Balm: Harbin Hot Springs as Healing Place, Identity

Harbin is a healing place. So many people find wellness here, through an amazingly wide variety of approaches - both spiritual and health promoting - as well as by just going into the pools. Ishvara envisioned it from the beginning as a Gestalt Center with hots springs, as well as a place informed by Taoism, – that is, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu's thinking, I think. And there’s a great degree of freedom here to do just what wants, interact freely in the way one can create, - with a community to support this.

Harbin is a place of energy, an energy center, that, in its complexity, is hard to characterize. It's in the water, the earth of the Harbin Valley, in people's interactions, and takes form elsewhere.

People wear beautiful, colorful clothes here, – and people come to shine.

Interactions with people can be very real at Harbin, with folks who aren’t alienated. Recently I met a very present and beautiful woman, with her boyfriend, who is from Santa Cruz. She had long dark hair, with some colors woven into it, which looked like they were streaming down. When I first saw them together she was naked sitting in his lap on a chair, - so relaxed and open - among a whole bunch of other people, all lying naked on the sun deck near the pools.

In Harbin's culture, 'readings' of what people want take shape in interesting ways, and play out in remarkable ways, and sometimes indirectly.

So, there is a lot of individualism here.

And people with strong personalities come to stay and play here. Harbin often receives them and these folks find a place here, but in other cases not. In general, Harbin is a very receptive and fluid place socially.

What works out in the soup is a kind of hippie commune in the 2000s, - where people come to stay for years. But in response to this degree of stability or longevity, Harbin doesn’t seem to move in the direction of more structure, authoritarianism, or any corporate-like practice. It's quite non-hierarchical; Harbin's culture is great.


People play music by the river. People sleep in tents - and through the winter, too - and some of these tents are very beautiful, with lovely fabrics inside.


And decisions get made through talking, where people say what they will do and do this, with all their human foilibles, but at other times decisions emerge in unspoken ways. In general though, Harbin folks make responsible decisions, informed by a vision of the Harbin experience - its identity - and the meditative qualities of the pools that can evoke oneness.

So, friendly hippie culture in all its variety is settled here - a kind of Harbin identity. People embody it. Northern California and the world gave rise to it – from its roots in the 1960s and 70s – and it finds a degree of sustainability here. Those residents who stay the longest seem to me to take a slightly retiring, living-in-a-village approach. There are a lot of Harbin residents, but you don't see very many of them. They seem to slip quietly into life in and around the Harbin Valley and Middletown area here.

Children come to visit here, too, with their parents. And residents have kids.


And the processes of coming inwardly, and softening - the relaxation response - are very present here, too. People relate often from this soft space or place, and with imagination and warmth.


To some degree at Harbin, people find a way to define their own lives, in response to modernity, post-modernity, the system, through a kind of Harbin identity, a way of categorizing the world, of otherness.