“It was the soul of the institution of Esalen — all those little babies and what they’re going to be,” said Zoe Garcia, a guest and nearby resident, who has been going to Esalen for 30 years.

The closing is partly a sign of the region’s changing demographics. As more of Big Sur’s homes are bought by tech executives as second homes, there are not as many young children, so the class of 30 had dwindled to 15 before the floods shut it down.

“It’s incredibly sad,” said Cortlan Robertson, whose daughter attended Gazebo and who said the Big Sur community had offered to pay for the preschool to continue. “Ben is always saying it’s just child care. But it was so much more.”

Closing Gazebo was also a sign of a shifting culture and new rules.

“Back then, we could go topless in the lodge,” Ms. Garcia said. “More conservative people started to come, so they started to make rules. Now next is mindfulness and technology. Who knows?”

Mr. Tauber was a surprising pick to head a retreat center. He had previously founded a real-time celebrity geo-stalking service called JustSpotted when Google hired him and his team in 2011. Soon after, he vacationed in Big Sur and decided his work was causing harm, he said.

“I realized I was addicting people to their phones,” Mr. Tauber said. “It’s a crisis that everyone’s in the culture of killing it, and inside they’re dying.”

In the hot spring one night, he ran into an Esalen leader who invited him to a conscious business event. Mr. Tauber quit Google to open a business coaching start-up founders and developed Esalen’s technology strategy, joining the board in 2015. During the springtime flooding, as Esalen cut its staff to 50 from 330, Mr. Tauber took over.