Esalen Institute’s 12th Annual Benefit Weekend
Embodying Spirit in Daily Living, Friday-Sunday, October 11-13, 2013,
You are invited to spend a weekend with a group of exceptional leaders who will help us reveal our spiritual essence in pragmatic and tangible ways in business, in the arts and sciences, in community, and in other aspects of daily living. We will explore unrealized capacities for illumination, dramatic renewal, self-surpassing love, and a sense of eternal freedom and identity.
This is not a quiet weekend! While Esalen is for many a retreat – spiritual or humanistic, depending on your point of view – and one renowned for meditative experiences, our annual benefit weekend promises cross-fertilization of ideas, creativity and multiple perspectives. Today, more than ever, many of us feel a need to live more deeply and to find ways to integrate mindfulness or spirituality into the many facets of our complex lives.
Our 12th Annual Benefit Weekend is when dedicated Friends of Esalen, as well as newcomers, join together in providing philanthropic support for Esalen’s mission in Big Sur and around the world.
It is a unique opportunity for you to gather with like hearts and minds and participate in what lies ahead for Esalen. In the camaraderie and shared intention of our time together, we will encounter new possibilities for ourselves, for our shared world, and for Esalen’s unique ability to embody spirituality in everyday life.
Confirmed presenters include:
- Brother David Steindl-Rast
- Joan Borysenko
- Robert Hass
- Gay and Katie Hendricks
- Brenda Hillman
- Michael Krasny
- Michael Murphy
- Maranda Pleasant
- Banafsheh Sayyad
- Ashley Smith-Johnson
Registration
To register or learn more, please contact Gayle Felbain at gayle.felbain@esalen.org, 831-250-1022 x249.
Brother David-Steindl-Rast
David Steindl-Rast is a Catholic Benedictine monk, notable for his active participation in interfaith dialogue and his work on the interaction between spirituality and science.
Brother David Steindl-Rast has been a practicing Benedictine monk for over half a century and was one of the first Vatican-sanctioned delegates to participate in Buddhist-Christian dialogue. He is a recipient of the Martin Buber Award for his outstanding role in building bridges between religious traditions, and serves as a senior member of the Mount Savior Monastery in Elmira, New York.
He co-founded the Center for Spiritual Studies with Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and Sufi teachers and is a member of the Lindisfarne Association. His writings include Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer, The Music of Silence (with Sharon Lebell), Words of Common Sense and Belonging to the Universe (co-authored with Fritjof Capra). He also co-founded A Network for Grateful Living, an organization dedicated to gratefulness as a transformative influence for individuals and society.
Joan Borysenko
This distinguished pioneer in integrative medicine is a world-renowned expert in the mind/body connection. Her work has been foundational in an international health-care revolution that recognizes the role of meaning, and the spiritual dimensions of life, as an integral part of health and healing. Eloquent and inspiring in settings that range from hospitals to hospices, from theaters to conference venues, and from boardrooms to houses of worship, she is a credible bridge between faith and reason. Her brilliance, humor, and authenticity—in combination with the latest research—make her a compelling and inspiring speaker and writer.
Robert Hass
Robert Hass is, first of all, a poet of great
eloquence, clarity, and force, whose work
is rooted in the landscapes of his native
Northern California. Widely read and
much honored, he has brought the kind
of energy in his poetry to his work as an
essayist, translator, and activist on behalf
of poetry, literacy, and the environment.
Most notably, in his tenure as United
States Poet Laureate, Robert Hass spent two years battling American illiteracy,
armed with the mantra, “imagination makes communities.” He crisscrossed the country speaking at Rotary Club meetings, raising money to organize conferences such as “Watershed,” which brought together noted novelists, poets, and storytellers to talk about writing, nature, and community. For Hass, everything is connected. When he works to heighten literacy, he is also working to promote awareness about the environment. Hass believes that natural beauty must be tended to and that caring for a place means knowing it intimately. Poets, especially, need to pay constant attention to the interaction of mind and environment. And when he is talking about poetry itself, whether Matsuo Basho’s or Elizabeth Bishop’s, Hass is both spontaneous and
original, offering poetic insights that cannot be found in any textbook. Click here for a complete bio.
Gay and Katie Hendricks
Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., has been a leader in the fields of relationship transformation and bodymind therapies for over 45 years. After earning his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Stanford, Gay served as professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of Colorado for 21 years.
He has written and co-authored (with Katie) 35 books, including the bestseller Conscious Loving, used as a primary text in universities around the world. In 2003, Gay co-founded The Spiritual Cinema Circle, which distributes inspirational movies and conscious entertainment to subscribers in 70+ countries.
Gay has offered seminars worldwide and appeared on more than 500 radio and television shows, including OPRAH, CNN, CNBC, 48 HOURS and others.
Katie Hendricks, Ph.D., BC-DMT, is an artist of life who creates transformational theater events around the world. Passionate about the power of embodied integrity and emergence, she continuously promotes creative expression in service of a direct experience of life, wholeness and evolutionary collaboration.
She has been a pioneer in the field of body-mind integration for over forty years. Katie has an international reputation as a seminar leader, training professionals from many fields in the core skills of conscious living through the lens of body intelligence. She has flown over 1 million miles consulting and teaching in a wide array of corporations and universities. Her explorations about the catalytic, transformational power of the creative arts have been featured in many magazines, journals and books.
Katie earned a Ph.D. in Transpersonal Psychology and has been a Board Certified-Dance/Movement Therapist of the American Dance Therapy Association since 1975.
Brenda Hillman
Brenda Hillman is the author of nine collections of poetry, all published by Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Practical Water (2009) and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (fall 2013). With Patricia Dienstfrey, she co-edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood. Named by Poets and Writers magazine as one of “Fifty Inspiring Writers,” Hillman is a non-violent activist; she teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California where she is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry. blueflowerarts.com/brenda-hillman
Michael Krasny
Michael Krasny is host of KQED radio’s award-winning Forum, a news and public affairs program that concentrates on the arts, culture, health, business, and technology and ks the author of Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic Quest.
Dr. Krasny hosted a nighttime talk program for KGO Radio and co-anchored the weekly KGO television show Nightfocus. Since 1970 he has been a professor of English at San Francisco State University and is a widely published scholar, critic, and fiction writer.Michael Krasny is host of KQED radio’s award-winning Forum, a news and public affairs program that concentrates on the arts, culture, health, business, and technology and ks the author of Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic Quest. Dr. Krasny hosted a nighttime talk program for KGO Radio and co-anchored the weekly KGO television show Nightfocus. Since 1970 he has been a professor of English at San Francisco State University and is a widely published scholar, critic, and fiction writer.
Michael Murphy
Michael Murphy is cofounder and Chairman Emeritus of the Board of the Esalen Institute, and serves as Director of Esalen’s Center for Theory & Research (CTR).
Born and raised in Salinas, California, Murphy graduated from Stanford University in 1952. He lived for a year and a half at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India before starting the Esalen Institute in 1962 with his fellow Stanford graduate, Richard Price. In Big Sur, Price and Murphy co-created a magical and magnificent living laboratory on land owned by Murphy’s family. But Michael insisted that Esalen focus not only on the wonders that happen for the thousands of people that come to be healed and made whole, but that it also work for social advance in various fields and fundamental research into the potentials of human nature.
Maranda Pleasant
Maranda Pleasant is Founder/Editor-in-Chief of ORIGIN Magazine, former conflict journalist and painter. Her vision is to build a platform bringing together Art, Sustainability, Conscious Culture, Music and Humanitarianism in a national publication, giving consciousness a larger voice. ORIGIN's new film series documents the planet's largest Eco + Human Rights issues.
Banafsheh Sayyad
Iranian-born dance artist and transformational teacher, Banafsheh communicates the universal message of Sufi mysticism in a passionate yet meditative way. Her dance is an interplay between trance and directed movement, completely precise yet completely abandoned and unrestrained. Her explosive movement is sensual and ritualistic, an organic trance of impeccable technique gone wild yet anchored by a serene core. She invokes the ancient roots of dance as devotion and prayer while blazing an unique trail in contemporary dance with her masterly fusion of high level dance technique and spirituality.
Ashley Smith-Johnson
Ashley Smith-Johnson was an aspiring VP of Marketing in Silicon Valley before stumbling across the Esalen Institute. Throwing caution to the wind, she quit her job and sold all her earthly possessions to become a dishwasher in the Esalen kitchen. Adopting the true spirit of Joseph Campbell, she has followed her bliss to become a music and movement arts teacher, an adoring wife, a doting mother and Esalen auctioneer extraordinaire.
To Register
To register or learn more about this year's Annual Benefit, please contact Gayle Felbain at gayle.felbain@esalen.org, 831-250-1022 x249.