Michael Murphy is the co‑founder and Chairman Emeritus of Esalen Institute and the author of both fiction and non‑fiction books that explore evidence for meta‑normal capacities in human beings, including Golf in the Kingdom and The Future of the Body. During his fifty- year involvement in the Human Potential Movement, he and his work have been profiled in the New Yorker and featured in many magazines and journals worldwide. A graduate of Stanford University, he was one of the first Americans to live at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India in the mid 1950s. In the 1980s, Murphy helped start a successful Soviet‑American Exchange Program, which was a premiere diplomacy vehicle for citizen‑to‑citizen Russian‑American relations. Boris Yeltsin's first visit to America In 1989, was initiated by Esalen. His other books include The Life We Are Given (co‑authored with George Leonard), The Kingdom of Shivas Irons, Jacob Atabet, An End to Ordinary History, In the Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports (coauthored with Rhea White), and The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation.