“Somebody around here needs to change.And your name is Somebody.”–Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River*
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The most beloved resident at Westminster Village, a resort-style retirement community in Scottsdale, is probably a sulcata tortoise named Bruno who moseys through the center’s secret garden and naps in the shade of his officially designated quarters: Bruno’s Boudoir.
Cute as he is, I hadn’t come to admire a hard-shelled reptile. I was there to meet a fast-moving octogenarian, Arleen Lorrance, known to bound through the complex offering bear hugs and posing the question “What’s the most meaningful thing in your life?” Contemporary researchers credit her, not Mahatma Gandhi, with originating the epoch-defining phrase “Be the change you want to see happen,” which she coined in the early 1970s shortly after a powerful spiritual experience while admiring a flower near Esalen, the iconic Big Sur retreat center.
The expression has shown a staying power few New Age-inflected slogans can match, serving as a secular mantra and the defining catchphrase of modern self-help and personal-growth spirituality.
It’s migrated over the past five decades from retreat centers to protest placards to TED Talk stages to your aunt’s Facebook page, becoming a kind of moral koan. It’s easy to memorize and roomy enough to accommodate both fierce activism and quiet withdrawal. Mission-driven brands love it too—purpose, packaged. Want to help young people? Donate to Be the Change Today Foundation. Passionate about the environment? Join Be the Change Earth Alliance. Trying to manifest a Maine coon? Visit Be the Change Cat Rescue.
If love could revitalize a battered public school, Arleen wondered, what else might it do? Change a neighborhood? A city? The world?
Politics is no refuge for those allergic to the viral aphorism. The phrase has echoed among the left; everyone from Barack Obama to Bernie Sanders has urged voters to be the change. Al Gore might be the most enamored of it. He’s invoked it so often that former campaign manager Donna Brazile once quipped he’d practically “become that quote.” Like most, Gore mistakenly credited it to Gandhi. It’s an understandable error, as Gandhi conveyed a similar message in 1913: “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.”
Republicans and libertarians have occasionally embraced the expression with a very different spin—as a call for personal responsibility and self-reliance. Instead of waiting for an inept city government to fix a pothole, a conservative columnist once wrote, to “be the change” means to “roll up [your] sleeves” and fix it yourself.
When Trump secured his presidential sequel, a Republican senator invoked Arleen’s words to support the impending wrecking ball to the system. “That’s what Donald Trump got elected to do—to be the change,” he told Fox News. I couldn’t find an instance of Trump himself using the phrase, but he did misattribute another quote to Gandhi in an Instagram post: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
“Be the change” may not fit Trump’s rhetorical style, yet his presidencies have embodied one of its interpretations. From the moment he first declared his plan to “Make America Great Again,” Trump positioned himself and his supporters as agents of transformation, albeit of a reactionary kind. Trump was top dog, of course, without whom nothing was possible. But every king needs an army. “Fight like hell” and “never concede,” he told those marching to the Capitol on his behalf in 2021, intent on being the change.
Among them was Alan Hostetter, later sentenced to eleven years in prison before being pardoned by Trump. Hostetter hadn’t always seemed like the type to storm the Capitol armed with hatchets and stun batons. Before his political conversion, he was a yoga instructor and sound healer leaning into his “yin side” after twenty-five years in law enforcement that, he wrote in an email to me before going quiet, had left him “broken physically and psychologically.” But then came 2020. The pandemic “did very strange things to people,” a lawyer for another Capitol rioter said. Certainly that was true for Hostetter, who emerged as a prominent anti-lockdown activist and MAGA devotee.
In the wellness circles Hostetter once moved in, “be the change” emphasized something else entirely: Before trying to change the world, work on yourself, lest you storm the Capitol over imaginary election fraud. A friend of mine channeled this interpretation in his own Instagram post: “There’s an old saying that says you can’t serve water from an empty pot, and in the same way, you can’t make the world better without first making yourself better… YOU have to be an example of the change you want to see in the world.”
But many progressive activists see that as an excuse for solipsism that serves to maintain the status quo. No amount of yoga or sound healing can shield a person from racism, gun violence, economic insecurity, or the myriad phobias—homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia—that so often fuel the GOP outrage machine. To many politically minded progressives, “be the change” has long meant living their values by transforming institutions and fighting against intolerance. There’s no utopia without structural change.
What does the mantra mean to the woman who authored it? Few people have bothered to ask. Arleen has lived a relatively private life, occasionally stopping a stranger on the street who’s wearing a Be the Change T-shirt to tell them she unleashed the expression on the world. I can’t imagine they believe her. When I told my dad I planned to visit its author, he replied, “But Gandhi’s dead.” Arleen, it seems, could use a publicist.
Her bright Westminster Village apartment was filled with modern artwork and books that reflect her many interests, from theater and politics to consciousness and love. A writer herself, she’d published a dozen little-known books, including The Theatre of Life, which invites readers to create their “personality consciously, moment by moment”; Buddha from Brooklyn, a spiritual memoir; and Sam Jaffe, a biography of the character actor best known for playing mentors, sages, and mystical figures. But I’d mostly come to talk about The Love Principles, in which she outlines six transformative values, including “Be the change you want to see happen, instead of trying to change anyone else.”
Arleen shares her home with Diane Kennedy Pike, widow of the radically progressive Episcopal bishop James Pike, who died in 1969 in the Judean desert while the Pikes were researching a book about the historical Jesus. Arleen clarified to me that she and Diane aren’t a couple in the traditional sense; she called them “life partners committed to consciousness work.” Romantic and sexual desire, she said, left her at age thirty after the flower episode in Big Sur.
“I was the flower and the flower was me,” Arleen told me at her kitchen table, barefoot in white shorts and a flower-patterned tank top. “I entered the energy world of what was the flower, and I immediately realized that I was one with everything. I said to my husband at the time, ‘Something just happened,’ but there was no way to explain it. All I knew is that I felt completely transformed.” From that moment on, she no longer dreamed of becoming an actress. Nor, to her husband’s displeasure, did she want to have sex. “The ecstasy I felt every day going forward couldn’t be matched by anything I’d experienced before.”
Arleen returned to her teaching job at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, a place that was no source of ecstasy. After breaking up yet another fight between students, she retreated to her office, where, she claims, a ray of light came through her wall, followed by a life-altering epiphany: Instead of trying to change other people, she would focus on further changing herself and accept everyone—even people she disliked; especially people she disliked—exactly as they were. She would lead with love.
Arleen launched a school program called the Love Project, animated by six love principles.
Be the change you want to see happen, instead of trying to change anyone else.Receive all people as beautiful exactly as they are.Create your own reality consciously.Provide others with opportunities to give.Have no expectations, but rather abundant expectancy.Problems are opportunities.
Many of Arleen’s chain-smoking colleagues thought she’d lost her mind; they called her Alice in Wonderland. This was an urban high school, after all, not a gathering of crystal enthusiasts. But even the cynics couldn’t deny something shifted that year when six teachers and thirty students calling themselves “the seekers” baked cookies, handed out free books, and promoted unconditional love at every turn.
The principal called it “a kind of human relations club” that created “better students.” The Love Project’s success even surprised a school superintendent who came to hear Arleen give a talk. “I must count myself among those who came to scoff and remained to praise,” he told her.
If love could revitalize a battered public school, Arleen wondered, what else might it do? Change a neighborhood? A city? The world?
*
The belief that an army of internally transformed people would ripple outward and save humanity was widely embraced by Arleen and countless other inner voyagers in the early and mid-1970s, particularly the many young political radicals who abandoned activism in favor of spirituality and guru worship.
For disillusioned leftists—a “generation in despair,” as sociologist Stephen Kent described them in his book From Slogans to Mantras—a new spiritual focus offered a way to believe they were still working to change the world. Except now, the revolution “would be heralded by a personal transformation of purified individuals.”
One of the purest was Rennie Davis, whose anti-Vietnam War activism had turned him into a national celebrity. But when he discovered acid and inner contemplation, he stunned his old allies and the many college students who idolized him by shedding his activist identity and claiming the real answer to war, poverty, and racism was spiritual enlightenment.
“I’m really blissed out with a capital B,” he told a dumbfounded crowd at UC Berkeley in 1973, occasionally dodging a tomato hurled by a furious activist. “We are operating under a new leadership, and it is divine.”
That leadership’s surprising front man was a fifteen-year-old Indian named Guru Maharaj Ji, whom Davis called “the perfect master.” Acting as both Maharaj Ji’s devotee and spokesperson, Davis helped organize Millennium ’73, a three-day event in the Houston Astrodome he promised would usher in “the greatest transformation in the history of human civilization.”
It did not.
Instead, Maharaj Ji reclined on a velveteen throne in the half-empty dome while his blissed-out followers, called premies (from the Hindi word prem, meaning “love”), tried to ignore a boisterous crew of protesting born-again Christians and Hare Krishnas. Some journalists and writers, including a charismatic former evangelical preacher covering the event for the pornographic magazine Oui, made a game of trying to sleep with premies, commemorating their efforts with a sign in the press area: “Fuck a Premie.”
So what had happened to Davis? Had the young guru hypnotized the activist? Did the CIA, eager to hamstring the anti-war movement, get to him? Explanations abounded, many of them paranoid. But paranoia appeared to be reasonable, because Davis had always seemed so unlikely to change in the way he had. Noting the stunned reaction to Davis’s conversion, journalist Ted Morgan—himself an identity changer, having renounced his French nobility and name, Sanche de Gramont—made a remarkable analogy: “Nothing quite like this had happened since Augustine defected from Neoplatonism to Christianity.”
New Agers believed that anything was possible if people tapped into their inner spontaneity and joy for living. Its progressive detractors believed no real change was possible until cultural and political institutions were transformed.
Activists turned spiritual seekers were favorite targets of the press. In “The New Narcissism,” a 1975 cover story in Harper’s, journalist Peter Marin argued that navel-gazing spirituality represented “the unrealized shame of having failed the world and not knowing what to do about it.” Marin directed some of his ire at Esalen, the epicenter of the Human Potential Movement and the playground, its critics scoffed, of those privileged enough to spend their days ruminating over the self.
The tension between the movement and its critics often felt like a clash of opposing worldviews. New Agers believed that anything was possible if people tapped into their inner spontaneity and joy for living. Its progressive detractors believed no real change was possible until cultural and political institutions were transformed.
Conservatives had their own ideas. Some dismissed workshops at Esalen and elsewhere as “newfangled methods of communist brainwashing,” while others linked Esalen to Charles Manson, who’d reportedly tried to get on the grounds just days before the gruesome murders committed by his cult. It was easy for Esalen cofounder Michael Murphy and others to dismiss their conservative critics, less so their leftist ones. The narcissism charge was especially baffling. One philosopher spoke for much of the Human Potential Movement when he said there was “nothing narcissistic about attempting to transcend those things in life that lead people to narcissism.”
Another eloquent defender of that idea was John Vasconcellos, an Esalen regular who served in the California legislature from 1967 to 2004. He was the rare politician who didn’t just promise change; he asked constituents to do their part by looking inward and making some adjustments. “You could change all the political leaders, rules, and institutions tomorrow,” he said, “but if we don’t change ourselves—if we keep carrying all our fears, denials, and self-repression in our minds and bodies—then we would live no differently.”
Activists and journalists criticized Esalen and others for ignoring the world beyond their navels, a charge that wasn’t entirely misplaced. “I didn’t even see the moon landing!” one psychologist who’d lived at Esalen in the late 1960s told me. While the retreat center was not a primarily political place, its critics mostly ignored its political ambitions and successes. The biggest was surely its surprising supporting role in nothing less than the collapse of Soviet Communism.
In the early 1980s, Murphy and a few associates ran an informal back channel between the United States and the Soviet Union. What began as New Age chatter evolved into the Esalen Soviet-American exchange program, drawing in writers, political operatives—and KGB agents. Some even visited the Esalen baths, where, Murphy told me, “CIA and KGB guys connected in ways they never would have elsewhere. It was magic.” On an Esalen-sponsored US tour, Boris Yeltsin stopped at a Texas supermarket and was stunned by the abundance, a moment said to shake his faith in Gorbachev and the Communist Party.
But even when Esalen wasn’t exhibiting “a kind of eccentric diplomatic genius,” as one historian called it, it was serving as a laboratory for theories and therapies its faculty believed could transform the world. Among them was Racial Confrontation as Transcendental Experience, a 1967 workshop that writer and teacher George Leonard co-facilitated with psychiatrist and Black Rage co-author Price Cobbs. The goal was to combat racial prejudice by putting white and Black people in a room together for a marathon weekend of unfiltered sharing and confrontation. After their inaugural group, Cobbs told Leonard, “We’ve got to take this to the world.”
Esalen framed this and similar efforts not just as political education but as deeply transformative experiences requiring self-examination and accountability. Unlike many contemporary anti-racism initiatives, which encourage white participants to confront their biases among themselves to avoid placing more emotional burdens on Black people, Esalen cultivated the friction and vulnerability of both groups doing the work side by side.
Countless Esalen-affiliated teachers were convinced their therapeutic techniques could help solve social ills like racism, and they flatly rejected the framing of transformation as a binary choice between inner change and social action. At a 1973 Esalen-sponsored conference featuring some big names—including Stewart Brand and EST founder Werner Erhard—the primary focus was on authoritarian dynamics in the Human Potential Movement. (And on the women protesting the conference, because all the speakers were men. California mystical circles weren’t exactly beacons of gender equity.)
But the event also grappled with the intersection of personal growth and activism, explored in panels like Political Action and the Inner Search. Philosopher Sam Keen best verbalized the ethos that animated so many at Esalen when he said human progress demanded “a double vision that can look both ‘in’ via meditation and mysticism and ‘out’ via social consciousness and radical criticism.”
Had Gestalt Therapy practitioner and longtime Esalen faculty member Fritz Perls been alive for the conference (he’d died four years earlier), he would surely have been a disruptive presence. For one thing, he was unsparing in his criticism of the self-serious and self-righteous. Erhard, in particular, would have made an easy target. I could imagine the eccentric Perls bounding into the conference late in a half-zipped onesie, listening to Erhard speak for a minute, then snorting and saying, “Oh, shut up, Werner. The only thing you transform in a weekend is your bank account.”
But Perls would also have had a larger critique of the conference.
He was famously suspicious of the grandiose, world-saving ambitions espoused by many New Agers. His stance was rooted in gestalt therapy’s focus on the here and now, on personal responsibility and direct experience rather than magical thinking. “Don’t push the river—it flows by itself,” he was known to say.
He believed life unfolded naturally, and grand efforts to “fix” the world were misguided and futile. Start and end with yourself, he believed, because it’s the only thing you can control. Perls distilled his philosophy in what he called the Gestalt Prayer:
I do my thing, and you do your thing.I am not in this world to live up to your expectations. And you are not in this world to live up to mine.You are you and I am I,And if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.
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From You’ve Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation by Benoit Denizet-Lewis. Copyright © 2026. Available from William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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