Over the Christ mas holy days, many came and went through the halls of Esalen. And as you might imagine more than a few of them were running away from their families specifically because of the traumas manifested throughout their lives on these important days. I remember being in the Lodge many times and hearing guests talk about how much they hated the holidays, thanksgiving and Christmas especially. They would talk about how their families came together every year only to hurt or get back at each other for things that happened the year or many years if not decades before, each one of them stuck in a recurring cycle of pain, and Esalen was their great escape from it all. It was a time I had never seen so many people gather to avoid their pain, instead of celebrating their freedom from it, perhaps they are one and the same. The bar was full of people and the alcohol flowed steadily. Conversations went on in ways I’m sure were the first of their kind, ones never allowed to be expressed while with their families, but were welcomed, desired even by those listening at Esalen.
Christmas is a time of mixed emotions for us all, carrying with it heavy baggage from multiple perspectives. But what is it really about? As with most things it depends on who you ask, and when you ask them. Esalen may be the place where the religion of no religion was coined, but that doesn’t stop people from expressing their views and beliefs while there. Some are very much in love with their Christian faith and share their passions with great love, others abandoned faith long ago, at least where God is concerned, choosing science as their savior and leaving Religion at the door. And too there are the many others who fall in the grey or uncelebrated areas of belief in between. But for me, Christmas is a time of release and renewal, a breaking point from the descent into the depths of shadow, rising again to meet the light.
Throughout my studies of all the major religions I have come to understand the relationships between important religious dates, and the astrological associations they coincide with. A field of study known as astrotheology. Christmas being a prime example of it. You see, the allegory of Christmas, that of Christ dying on the cross and being resurrected three days later, between the 23rd, 24th and 25th coincides with the earths Sun, “dying” meaning it no longer falls in degrees as it arcs through the sky, and on the third day is “resurrected” (starts rising again) and we begin our planetary journey back to spring (rebirth). Out of the stages of winter, (the darkness, death, subconscious, underworld, etc...) There are many scholars I greatly admire who have written extensively on this subject, such as Manly P Hall, Michael Tsarion and Jordan Maxwell, and I highly recommend their work.
At Esalen such deaths and rebirths happen daily, especially for those new to the land, the community, and the institute that Stewarts it. For myself these deaths and rebirths happened most frequently during the first few months there, but all told added up to some of the most profound and transformational experiences of my life. All of which were compounded by the fact that I was constantly surrounded by people sharing such revelations with me.
I remember being in the Big yurt below the Kindergarten (gazeebo school) during an ecstatic dance session a few days before Christmas, the dj asked us to imagine a world awakening to its own light, and to concentrate on that light growing within us and nothing else. To dance with all our might until we could no longer breath. During this exercise I had a mystical experience induced by physical movement and music alone, it was the first time I can remember going to that level of experience without Psychedelics or extreme dehydration and exhaustion mixed with oxygen deprivation, which is what happened the time I had climbed mount Shasta and seen thousands of tents that weren’t really there. During this dancing I remember meeting myself at several levels of awareness, reaching down to my hurt and scared self from a higher plane and pulling that version of me up to meet me in the clouds.
After this experience I walked away from the yurt in a trance, neither in my body nor out of it, but somewhere in between. The people I passed along the trail were like ghosts of myself, wearing the mantle of their lives like clothes I had yet to own, or those I had lost along roads long overgrown. The expressions of their pain and joy, hope and fear, written as swirling hieroglyphs within their auric fields, those usually hidden from sight, but in that moment, plain as day. It was during this release and renewal, the strongest thus far in my Esalen journey, that I was to glimpse the path I had set out to travel. It was there, on that holy land, during those holy days, I would first uncover my religious belief in my own story, and how I might escape it, to live free from those tales rooted in pain and anger…