DESTINATIONS

You might expect there to be a big difference between enlightenment and a relaxing holiday. One usually involves a long painful inner journey and the other reading a Stieg Larsson book on a sun lounger. In California, pleasure and spiritual growth can be almost the same thing. I spent a week's road trip on a tour of spiritual sites of the sunshine state. My main stop-off was at the granddaddy of all retreats, the Esalen Institute, perched on cliffs halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The Esalen has been a non-profit-making outfit since its foundation in the 1960s. But almost every luxury hotel that offers a spa for 'mind, body and spirit' owes something to this small, basic retreat that pioneered the whole idea of massage as therapy rather than as a remedy for sports injuries or the thumping you got in Turkish baths. I've been fascinated by Esalen since the 1960s, a time when such intellectual luminaries as Hunter S Thompson and the mythologist Joseph Campbell were acolytes, and Aldous Huxley was a teacher. Now the Institute has become more about group therapy and body treatments than intellectual exploration, but its influence stretches far and wide. Many team-building and role-playing exercises now used by mainstream businesses had their roots with Esalen's pioneering 'encounter groups'.

I took the seven-hour drive north from Los Angeles. The journey is vertiginous — the Pacific Coast Highway stretches along some of the most dramatic cliffs in America — and arriving at Esalen, you are presented with a wild, vivid landscape. Not only is it set on high terraces, where you can watch whales, pelicans and seals, but it is carpeted with flower gardens and blessed with wild beaches and rugged hiking trails.

The rooms themselves are basic, simple log cabins with slanting roofs and skylights, but the atmosphere of the place — it supposedly inhabits a unique 'energy nexus' — has a cleansing and uplifting effect. There are also hot mineral springs perched on the cliff side, where swimsuits are discouraged. From the cosy communal restaurant, where a flyer advertised John Cleese appearing in a seminar entitled Survival of Bodily Death (Cleese is on the board of Esalen), I vaguely noted lithe, naked women moving silkily from hot pool to pool. It seemed ludicrously optimistic that they would allow a pot-bellied codger like me within 50 yards, but Esalen was one of the originators of the let-it-all-hang-out philosophy.

I was — ostensibly — here not for the pools but for Start Over: Choose Aliveness and Intimacy, one of the 400 courses that Esalen offers, run by veteran group leader Mary Goldenson. There were 30 participants, and we met in a circular building called the Yurt. As we spread around the edges like nervous suitors, Mary disconcerted me by picking on a couple of group members and taking a scalpel to their weaknesses and fears.

One member, who I will call Strawberry (another member introduced herself as Devon Cream) had 'self-esteem issues'. A second, Hank, thought he was a bad father. Mary in no time had given Strawberry a task — to walk up to four complete strangers that day and announce, 'I am a miracle.' Hank's task was to approach strangers and tell them he was a great father. Or a great husband. My reticent English blood ran cold.

I wanted out, but it was too late. Mary had us all join hands in a circle, asking us to choose a partner and 'go and get them'. I hesitated fatally and watched as everyone else zeroed in. I got Hector, a 60-something geezer, who, like me, no one else had wanted. I was back at the school disco, the lemon.

Mary worked her way around the group. There were cancer survivors here, divorcées, people who had lost everything. I felt immediately out of place because when Mary asked, 'Who wants to be happy?' I was the only one not to put my hand up.
'Why don't you want to be happy?' asked Mary firmly. 'Because wanting to be happy makes you miserable,' I replied lamely.

My initial reaction — the world-weary yawn — soon wore off. Everybody seemed to be having such positive experiences. The culmination of the five sessions arrived, when we again had to choose partners — two this time — and instead of Hector, the most beautiful woman in the room, Honey, chose me (unfortunately with her towering boyfriend, Carl, in tow).

We were instructed to start massaging one another. I found myself rubbing Carl's thighs and pulling his fingers and stroking Honey's temples and hair. Mary told us to look directly into one another's eyes — an extraordinarily intimate thing to do to a stranger. Within a few minutes, some group dynamic took over, and the room was full of tears and screaming, crying and wailing. Honey, rather charmingly, started to laugh uncontrollably.

'Laughing is defence,' barked Mary, reprovingly. However, when Carl and I got the full massage treatment and the instruction to 'speak the words that you never had the chance to say to those in your life who have gone', we both found ourselves in tears — though I am not sure what or who provoked the tears.

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