended its goal-driven structure into our precious remaining leisure and vacation time, we are clearly leaning away, and even afraid to engage with, any activity that is simply supposed to be fun and pointless, an end in and of itself.
New Life Hiking Spa guests take on an intermediate trail, one of 21 different hikes the spa offers. Photo by Stan Grossfeld/The Boston Globe via Getty.
Among people for whom taking time off is hard, retreats can assuage guilt. “Retreats, even when they’re really relaxing, can make you feel that you’re being productive in some way,” said Petersen.During one of our hikes, a woman from Houston who was at New Life with her childhood best friend told me they try to take a trip together every few years, but planning a vacation by oneself can be a lot of work—and then, what if it ends up being a bust? There’s a lot of pressure. “We want to go somewhere and basically not have to think, at all,” she said.Conventional wisdom maintains that vacation is a time to cease working. But increasingly, people use vacations as an opportunity to work on themselves.
