Richard Price

by Christine Stewart 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 2010 marks eighty years since Dick’s birth and twenty-five years since his death. His legacy at Esalen is wide ranging. In the first few years, 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 at Esalen 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, the German psychotherapist who developed Gestalt Therapy, and created a method that many of us continue to follow and teach. Staying true to Fritz’s emphasis on awareness of sensation and perception in the present moment, Dick shifted the paradigm from therapy to a peer practice where following process and trusting self-regulation became a form of active meditation. At Esalen, and around the world, 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, teacher of Gestalt Awareness Practice and wife of Richard Price 1974-85. For more information about Christine Price and Gestalt Awareness Practice see: Tribal Ground

This season Esalen is celebrating Dick Price's life and legacy with several special workshop offerings. Please see Stepping In, Stepping Out: Gestalt and Hiking Practice, October 3-8 and Following the Way, Returning to the Source: A Celebration of the Life and Work of Richard Price, November 14-19.

Richard Price photo by Joyce Rogers Lyke around 1983.