Workshops

Imagine that your body has a voice. What would it say?

The body speaks through movement, where each breath, feeling, and memory becomes a metaphor — a living story longing to be heard and danced. Begin by digging, fearlessly and with tenderness, into the fertile soil of soft skin. Touch bone. Listen to the heart, fluttering its wings against the ribs. Pluck your veins as if they were strings on a violin, playing an ancient universal rhythm.

This workshop is an invitation to return to the wisdom of the body. To listen, to express, to transform. Rooted in the Life/Art Process® developed by Anna and Daria Halprin, we will journey through movement, drawing, poetic narrative, and improvisation as pathways toward personal meaning, healing, and creative renewal.

Each day will unfold as a ritual: breath becomes rhythm, movement becomes story. We will explore what moves through us, both individually and collectively. Held within the wild beauty of Esalen, and accompanied by the live music of guest musician Miles Lassi, we will explore deeply, play wildly, and harvest what we find. No prior experience in dance or art is needed, only a willingness to express, feel, and listen.

Originating in the 1950s, the Halprin work has played a pivotal role in the groundbreaking human potential, postmodern dance, and healing arts movements, and has been offered at Esalen since the 1960s.

Recommended Reading: The Expressive Body in Life, Art & Therapy by Daria Halprin; Dances That Matter by Anna Halprin with Rachel Kaplan.

Through mindful viewing of four classic motion pictures filled with color/music/dance, participants will open their hearts to profound cinematic beauty. This seminar offers an enhanced mindfulness experience through films directed by Jacques Demy, Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger filled with cinematic beauty involving color/music/dance. These films are presented for the purpose of evoking similar discoveries in the lives of the workshop participants.

This workshop employs methods developed over the course of 28 film seminars at Esalen, co-led by Francis Lu and Brother David Steindl-Rast, including mindful film viewing, contemplative reflection, and group interaction focused on the participants’ unique experiences. In the words of Joseph Campbell, “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 is supported by 4K Blu-ray projection on a large screen and surround sound delivered by six loudspeakers.

This workshop invites you to enjoy Esalen in the summertime as you practice foundational skills in our famed massage modality. Silvia and Lori will guide you in this experience of mindful touch translated to the massage table. Through lectures, brief demonstrations, and supervised practice, they will introduce the basics: quality of touch, rapport, massage skills with “the listening hand” and effective body mechanics.

The slow-paced practice of Esalen massage sets the stage for a pleasurable natural healing process to emerge, rather than any focus on “fixing.”  You will learn how to drape and how to easily apply Esalen’s signature integrative strokes, detail,  gentle stretches, with a concluding pause. You will be encouraged to effectively share your experience. You may even enjoy giving a massage  as much as receiving one.

Classroom tools include exercises designed to awaken the senses and illuminate the value of boundaries in healing work, demonstrations, and tableside guidance tailored specifically for your experience level. The class is appropriate for the new and curious as well as the professional seeking to refresh their senses and the quality of their touch.

10 hours of continuing education provided by the faculty through Esalen Massage and Bodywork Association Teachers. For more information on CE email EMBA@esalen.org.

Have you created the impact you want? Are you showing up the way you’d like? Are you going in the right direction? You have never before been where you are right now. You have never been the age you are today, never had the experiences you now possess. This is your time to pause and reflect. We rarely allow ourselves the opportunity to stop and look at what is changing — or discover what we truly need to feel fulfilled.

This very interactive workshop will include lots of experiential exercises. Though we will cover valuable theory and there will be plenty of reflection time, this will not be a series of talks/lectures. There will be movement, coaching, a little dance, and lots of opportunity to share insights. Active participation is strongly encouraged; however, participation will always be voluntary.

Our goal is to step back from our lives and renew. We will create a courageous community to challenge, nurture and express ourselves. Participants will have the opportunity to learn what brings them joy and purpose, and then cultivate a vision to serve as a foundation for both the next year and next phase of life.

We will engage in a progression of individual and group exercises focused on reflection, movement, and listening to our inner wisdom. We’ll discover how to navigate major life transitions and learn skills to access our intuition. We will uncover the behaviors that support our overall success, and reveal which ones undermine our goals and fulfillment. If you are passionate about having a more powerful and authentic impact on the world around you, this program of renewal will be especially valuable.

Power without surrender is force. Surrender without power is collapse. True freedom comes from knowing how to embody both.

BDSM is often misunderstood as only rough sex or kink, but at its core, it’s the consensual exploration of power dynamics. It can include play with dominance and submission, sensation, and restraint — but ultimately, it’s about trust, communication, and the courage to feel deeply.

In this experiential workshop, we’ll explore power and surrender as embodied states, not just ideas. Using the Wheel of Consent® as our foundation, we’ll uncover how these dynamics show up in our desires, boundaries, and interactions. Through guided exercises, movement, and deep noticing, you’ll gain tools to navigate these energies with clarity and confidence — in erotic and everyday contexts.

You’ll be invited to:

• Engage in structured practices to embody power, surrender, and choice.
• Explore the emotions, sensations, and meanings behind these states.
• Use breath, sound, and movement to expand your awareness.
• Practice dynamics like take/allow, serve/accept, and lead/follow.
• Discover how power and surrender can bring connection, agency, and pleasure.
• Develop a deeper trust in yourself — unafraid of power, unafraid of surrender, and ready to claim both.

This workshop is somatic and participatory, with options to learn through touch and simple props like rope or blindfolds. All participation is optional — your consent always leads the way.

Please Note: This workshop will not include:

• Nudity
• Sexual activity
• BDSM technique tutorials
• Anything you do not enthusiastically consent to

This workshop includes an additional $50 of faculty tuition.

Recommended Reading: The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent, by Betty Martin

Imagine reaching the end and realizing your biggest regret is that you never found the courage to live authentically because you lived the life others expected. In this workshop, we will embark on a transformative journey inspired by the wisdom of Human Design and the spirit of Esalen. Human Design blends ancient wisdom from astrology, the I Ching, the Kabbalah, and the Hindu-Brahmin chakra system with cutting-edge insights from quantum physics to create a holistic system of self-knowledge.

We’ll explore ways to embrace our true selves, understand our inner guidance system, make wise choices, and unlock our highest potential. Practical applications will include daily decision-making, personal development, and enhancing relationships. We’ll also engage in embodiment practices, integration practices, and interactive sessions to deepen understanding.

This workshop invites you to embrace your authenticity and discover your potential. By loving your true self, following your inner authority, making wise choices, and understanding your greater purpose, you can transform your life.

Participants must bring the specifics of their birth, including their birthplace and time, along with a journal. Join us in mastering authentic living to unlock your potential within a supportive community.

Longstanding relationship structures are now being questioned in ways that are both liberating and disorienting. As inherited models rooted in codependency, people-pleasing, and rigid roles lose their authority, many of us find ourselves at a threshold, no longer willing to sacrifice sovereignty for belonging, yet unsure how to relate outside of familiar and societal patterns. This moment invites a deeper inquiry: How do we stay connected without losing ourselves? What new forms of intimacy, partnership, and community might emerge when relationships are no longer organized around survival?

During this weekend intensive, we will explore how societal conditioning has shaped our ideas of partnership — including the belief that we are incomplete without one, or that a relationship’s end signals failure. We will consider what becomes possible as codependent patterns, limiting beliefs, and outdated gender roles are released, and examine the challenges that arise when attachment is prioritized over individuality. Together, we will explore how relationships of all kinds can be approached as a reciprocal space of healing rooted in sovereignty.

This workshop will support you in:

• Recognizing and moving past societal conditioning toward authentic intimacy.
• Balancing the need for belonging and self sovereignty, while releasing fear-based relating.
• Integrating the masculine (structural) and feminine (aliveness) energetics existing within all of us, regardless of how we identify in terms of gender.
• Showing up to your community and relationships with a deeper sense of sovereignty.

If you find yourself standing at a relational threshold — ready to release old patterns yet uncertain about what may come next — join us for an exploration of connection grounded in clarity and self-authorship and discover an expansive framework rooted in the space of sovereignty.

Recommended Reading: Sovereign Love: A Guide to Healing Relationships by Reclaiming the Masculine and Feminine Within by Dené Logan

Through eastern mysticism, quantum physics, psychedelics, and films like The Matrix, we are starting to catch on that “reality” may not be as it seems.

In this workshop, you’ll be guided to develop the x-ray vision needed to see beyond the concrete circumstances of your life to peer into the underlying “code” that is responsible for the tangles holding you back. Once identified, you will be empowered to shift that code through a beautiful process of quantum alchemy.

With a background in AI, neuroscience, Eastern religion, and psychology, Sam Rader has devoted the last 28 years to discovering the energetic patterns that run our lives. Often these patterns are manifestations that were programmed during the first five years of life. Understanding our source code allows us to quickly and gently get to the root of core issues, so we can shift our energy and embodiment to shift our world.

Many say discovering your source code is like a psychedelic experience— yet much more gentle and precise. With no ingestion of substances, no catharsis, no drama, and nothing overwhelming, this is a subtle yet profound journey —  a deep dive beneath our ordinary consciousness — to radically reconfigure ourselves and our reality.

In this workshop, you will be guided to dissolve and resolve anything standing in the way of becoming the fullest you and living your true expression of love, joy, and ease.

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

Movement will be guided by guest faculty Sunshine Zerda, featuring a transformational dance experience with 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)

Experience five days of deep rest, reflection, and rejuvenation through movement, guided meditation, and the profound practice of Yoga Nidra. This workshop is designed to restore the body, clear the mind, and shift the habitual patterns that keep us from experiencing a state of calm, clarity, and balance.

Yoga Nidra, which translates to "yogic sleep," guides you to that liminal state between wakefulness and sleep, where you can systematically release stored physical, emotional, and mental tensions. In this state, you can let go of old beliefs and habits that keep you stuck in the past and fearful of the future.

With this practice, you can fully experience your emotions while knowing that there is unchanging, unshakable ground beneath you — a calm inner presence that allows you to see clearly and navigate life with greater ease.

Throughout the retreat, we will work with our bodies and minds, creating clear intentions to shift from living by unconscious, automatic programming and find a new perspective — an aware, deliberate way of being. You'll explore how to bring this newfound awareness of your true self into your personal life, relationships, work, and moments of solitude and love.

Together, we will cultivate new tools to help us navigate when we feel lost, tired, or confused and forget who we are. These guiding instruments can help us negotiate life's challenges, welcome them as opportunities, and remember our true nature.

This workshop is a unique opportunity to recognize your wholeness, the truth of who you are, and the inner peace that has always been within you — that unchanging, unshakable ground of being that you are. All that is being asked of you is to show up, lie down, and let go. Yoga Nidra will do the rest.

What to bring: blankets, a yoga mat, an eye pillow, and anything else you need to lie comfortably on the floor for extended periods. We'll also have opportunities to practice outdoors, so make sure you have layers to stay comfortable in varying conditions.

Recommended Reading: Yoga Nidra: The Art of Transformational Sleep, by Kamini Desai; and Yoga Nidra: A Meditative Practice for Deep Relaxation Healing, by Richard Miller

The body doesn’t need to be forced into healing — it needs the interference removed and the conditions restored. Most of us have been taught to approach health one symptom at a time. But what if there’s a deeper order — a way to work with your body’s systems that cultivates relief and lasting change?

This five-day immersive workshop offers a new framework for your wellness strategy. You’ll be guided through the Mohan Method, a sequential approach that addresses health from the ground up: clearing disruptors, restoring nutrients, repairing digestion, calibrating metabolism, and redesigning the patterns that shape your daily life. Each day explores one phase through self-assessment, natural remedies, somatic practices, and live music and movement led by Sunshine Zerda and QVLN.

During this workshop, you will:

• Learn body systems thinking that expands beyond conventional symptom management into root-cause awareness.
• Explore natural remedies and Ayurvedic protocols aligned with each phase — from clearing environmental toxins to supporting hormone balance through lifestyle and herbs.
• Practice somatic integration and movement to embody each phase, allowing the learning to land in your tissues, not just your mind.
• Assess your own patterns using simple, accessible tools that reveal where your system may be stuck.
• Redesign your relationship to health with clarity, agency, and a framework you can return to long after you leave Big Sur.

Walk away with practical knowledge, integrative tools, and a personalized roadmap for your wellness strategy—combining the power of Ayurveda, body systems thinking, and emotional wellness to create sustainable change in how you feel.

Imagine reconnecting with a part of you – the Divine Feminine – that brings you back into balance and harmony with yourself and all your relations. This transformative workshop combines social and political knowledge, energy- and earth-based practices, and embodiment exercises to help you release fears, resentment, and pain while inviting intuition, surrender, and flow to create a deeper sense of wholeness in your life. By decolonizing wellness and coming into right relationship with all living things, genuine healing becomes possible.

*The workshop is open to people of all gender identities and expressions.*

At the root of social, political, and economic inequities between men and women is the patriarchal culture’s colonial denigration of femininity. This central conflict in our society is something we learn at an early age and carry in our emotional, perceptual, sensory, and physical selves. Embracing femininity benefits not only women and femmes. Femininity is a spiritual energy and quality of the universe that is necessary to balance and restore us all. The Feminine Principle includes qualities like allowing, intuition, patience, nurturing, connection, mother love, and the generative principle of life itself.  

During the workshop, you will experience:

• Heart-centered journeys to connect with the energy of Mother.
• Light movement with breath, body, earth, and trees.
• Teaching sessions for frameworks of understanding.
• Creative writing for self-reflection and expression
• Group dialogue for connection and affirmation.
• A closing ceremony and celebration to set intentions and launch a new path.

This workshop is an opportunity to see beyond the distortions of heteropatriarchy to something truer about ourselves where our heart’s desires are not at odds with one another. To connect with the Divine Feminine can be a balm and antidote that heals the instilled resentments, hostility, and fear that divide us.

Recommended Reading: Awakening Shakti by Sally Kempton

Learn to call on your spirit guides and tap into your intuitive mind. Join us in a transformative workshop combining scientifically proven brain-enhancing techniques with intuitive guidance to help you break free from self-limiting patterns and create the life you desire.

This workshop brings together two powerful approaches to help you develop tools for personal growth and transformation. Through easy-to-learn exercises, you will learn how opening neural pathways to your higher consciousness can bring valuable insights into areas where you may feel stuck. By thinking outside the box and accessing your intuitive mind, you have the ability to unlock your creative potential and experience increased productivity and happiness.

Guest faculty Joseph Perreta, a certified psychic medium, will guide you in connecting with your support system on the other side. Joseph’s ability to channel messages directly from the spirit world offers validation, clarification, healing, and peace. His presence will enrich your experience and provide a deeper understanding of the spiritual realm.

Throughout the workshop, you will develop practical tools that you can apply whenever you face important decisions or obstacles in life. By harnessing your intuition and uncovering profound insights about yourself, you will gain the clarity and confidence needed to make positive changes.

Our intention is to empower you to unlock your intuitive mind and carry these transformative practices with you long after the workshop ends. Please come prepared with a notebook or journal and a pen to capture your experiences and reflections.

This workshop has two options on length of stay: a traditional weekend of two nights or a long weekend of three nights. The extended stay workshop will include more workshop content which is reflected in the extended stay schedule.

Recommended Reading: Thought Revolution: How to Unlock Your Inner Genius by William Donius

Are you ready to listen to the calling of your courageous heart?

This weekend yoga retreat invites you to slow down and relax into a deep knowing of your heart’s wisdom. Tap into the astrological event known as The Lion’s Gate Portal, in which Sirius, the brightest star, aligns with the Sun during our time together, and let this auspicious meeting of energy in the sky amplify your own courage to follow your heart and realign your body, mind, and spirit with your higher purpose.

During this weekend, we will:

• Take time to flow through meditative yoga practices to strengthen the body and witness consciousness.
• Experience sound healing to nurture and support the immune system and subtle energy body.
• Create a ritual on Saturday, 8/8, to honor the invisible forces that guide our spiritual paths.

Step through the portal and move with the great mystery. Come practice in community and uplift each other. Receive nourishment from the sacred land at Esalen. Return home feeling fully alive with a deeper sense of gratitude and focus.

Note: Jovinna invites you to detox from or minimize the use of all electronics during your time here. Some yoga experience is recommended. Bring a journal and pen.

This workshop includes an additional $35 in faculty tuition.

These are not gentle times. The world presses hard, fast, and loud, and many of us are carrying more than we know how to hold. Rage, fear, grief, and urgency — energies that don’t easily soothe or settle — have worn hope thin.

This workshop is an invitation to move with what feels big, unruly, and alive. Instead of shutting down, pushing through, or collapsing under intensity, we’ll explore how to meet and channel it through the body, with guidance and care.

We align with magnitude — the size and intensity of our experience. We dance with mayhem — disruption, chaos, loss of control. We open to monstrosity — the parts of us that may be hidden, inconvenient, feral, or frightening, yet deeply enlivening.

Through guided movement, music, and art-making, we practice channeling big energies into motion and form, allowing intensity to become expressive and creative, rather than overwhelming or destructive.

The space is clearly facilitated and well-contained, rooted in choice, gradation, and consent. All movements are invitational and adaptable. You choose how close you get. You choose the pace. You choose how much to share and in what form. Time will be included for grounding and integration.

Expect uncertainty, transformation, and good company.

How we sit, stand, move, and respond to our inner and outer world reflects deeply ingrained patterns wired into our nervous systems since childhood. They reflect our early solutions to physical survival in our family system. Out of awareness, these beliefs and strategies can still run our adult lives, limit our choices, and prevent physical ease and emotional healing.

If you still have pain or limitations from a past injury, it is usually because many other areas in your body had to overwork to protect and avoid using the injured area while you were recovering. These unconscious compensations can create an imbalanced workload and, eventually, new issues elsewhere in our body that prevent complete healing.

Using CFR®, we slowly explore and deeply sense small, gentle movements that bring these hidden patterns into awareness. When our genius nervous system becomes aware of a habit that is no longer useful, it extinguishes it. A greater experience of self-trust and self-worth is uncovered. A new sense of self-love, which comes from paying attention to your details without judgment, usually emerges.

This workshop is for the sedentary who want to become more active, the highly active who want to avoid injury and gain a competitive edge, and the chronically tired and stressed who want to improve breathing, posture, and flexibility. It is for those who have experienced physical injury or emotional trauma and those in helping professions who wish to enhance outcomes for clients and patients.  

You will leave equipped with simple yet effective tools for continued self-healing. Your discoveries will lead to a state of awe about what is possible in your body, your movement, and your life.

Recommended Reading: Somatics by Thomas Hanna and The Elusive Obvious by Moshé Feldenkrais

Continuing education credit is available for Physical Therapist who are licensed in CA and TX. Note that TX has reciprocity with the following states: AL, AK, AZ, AR, CO, CT,  FL, ID, IN, KY, MA , MI, MS, MO, MT, NH, NC, ND, OR, RI, SD, VT, WA. Please check with your state board to confirm.. Please see the faculty during your first workshop session for more information. OR email faculty member Melissa Krikorian info@thenexusway.com.

Have you ever wanted to learn how to grow your own food? Experience a dynamic week in the Esalen Farm and Garden and fully participate alongside our talented and experienced staff. Local food security is a major issue facing communities worldwide. It is said that there is no greater form of activism than growing one’s own food—no greater sense of connection to the land than sowing, cultivating, and harvesting from the earth that sustains us. This is the essence of SLOW food (Sustainable, Local, Organic and in respect to the Wild).

Come into a deeper relationship with and celebration of the whole process. By working directly with the Esalen Farm and Garden crew, you will experience the joys and challenges that come with making a garden thrive.

Our days together will include:

• Hands-on experience: harvesting, composting, bed preparation, seed starting, cultivation, irrigation systems, transplanting, and other farming techniques.
• Daily curriculum sessions: diving deeper into specific topics, with space to ask questions and have discussions.
• Community and connection: working together to cultivate teamwork and meaningful relationships.

From a seed planted with intention, the world can change. Participate in the amazing cycles of the season in the garden. We will cultivate community with each other and be part of the magic in the fields of the Esalen Farm & Garden. You are invited to learn about organic and regenerative farming practices that embody our mission of human potential in harmony with nature. Join the legacy of this collaborative creative project, grow healthy, nutrient-rich foods, and become part of the next generation of growers, educators, and land stewards to build connected, thriving, and ever-strengthening communities.

This workshop includes an additional $40 materials fee.

What would happen if you stopped editing yourself before you began?

This embodied writing workshop is designed to get you out of your head and into your body — where the stories that refuse to stay quiet live. Through writing, movement, and deep listening, participants access material often buried beneath politeness and perfection. This is where the censoring mind loosens, and something truer emerges. The stories we avoid are often the ones most worth telling.

Writers and non-writers alike are welcome. No experience is required, and sharing is always optional. Presence — not perfection — is the practice.

During this workshop, participants will:

• Learn to access their voice through guided writing exercises before the censoring mind takes over.
• Use gentle movement and experiential exercises to unlock insight held in the body.
• Explore irreverence and reverence side by side, creating safety for vulnerable material.
• Practice deep listening to self and others, cultivating trust and creative permission.

Leave emboldened, with trust in your own voice and a renewed sense of boundless creative expression. Come as you are. This is where you unmute it.

Recommended Reading: War of Art by Steven Pressfield

What would happen if you stopped editing yourself before you began?

This embodied writing workshop is designed to get you out of your head and into your body — where the stories that refuse to stay quiet live. Through writing, movement, and deep listening, participants access material often buried beneath politeness and perfection. This is where the censoring mind loosens, and something truer emerges. The stories we avoid are often the ones most worth telling.

Writers and non-writers alike are welcome. No experience is required, and sharing is always optional. Presence — not perfection — is the practice.

During this workshop, participants will:

• Learn to access their voice through guided writing exercises before the censoring mind takes over.
• Use gentle movement and experiential exercises to unlock insight held in the body.
• Explore irreverence and reverence side by side, creating safety for vulnerable material.
• Practice deep listening to self and others, cultivating trust and creative permission.

Leave emboldened, with trust in your own voice and a renewed sense of boundless creative expression. Come as you are. This is where you unmute it.

Recommended Reading: War of Art by Steven Pressfield

We’re all natural liminal dreamers. Every 24 hours, in the spaces between waking and sleep, we pass through the zones of liminal dreaming, hypnagogia and hypnopompia, where the mind meanders between daytime awareness and the depths of the dream.

Every one of us possesses the ability to maintain the crisp awareness of the waking mind while sinking into the free-associative, kaleidoscopic realms of the unconscious. It’s easy to learn to locate and linger in this unique realm of consciousness — and to plumb it for creativity, problem-solving, mental and spiritual healing, and consciousness exploration.

This workshop provides an in-depth exploration of hypnagogia and hypnopompia, integrating pioneering neuroscience with deep experiential practice. Jennifer Dumpert, author of Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep, draws on decades of work developing and teaching practices for accessing these remarkable states. Adam Haar Horowitz, neuroscientist and co-inventor of Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI) and the Dormio device, presents the underlying neurophysiology of sleep onset and demonstrates how real-time sleep sensing and precisely timed auditory cues can stabilize and extend hypnagogia.

Together, Jennifer and Adam bridge empirical and contemplative approaches, guiding participants to not only experience liminal dreaming firsthand but to understand its measurable mechanisms and transformative potentials.

Note: As we will be settling into a dreamy state throughout the weekend, you are encouraged to bring any comforting items that might assist you in relaxing: special pillow, eye mask, blanket, etc.

Recommended Reading: Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep by Jennifer Dumpert

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?—Mary Oliver

The Brahmavihārās (divine abodes) are profound practices that uncover your natural capacity to live your life easefully with love, connection, wisdom, and joy. In this experiential workshop, we’ll use daily guided meditation practices, storytelling, song, relational mindfulness practices, self-directed neuroplasticity, yoga, and somatic play to explore the classical Buddhist Heart practices known as the “boundless states” or the “four immeasurables.”

In this workshop, we will explore these four key virtues (found in the Yogic & Buddhist traditions) and ways to cultivate them, including:

• Loving-kindness (metta) practices for self-acceptance, relational healing, gratitude, forgiveness, and kinship with all beings.  
• Compassion (karuna) practices for tenderness, resilience, an open-heart to suffering, and a greater sense of our shared humanity.
• Sympathetic joy (mudita) practices for enthusiasm, authentic joy, generosity, and celebratory participation in life. 
• Equanimity (upekka) practices for wisdom, perspective, clarity, and an unwavering sense of trust.

‍Our days will follow a nourishing schedule of embodied experiences balanced harmoniously with relaxing meals, community connection, and starlit soaks in Esalen’s healing baths. Live music, nature, poetry, shadow work, journaling, breathwork, and ritual will all be artfully woven into our time together.

Whereas some spiritual practices are aimed at otherworldly enlightenment, the four divine abodes help us awaken to the beauty, clarity, and vast possibility available right here in our complex, often messy, mundane, and wholly sacred human experience. They are a pathway to unburdening ourselves of self-doubt, resentment, and regret. They guide our way home to that wellspring in our hearts from which unconditional love flows, where we contact our wholeness, discover radical acceptance, and remember our belonging in this world.

No matter who you are, where you are on your spiritual path, or what you’ve been through, discovering renewal is possible. Join us if you long for a deep, playful, tenderizing workshop that may touch your heart and leave you forever transformed.

The Big Sur wilderness lives and breathes, listens, and speaks. Beneath ancient redwood trees, a shimmering creek journeys toward the sea. In the oak woodland, a polyphony of birds sings to the rising sun. Fog dances across chaparral bluffs, caressing sagebrush and sandstone cliffs. Every cove, meadow, and forest of this biodiverse landscape is alive with presences embodying agency, awareness, and beinghood.

Many of us, however, have inherited a modern Western perspective — shaped by human exceptionalism and reductionistic materialism — that dims our ability to perceive the living complexity and intelligence of our wild world. We are conditioned to see scenery instead of sentience, resource instead of relation. This objectification of the Earth has severed us from the natural world, yielding existential loneliness and environmental peril.

Animism — humanity’s foundational, pre-modern worldview — offers a different frame, regarding the cosmos and all within it as alive, awake, and irreducibly valuable. From this vantage, the world is a great family of interconnected kin, each with distinct perspectives and gifts, all possessing dignity and knowing.

Join us for five days of immersion in animism’s deeper, more ancient relational reality. Through mindful hiking on Big Sur’s trails — Esselen tribal lands — sustained time in the wild, and playful tuning of awareness, we will cultivate our attention and intuition to begin to see beyond modernity’s myopic view. Rather than approaching animism as belief, we will explore it as practice — a patient, embodied turning toward the living land as companion and teacher.

This workshop invites us to remember ourselves as kindred with all life, rooted in belonging to the Earth and our deeper-time ancestors. By encountering these older ways of being and knowing, we joyfully re-enter the enchanted, animate world.

Notes:

• Answers to frequently asked questions about the workshop can be found here.
• This workshop will consist of numerous, outdoor, physical practices and a great deal of walking, including two long-form hikes and one half-day hike. Various hiking abilities can be accommodated, bearing in mind that our long hikes are up to seven miles in length, over uneven and often steep terrain. Participants must be able to sit on the ground, practice outside in all weathers, and get a little dirty. If you have any questions about your ability to participate, please read the workshop FAQs or email info@wildtender.com.
• An additional $100 fee to cover parks permits and parking fees is included in the workshop cost.

For thousands of years across many cultures, expanded states of consciousness have been used intentionally 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.

This workshop includes an additional $75 of faculty tuition.

Let’s be real — queer men are already masters of reinvention. We’ve learned to shapeshift, decode signals, seduce with a glance, armor up when needed, and sometimes dissociate in the name of survival. Our sexuality has been a battlefield and a playground — sometimes both in the same night. Sexuality offers a lens through which we may examine and deeply experience ourselves and our connection to all of existence. By fully immersing yourself in your sexual experiences, there is more — more pleasure, more presence, more freedom — hiding in plain sight. In your hips. Your breath. Your belly. Your no. Your yes. Your body.

This weekend is a playful deep dive into what it means to live in a queer male body — cis or transmasculine — with curiosity, with courage, and in relation to society and one another.

Together, we’ll explore the wild terrain of gender and sexuality — not from a textbook, but from the inside out. Through guided practices, embodied rituals, and communal reflection, you’ll get to ask big, juicy questions like:

• What kind of man am I when I stop trying so hard? If I move past the “masc” persona and its acceptable coded behaviors to embrace an energy that is both boundless and de-gendered?
• How much of my desire is mine, and how much is performance?
• What would it feel like to inhabit my sexuality without apology — or choreography?

We’ll explore how shame, culture, trauma, and liberation show up in our movements, our fantasies, our ability (or inability) to receive touch. We’ll stretch out of binary thinking and into something more fluid, more alive, more you. You’ll be invited to experiment with different ways of relating, touching, and expressing — from the tender to the wild, the sacred to the silly.

This is not about being “good at sex.” It’s about being honest in our sexuality. And maybe even finding new ways to experience it as medicine, mischief, and art.

Why this, why now? Because queer men are still carrying a lot — even in all our glittering freedom. We’ve inherited both boldness and bruises. While we celebrate open sexuality in our culture, we rarely get the space to slow down and feel what it all means in our bodies. This is that space. Join us to make meaning together — with breath, touch, and truth.

Please note: This workshop, designed specifically for those who identify as queer men (cis or trans), includes partial nudity, guided touch, roleplay, and somatic exploration of gender and sexuality. All activities are optional. The space we create together centers safety, sovereignty, and presence, prioritizing your agency and comfort at every turn. Your consent leads the way. Although we will explore touch and sensuality, no sexual acts of any kind will be instructed or included in this workshop. It will not include full nudity, nor anything you do not enthusiastically consent to.

Recommended Reading: Urban Tantra by Barbara Carrellas; The ManTantra Letters by Victor Bliss & Nathan James

Come with an open mind and an open heart, and allow consciousness to meet you where you are.

Across cultures and throughout history, humans have reported subtle perceptual capacities — deep intuition, nonlocal connections, and heightened sensitivity to energy and emotion — that extend beyond ordinary awareness. While such experiences were once considered natural aspects of being human, modern education and cultural conditioning have narrowed our idea of perception, privileging only what can be measured and easily explained. In the process, many people may have lost access to dimensions of awareness that remain quietly present within them.

Drawing on decades of clinical work, interdisciplinary research, and personal exploration, this experiential approach to expanded consciousness emphasizes embodiment, emotional coherence, and nervous-system regulation. Rather than relying on mental effort or concentration, participants are guided to attune deeply to body, breath, sensation, feeling, and heart, forming an integrated Body–Feeling–Mind field.

Within this unified field of awareness, intuitive and so-called “extra-ordinary” perceptions can arise spontaneously — not as special abilities to be forced or performed, but as natural expressions of coherence, presence, and connection. This workshop does not ask participants to adopt any particular belief system; instead, it invites direct experience, self-inquiry, and integration.

Through guided practices, dialogue, and gentle somatic exploration, we’ll explore how expanded awareness can be accessed safely and meaningfully — and how it may be integrated into everyday life, relationships, creativity, and service. Join us for a transformative weekend of embodied exploration, community, and remembrance of the vast potential of human consciousness.

Recommended Reading: The ESP Enigma – The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena by Diane Hennacy Powell;  Space, Time and Beyond by Bob Toben