Workshops

Join us for deep release and renewal as we pause to align with autumn, acknowledge the sacred cycle of life, and move gracefully through this transitory season.

Autumn is a time of letting go and accepting the impermanence of things. For many spiritual traditions, it has long been an opportunity to slow down and reflect — to consciously participate in the process of closing one chapter and starting anew.

During this period of great change, our yoga and meditation practices can help us feel more grounded, rooted, supported, and nourished. We can create more intentional pauses and open to the sacred present moment as it is while we also fortify our inner resources, nourish our health and wellbeing, and expand our capacity for compassion and connection.

With an emphasis on rooting while opening change, we will work with multiple practices to meet this moment of transition and transformation. Each class will focus on balancing the nervous system while weaving together heart-based practices with slow flow yoga, somatic movement, deep restorative relaxation, and Metta meditation. Plus, we’ll incorporate inner reflection, seasonal rituals, and journaling options to help us flow through fall with reverence and ease.

More than ever, we can benefit by pausing, releasing stress and tension, and restoring our energy and nurturing ourselves in order to better nurture our world.

Garth Stevenson will add deeply healing vibrations with his double bass to help us cultivate the balance between grounding and releasing into the spaciousness of the season.

Throughout this retreat, we will practice outdoors and embrace the Autumn elements to truly be with life’s changes and arrive more fully in the present moment.

Recommended Reading: The Power of the Pause By Jillian Pransky

This workshop includes an additional $125 in faculty tuition.

Many of us are overextended yet underfulfilled. In this highly experiential workshop, you’ll be guided through the Wise Effort Method, a powerful, ACT- and wisdom traditions-informed process to reclaim your energy and direct it toward what matters most. Through values mapping, group work, and real-life behavior experiments, you’ll be invited to identify what’s draining you, strengthen what sustains you, and design wiser ways of showing up in your life, relationships, and work.

Explore three Wise Effort practices designed to help you reconnect with what truly matters. We’ll begin by getting curious and gently mapping where your energy is actually going right now, noticing what may be keeping you stuck, and discovering what truly matters to you. From there, you’ll open up, practicing radical acceptance of what is so you can open up to more of who you are. Finally, you’ll focus your energy, designing and committing to a life that reflects your values in key areas such as work, relationships, health, and creativity.

This retreat centers on interactive practices: partner and small-group exercises, live coaching demonstrations, and gently guided reflection time.

Participants will be invited to:

• Explore three ways of relating to the world that keep us stuck in unwise effort.
• Clarify core values.
• Learn and practice skills to open up and focus your energy on what matters most to you.

Recommended reading: Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Energy on What Matters Most by Dr. Diana Hill

The Artist lives within everyone! Art can be made out of just about anything! It’s a time to leave the critic behind and allow oneself to play, nourish, and replenish the creative spirit. It’s also a time to enjoy the company and camaraderie of like-minded peers. Now is your time to discover the joys of art based on community and collaboration and to find out how meaningful and grand a shared, creative experience can be.

In this transformative workshop, we will use repurposed material in a whole new context of re-creation.

Come experiment with a vast array of reused materials to create mixed-media mosaics, sculptures, and collages. There will be an assortment of recycled glass, metals, wood, plastics, paper, photographs, fabrics, and old artifacts — bits and pieces of the past and present.

In a beautiful, nurturing, supportive setting, we will reclaim and shape society’s scraps and discarded objects into re-imagined meaning. Find your own inner voice of expression as you delve into the process of creating art out of different materials and mediums,  and learn new skills.

Not only will you have the opportunity to explore your own expression and immerse yourself in solo creations, but we will also engage in a collaborative group project to enter the whimsical world of community-oriented magic and play.

There is a transformative joy that comes from engaging with others in the artistic process. It opens doors unseen and forges deeper bonds between people. This exciting, shared experience teaches us how beautiful it is to break down barriers and collaborate.

This workshop is geared toward anyone with the desire to create. From the beginner to the advanced, this is a time to explore new possibilities. Together, we will:

• Explore our own creativity and immerse ourselves in solo artistic expression.
• Engage in a collaborative group project and enter the whimsical world of community-oriented magic and play.
• Leave the critic behind and allow ourselves to play, nourish, and replenish the creative spirit.
• Discover the joys of art based on community and collaboration and how meaningful and grand a shared experience can be.

If there are any recycled materials, special mementos, poems, or photos you would like to bring and include in our creations, please feel free!

This workshop includes an additional $115 for workshop materials.

The myths that built this world — the ones that tell us who belongs, who leads, and who is worthy of care — are losing their hold, and the body knows it. Long before the mind catches up, the body has been carrying the weight of these stories: in the armor we wear, the patterns we embody, and the creativity we withhold.

This workshop is an invitation to go beyond the veil and begin the ancient, necessary work of returning to yourself. Over the course of our time together, you will be guided through a layered journey of the myths that have shaped us and the medicine waiting on the other side.

Our journey weaves in four directions:

• Unlearn — surface the cultural stories embedded in your posture, your patterns, and your pain, and begin to loosen their grip.
• Transform — reorganize the patterns of control, scarcity, and separation that have run your inner life, and feel what opens when they no longer do.
• Recover — reclaim the wisdom, histories, and ways of knowing that dominant culture has obscured or erased.
• Co–create — practice, together, what it actually feels like to move from a different story entirely.

This is the work that makes the other work possible — the foundation beneath every vision, every relationship, every act of courage toward a different future. Designed for those who sense that the world will not change until we do.

Who are we to tell our stories? How can we grant ourselves permission to write the truths we’re compelled after being told we shouldn’t?

Designed for creatives of every stripe and at every level, this workshop is a generative and inspiring experience that empowers participants to unpack their right to tell the stories that make them who they are in a world that asks them to stay silent. It is designed to enable participants to embrace the stories that are theirs to share, write them with authenticity, clarity, and compassion, and cultivate the courage it takes to transform their stories into art.

This immersive program will lead participants through a supportive exploration of the craft of personal storytelling — how to short-circuit the fear that prevents creation, how to begin and persevere after being told you can’t, and how to transcend the constraints that keep vital stories from being written.

Over the course of a week, participants will engage in exercises that marry creative exploration with practical writing techniques, including:

• Exploring strategies for overcoming creative self-doubt.
• Navigating shame-based emotional obstacles that prevent writers from reclaiming ownership of their stories.
• Structuring narratives in ways that resonate deeply not only with themselves but also with readers.

The workshop will address the psychological and emotional aspects of memoir writing, helping participants recognize internal barriers and develop practices for sustained creative confidence. Attendees will be given tangible tools to continue their work beyond the retreat and to lay the foundation for a memoir or personal project grounded in their deepest intentions.

Open to writers of all levels. Attendees will be encouraged to share their work in a safe, creative, productive environment designed for creativity, courage, and personal growth.

Recommended Reading: Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create by Elissa Altman, Motherland by Elissa Altman, Poor Man’s Feast by Elissa Altman, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief  by Victoria Chang, Writing Past Dark by Bonnie Friedman, and Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott.

The Shame Triangle is an inner dynamic of parts that many of us carry without even realizing. It includes three primary roles: an Inner Critic that attacks, a Shame Part that absorbs the blow, and an Inner Escaper that tries to avoid pain while showing up in many forms: overfunctioning, perfectionism, and overachieving on one end, and dissociating, zoning out, using substances, or lashing out on the other. Together, these parts form a closed loop that keeps us stuck in survival strategies, disconnected from others and our deeper truth, and unable to fully access the Self.

Rooted in Internal Family Systems (IFS), narrative therapy, and the transformative power of Parts Work, this workshop guides participants to access Self-energy — the calm, clear presence within that can witness and transform our inner dynamics. We’ll explore how the Shame Triangle forms, how it functions internally, and how it is shaped by larger social, cultural, and intergenerational influences.

As the Shame Triangle softens, it gives rise to what we call the Inner Love Triangle, where the Inner Critic becomes an Inner Coach, Shame opens into Raw Experience, and the Escaper evolves into an Inner Nurturer — a dynamic grounded in support, truth, and clarity, where previously conflictual parts become powerful allies.

The workshop includes:

• Guided parts work.
• Somatic practices and narrative inquiry.
• Relational exercises in pairs and small groups.
• Live demonstrations of working with parts.
• IFS sculpting, a dynamic group process similar to Family Constellations that makes internal parts visible and experiential.
• Legacy unburdening for the aspects of the Shame Triangle that are inherited rather than personally acquired.

Discover a clear map of how shame operates within, where it originates — both personally and collectively — and how to transform this inner structure to support lasting change and self-leadership.

Note: Familiarity with Internal Family Systems, parts work, or somatic practices is helpful but not required. Participants at all levels can find meaningful entry points into this work. Those currently in crisis, in early trauma recovery, or without access to adequate support are encouraged to consider whether the timing is right for this work

Recommended reading: Transforming the Shame Triangle: From Shame to Love Using Parts Work by Jessica Fern & David Cooley

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.

The Earth holds us, breathes with us, moves through us.

Since time immemorial, human beings have lived in deep, reciprocal relationship with landscapes—our movements shaped by terrain, our nervous systems regulated by the rhythms of seasons and tides, our sense of self inseparable from the more-than-human world. Yet, in this modern, frenetic age, we are conditioned to see our bodies as isolated, our healing as individual, and “nature” as separate. This retreat is an invitation to remember an older truth: to inhabit our own bodies fully is to reinhabit the living Earth.

Rooted in the Gestalt traditions of Esalen and the emergent field of eco-somatics, our four-day backpacking journey will guide us through the wilds of Big Sur—Esselen tribal territory—in an immersive exploration of belonging, awareness, and interconnection, followed by a weekend of retreat and integration at Esalen Institute.

While trekking through awe-inspiring wilderness, we will engage in somatic practices that reawaken our felt kinship with the natural world. Embracing slowness and spaciousness, we will attune to gravity, breath, and the sensuous aliveness of place. Silent hiking, intuitive movement, meditation, and earth-based ritual will dissolve the false boundary between self and landscape. Exploring embodiment as an intimate community, we will move beyond notions of individual self-care to a lived experience of healing as relational and ecological.

Through this retreat, we step into a different rhythm—one guided by the living world around and within us. As we listen with our whole bodies, we begin to sense the reciprocity woven into all things. What emerges is not just connection but remembering—a return to a relationship as ancient as our true body: the Earth.

Important Notes:

• The full experience takes place over six days, from Tuesday, October 13th to Sunday, October 18th, 2026.

• This is a partner program with Wildtender, an organization based in Big Sur exploring the embodied intersection of wilderness and wisdom traditions. Prior to registering with Esalen, you will need to register and pay tuition fees through Wildtender for the wilderness portion of the program. For more details and to register, visit wildtender.org/earthbody

Experience with backpacking is not required. Wilderness skills will be taught before and within the program, and participants will be supported in preparations. Please see Wildtender’s program page for a more detailed hiking itinerary and backpacking eligibility criteria.

Our instinctual nature shapes how we move through life — how we seek safety, connection, and passion. Yet this powerful aspect of us is often misunderstood or overlooked, even in spiritual work. In the Enneagram tradition, our instincts are seen as three fundamental drives — Self-Preservation, Sexual (Attraction), and Social (Adaptation) — that influence how our type expresses itself. Each of these is further divided into three zones for practical understanding and clarity.

The Instincts are not just an overlay to your Type; they are the engine of your personality. They determine how you engage with the world, how you seek safety, and how you love. Without understanding the Instincts — the biological and physical zones of our being — we are trying to navigate the Enneagram without the foundation. They are the core of our relationship with self and others.

Each of us relies more heavily on one instinct, while the others tend to be underdeveloped or neglected. The “instinctual stack” profoundly affects our attention, relationships, and personal growth. Learning to recognize these patterns brings greater balance and presence to our daily lives.

In this workshop, we will clarify and deepen our understanding of the Instincts, seeing them at work in our personal experiences. Through experiential exercises, movement, and meditation, we will observe how the instincts show up in real time — how they support, limit, and shape our awareness — and practice engaging them with curiosity rather than resistance.

Open to both newcomers and longtime students of the Enneagram, this is an accessible and grounded approach to understanding how our most basic drives can become allies in living with greater awareness and authenticity.

Recommended reading: Wisdom of the Enneagram by Russ Hudson & Don Riso ;
The Instinctual Drives and the Enneagram by John Luckovich

Join master craftsman and musician Guillermo Martinez for an unforgettable journey into the sacred traditions of Native American instrument making and music. This immersive, hands-on workshop invites you to reconnect with the spirit of sound by crafting three profound instruments: a Native American bamboo flute, a 16″ elk-hide medicine drum, and a gourd crystal rattle.

Designed for beginners and enthusiasts alike, this workshop begins with an exploration of the Native American flute. You’ll not only learn to play this sacred instrument — with guidance on breath control, finger positioning, and melodic phrasing — but you will also craft your own Native American-style flute using bamboo. Through this experiential journey, you’ll discover the flute’s power to express emotion, foster introspection, and create a deep sense of connection.

Next, delve into the sacred art of drum making as you create a 16” elk-hide medicine drum — a profound instrument that serves as the foundation of a trilogy of sacred tools in Native traditions. Guillermo will share the cultural and spiritual significance of the medicine drum and its role as a vessel of healing, rhythm, and spiritual resonance. Using traditional techniques, you will stretch the elk hide and lace the drum by hand, crafting a one-of-a-kind instrument that carries your unique spirit and purpose.

Lastly, connect with the power of resonance as you create your own crystal rattle using ethically sourced gourds, crystals, and natural materials. By blending traditional techniques with your personal intention, you’ll craft a sacred tool for healing, ceremony, and transformation.

No prior musical experience is necessary — just an open heart and a willingness to listen deeply. All materials will be provided, including tools and components for flute, drum, and rattle making.

This workshop has a $225 material fee, which covers all materials for instrument making.

“To feel is to heal. To contact is to awaken.” — Dick Price

Human beings are relational by nature. We are an intricate web of anatomy, energy, space, and time that takes shape through our life experiences. Our physical structure, function, and sense of self are reflected in our fascial layers and formed by our early development, by principles of self-organization, and by how we engage with our environment.

When we fall into habitual patterns, parts of ourselves become undeveloped, unseen. If our bodies are given a setting in which to relate to gravity, others, and our environment with curiosity and attunement, we can be free to move and relate with more choice and ease.

Using the grounds, waters, and spirit of Esalen as our laboratory, Kate and Dwight will use the Feldenkrais Method and Gestalt process as a guide to contact and nurture the influences of the subtle body – our relationship to ground, gravity, and the space between.

In this workshop, participants will:

Identify the habitual relational patterns that prevent us from cultivating ease in our lives.

Investigate how the subtle body is influenced by the principles of emotional anatomy, tensegrity, neuroplasticity, and self-organization through experiential movement.

Be guided through Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement (ATM) lessons tailored toward the subtle body and creating more sophistication in functional movement.

Explore sensation, weight, gravity, and relationship through movement and contact.

Learn tools of Gestalt Relational Process to increase presence and awareness and integration of ourselves.

Recommended Reading: Feldenkrais, The Potent Self: A Study of Spontaneity and Compulsion; Gladis, Tales of a Wounded Healer: Creating Exact Moments of Healing; Bodywise: An Introduction to Hellerwork for Regaining Flexibility & Well-Being.

What if personal power isn’t something you earn by doing more, but something you reclaim by being more fully yourself? How might your life and relationships shift if you could lead from your truth? What if your body became your inner compass, a steady and trustworthy guide through life?

This is an invitation into the wisdom of the body.

Somatic research affirms what embodied traditions have long known: the body holds the keys to authenticity, presence, and lasting change. By attuning to inner signals, noticing patterns, and returning to center, space opens for truth, choice, and alignment. This is not about pathologizing. It is about becoming.

Through trauma-informed facilitation, participants will engage in solo reflection, partnered exploration, small group practice, and collective experience. Grounded in somatics, embodied and Authentic Relating, breathwork, vocal activation, and expressive movement, this work moves beyond concept into direct experience, where insight can be felt, practiced, and integrated in real time.

Over the course of the immersion, we will explore:

• Somatic theory and practice for emotional tracking, inner listening, and aligned action
• Solo and relational practices rooted in the body’s wisdom
• Centering and resourcing tools to meet challenge and pressure with greater resilience and ease
• Expression through voice, movement, and the language of the body

We’ll blend seated, standing, and movement practices, adaptable for all bodies, identities, abilities, and lived experiences.

What does it mean to remain human in the new age of artificial intelligence? In this immersive weekend workshop, we’ll explore this profound question together, journeying from awareness to empowerment to integration as we discover how to shape our relationship with AI while preserving what matters most.

Through hands-on AI demonstrations, creative labs, and experiential exercises, we’ll witness firsthand both the remarkable capabilities and profound implications of this technology. We’ll experiment with AI as a creative collaborator, experimenting with the technology in conscious ways. With somatic practices, guided meditation, and time in nature, we’ll envision the future we want, free from tech industry narratives about what’s “inevitable.”

Each session will blend practical exploration with deep reflection. Through live talks and demonstrations, group dialogue, and creative experimentation, we’ll explore AI’s current capabilities while staying grounded in embodied practices. Throughout the experience, we’ll integrate insights through authentic sharing and meaningful connection with one another, and with ourselves.

You’ll have the opportunity to develop your personal AI Code of Practice, create conscious engagement with technology, and forge genuine connections with fellow participants. This workshop offers resources and perspectives to support you in bringing these meaningful conversations to your own communities, helping others find empowerment rather than overwhelm in our rapidly changing world.

Most people are not stuck because they lack insight. They are stuck because inherited rhythms still live in the body. Rhythms of culture, survival, and belonging that have shaped what felt safe, possible, or forbidden.

Join this transformative weekend workshop on disrupting inherited grooves, creating inner and collective space, and practicing new life. In music, a breakbeat interrupts the expected pattern and opens a new groove. In life, a break can become a threshold: a sacred interruption where breath returns, choice awakens, and new movement becomes possible.

During our time together, we  will:

• Practice guided breath and somatic awareness to cultivate presence, spaciousness, and nervous system capacity.
• Work with powerful prompts and reflective writing to identify inherited rhythms, default responses, and outdated survival strategies.
• Engage in storytelling, witnessing, and peer coaching circles to be seen clearly, listen deeply, and practice new ways of relating.
• Explore gentle movement and rhythm-based collective play to interrupt automatic responses and embody new choices.
• Create simple integration rituals and commitments that support continued becoming in life, leadership, creativity, relationships, and healing.

This experience is for anyone ready to move beyond inherited grooves and practice a more embodied, communal, creative, and choiceful life. One rooted in lineage, healing, and collective possibility.

For thousands of years, autumnal holidays such as Samhain, Hallowe’en, and Vetrnætr have served as ceremonial foundations — connecting pre-modern peoples to landscape, ancestors, and ritual time. Many cultures believe “the veil thins” during this time, letting enchantment flood back into our world. The time is rife with opportunities to renew sacred relationships with the Earth, ourselves, and beings seen and unseen.

As the deciduous trees draw inward to direct energy into their roots, we too may feel drawn to our deeper inner worlds. The Big Sur wilderness — Esselen Tribal territory — is a fertile habitat for mind and spirit, and a potent domain for ritual to support transformation during this liminal season. Approaching the landscape as our teacher and guide, we will engage with the natural world in an embodied ecological context and explore the mythological and psycho-spiritual dimensions of land connectedness.

Drawing from their own European earth-based kinship traditions while holding a larger frame of pancultural land relationship, facilitators Fletcher Tucker and Micha Merrick will offer daily encounters with the medicinal, ecological, and ritual dimensions of plants found across the Northern Hemisphere. Diverse practices, including sound journeywork and guided meditations, will aid us in cultivating enhanced awareness, interconnectedness, and ceremonial reverence. Rooted in the Gestalt tradition of Esalen, we will build a container of safety and heart-centered community to connect meaningfully with ourselves and one another. Over five days of presence, play, and practice on the land, we will depart from modernity’s anthropocentric paradigm and descend into the ancient, potent, animate world of kinship and enchantment.

Important notes: This retreat will include one full day of immersion in the Big Sur wilderness, with a hike up to three miles. Please be aware that the hiking terrain can be steep, rugged, and sometimes strenuous. There may be prolonged sun exposure. Participants must be able to hike and carry what they need for the day: two liters of water, a pack lunch provided by Esalen, and sun protection. Other workshop sessions will be mostly situated outdoors on the Esalen property.

This workshop includes an additional $60 for Materials and Park fees.

Join us for a deeply nourishing sound immersion where sacred resonance becomes a gateway to transformation. In this weeklong workshop, we work with alchemy crystal singing bowls — instruments of subtle energy and crystalline intelligence — to harmonize the nervous system, soften emotional residue in the biofield, and awaken a more grounded, joyful state of being.

Each day includes spacious sound journeys designed to support theta brainwave states and foster deep relaxation, subconscious clearing, and intuitive insight. As we attune to the bowls’ harmonic field, we invite a gentle re-patterning of the nervous system and access to peace, presence, and embodied vitality.

Through practices in mantra (a Sanskrit word meaning “mind tool”), movement, voice, and reflection, we’ll explore how sound can:

• Clear energetic stagnation.
• Cultivate inner calm and self-trust.
• Interrupt and rewire habitual stress loops.
• Open pathways to awe, clarity, and inspiration.

You’ll experience seven alchemy crystal bowl sound journeys, heart-opening vocal practices, and a co-creative session in the Art Barn. We’ll also share journaling, partner work, and restorative space for integration.

Held within the elemental beauty of Esalen, where ocean waves, mineral springs, and towering trees invite deep renewal, this retreat offers space to soften, realign, and reconnect with your true self.

Come as you are. Leave radiant from within.

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, as is attending all sessions, including the final morning; 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.

If your life were a song, what would it be? If you told the story of your heart, what tale would you tell? This workshop invites participants to discover their authentic singing and songwriting voice through creative exercises, prompts, and assignments. We will focus on opening the creative heart and bringing forth the music and stories that dwell within. All are welcome, regardless of prior songwriting experience or musical background.

With a playful spirit, we will invite the stunning natural beauty of the Big Sur coast — its healing waters and the spirit of the land — to work its magic on us as we immerse ourselves in creative flow.

We will be connecting with the subtle body through movement, singing, meditation, chanting, and journaling. Through these practices, we open the channels to creativity and healing, lifting our voices together in song to create a sense of community that the world is so hungry for now.

Learn the craft and tools of songwriting: verses, choruses, bridges, melody, rhythm, rhyme, and more. It is not required that you play a musical instrument, but if you have one, bring it. Evening jams in the lodge or around the fire will be open to everyone.

Within the safe container of community, everyone will be invited to delve into the deep work that only creative play allows.

Life invites us into change, but rarely teaches us how to move through it well. Whether it’s a relationship ending, a role dissolving, a chapter closing, or a calling emerging, you may find yourself standing at the edge of what was … and unsure how to step into what comes next.

This immersive weekend retreat is a sacred pause for anyone navigating change. Through nature-based ritual, creative altar-making, reflective writing, and a circle of shared witnessing, you’ll learn how to tend life’s thresholds not as chaotic interruptions but as initiations into a deeper sense of purpose.

Held over Halloween weekend — a time often associated with the thinning of boundaries between past and present — we’ll also explore how moments of change can open us to a wider field of awareness. At times, this may include a felt sense of where we come from and what has shaped us.

Guided by renowned artist, author, and ritualist Day Schildkret, you’ll explore four notes of Threshold Literacy:

• Cherishing: Honoring what has been lost and what still remains
• Inventorying: Seeing clearly what is alive and what is no longer needed
• Remembering: Reconnecting with what has shaped you and continues to live within you
• Orienting: Choosing what matters most and the direction you want to move in

Using the acclaimed Morning Altars practice, you’ll forage for meaning, create ritual altars in nature, and experience the power of communal witnessing. This is not a weekend of quick fixes; it’s an invitation to slow down, tend what’s tender, and mark the sacred moment you are living through.

Whether you’re grieving a loss, stepping into a new role, or simply sensing that something is shifting within, this retreat is designed to support you in crafting your own modern rituals of change.

No prior experience with ritual, art, or nature work is necessary. Just bring your truth, your questions, and your willingness to cross the threshold.

Recommended Reading: Morning Altars: A 7-Step Practice to Nourish Your Spirit through Nature, Art, and Ritual by Day Schildkret and Hello, Goodbye: 75 Rituals for Times of Loss, Celebration, and Change by Day Schildkret

This workshop includes an additional $20 for workshop material.

This is a perfect season to awaken touch, our forgotten language. In this introductory massage course, participants will learn to listen to each other, gain the sensory skill of initiating touch, experience the felt sense of touch and muscle release, and close with a balanced tenderness. Seasoned instructors will offer exercises, demonstrations, and at-the-table guidance during supervised practice. The simple principles of Esalen® Massage – presence, connection, attending rather than fixing, self-care, and slow, lengthening strokes encompassing the body – will build a heartfelt experience with our partner or friend and, perhaps most significantly, ourselves.

By the final session, participants will share the basics of an Esalen Massage. Beginners, practitioners, and caregivers will find this method  personally refreshing, and will notice its healing effect as their pace slows and focus rests on compassionate contact rather than technique.

Touch can evoke an openness to spirit, enhancing our natural inclination toward healthful balance, and sparking our awareness of interconnection with all beings in this edgy wildness of canyons, hot springs, flowers, and mountains.

This workshop is for couples, partners, or friends registering together, as they will be your bodywork partner for the weekend.

Haruki Murakami wrote that writing a novel is like running a marathon — it requires endurance, consistency, and mental discipline over a long stretch.

In this workshop, we will look at all the ways writers, both beginning and experienced, can support themselves both creatively and physically during the novel-writing process.

Using a combination of generative exercises meant to spark creativity, meditations designed to build focus, and practical advice on how to keep going, we’ll talk about how to take a fictional project from beginning to end without losing our way. We’ll also touch on the craft of creating compelling stories and characters by looking at published works and sharing our own writing.

And, we’ll discuss ways to build your own literary community to provide emotional and creative support and make the solitary process of writing a little less solitary.

By the end of the weekend, participants will leave with a road map to finishing a novel and taking care of themselves in the process.

This course builds on your previous seven rich days of exploration in CFR® Week One. During that crucial week, you laid the foundation for releasing your childhood survival patterns and moving through life with more ease and presence physically, mentally, and emotionally.

In CFR® Week 1, you reorganized the stranger you once called “self” to become more objective, compassionate, curious, and hopeful, changing how you live with yourself and others.

We will continue excavating and healing old patterns that no longer serve you. You will gain deeper appreciation for how embodied movement can serve as a portal to your soul. Using newly experienced body wisdom, you will uncover what has been hidden, held back, and inhibited your fullest expression of ease, joy, and authentic self.

Bring your lingering issues, past injuries, and a desire for freedom on all levels. Leave more deeply connected to your body and present in your soul.                                                              

Prerequisite: This workshop is designed for advanced (Level 2) students. Participants must have completed either the Esalen Cortical Field Reeducation®: Accessing the Genius Within workshop or a CFR® Level 1 training.

In this five-day workshop, we will explore how sleep, dreams, and even the process of death can become gateways to deeper awareness and freedom. We’ll draw from the Tibetan contemplative traditions of dream and sleep practice to reveal how awareness continues through all states of experience.

The retreat combines traditional teachings with insights from Western psychology and contemporary understandings of consciousness. Through meditation, reflection, and experiential practices, participants will discover ways to integrate these teachings into everyday life.

Rather than remain solely in the realm of abstract philosophy, we’ll emphasize direct experience — learning how ordinary experiences such as falling asleep, dreaming, and facing life’s transitions can become opportunities for greater clarity, compassion, and inner freedom.

Recommended reading: Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche & Sleep & Awakening the Sacred Body, by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Your Spirit Guides are speaking to you. Join the conversation.

This weeklong retreat is devoted to deepening your relationship with your spiritual team as a direct and reliable source of guidance, clarity, and transformation.

This work centers on real-time dialogue. You bring what is present in your life, and your Guides respond. The exchange reveals what is ready to be understood, addressed, and shifted. Participants learn how to stay in that dialogue long enough for it to become clear, steady, and actionable.

The retreat is anchored in Aja Daashuur’s CCCE Method™: Connect, Channel, Clear, Embody — a framework developed through years of direct work with Spirit Guides and sustained connection to the unseen.

Participants establish a grounded relationship with their spiritual team and work through their intuitive language using oracle cards, guided exercises, divination tools, invocations, meditation, and the clairs — the intuitive senses through which information is received. Seeing, hearing, feeling, and knowing. Patterns are addressed through direct engagement with Spirit. Insight is integrated into the body and carried forward through tangible change.

Throughout the retreat, Aja’s Spirit Guides lead a series of channeled journeys that move through past, present, and future. These experiences reveal how different points in your life connect and inform one another, allowing a deeper understanding of your path and your choices.

This retreat is designed for those who are ready to move beyond initial connection and begin working directly with the guidance they receive. The focus is on staying in communication, understanding what is being shown, and allowing that information to shape real movement in your life.

Discover practices for sustaining an ongoing relationship with your Guides, one that continues to offer clarity, direction, and support beyond the retreat.

This is a strong next step for those who have experienced Aja’s Spirit Bridge retreat at Esalen or for those who already recognize how their intuitive senses present within them.

Revolutionary findings in neuroscience have demonstrated that we can literally re-architect the very structure of our brains. In fact, we can even rewire our neurology to be more focused, calmer, and happier.

In this workshop, Dr. Shauna Shapiro — a leading scientist studying the effects of meditation on well-being — will teach you the most powerful science-based practices for increasing the neural pathways of happiness. She’ll explain basic brain science and offer a clear roadmap for living a joyful, connected, and meaningful life. Be prepared for unexpected transformation and delight.

During this weekend workshop, we’ll learn:

• Science-based practices to increase your baseline level of happiness.
• How to cultivate greater joy, gratitude, and connection.
• To integrate these practices into our everyday lives.

Recommended Reading: Good Morning, I Love You: Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Practices to Rewire the Brain for Calm, Clarity + Joy and Good Morning, I Love You: A Guided Journal for Calm, Clarity + Joy by Shauna Shapiro.

This workshop includes an additional $375 faculty tuition. *For anyone facing financial hardship, Dr. Shauna Shapiro invites you to contact her directly for tuition scholarship at slshapiro@scu.edu.