Widening the Circle – Connecting the Waterplanet. Virginia (Gigi) Coyle as a Citizen Diplomat in the USSR

When Gigi Coyle was invited to visit the USSR in 1982 as a citizen diplomat, part of the Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program, the tensions between the superpowers were at a high point. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the nuclear arms race had built up massively, Western countries had boycotted the Olympic Games in Moscow, and official diplomatic relations were almost cut off. Traveling became particularly difficult in 1983–1984, when, after the shooting down of a Korean Air Lines passenger plane by a Russian fighter jet, all Soviet flights to and from North America were canceled. But on her six trips between 1982 and 1988, Gigi witnessed the emerging opening of the country from harsh political control and repression to a fundamental change with Gorbachev’s Perestroika. 

Gigi Coyle had been a peace activist who became politically engaged after growing up in a conservative middle-class Irish catholic family in Connecticut. She had given up a university career as one of the founders of international women’s programs and followed a calling to move further to the West Coast. At the Californian Esalen Institute, she met many of the influential teachers of the New Age. She was trained by Stanislav (Stan) Grof (b. 1931) in Holotropic Breathwork and became his intern in the first Spiritual Emergency Network. There she met John and Toni Lilly (the Human Dolphin Foundation), and soon thereafter, their two dolphins engaged in communication experiments. In 1985, with the support of her partner, Jim Hickman (1947–2025), she took responsibility for the first-ever release of the two dolphins back into the wild.[1] From early on, water, the basic element of life, was the determining factor or teacher of her life. Being with and swimming with dolphins, and spending time alone in the wilderness, where she experienced a rite of passage, gave her a deep sense of listening to nature. Interspecies communication between humans and animals became a focus as an important pathway of healing and awakening guardians for this water planet.

In the years of her visits to the USSR, she also became a co-founder of the Ojaj Foundation, another spiritual retreat center in Southern California, and had begun the practice of council, rooted in an old Indigenous circle way of non-hierarchical, non-ideological sitting in circles, listening and sharing stories.

On her trips to the USSR, Gigi was part of an official group of young emissaries on a peace mission initiated by Jim Hickman, the president of the Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program (ESAEP). He had already organized a “space bridge,” the first-ever uncensored direct satellite link-up between Soviet and American citizens in 1982, and later helped to establish the Association of Space Explorers (ASE) with astronauts and cosmonauts. Together with Jim Hickman and Linda Tellington-Jones, a psychic horse trainer who had developed a healing method TTouch for horses, the group went to Moscow, Kyiv, the Black Sea, Sochi, and Piatigorsk, and later also to Lake Baikal in Siberia. On the tourist visa, her role was defined as “communications,” which proved to be accurate in a variety of ways that unfolded. Since she had studied and learned many alternative healing practices including the breathwork, Reiki, and Jin Shin Shiatsu, as well as developed cross-cultural community relationships, she was invited to meet like-minded Soviet citizens on these trips.

The group of young Americans, somewhat innocent, if not ignorant, of Russia’s political conditions, history, and culture, had clear, transparent goals to connect directly with open-minded individuals. They had numerous encounters with government officials, scientists, healers, journalists, and unofficial activists involved in alternative healing practices. Closely watched and constantly accompanied by KGB, she quickly learned about the paradoxical ways of communication, especially under the guidance of Joseph Goldin, Jim Hickman’s counterpart on the Russian side, a most skilful maverick who opened gateways and channels of communication from the top of the nomenclature to the underground for them.

In the meetings, i.e., with people from the Moscow Healthy Family Club (Zdorovaia sem’ia), together with Linda Tellington-Jones, she shared the idea of dolphins and other animals as guardians of the planet, as well as some of the “Legend of the Golden Dolphin,” which was passed on to her from the Australian mythmaker Peter Shenstone. What left a deep impression was her encounter with Igor Charkovsky (1936–2021), a Siberian-born physiotherapist at a Moscow public pool, who had founded and developed the practice of water birth. He had become a charismatic guru for many people, especially young parents who were seeking alternatives to the brutal conditions in Soviet birth hospitals. Since home- and even more water birth was illegal, it had to be practiced in semi-secret ways. So, in a private Moscow apartment, Gigi met little children diving underwater for minutes in a 6 ft x 6 ft water tank for coins. She participated in numerous water training sessions, including one in the Gorky Park, where Charkovsky practiced strengthening infants by an ancient Siberian practice of dipping into ice water in winter.

Together with Charkovsky, she met with pregnant women, midwives, artists, and alternative healers in each successive visit. She sat in meetings and in council, sharing stories with new Russian friends, even when the focus was on another ambassador such as John Denver (1943–1997). During her visits, she was accompanied by Andrei Orlov (known by the pseudonym Orlusha, born in 1957), a well-known journalist and poet who served as the group’s interpreter, thanks to his excellent English. “The need for translation slowed down the process of communication, giving time to breathe,” says Gigi, recalling the encounters. Orlov had navigated his unusually independent existence as a freelance writer, and “beating the system had become a skill that preserved his integrity.”[2] Communication happened on verbal and nonverbal levels, since both Gigi and Charkovsky shared the dream of water and the human-dolphin connection as a way of deep healing. Even Orlov unconsciously came to share this dream. In one last night of a trip before Gigi left Moscow, he dreamed a picture of a woman-baby-dolphin, something that, as he stated, had never happened before.[3] In the morning, he gave her the drawing, which she then chose as a visual core symbol of her life’s work focused on building alliances. The abstract picture has been used both in the West and the East to the present, as a logo depicting the importance of the human-dolphin connection, a relationship Gigi feels is key to the future of this Waterplanet.

In 1984–1985, Jim Hickman negotiated the first invitation of an American performer to play to the Soviet public in five years: a 12-day-concert-tour with the popular singer-songwriter John Denver in June 1985. It was preceded by a non-public concert visit by invitation of the Soviet Union of Composers in November 1984. A performance by Denver at the American Embassy attracted the first Soviet officials to attend an Embassy event since the cultural exchange between the U.S. and the USSR expired in 1980.

John Denver was at the peak of his career as a top-selling artist in music history, and the first to be allowed to record together with Alexander Gradsky (1949–2021), one of the most popular Soviet pop singers. Gigi joined the exchange team and accompanied both men to Moscow on these trips. The tour was a huge success, and John Denver himself became even more of a lifelong engaged peace activist and citizen diplomat in this renewed Soviet-American cultural exchange. Back in Colorado, he had co-founded the Windstar Foundation, an educational project exploring healthful and balanced solutions to crucial contemporary issues through the integration of earth, mind, and spirit. As one devoted to care for this earth, he had a similarly deep relationship to nature, water and dolphins and quickly found common ground with Gigi.

Another remarkable man whom Gigi met  and spent time with in Moscow was the Latvian filmmaker and poet Andris Slapiņš (1949–1991). “Unique, most talented and enigmatic”[4], Slapiņš “went boldly to the forefront regardless of danger” when he filmed, “with drive and courage, often alone, Indigenous people and animals in the Far East and on Northern Arctic shores.” Slapiņš, who had a “single-minded commitment in seeking and portraying truth”[5], became known for documentary films on Siberian shamans and with indigenous people on the Chukotka peninsula.[6] He was described as a “figure larger than life”; “his ability to establish close bonds with native peoples and his instinct of homing in lasting friendships,” and an “instinct of homing in on deeply rooted cultural traditions mark a unique humanistic style” (William Fitzhugh). This was something they shared together when meeting, and he had in common with Gigi Coyle. When travel restrictions eased, Slapiņš was allowed to travel abroad. He went to Alaska, where he filmed and bonded with Indigenous people in Labrador and soon established relations with Western anthropologists and folklorists. He became internationally known through a Smithsonian joint exhibition with the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Washington, Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska (1988–1989).

Gigi and Andris made plans to meet and film with musician-ecologist Jim Nollman (b. 1947), with whom Gigi had created a summer camp in British Columbia to establish relationships with Orca whales (Orcananda). But before the plan to create a connection and make a film with Beluga whales in the Canadian Arctic came through. Slapiņš and his colleague Gvido Zvaigzne were both shot and killed while filming the downtown Riga riots during a clash with the Riga OMON in January 1991. Gigi kept correspondence around the dream of nations and whales coming together in the Berring Strait with Andris until he died. (See Leo Szilard’s The Voice of Dolphins: And Other Stories (Stanford Nuclear Age Series, 1961).

The opening of Perestroika in the USSR became manifest in the first reciprocal book fair of independent publishers in the USSR, negotiated as part of the Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program. In April 1985, 1,100 Soviet books on medical sciences and health were exhibited at the UCLA School of Nursing in Los Angeles. And in September 1985, 1,300 American books on health promotion, stress, sports, physical fitness, childcare, alternative therapies, and psychology were exhibited at the Central Library in Moscow and in the National Library of Science and Technology in Novosibirsk. Gigi, who was asked by Hickman to join the group through the Esalen Exchange Program again, brought photographs by Arnold Newman, founder of the International Tropical Rainforest Society. He had had a kind of aha moment in life and turned from being a “collector” of fossils, plants, animals, and photographs to becoming a protector of rainforests.[7]

One evening at a gathering in a private Moscow apartment, she made a toast with water rather than the usual much-consumed vodka. She spoke about the water connecting us all and Newman’s work, our health being interdependent with the health of this shared earth. One of the omnipresent officers of the KGB approached her with curiosity and asked if she had an idea of books to support such. She shared the photos and the idea to have this book translated and published in Russia, maybe as a joint venture. Meetings were arranged with the top nature publisher in Moscow, and in fact, the book was published in 1989. Newman, whose photographs were also exhibited in a museum, later traveled to Moscow himself and participated in a series of seminars.

Throughout all these trips with many different and diverse agendas – Gigi listened, learned and witnessed a lot of her time in the USSR. Much of her energy was spent behind the scenes supporting Linda Tellington-Jones at the start and Jim Hickman throughout. In a complex field of cross-cultural communication and translation, she spoke only what seemed essential, hoping to support better relations between our nations. This was the shared vision of citizen diplomacy. Her commitment to alliances of care for this earth – the best of the oldest knowledge and worldview along with the best of the new, her lifelong experience in community, her focus on water and interspecies communication, her relations with Indigenous peoples – continued to shape her actions over those years. She showed up to help host Soviet cosmonauts and US astronauts in San Francisco as she went on to work on many projects with Hickman out of their shared office in Ojai, California. They hosted Russian health professionals and other citizen diplomats on a special visit to the Ojai Foundation. Although she stopped her personal travel to the USSR after 1986, her involvement with international relations and citizen diplomacy continues today as Gigi says – always with the possibility of Russian-American relations blossoming once again.[8] This blog came out of recent meetings with her in council gatherings and several following interviews.

          

---

[1] Documentary film by National Geographic https://vimeo.com/115845838

[2] Gale Warner. “The One Who Didn’t Shoot.” The Invisible Threads. Independent Soviets Working for Global Awareness and Social Transformation. Washington: Seven Locks Press, 1991: 97–111, here 98.

[3] Andrei Orlov later became a celebrated poet, especially among post-Soviet youth in Russia until 2022. In several interviews, he reflected on his time with citizen diplomats, though he rejected the term as misleading in a Soviet context. See, for example, an interview from 1987.

[4] Ilga Vitola. “Podstrelennye ptitsy. Vospominaniia o Gvido Zvaigzne, Iurise Podniekse, Andrise Slapin’she (The Shot-Down Birds. Memoirs of Gvido Zvaigzne, Juris Podnieks, and Andris Slapiņš.” Iskusstvo kino (The Art of Cinema) 8(2006). http://old.kinoart.ru/archive/2006/08/n8-article21

[5] William Fitzhugh. “A Letter from…Andris Slapins, Latvian Filmmaker.” CVA Review (La Commission D’Anthropologie Visuelle). Spring (1991): 2–3.

[6] See Chukotka – bereg pamiati (Chukotka: The Shore of Memory). Dir. Andris Slapiņš. 1987, 46 min. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1Ov7UCfgOA

[7] https://tropicalforesters.org/

[8] See https://walking-water.org/the-team/; https://waysofcouncil.net/; https://www.council-network.eu/; https://www.thewhaledreamer.com      

---

The text only may be used under licence Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

---

---