Workshops

As life changes, we also must change — yet this isn’t guaranteed. Too many of us get stuck at our thresholds. Ritual can help us cultivate discernment, recognize gains and losses, and conjure possibility. Join us for a transformative workshop designed to provide the skills and understanding needed to create your own modern rituals. Learn to reflect, reimagine, and renew the purpose of your life’s next chapter.

Guided by award-winning author, artist, teacher, and ritualist Day Schildkret, you are invited to:

• Learn the ins and outs of this ancient technology to expertly navigate change.
• Learn the power of “symbolic action” to align your psycho-spiritual experience.
• Craft your own modern ritual to mark your personal threshold and rediscover yourself.
• Discover the 7-step Morning Altars practice to use nature, art, and ritual for understanding and meaning.
• Experience the support and witness of others also renewing their life’s purpose.
• Create custom “Threshold Wonderings” that provide reflection, refinement, and direction.
• Discover the meaning-making skills needed to step into your life thresholds with renewed grace and purpose.

This workshop is designed for anyone in a life transition who wants to renew their life’s purpose. Crafted with great care, we welcome all genders, races, identities, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Threshold moments are meant to be crossed together. Join us if you feel your transition has become protracted or need greater support and attention to skillfully move to your next chapter.

Recommended Reading: Hello, Goodbye. By Day Schildkret

The latest research clearly demonstrates the powerful impact emotional experiences have on our health and longevity. While we know this to be true, we don’t always know how to be emotionally well.

During this weekend, we’ll open the door to greater emotional intelligence and perception. With a combination of lectures, interactive exercises, live music, breathwork, movement (yoga and dance), and meditation, we’ll practice understanding our feelings — and how to respond to them.

We’ll explore emotional wellness through the lens of Ayurveda, customizing our healing based on what we are experiencing in real time. This, in turn, increases our depth of connection with ourselves and others.

In this experiential workshop, we’ll be invited to learn Ayurvedic approaches to:

• Emotional wellness
• Self-assessment
• Psychospiritual healing
• Customizing healing tools

There will be movement in this program. Guest faculty QVLN + Sunshine Zerda will lead us in a transformational dance experience with guided somatic release. Everyone, from beginners to advanced students of Ayurveda, is welcome.

Recommended Reading: Ayurveda for Yoga Teachers and Students by Dr. Siva Mohan (Chapter on Emotional Wellness)

This workshop is a perfect opportunity for you to enjoy the natural beauty of Esalen’s land while gaining a foundation in Esalen® Massage. Senior teachers and staff will guide you in this experience of connection and presence translated to the massage table.

Through lecture, demonstration and practice with your fellow students, you  will be introduced to the essentials, including quality of touch, rapport, a respect for our natural impulse toward healing, and mindful body mechanics. You will listen to what is felt as well as what is said. You will learn how to comfortably drape, and how to easily apply the foundational long, integration strokes and gentle stretches. You will have plenty of time for guided practice and to effectively share your experience. At the end of the weekend, you will be able to give a simple massage to friends and family back home.

Esalen massage promotes feelings of wholeness and reconnects us with our natural state of being. Teaching tools include experiential exercises to awaken the senses, demonstrations, and tableside guidance appropriate for you. The class will enjoy an optional evening in the hot tubs, birthplace of Esalen® Massage. The class is appropriate for the new and curious as well as the professional who would like to rejuvenate their senses and the quality of their touch.

10 hours of CE credit will be provided by the faculty.  For more information on CE email EMBA@esalen.org.

We live in times of rapid change and high stress. You are not alone if you’re experiencing the unease of increasing personal, societal, and global pressures — the pain of witnessing widespread social injustices and devastating ecological crises. These shared challenges create opportunities for us to heal from within in order to heal the world — to reconsider our relationships to our inner lives, one another, and the planet — to choose a life of peak purpose, intraconnectedness and interdependence.

A collective trauma of modern life is the portrayal of our identities as fundamentally separate. And yet, who we are is part of a tapestry of wholeness that modern culture often tells us does not exist.

Indigenous and contemplative teachings for thousands of years have offered insights into the deeply connected reality of our lives. Today science is catching up with this ancient wisdom. This gathering is a celebration and a sacred opportunity to shape cultural evolution towards a world of compassion and connection.    

Esalen Institute is excited to present a timely curation of five individual powerhouses in their fields of expertise: Dan Siegel (interpersonal neurobiology), Elissa Epel (science of stress), Rhonda V Magee (soulfulness and the inner work of social justice), Esselen Tribal Elder, Tom Little Bear Nason and Douglas Drummond (reconciliation and somatic facilitator), and powerful musicians: Sanga of the Valley, Nick Ayers, and Tihikpas. This unique synergy of leading voices across body, mind, relationships and spirit disciplines is designed to nurture connections not only with your fellow participants, with your own body/mind, but also with your own ancestors, and the ancient, sacred Esselen land that the Esalen Institute resides upon.

This weaving of the inner and the inter- can simply be named as the intraconnected nature of the wholeness of our fully integrated lives. Expect a renewed way of experiencing life, a more mindful and socially just way of connecting to other humans, and the profound feeling of the interdependence of our planet with a sense of purpose. This synergistic and immersive journey of exploration and intraconnectedness of the self links our inner lives to those of fellow humans and to all of nature — creating deeper ways to bring healing and transformation into our shared world.

The Come Together Festival of IntraConnectivity and Spirit will be guided by practices reflecting both indigenous and contemporary wisdom. You will explore deep lessons from embodied mindfulness, interpersonal neurobiology, and the sacred hoop — the four directions of the sacred hoop of life.

Why do we need this? To establish, renew, and recharge our commitments to stewardship of our communities and Mother Earth in these rapidly changing and transformational times.

This campus wide festival of togetherness and intraconnection will involve deep listening, experiential activities, lectures, and discussions. Come ready to receive and to give. We will incorporate ritual, meditation, nature immersion, and movement into each day.

Come together with Tom Little Bear, Rhonda Magee, Elissa Epel, Dan Siegel and Douglas Drummond as we create new pathways to sacred connection and explore, learn, laugh, love, and bring healing to ourselves and our world.

If this invitation speaks to your heart, you are already joined with us in spirit! Join us this June to experience connecting in-person, on sacred land.

This workshop has an additional $200 of faculty tuition.

Now more than ever, it is important we build practices to strengthen our internal resolve and self-resourcing amidst a dynamically shifting society. Together, we will listen to our heart’s wisdom in this rich four-day journey (Monday to Friday) through sound, ceremony, and self-discovery.

In this intimate and transformative workshop, you will have the unique opportunity to experience multiple East Forest’s live music performances. Additionally, Radha will lead us in embodiment practices of Self-Awakening Yoga, Yin Yoga, and Pranayama to create an all-levels and accessible doorway to inner insights. Through the primacy of our own heart-opening and felt experience, we can discover the inner pathways to fortitude and healing.

East Forest and Radha would like to offer a certain amount of scholarship to those in need. Please apply with this form. If further assistance would be helpful, you may also apply for an Esalen scholarship.

***Please note: While the retreat space and exercises are conducive to deep inner work, the facilitators and Esalen do not condone the use of or provide substances of any kind.

• Intimate live musical performances by East Forest
• Group co-creative musical process with East Forest
• Daily morning yoga and meditation practices
• Awe-inspiring time in nature
• Yoga
• Pranayama
• Meditation and group insight exercises
• Journaling
• Dance party

This workshop includes an additional $290 faculty tuition.

Rhythm is the universal mother tongue. It is the language of the soul. — Gabrielle Roth

Silent introspection through seated meditation and the dynamic movement practice of the 5Rhythms® both support unlocking gateways to celebration and joy. Together, we will unite these healing modalities in an environment that cultivates peace, balance, and well-being. Through sweat and stillness, we will ride the rhythms of the mother tongue and turn the heart toward self-realization.

The 5Rhythms dance method, focused on presence versus performance, is where movement becomes the metaphor for all of life. It teaches us how energy moves and where it gets stuck. The rhythms of Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness help us to more skillfully understand and navigate the inner and outer landscapes of reality.

Trauma-sensitive mindfulness builds a container to hold both movement and stillness in a way that supports all you are facing. This approach offers tools that allow you to both “work with” and “be with” what is present.

This workshop will include:

• 5Rhythms practice and theory (expect both gentle and vigorous movement)
• Trauma-sensitive mindfulness practice and philosophy
• Seated meditation
• Walking meditation
• Live music
• Sound healing
• Sharing circles

Please note that though this is trauma-informed work, trauma is not the specific focus of this workshop.

This workshop includes an additional $100 faculty tuition.

When we experience moments of ecstasy, we taste what life is meant to be. — Gabrielle Roth

The 5Rhythms® maps hold all the information required to lead us where we want to go. What is your destination? There is a science to achieving ecstatic states, and this is the mastery we have come to share. This workshop is designed for all who want to discover these possibilities for entering altered states in a natural way.

"I want to take you to a place of pure magic ... It's the place athletes call ‘the zone.’ Buddhists call ‘satori’ and ravers call ‘trance.’ I call it the Silver Desert. It's a place of pure light that holds the dark within it. It's a place of pure rhythm,” wrote Gabrielle Roth. Her dance and somatic meditation can assist you in navigating your way out of resistance and into ecstasy and help you build a skill set that supports balance, ease, and joy. If you have been looking to increase appreciation, gratitude, and happiness, now is a perfect time to celebrate being alive in the wild, wondrous, natural beauty of Esalen.

This course will include:

• 5Rhythms dance both indoors and outside by daylight and moonlight
• Creating art in nature through group projects with resident artists
• Trauma-sensitive mindfulness, including Dharma talk and sitting and walking meditations
• Group sharing circles with optional men’s and women’s circles
• Live and recorded music
• An evening program guest speaker

Lucia and Douglas, the dancing duo, invite you to join them for a week of dance and celebration under the new moon. Together with our team of musicians and artists, we seek to bring you inspiration and lightness so you return home feeling nurtured and alive.

Recommended Reading: Sweat Your Prayers by Gabrielle Roth, Maps to Ecstasy by Gabrielle Roth, Connections by Gabrielle Roth, Dancing with the Dharma edited by Harrison Blum

This workshop has an additional $100 of faculty tuition.

Through yoga and intentional music crafted from ancient beats, we’re thrilled to gather as a community to celebrate our inter-dependence.

We’ll dive into meditation, pranayama, chanting, yoga asana, dance, hot baths, lovingly prepared food, open time, and space for connection, creativity and collaboration.

Meet us at sacred Esalen on the cliffs, in the hot baths, in the redwoods, on the mat, in the heart.

Let’s rediscover the power of connection together.

10 hours of Continuing Education hours are available with Yoga Alliance; See leader.

This workshop includes an additional $110 faculty tuition.

Fostering close and connected relationships is one of the most important things affecting the quality of our lives. Cultivating trust and openness with a loved one, whether with an intimate partner or friend, is an essential aspect of any successful, supportive relationship.

This weekend, Perry and Johanna Holloman, intimate partners and friends for over 30 years, will share the most effective tools and practices they have developed to nurture their connection to each other.

The primary tool Perry and Johanna will share is called Gestalt Inquiry. This easy-to-learn, powerful practice provides a safe context for exploring the most meaningful and sensitive aspects of relationships. Perry and Johanna like to think of it as a practice that becomes a continuing part of any successful long-term relationship because it places high value on compassion, respect, and love of truth. As we learn to discover and safely express what is true for us, individually, as a couple, or as friends, we deepen our heart’s capacity for intimacy and connection, which leads to a more fulfilling and meaningful shared life.

During our time together, you will learn practices and resources to integrate into your everyday life, such as:

• Embodied practices involving movement, breath, meditation, and awareness to develop a sense of palpable presence as the foundation upon which your relationship can flourish.
• The Art of Conscious Dialogue: learning to care as much about understanding our partner and what they’re communicating as we care about being heard and understood by them.
• How to express needs, feelings, and appreciations in an attuned manner to deepen relational trust.
• Understanding the “distancing behaviors” we engage in, usually as an unconscious form of defense against vulnerability and contact.
• Learning to co-regulate each other in structured exercises, emphasizing compassion and respect so presence-based relating naturally arises.

This workshop is for couples of all genders and sexual orientations. A couple may be any two people with a history who desire a better future together, e.g., friends, partners, married or divorced spouses, parent and child, siblings, and others.

This workshop includes an additional $50 faculty tuition.

Let’s meet together at Esalen, beneath the summer sun, and immerse in the power of movement, community, music, and the glory of this land and her three waters.

Janet Stone, joined by a luminous cast of musicians and teachers, will welcome you to a journey so rich with connection and an opportunity to reset.

At the edge of the world, we will look simultaneously inward and outward to reintegrate ourselves into the natural world and our deep inner wisdom.

Through yoga, mythology, chanting, dancing, and music

We’ll create a different kind of playground for the internal senses.

Come dance, sit, and wonder with us as we honor the naturalness of transition, the outward and inward, and the waxing and waning of this precious life. Please bring a yoga mat.

CE Credit Available: 30 hours of continued education credit for registered yoga teachers (RYT) available through Yoga Alliance; see leader.

This workshop includes an additional $220 faculty tuition.

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The highest spiritual practice is self observation without judgment. — Swami Kripalu

Welcome to Esalen, a sacred haven, where the echoes of nature harmonize with the rhythms of self-discovery. This workshop invites you to embark on a transformative seven-day experience designed to nourish your mind, body, heart, and spirit. Take a deep dive into yoga wisdom and immerse yourself in the profound teachings of Yoga and Yoga Nidra.

More than a workshop, this experience can help you discover the roadmap to your true self. Guided by seasoned instructors, we’ll explore the intricacies of the ancient science of Yoga and Yoga Nidra to create a foundation for conscious living.

We believe in weaving the timeless threads of ancient practices into the fabric of contemporary life. Our workshop is a celebration to synthesize this age-old wisdom with the modern world and all of its demands. Discover how these teachings become a guiding light in your daily existence.

Whether you’re a seasoned yogi or just beginning your journey, our workshop caters to all. With a focus on modifications for diverse bodies, we create a safe space where rejuvenation and restoration are accessible to everyone.

Experience a holistic integration of body, mind, and soul through a carefully curated blend of Yoga, Yoga Nidra, meditation, mindfulness, and immersive nature experiences that goes beyond the mat, fostering a transformative environment to extend into all aspects of your life.

Escape the mundane and embrace the extraordinary.  Embark on a transformative journey for rejuvenation, for self-discovery, and to find your true, whole self.

“To live in accord with love is to set your heart on fire. In the crucible of such an inferno all convention burns away. What’s left is an entirely new kind of existence, one full of passion, presence and infinite possibility.” — Setting Your Heart on Fire

What if you could fall absolutely in love with every moment? What if you could use love’s radiance to heal your deepest wounds and break through any personal challenges — career, relationships, family, weight, self-esteem, addiction, anything?

All of this happens naturally when you stop trying to change your life and instead learn to relax into it. This workshop is designed to meet you where you are and then call forth your very best.  You’ll discover the simple, practical steps necessary to feel all emotions with willingness and compassion, uncover and transform your limiting beliefs; and create a life of greater ease, joy, and exquisite connection.

This weekend is primarily experiential. It’s designed with the recognition that your heart is already on fire – our job is to remove what’s dampening the flame. The key explorations and practices of the gathering:

• Take place solo, in dyads and triads
• Focus on the use of precise attention
• Are mainly centered in the body
• Feature  movement and active imagination
• Culminate in an “inner surfing” modality that combines vipassana, metta, and tantric approaches

Special note: On Saturday night our group will host a Freestyle Dance Jam, with Raphael as DJ, as a gift for ourselves and everyone at Esalen that night. Remember to pack some loose fitting attire and get ready to rock and roll and shake and swing and let it all go!

Recommended reading: Cushnir, Setting Your Heart on Fire, and The One Thing Holding You Back.

This workshop includes an additional $15 faculty tuition.

To breathe well is to live well. When we befriend the breath, we expand our capacity for choice, change, joy, and healing. When we embody breath — allowing limbs and bones to express outwardly the dynamic, unceasing pulsation of life within — we touch freedom.

In this new and electrifying experiential workshop, we’ll explore and deepen our connection to our breathing bodies through a number of somatic pathways: embodied movement, breathwork, presencing exercises, meditation in motion, and sound.

Operating from philosopher Havi Carel’s conception of breath as “a juncture of the physiological, psychological, existential, spiritual, and cultural,” we’ll practice dancing and digging at this intersection and, in effect, access a felt reconnection to our wholeness.

Join Sadia in her signature practice, which draws from her many deep pools of training and experience. This deeply embodied practice will include:

• A movement practice that draws equally from hatha yoga, calisthenics, ritual, Qigong, dance, and your own intuition.
• Intuitive breathwork and pranayama to help you connect more honestly to the nature of your aliveness.
• Sounding practices to liberate the use of your voice and guide you toward expanded breath capacity.
• Guided dance rituals to help you develop inner attunement and feel the limitless power of embodied expression.
• Restorative moving meditation to access the powerful convergence of attention and surrender, giving you an embodied understanding of the power of yielding to both breath and life.

Together, we’ll form a sacred community of breathing beings and establish conditions for the unobstructed flow of life force within and around our bodies — and our lives. The natural, subtly explosive intimacy that exists between body and breath — and between you and your breathing body— can emerge anew, rendering you more sensitized to desire, pleasure, purpose, and power; to who you are, what you want, and why.

Get ready for ecstatic rebirth! This small group workshop is for you if you are prepared and 100 percent willing to:

• Determine the aspects of your life that are calling for healing and change.
• Move toward healing and change on the very first day.
• Commit to an action plan.
• Take a giant leap forward in consciousness.
• Help create and support a small, like-minded community committed to the same leap.

Raphael Cushnir creates a safe and gentle environment to help call forth your very best, using tools such as:

• Emotional-release work that combines vipassana, metta, and tantric approaches.
• Journaling and vision-boarding.
• Dyadic and triadic communication process.
• Movement and chanting.

The highlight of this retreat is designing a unique transformative experience all your own. You leave with a practical road map for real-life integration, plus benefits you can experience immediately— and for the rest of your life.

Special note: On Tuesday night, our group will host a Freestyle Dance Jam, with Raphael as DJ, as a gift for ourselves and everyone at Esalen. Remember to pack some loose-fitting attire and get ready to rock and roll, shake and swing, and let it all go!

Recommended reading: The One Thing Holding You Back, by Raphael Cushnir

This workshop included an additional $25 faculty tuition.

We must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or perish together as fools. — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Through mindful viewing of eight feature films — today’s vehicles of myth — participants will open their hearts to the quality of belonging with and to others that is so important in our time. We will trace how cinema’s greatest directors have depicted intolerance and ways to embrace the other through compassion, love, and recognition of our interdependence as humans. Your cinematic repertoire will include films directed by D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Kon Ichikawa, Kenneth Branagh, Celine Song, and more.

Employing methods developed over the course of 28 film seminars co-led by Francis Lu and Brother David Steindl-Rast, this seminar will include mindful film viewing, contemplative reflection, and group interactions focused on each participant’s unique experience of these carefully curated films. As Joseph Campbell taught, “the images of myths are reflections of the spiritual and depth potentialities of every one of us …Through contemplating those, we evoke their powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.”

The viewing experience will be supported by 4K Blu-Ray video projection and a surround sound of seven loudspeakers.

5.5 CE Credits for Health Professionals are available for an additional $35 fee payable to the workshop leader. Click here for details.

Dr. Lu personally recommends, but does not require, that participants use N95 masks during the workshop sessions, which will be provided.

For further information about the seminar, please contact Francis Lu, MD, at francislumd@gmail.com

Part writing workshop and part tantric retreat, this unique practice week explores the relationship between personal writing and subtle body practices.

Religious historian and Tantric practitioner Sravana Borkataky-Varma will lead experiential sessions largely stemming from Hindu Goddess Tantra practices. Award-winning author and scholar Erik Davis will then guide the group in reading and writing exercises, developing skills and techniques that will help us creatively express our embodied experiences.

Exercises and opportunities will include:

• Chakra and subtle body meditations.
• Reading short texts to understand how writing engages subtle embodied experience.
• Using elements of writing, including metaphor, poetry, and spontaneous  language, to capture and express your own inner work.
• Techniques to develop an ongoing writing practice that supports a deepening engagement with meditation and embodied life.

Over the days, we will collectively cultivate a feedback loop between writing, discussion, and inner work. Through this alchemical process, participants will learn to more intimately and poetically clarify their subtle experiences, while at the same time using the power and energy of such practices to fire up and inspire their writing life.

This workshop has an additional $50 of faculty tuition.

Imagine your relationship expressing the true depths of your love and commitment. If you are in love, this retreat is an opportunity to rise even higher in love. If you are in crisis, it is an opportunity for healing on the deepest level. We all carry some degree of negative programming from our past, and there are loving and effective ways to transform this programming into a positive and vibrant celebration of our connection.

During this workshop, you will experience exercises and practices for you to do with each other, therapeutic coaching of each couple by the Vissells, the support of other couples and time for sharing after each practice.

You’ll acquire a collection of tools for deeper appreciation and communication building, including healthy communication of feelings, our partner as a mirror, understanding and respecting each other’s differences, conflict resolution, healing past hurts, sexual wellness, inner child/inner parent, taking responsibility and developing a true inner connection. Take the opportunity to explore these tools with your partner during the workshop and learn to incorporate them into everyday life as you continue to improve your relationship at home. For more information, visit www.SharedHeart.org.

This workshop welcomes couples of all gender and sexual orientations.

Recommended Reading: Vissell and Vissell, To Really Love a Man and To Really Love a Woman.

Asanga’s Nine Stages of Staying is one of the oldest and most comprehensive systems of concentration in the Buddhist tradition. Sometimes called the Elephant Path, this approach was originated by the great Buddhist master in 506 A.D., and it is now the main method of training the mind in the Tibetan tradition.

In this weekend meditation retreat, participants will learn the stages of the Elephant Path using the body as the primary object of concentration. Students will also receive an introduction to the basic stages of ordinary insight. By the end of our time together, students will have all the instructions necessary to successfully incorporate a robust meditation practice into everyday life.

Training the mind in this way can lead to a direct experience of equanimity and can put the student in a range of practice wherein pointing out the real nature of the awakened mind is possible.

No experience with meditation is required. If you have your own preferred meditation pillow and mat, please bring them.

Summer is the time to take a break, step off the treadmill of modern life, take care of oneself, and refill the tanks before gearing up for the busyness of fall. What does taking care of yourself really mean—for you? What do you want and need at this moment in your life; what genuinely takes care of you?

For many women, these are questions we never ask ourselves, much less express or dare to live by. We’ve been trained to know what everyone else wants and needs but not what we want and need. We know who we are in all of our roles to and for other people, but not who we are for ourselves. We sacrifice authenticity for likability, abandoning ourselves in order to be pleasing and manage other people’s perceptions of us. But there’s a longing inside us that wants to live a more truthful and vital life—a life that’s truly ours.  

This is a workshop for that longing. Through teaching, meditation, journaling, and dyad and group dialogue, you will be invited to:

• Become aware of where and how you abandon yourself by taking care of others at the expense of yourself.
• Free yourself from the likability cage and let go of being who everyone else needs you to be.
• Make the shift from doing self-care to being self-caring, rebuild your relationship with yourself to be on your own side, and reconnect with your truth.  
• Bring your own still small voice back into the conversation and into your life.
• Build the tools (and courage) for an authentic life, tell the truth, and value a relationship with yourself as much as with others.
• Come to trust, believe, and know that you matter.

The good news is this: Once you recognize the call of your own wanting, you’re already in the process of changing and reconnecting with your inherent vitality. “What do I want?” starts showing up as a question that matters, and indeed, you start showing up as someone who knows that she matters. Join this weekend of adventure and build the real-life tools, behaviors, and choices to live this change forward and create a truthful and self-affirming life.

Healing ourselves is a journey of return. During this weekend workshop, you will be invited to learn about the practice and traditions of “curanderisma” (folk medicine) to bring forth awareness and attune us to our individual healing journeys. Through meditative and contemplative practices, touch, prayer, plants, and natural elements, their work honors a lineage of centuries-old wisdom to bring a sense of well being to those seeking renewal.

This workshop will include:

• Optional morning movement and mediation practice.
• The Point of Origin: A session focused on the navel and abdominal massage for somatic release and greater self connection.
• Barridas (Plant Sweepings): Foraging and working with plant and herb bundles to cleanse energies.
• Empathic Connection: An exploration with our intuition, revealing how to listen and connect with each other, and ourselves, more deeply.
• Limpia con Huevo (Washing with an Egg): A lesson sharing the practice of clearing and divining one’s energies with the use of an egg.
• Evening Moon Meditation and Flowering Bathing.

Through Margaret and Michael’s teachings, you’re invited to connect to your own innate healing potential and have the ability to support others with love and intention.

Join us for an extended opportunity to explore the true essence of Esalen, and find yourself in the process. Like a snapshot of all that we do here on campus, this workshop is composed of enlivening and heart-opening classes that are driven by Esalen’s founding areas of focus: Heart, Mind, Body, Spirit, and Community.

During this month-long program, a cohort of like-minded students will have the opportunity to lean into the richness and diversity of programming that has both grown up on campus and is being infused into its current culture. In addition to working in service to the running of Esalen, the workshop classes have been designed to support the process of healing, transformation, and joy.

Classes will be led by the Esalen Resident Faculty Team, each bringing something uniquely transformative to the daily experience. Practices will include:

• Gestalt Awareness Practices
• Esalen-style “check-ins”
• combinations of breathwork, yoga, and inspirational writing practice
• 5Rhythms dance and movement
• And more!

Come experience Esalen for a heartful and healing month of service and transformation!

Since time immemorial, movement, dance, and the expressive arts have provided individuals and communities with a sense of soulful expression, healing, inspiration, spirit, and connection. We now need to reconnect with these ways more than ever.

The Life/Art Process®, developed by Anna Halprin and Daria Halprin, bridges body awareness, art expression, and psychological processes, providing people with an opportunity to experience dance and the expressive arts as a way to learn, heal, expand creativity, and develop new strategies for personal and professional life. This groundbreaking, innovative approach to human development, embodied creativity, and transformative learning began in the 1950s, and the tradition continues today.

Daria Halprin’s work connects dance, somatics, psychology, and artistic practices to foster personal, group, and community development and creativity. In this workshop, movement, dance, drawing, poetic dialogue,  reflective exchanges, and witnessing practices will generate new thresholds of exploration and expression, catalyzing new resources for daily life.

Morning sessions will focus on somatic awareness and individual and group movement exploration to tune the physical body to sensation and feeling. Afternoon sessions will facilitate creative encounters through dance, drawing, and spoken and written narratives to explore our life experiences. Evening sessions will be devoted to questions generated by the day’s work, reflection, and releasing activities, including creative play and meditative art practices.

Participants will be invited to :

• Experience how movement, dance, and expressive arts can be applied to their personal and professional practices.
• Develop body/mind awareness and connection.
• Expand creative expression.
• Experience improvisation and performance.
• Explore old material in new ways and generate new resources to bring into daily life.
• Play with artistic expression as a psychological tool.

No previous artistic experience is necessary. This workshop is designed for everyone.

Recommended Reading: The Expressive Body in Life, Art and Therapy by Daria Halprin

For thousands of years across many cultures, enhanced states of consciousness have been used as a strategy for meaningful transformation and self-exploration — marking life’s major transitions and rites of passage and deepening one’s connection to self, community, and the natural world.

In this workshop, we will gather in the rich field of community for an immersive experience and personal exploration of enhanced states of consciousness. Our time together will include strategies for navigating, integrating, and preparing for these experiences. Holotropic Breathwork® offers language, method, and structure for turning inward and working with deeply personal material as it emerges, uniquely, from one’s own intrinsic intelligence. We will be supported by time-honored practices that are simple, yet powerful. These unique states can offer us unmediated access to the self as a deep source of healing, insight, and evolutionary potential. Participants will experience four Holotropic Breathwork sessions, with two as “breather” and two as “sitter.” Your time assisting others in “non-ordinary state” space will complement your personal exploration. Additionally, contemplative practice, movement, expressive arts, and time in community will support the integration process throughout the week.

Originating from the pioneering psychedelic researcher, Stanislav Grof, and his late wife, Christina Grof, Holotropic Breathwork is a particularly useful practice for those interested in or training to work in psychedelic-assisted therapy.

This workshop is suited for all those of heart who are curious about exploring enhanced states of consciousness and opening to an evolutionary process of unfolding. New or novice explorers/breathers are very welcome, along with experienced navigators/breathers. The fundamental urge to grow, to heal, and to be transformed in a truly authentic way drives us not outward but inward, toward the depths of our own being, toward a deep mystery within. This inward journey strengthens and nourishes our senses in a way that can revitalize our daily lives with creative and emergent energy.

Recommended Reading: Holotropic Breathwork by Stan Grof