The Body Is All Connected
Dean came to Esalen in 1978 as a work scholar. He had not yet imagined that massage would become his life’s work. Then he received his first full-body oil massage, on the deck by the pool.
“I was blessed to have Peggy Horan for my first massage,” he says. “I remember just feeling like, oh, my body is all connected. I had never felt this in this same way. “I felt this connection, not only in my body but to the crashing ocean waves below, the sunshine, the almost magical touch... to everything!”
It was “a very overwhelming experience.” That experience “got me there.”
Finding the Path
He stayed on in Big Sur and began taking classes in massage, yoga, many things. Eventually he entered the Trager training in 1981. To complete the Trager certification, he worked on one hundred people.
In that process, something became clear. “I think it was there that I really had the sense that, yeah, I think I’m going to be doing this for a long time.”
Life on the Massage Crew
In 1983, he was hired onto the massage crew as a Trager practitioner. At that time, he says, it was Dean Juhan, himself, and one other person doing Trager, while the rest of the crew was doing Esalen Massage.
He loved the camaraderie of the crew, the old baths, and “the feeling of working out there in the sunshine, surrounded by all those amazing practitioners.” It was, for him, “such a learning experience.”
From Structure to Freedom
For about two and a half years, he worked only with Trager. But while he was on the crew, he was also watching the Esalen practitioners around him.
“Trager is a pattern, a formula, a flow that you follow,” he says. “And I wanted to be more free, more open.”
When the crew offered a self-certification process, he took it, received his Esalen certificate, and switched over to Esalen Massage.
Milton Trager
Dean still speaks about Milton with great respect. He later studied advanced work with him and remembers him clearly. “He was a very curious character… a little gruff,” he says. He recalls his presence as much as his touch — a short man with “the longest arms” and large hands, moving with surprising ease.
To watch him work left a deep impression. It was, as Dean describes, “like watching someone touching a baby.” Even when Milton used shaking and rattling movements, “it didn’t feel like you were being handled… it felt very, very smooth and flowing.”
Dean describes Milton as a natural — someone who found his own way and later shaped it into a systematic approach to the body. “Trager is great work,” he says. “I have the greatest respect for it.”
At the same time, he was glad to shift into practicing Esalen Massage. It gave him more freedom to bring different influences together — “all under the umbrella of presence and the flowing Esalen approach,” and of “working with another person rather than on them.”
Lineage and Learning
Over the years, many people shaped his path. He names Peggy, Brita, Deborah and Vicki as primary teachers he learned Esalen Massage from and with whom he has taught for many years since.
He also speaks of Fritz Smith and of the pioneers of bodywork he learned from in the first Esalen Somatics Training as important influences on the way he understood bodywork. What stayed with him was not one method alone, but a widening sense of possibility.
Esalen, he says, is “a dynamic place where people constantly learn from one another.”
A Life in Practice
Dean lived and worked at Esalen for 30 years until the early 2000s when he and his wife Ginger moved to central Washington State to care for his father and decided to stay. He now lives in a small valley surrounded by snow-capped peaks, and he continues to teach there and around the world from Europe to Asia though especially in Japan where he and Brita recently offered the first Japanese Teacher Training.
Presence
One of the deepest threads in his teaching is the sense of presence that is found in mindfulness practice--he has been a student of meditation since college. He says he realized early on “the importance of awareness, of presence” in bodywork.
In the mid-1980s, after a month of intensives and daily sitting with a meditation teacher, he was encouraged to take this simple practice out into the world and teach it. “So I took him at his word,” Dean says, “and I’ve been really using meditation in massage classes ever since.”
Moving Presence
For him, Esalen Massage and meditation belong together. “Esalen Massage is a moving meditation,” he says.
In his teaching, he often returns to three key elements: awareness, presence, and connection. Awareness is what is coming in through the senses, presence is how we meet awareness in ourselves and connection is where those two meet.
He asks “How do we bring these qualities found in sitting practice into our massage work?”
He describes the approach as “a return, again and again,” to what he calls “moving presence.” “It’s really not that we can remain in presence constantly-- there too many distractions in the world” he says. “What is important is to continually return to presence.”
This is accomplished while giving a massage when the practitioner remembers “to feel their feet on the ground, their center as well as the qualities of what they are touching.” He refers to this as “the dance of awareness.”
Self-Care
Awareness and presence also helped shape how he understands self-care. He noticed that when he was caring for other people’s bodies without caring for his own- something was missing.
Dean began exploring self-care techniques and has now been teaching Yoga for 25 years. He encourages practitioners to “find a movement modality you love and practice it! I think it’s really key to practice what we preach,” he says, “we must take care of ourselves in order to care for others.”
A Global Path
Dean has taught widely over the years: across the US, in Germany, Austria, Denmark, Canada, Bali, China, and Japan. He taught his first training in Japan in 1999 and has returned many times since. He speaks warmly of the culture and the people there, and of his long collaboration with Makiko Kondo.
Looking back, he says teaching has been “a wonderful, wonderful way of being in the world” and feels “very much like it is right livelihood.”
The Global Village
When he speaks about coming to Switzerland, he does not speak in grand claims. He speaks about connection. He calls it “a really unique opportunity” to come together with people from around the world who are practicing and teaching Esalen Massage.
He also speaks honestly about the work itself. “Massage can be isolating,” he says, “often you are alone in a room with just one other person, having your own experience as they have theirs. The opportunity to gather with others who are on the same wavelength is rare. It offers space to share the practice, the joy of it, and the challenges.”
Esalen Massage and Mindfulness
At the Global Village, Dean will teach Esalen Massage and Mindfulness.
His invitation is simple and direct: “I would invite you to awaken to presence, come home to yourself, and be a guide for others to do the same.”