Join us for a free webinar on May 10:
Tap Into Your Unshakeable Trust with Alchemic Yoga Practices
Learn more
Esalen is a holistic retreat and educational institute. Established in 1962 and considered the epicenter of the Human Potential Movement, we are a non-profit offering comfort and space for exploration, transformation, and healing within the wilds of Big Sur’s majestic mountainscape and glittering coastline.
Our curiosity and research explores new ideas around creativity and the brain, body work, spirituality, leadership, Gestalt, plant medicine, citizen diplomacy, superhumanism, the survival of bodily death, Extraterrestrial intelligence, and more. Learn more about our story, mission, and vision.
We welcome visitors with advance reservations for workshops and massages to our California campus. This 100-acre stretch of Mother Nature boasts cliffside natural hot springs, an organic farm and garden, serene, rustic guest suites, and more.
Scholarships are available to make the healing and transformational magic of Esalen more easily accessible to a more diverse community of brains, hearts and souls.
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To explore transformation and experience healing is to enjoy unparalleled access to leading brains and hearts, both on our Big Sur campus and virtually worldwide.
Anchored by the inspiring beauty of this sacred land and an incomparable intellectual and social history, Esalen is a place to negotiate nuance, tangle with complexity, and sit inside contradiction. Here, we embrace the messy, imperfect practice of moving toward our highest humanity.
To realign with what is essential in ourselves is vital to living meaningfully with our own values and gifts. During this week of retreat and focused play led by Andrea Juhan, you’ll be invited to reevaluate and renew through Open Floor Movement — a mindful movement practice that can be done at any level of fitness — within a supportive group process.
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Both an important part of our global spiritual heritage and a powerful and effective mode of spiritual expression, traditional West African rituals provide techniques for manifestation, fostering empowerment, affecting transformation, cultivating vitality, and expanding human consciousness. Join Marques Redd and experience a variety of ritual modalities designed to enliven all senses, energize your intentions, and draw your desires. Return home with a variety of potent ritual tools to empower your life!
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How do you process profound loss? Many of us have not found effective ways of expressing grief and as a result, we carry the cumulative weight of our unfinished business with us everywhere. Dancer and meditation teacher Lucia Horan and physician Peter Selwyn guide you in a weekend of movement, story sharing, and supportive presence to help you move through grief and into the next phases of your life.
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We are part of a continuum, poised between the past and future — living in this present moment while carrying the legacy of the gifts and burdens of all of those who came before. Join Gitanjali Hemp for a time of teachings, meditative and reflective practices, energy healing, ceremony, and ritual. We will honor and begin healing our relationship to the ancestral fields and shift the patterns of our ingrained conditioning to choose a new way forward together.
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Ritual brings astrology to life, and the power of the celestial bodies is best understood through embodiment practices and ceremony. Learn from ritualist, author, and artist Day Schildkret and astrologer Heidi Rose Robbins to invoke the potency of archetypal energies through meaning- and presence-making tools such as altars, guided meditation, nature connection, and movement.
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Blending philosophy teachings with a variety of experiential exercises, this workshop led by Hannah Muse will explore the Brahmavihārās (Divine Abodes): loving-kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita), and equanimity (upekka). These profound, classical Buddhist Heart practices help you awaken to the beauty and possibility available in your complex, often messy, mundane, yet wholly sacred human experience.
Guided explorations are an evolution of programming designed to function outside of the group structures of our workshops. These experiences are for those who want to immerse themselves in the peace, space, and natural beauty of our campus to do the work of their own personal growth. The beauty of our Big Sur campus supports serenity for the mind, the body, the spirit, and offers nourishment for all three.
Guided by Deva Munay, learn to aid your healing processes, improve your well-being, and embrace higher consciousness with this deep dive into the world of sound using alchemy crystal singing bowls. Restore balance and connectivity to yourself and the world around you through a blend of transformational sound journeys, experiential activities, breathwork, movement, journaling, and group discussion.
Drawing on the embodied practices of yoga, pranayama (breath practice), sound meditation, and conscious dance, this week with Jovinna Chan is designed to help you reconnect your body and mind, digest your feelings and emotions, and open yourself to the wisdom of your heart. Together, we’ll gently expand your vision to include a bigger perspective on the suffering of the world.
At the baths, have you ever thought…I wish I could bottle this up? Our newest addition to the Esalen store taps you into a bit of healing at home. Learn about the Bathing & Spa collection inspired by local woods, meadows, and historical bathing rituals.
All purchases made at the Esalen Store, both in person and online, go directly to support Esalen programs and the land. Thank you for giving back to our community!
In this era of chaos, change, and grief for the world, you may find yourself facing difficulties that seem insurmountable. Lucia Horan and Peter Selwyn invite you to a weekend retreat to hold together what should not be held alone. Using the tools of 5Rhythms movement practice combined with a process of grief work grounded in emotional presence, non-judgment, and supportive witnessing, participants will come together in a safe space to help heal mind, body, and spirit.
Join us April 23 - 26, 2021 for a live-streamed event that is the first in an 8-part Entheowheel series. Your guides for this inaugural journey The Ceremony & Science of Psilocybin include: Jyoti Ma, Paul Stamets, Xochitl Ashe, East Forest, Robin Earhart-Harris, Dream Mullick, James Fadiman, Millana Snow, Justin Boretta, Allan Badiner, Grace Oh, Rhada Weppner, Sachin Patel and a digital pre-recorded transmission from Francoise Bourzat, and more to be announced. This event is designed as an educational opportunity to nurture a sense of belonging while you move through the arc of preparing, experiencing, and integrating a future sacred plant medicine experience.
The first installment of our new, free quarterly digital summit, The Way Forward: How To Stay Inspired, Reintegrate, and Find Hope in the Shadow of the Pandemic will explore the concept of collective trauma, how it both unifies and divides us, and most importantly, how we can face it together to heal on a local and national level. Offered for a sliding scale contribution, the two-day program includes multiple tracks to dig into, from interviews with incredible thought leaders and activists to a session on prolonged somatic grief processing through dance and movement. Each interview will be followed by a live Q&A with the speaker, and every attendee is welcome to join in connecting with our luminaries. In true Esalen style, we will open the event on Saturday and close it on Sunday with a group awareness practice.
Esalen Institute
55000 Highway 1
Big Sur, CA 93920
US: 1-831-667-3000
info@esalen.org
Join us for a free webinar on May 10:
Tap Into Your Unshakeable Trust with Alchemic Yoga Practices
Learn more
