Michael Murphy

Michael Murphy

Michael Murphy is co-founder of Integral Transformative Practice®, co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Esalen Institute and serves as Director of Esalen’s Center for Theory and Research (CTR). He has authored four novels: Golf in the Kingdom, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons, Jacob Atabet and An End to Ordinary History.

His nonfiction works, in addition to The Life We Are Given, include In the Zone, an anthology of extraordinary sports experience, co-authored with Rhea White, and The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature. Golf in the Kingdom, still a bestseller 50 years after it was published, has spawned the Shivas Irons Society, a nonprofit organization with members in the U.S. and in 20 countries as well.

Murphy was born in Salinas, California, graduated from Stanford University and lived at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India for one year. In 1980, he helped initiate Esalen’s Soviet-American Exchange Program, which was a premiere diplomacy vehicle for citizen-to-citizen relations.

During his long involvement in the human potential movement, Murphy and his work have been profiled in The New Yorker and featured in many magazines and journals worldwide.

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