April / May 2005

George Burr Leonard

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Interview with
GEORGE LEONARD

— Kathleen E. Erickson

When I went to interview George Leonard, I found a Renaissance
man, a humanist thinker, a Southern gentleman, and a walking
(tall) testament to somatic practice. He was full of grace and
energy and health and happiness, and every moment in his
company was a pleasure. I asked him about his life and work and
about somatics, including such questions as: When did you get
interested in somatics? Who were your mentors? What led you on
to integral psychology? How do you define somatics? What is its future?

After serving as a pilot in the Pacific during World War II (first as an air training instructor and then as a combat pilot for the Army Air Corps) and then in military intelligence in the Korean War, I served as a senior editor for Look Magazine from 1953 to 1970— seventeen wonderful years. In Look’s unique system, the senior editors carried through a story from inception to publication, including idea, research, planning, reportage, picture selection, layout, writing, and fact-checking—with a maximum of freedom and a maximum of accountability at every step along the way. Other major magazines of the time used the production line system, with different people taking specialized roles [as is true today].

George earned his undergraduate degree in English and Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and honorary Doctor of Humanities degrees from Lewis and Clark College, John F. Kennedy University, and Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center. While at Look, he won an unprecedented number of awards, for education articles. During the 1960s, he traveled through the South to report on the Civil Rights Crisis and was literally chased out of Alabama.

I was a writer for Esquire for 10 years, and every May would do the Ultimate Fitness series of 20 to 40 pages. The later book Mastery came out of that (see summary on page 17).

George also wrote for Harper’s Review, The Atlantic Monthly, New York magazine, Saturday Review, and The Nation.

When I met Michael Murphy, that changed my life.

GEORGE LEONARD’S PUBLICATIONS EDUCATION AND ECSTASY: With “The Great School Reform Hoax”, Delacorte Press, 1968, North Atlantic Books, 1976, 1987. INSPIRING WORDS FROM THE LIFE WE ARE GIVEN (CD), George Leonard & Michael Murphy, 1995. MASTERY: The Keys to Long-Term Success and Fulfillment, Dutton 1991; Plume, 1992. MASTERY (audiotape), George Leonard, 1995. SHOULDER THE SKY, McDowell-Obolensky, 1958. THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN MALE, with William Attwood and J. Robert Moskin, Random House, 1958. THE END OF SEX: Erotic Love After the Sexual Revolution, J. P. Tarcher, Inc., 1983; Bantam, 1984. THE LIFE WE ARE GIVEN: A Long-Term Program for Realizing the Potential of Body, Mind, Heart, and Soul (Inner Work Book), with Michael Murphy, Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1995. THE MAN & WOMAN THING—And Other Provocations, Delacorte Press, 1970. THE SILENT PULSE: A Search for the Perfect Rhythm that Exists in Each of Us, Dutton, 1978. THE TAO OF PRACTICE—Exercises and Imagings for the Body, Mind, Heart, and Soul, DVD, George Leonard, 1995. THE TRANSFORMATION—A Guide to the Inevitable Changes in Humankind, Delacorte, 1972; Bantam, Doubleday, Dell, 1973. THE ULTIMATE ATHLETE: Revisioning Sports, Physical Education, and the Body, Viking Press, 1975, NorthAtlantic Books, 1990, 2000. THE WAY OF AIKIDO: Life Lessons from an American Sensei, Dutton, 1999; Plume, 2000. WALKING ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: A Memoir of the Sixties and Beyond, Houghton Mifflin, 1988. Integral Transformative Practice: www.itp-life.com

ESALEN INSTITUTE

I’ve been deeply interested in somatics since I first became involved in Esalen—which was on February 2, 1965, the date of my first meeting with Michael Murphy. Two weeks after that, I visited Esalen and had sensory awareness sessions with Bernie Gunther and a shiatsu session with Giafu Feng. Over the years since then, I’ve gone through a full session of Rolfing, have worked with the incomparable dancer Anna Halprin and charming tai chi master Al Huang, co-leading sessions with each of them that involve somatic awareness at large-scale conferences—500 to 1500 participants all moving together in a hotel ballroom. I dined with Moshe Feldenkrais when he first came to the U.S. in 1970, and became friends with the late Tom Hanna. I was involved at the historic 1987 invited conference at Esalen on “The Biological, Psychological, and Cultural Body: Methods of Transformation,” which was convened by Don Hanlon Johnson, always an inspiration to me. I have given keynote addresses for both the Rolf Institute and Somatics Annual Conference.

People don’t know what Esalen is and what it does. It’s been a great experiment in education and sustainability for 40 years.

Esalen brought Boris Yeltsin to the U.S. in 1989 (which effectively helped to end the Cold War) and arranged for his meetings with President Bush and former President Reagan. When Yeltsin visited Houston, and saw all the food in the supermarkets there, he exclaimed: “They lied to us about the food prosperity in the U.S. They said only the stores on the coasts were full of food. They lied to us.” He was quite torn up about it, and it was a turning point for him.

Jeff Kripal, a brilliant scholar and professor of religious studies at Rice University is writing the definitive book on Esalen Institute for the University of Chicago Press. It’s slated as their big trade book of 2006. I’ve read some early drafts, and it is truly marvelous—both scholarly and anecdotal. It will change many people’s ideas about Esalen. One of many things it will include will be about one of Esalen’s many invited conferences now under way: “Survival of Bodily Death.”

For a summary of the accomplishments of the Esalen Institute, go to www.esalen.org and look at the Esalen Initiatives page. It’s also a “Who’s Who of AHP.”

ASSOCIATION FOR HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY

When I was President of AHP in 1979, the first thing I did was to initiate a membership drive, and membership went up by 27% in one year. How did we do it? We focused on it. When I ended my tenure, we were at 6600 members. [AHP currently has about 2000 members.] I worked a half day every Tuesday afternoon in the AHP Office during my presidency. Before that, AHP presidents were more ornamental. It’s not even [just] what you do, but who you are. We had Carol Guion doing the AHP Newsletter and her vision. We worked on environmental policy. AHP even dreamed of having a part-time lobbyist in Washington.

During that time, I corresponded with President Carter about energy and information. Some of my words—from The Transformation—were used in his speeches.

During my presidency, we were looking for AHP’s Invisible Constituency, those who agreed with the core values but were invisible to us. But a following president was calling AHP the “refuge for wounded warriors.” That wasn’t the direction I had been going in during my term of office. We were warriors. Then we got some power struggles in the energy centers around the country, and more decentralization, which in my opinion was not productive and even fostered competition. [organizational] Power to the energy centers meant squabbling among the energy centers.

AHP last year initiated a series of bylaws changes that re-centralizes administrative functions, relieves energy centers of board membership and board responsibility, and allows them to stay focused on functioning in their local activities, projects, and interests.

Click to go to www.HakomiInstitute.com

THE PRACTICE OF AIKIDO

I’m a long-time student and teacher of aikido. With all the exposure to so many great teachers in the somatics movements (some mentioned under the Esalen paragraph), the most powerful somatics influence in my life has been my first aikido teacher, Robert Nadeau. Upon starting aikido in 1970, I realized that Nadeau was interested in teaching not only an effective martial art but also using it as the basis for what he called “Energy Awareness,” or “Non-Falling Aikido,” a series of exercises involving the use of ki (chi in Chinese) along with an exquisite bodily awareness to produce results that seem nothing less than magical. After two years practicing a combination of aikido and Energy Awareness, I felt empowered to start teaching the latter on my own. I gave my first Esalen workshop in this unique art in 1972, and have been doing them all over the U.S. and in Europe ever since. After a few years, I had developed enough Energy Awareness exercises on my own to call it Leonard Energy Training, which I included in the later creation of Integral Transformative Practice (ITP), the long-term program for “realizing the Potential of Body, Mind, Heart, and Soul,” co-created with Michael Murphy. I still teach aikido.

George holds a fifth-degree black belt in aikido and is still teaching it in his eighties.

I play piano and belong to a jazz group.

I am treated to an audiotape of George playing jazz piano with his group. When he is ready for the bassist’s riff to be over, he comes in strong but graceful with a new message, clear in his intent to change direction.

THE FIVE MASTER KEYS TO MASTERY (from the book Mastery by George Leonard) 1. INSTRUCTION. Get good information and instruction. Find teachers who work well with beginners. Keep perspective enough to know when to move on from your teacher. 2. PRACTICE. Practice can be a noun as well as averb. Love the practice of your skill. A master continues the practice long after a goal is reached. 3. SURRENDER. Surrender to your teacher, to your discipline, and to your proficiency. Satisfaction lies in mindful repetition. Cultivate the mind and heart of a beginner, and remember that you are always a learner, even when you are a master. 4. INTENTIONALITY. Visualization is as important as preparation and execution. Physical transformations happen more easily when the idea of them is clear. Every “master” is a master of vision. Some years ago— “All I know,” said Arnold Schwarzenneger, “is that the first step is to create the vision, because when you see the vision there—the beautiful vision—that creates the ‘want power.’ For example, my wanting to be Mr. Universe came about because I saw myself up there on the stage and winning.” (p. 96) 5. THE EDGE. Be willing and prepared to occasionally test the edge. Decide when is the time to give your all and to take high risks.

INTEGRAL TRANSFORMATIVE PRACTICE

After developing the ITP program and much experimentation with a long-running group, I wrote The Life We Are Given with Michael Murphy, and then we founded ITP. We just want to give this practice to the world. www.itp-life.com. ITP is a way of life. One of its components is the practice of affirmations, which really work.

There isn’t space here to describe how ITP works with affirmations, but the practice includes relaxation, breathwork, the affirmations themselves, intention, and letting go of the affirmation at the end. It’s about firm intention, saying “I can,” and about priorities. It’s not about one thing being more important than others in the practice: it’s integral. As a decades-long affirmation-resistant person, I did the exercises in The Life We Are Given (the ones in the second chapter that talks about affirmations, specifically Grace and Affirmations), and was shocked to find myself snapped into a central feeling place of peace and knowing—about a months-long angst over my daughter’s applying to private high school.

What do we need as human beings now? We need: 1) the right environment, 2) to let go, 3) downtime. . . . Chapter Eleven of our book The Life We Are Given, which is called “The Body as Teacher,” perfectly describes our feelings about somatics:

“There is a profound wisdom in the body, in the pulsing of the blood, the rhythm of the breath, the turning of the joints. Once we are aware of its subtle power, the body becomes a sensitive antenna for tuning into nature and other people. It can serve as a metaphor for every human thought, emotion, and action. It is the royal road to the unconscious. It is a small, handy model of the universe. All the books, computers, and electronic networks in the world contain only a minuscule fraction of the information it takes to create one human body. “

When you need to make a decision, touch your heart with one hand and your head with the other, and imagine and visualize the outcomes. Write a list of pros and cons. Are head decisions vetoed by the heart (intuition)? Trusting your intuition as much as your logic puts you in balance. When you’ve made your decision, say thank you to the center (hara). Trusting your intuitionasmuch as your logic puts you in balance.The body is also a master teacher. In our ITP practice, we offer exercises that call upon this teacher not only to show us how to live a more balanced, vital,and healthy life, but also to point the way toward the next stage of human evolution.

Some of the ITP workshops I teach are for people who want to train to lead groups, but you don’t have to do a training to lead your own local group.

Regarding integral psychology: As you can see from all I’ve said, I have certainly followed the idea of the integral ever since starting aikido-Energy Awareness in 1970. Ken Wilber is our pal in the integral, though his is a little more intellectual (the four-quadrant idea, for example) than is our integral transformative practice. Still, Michael and Ken and I are in perfect pitch on this.

“The integral—which certainly includes the long neglected body—is unquestionably the way of the future. “

George is an example of his beliefs in humankind as espoused in his book The Life We Are Given: of the unity of mind/body/spirit (as he excels in each), of mind over matter (he appears to have no knowing/ doing gap), that lives can change (he has lived many lives already), and that humankind evolves (he is still working on learning, growing, transforming).

KATHLEEN E. ERICKSON is Editor of this magazine.

Second Cover Story

THERE IS MORE TO LIFE THAN DENTAL FEAR — Cor W. Anneese