Richard Price

Do you want to be a positive influence in the world? First, get your own life in order.
Ground yourself in the single principle so that your behavior is wholesome and effective.
~John Heider, The Tao of Leadership

Autumn 2025 marked 95 years since Dick’s birth and 40 years since his death. His legacy is wide-ranging, beginning when he and Michael Murphy moved to Big Sur, California to begin what is now known as Esalen Institute.

In the first few years there, Dick ran the business from his jeans pockets: income into one pocket, expenditures from another, keys to available rooms in a third. He regularly performed miracles, rearranging the room sheet to find one more bed for an honored guest, another for the person in distress who needed a few days of refuge. Some of his legacy lives in the rock walls he built, the brush he cleared, and the many details he handled daily for more than two decades.

Eighteen months of involuntary hospitalization earlier in his life fueled Dick’s commitment to create an environment where human experience, whether ordinary or extraordinary, could be explored without suppression, coercion, or violation. Combining his interest in Buddhist practice with his Taoist approach to life, Dick adapted what he learned from Fritz Perls, creating a method that many of us continue to follow and teach. A new generation of students finds guidance, healing, and inspiration in the process and principles he formulated.

Dick embodied his work. More accurately, the work he developed is an embodiment of who he was. He was fearless, funny, unpretentious, generous, and completely uninterested in promoting himself. Spare with his words, spacious in his presence, he truly trusted process, ours and his own. He never meant to teach by example, but many of us learned what we deeply needed to know by being near him. He wasn’t perfect, he was authentic. We are grateful.

Christine Price