Workshops

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• Work with powerful prompts and reflective writing to identify inherited rhythms, default responses, and outdated survival strategies.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.

Conflict is no longer something happening “out there.” It lives in our conversations, our communities, and often within ourselves, shaping what feels possible and what feels stuck. In a time of rapid change and deepening division, many of us find ourselves caught inside stories that harden perspectives, narrow imagination, and limit our capacity to respond. The key to surviving and thriving at this moment is finding ways to negotiate change and transform the rising conflict around us.

Together, we will explore a different way of meeting conflict — one that begins with curiosity. We will listen for the narratives that shape our experience and engage the imagination as a resource for transformation, exploring how conflict can be approached not only as a story we tell, but as a waking dream. In this integrated approach, narration and dreamwork move together to reveal how meaning is made, how it can shift, and how new pathways can emerge if we loosen our grip on a single way of seeing.

Topics include:

• Conflict Narration and Transformation, to view conflict through a narrative lens and articulate what’s happening around us —  identifying stories and exploring how people can draw different meanings from the same moment. This approach allows us to discover what differing stories tell us about what we (and “they”) might do next and what feels possible.
• Peace Work as Dream WorkTM, which uses projective group dreamwork to analyze conflicts (from the interpersonal to the international) as waking dreams to break the rules of waking life, imagine new possibilities, and create new approaches for conflict transformation.  

Together, these practices invite a spacious and creative relationship to conflict that can be lived and applied across the many domains of our lives. At the intersection of spirit and praxis, this workshop takes a dignity-centered approach and unfolds through a blend of lectures and experiential group work, providing concrete tools for personal and professional use.

Recommended reading: Transformative Negotiation: Strategies for Everyday Change and Equitable Futures by Sarah Federman

Breathing is one of the few functions in the human body that is both automatic and voluntary — happening unconsciously every moment of our lives, yet also available to conscious control. In the yogic traditions, this makes the breath profoundly significant: a bridge between body and mind, conscious and subconscious awareness, the autonomic and non-autonomic nervous systems, and ultimately, a gateway into meditation and expanded states of consciousness.

In this immersive weekend workshop, we will explore the ancient science and transformative art of pranayama through practices rooted in the Sivananda, Iyengar, and Ashtanga yoga traditions. Far beyond simple breathing exercises, pranayama has been cultivated for thousands of years as a methodology for regulating energy, refining attention, stabilizing the mind, and priming the “pump” to help us reach deeper states of meditation.

Together, we will investigate why breath has long been considered the “master key” within contemplative traditions. The techniques we will practice are designed to support:

• Regulation of the nervous system and cultivation of greater resilience in the face of stress, anxiety, and emotional overwhelm.
• Increased vitality, respiratory awareness, and energy through classical pranayama techniques developed over centuries.
• Improved concentration, mental clarity, and the ability to steady attention in preparation for meditation.
• A deeper understanding of the relationship between breath, consciousness, the vagus nerve, and trauma.
• Greater connection to presence, embodiment, inner stillness, and the subtle dimensions of awareness often obscured by the pace of modern life.

Practices will include diaphragmatic breathing, Nadi Shodhana (alternate nostril breathing) pranayamas, ratio breathing, breath retention, cleansing techniques, subtle energetic practices, guided meditation, gentle movement, and inquiry into both the ancient philosophy and modern science of conscious breathing.

Most importantly, this retreat approaches pranayama as a practice that transcends traditional wellness goals and explores it as a doorway. A doorway into stillness. Into presence. Into deeper listening. Into meditation. And ultimately, into liberation from suffering. This weekend invites participants to slow down, breathe consciously, and reconnect with one of humanity’s oldest and most profound inner technologies.

Primordial Qigong is meditation in motion and includes the two most famous forms of Taoist Meditation: the Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Energy Circulation, in which the solar (yang) and lunar (yin) energies flow in harmony, an essential key to vitality and longevity. You will also be given the tools on how to recharge the three dan tians, the body’s primary energy “batteries,” to increase your storehouse of resilient qi (life force) as a buffer against stress and other challenges to well-being. During discussion time, we’ll discover how science explains the benefits of qigong and how the practice is redefining our understanding of health. Primordial Qigong is the legacy of Ken’s teacher Madame Gao Fu, in direct lineage from the founder of the “medical qigong” movement in modern China. The course is perfect for beginners and all levels.

In this weeklong workshop, you’ll have the opportunity to:

• Learn all 12 movements of Hunyuan (Primordial) Qigong for strong, resilient energy.
• Practice the two most famous forms of Taoist Meditation: the Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Orbits (or Energy Circulation techniques) to awaken and harmonize the primary acupuncture meridians.
• Recharge the internal “batteries,” the dan tians, and learn about their connection with slow, deep breathing.
• Improve posture, alignment, movement efficiency, and breathing.
• Discover how science measures the healing benefits of qigong and how the practice is redefining human health and human potential.

Recommended Reading: The Way of Qigong: The Art and Science of Chinese Energy Healing, by Kenneth Cohen

In a time when many men are questioning the inherited roles, social pressures, and stories that have shaped what it means to be a man, this workshop is an invitation to courageously explore masculinity. Through movement, honest self-reflection, and the profound learning that becomes possible when men gather, we’ll uncover challenges, witness one another’s vulnerability, and discover new ways of belonging, relating, and being.

Held within the healing container of Esalen Institute, this five-day immersive workshop offers a powerful space to return to the body, reconnect with inner truth, and explore more conscious, relational ways of inhabiting masculinity. Through the moving meditation practice of 5Rhythms®, guided somatic inquiry, live and DJd music, and shared witnessing, we’ll generate the conditions for honest self-discovery, deep connection, and the kind of embodied leadership the world is calling for now.

This is not about fixing men or prescribing a singular model of manhood. Rather, it is an opportunity to investigate the many ways masculinity is lived, inherited, defended, softened, and transformed. Together, we’ll explore how agency, accountability, tenderness, courage, grief, power, and presence live in the body, and how conscious movement can open new pathways toward choice, responsiveness, and relational integrity.

As the week unfolds, participants are invited to:

• Explore their relationship to masculinity through movement and breath.
• Develop somatic resources for resilience, regulation, and emotional range.
• Investigate vulnerability as a source of strength and relational trust.
• Deepen accountability, self-awareness, and integrity in leadership.
• Honor the diversity of lived male experience across generations, identities, and personal histories.
• Experience the restorative support that emerges through collective presence and compassionate witnessing.

Rooted in trauma-informed principles, the workshop emphasizes agency, consent, personal choice, and respect for boundaries. It welcomes men of all backgrounds and movement experience. What is asked is simple, though not always easy: a willingness to arrive, listen deeply, move honestly, and meet yourself and one another with courage.

Together, we’ll discover what becomes possible when men move beyond performance and into presence, beyond separation into authentic connection.

This workshop includes an additional $100 of faculty tuition.

Discover the art of creating color sourced directly from the land. In this immersive workshop, participants explore plant-based dyeing through mindful foraging, wildcrafting, and creative practice inspired by Esalen’s gardens and landscape.

Each day begins with a grounding meditation to connect with the earth and awaken creative flow. Through hands-on exploration of resist techniques, surface design, and natural dyes, participants learn to transform whole plants into living color on fabric. One full day focuses on indigo dyeing and clay paste resist to create patterns on cloth. The following days delve into harvesting and preparing dye baths in hues of yellow, orange, and red, resulting in a full spectrum of color from nature.

By slowing down and engaging the senses, these practices invite us to listen deeply, restore balance, and cultivate a renewed connection between self and nature. Participants leave with hand-dyed textiles, new skills, and simple rituals to carry creativity and mindfulness into everyday life.

Bring new life to natural fiber textiles and your own clothing! Plan to pack at least two yards of natural fiber, such as cotton, linen, hemp, rayon, silk, or wool.

Recommended Reading: Art and Science of Natural Dyes by Catharine Ellis and Joy Boutrup

This workshop includes an additional $45 in material fee.

Do you face challenges with focus and time management? Do you struggle with emotional hypersensitivity or frustration tolerance? Do you find it hard to follow through on tasks or commitments? Or to be reliable and consistent? If so, you are not alone.

Millions of people suffer daily from conditions associated with these executive function challenges. Though commonly referred to as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), these symptoms are not limited to this single condition, and they are often exacerbated by our complex, fast-paced, high-tech lives.

ADHD and related issues often leave people with a sense of self-doubt, shame, or unworthiness. The good news is that with mindfulness, compassion, and the application of skillful techniques, it is possible to move through life more effectively with care and wisdom.

In this workshop, through engaging in various mindfulness meditations, loving kindness and forgiveness practices and contemplative inquiry, you will discover how these challenges interrupt our functioning, how to navigate them, and how we can meet ourselves with compassion, forgiveness, and a good sense of humor.

This workshop includes an additional $100 in faculty tuition.

What if you could use your voice to feel alive and present in your body? What would it look like to discover your own voice and fulfill its unique potential? This November, join sound therapy pioneer Eileen McKusick and transformational voice leaders and international recording artists Isaac and Thorald Koren of the Brothers Koren in a workshop designed to help you find the electric power in your voice.

Eileen, Isaac, and Thorald will combine their disciplines to create an electrified, liberated, embodied experience of vocal expression and play. This program is designed for those with and without previous musical experience — useful for seasoned professionals and first-time explorers of voice.

Using the power of new awareness, breath, sounding, and tuning with interactive immersion into the innate musicality of your human instruments, you will:

• Explore the 12 tones of our sonic anatomy, the resonant zones and the emotional spectrum of your voice.
• Express the range of your emotions with sound and play with musical modes and archetypes
• Learn to use music to express and balance our feelings, bodies, and biofields.
• Learn practical, playful, simple vocal exercises to support your vitality, freedom, and sense of well-being.
• Stretch the boundaries of your expression and liberate your greatest sound healing tool, your own voice!

Leave the immersive retreat feeling recalibrated, uplifted, and sonically invigorated. Previous participants noted dramatic changes in their freedom of voice after this safe and fun experience.

No vocal ability or musical experience required!

For hundreds of thousands of years, plants have been humanity’s greatest allies, shaping culture in material and spiritual ways. Across the Northern Hemisphere, a shared cohort of plants has profoundly influenced human existence, providing sustenance, medicine, textiles, and more. Honored as wise relatives, they carry mythic and spiritual significance across diverse cultures, forming a thread of kinship connecting our ancestors across continents and histories. Though modernity has painfully estranged us from the expansive web of relationality that our ancestors shared with the more-than-human-world, we can reclaim our “inalienable belonging to the earth community,” in the words of Joanna Macy. Meeting our botanical kin with curiosity and intention is a gesture toward restoring this enchanted ecological paradigm.

Join us to meaningfully engage with the lore and lives of pan-culturally significant plants — such as oak, nettle, mint, mugwort, elder, and rose — attuning to their presence in Big Sur’s wildlands while cultivating our botanical and cultural literacy. Through hands-on collaboration and an approach of reciprocity instead of extraction, we will craft herbal medicines, natural pigments, fibers, and tools in a manner that benefits the land and plants. Ceremony will invite us to discover these plants’ archetypal dimensions, revealing their roles as teachers and healers. As guests on Esselen tribal land, we will root our explorations in respect and reverence, honoring the relational worldviews of all our land-connected ancestors. Guest faculty Ariel Johnson will offer somatic practices to help guide us into embodied kinship — grounding us in gravity, sensory awareness, and open-hearted presence with our floral relatives.

Through these efforts, we remember our belonging, and we are remembered in return. The plants know us, after all, and welcome us back into our ancient traditions of botanical kinship.

Important Notes:

This retreat will include one full-day immersion as well as two half-day hiking excursions in the Big Sur wilderness, involving hikes up to 3 miles each. Please be aware that the hiking terrain can be steep, rugged, and sometimes strenuous, including prolonged sun exposure. Participants must be able to hike and carry what they need for the day: 2 liters of water, pack lunch provided by Esalen, and sun protection. Other workshop sessions will be mostly situated outdoors on the Esalen property.

This workshops includes an additional $60 of faculty tuition and $40 for park entrance fees.

For thousands of years across many cultures, expanded states of consciousness have been used intentionally as a strategy for meaningful transformation 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  these unique states. Our time together will include strategies for navigating, integrating, and preparing for these experiences. Holotropic Breathwork® will be our experiential modality offering a dynamic method 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.

Have you ever held the wind? Or been held by the wind? There is a vitality in all life that is ancient, intuitive, and always accessible. This energy, like the wind, formless yet moving in all directions, creates and sustains life. The body is the doorway through which to meet this energy of being. It is alive inside us, ever-changing, and knows its way around.  

Come home to your body to reconnect, remember, and reclaim this vitality. Embrace the knowledge that our lives are much more than a linear unfolding of accomplishments; life is an extension of nature, and our well-being blossoms when we realign with the rhythm of this ancient life force.

During our week together, we’ll slow down and move through an alchemical combination of practices to soothe the senses, quiet the mind, balance the nervous system, and become fully embodied.  

Our practices will include:

• Conscious dance and gentle yoga practice
• Crystal bowl sound healing
• Ceremonial offerings to the land
• Contemplation in nature

Let the beauty of this sacred land and the power of community restore your strength and deepen your experience of interconnectedness with everything and everyone. We are not alone. Embrace the awe and wonder of being alive so that you may return home rejuvenated and inspired to continue walking your unique life path.

Note: Please bring a journal. Jovinna invites you to detox from or minimize the use of all electronics during your stay at Esalen.

This workshop includes an additional $55 in faculty tuition.

We gather on this powerful land for a weekend to remember — with our bodies, minds, and spirits — all that we have to be grateful for. Amidst all of the turmoil, we come together in community to remember that we are enough as we are. Through yoga, meditation, reflection, cliff side baths, and walking on Esalen’s healing land, we will return to our hearts. We’ll be joined by incredible guest teachers and musicians, sharing their expertise, wisdom and gratitude with us.

Together, we’ll explore dynamic yoga asana, pranayama, chanting, meditation, and yoga nidra. Let’s recognize each breath as a gift, as we’re nourished by delicious organic meals, the natural hot springs, walks among the majestic redwoods, or simply curling up in an ocean-view chair. Whether you come alone or with loved ones, you are sure to return to your daily rhythm with a newfound sense of ease, inspiration, and deep gratitude for the life you’re living.

This weekend is about community connection. Opening and closing sessions will be cozy, with more spacious workshops offered on Saturday. In addition, a professional photographer will be part of this experience, and a photo set of the experience will be shared with participants.

This workshop includes an additional $100 faculty tuition.

“Enoughness” is the starting point of any journey toward gratitude. We begin to fully take in the profound gift of all that is unfolding only when we recognize that we are enough.

With Esalen as our transformative container, let’s meet during the week of Thanksgiving. Let’s honor the land and the Esselen people, the indigenous stewards of this place, as we remember the awe of the natural world around us and the life force within us.

Throughout the week, we will practice giving thanks for the world around us. We’ll cultivate curiosity and wonder for the life we have here and now. We’ll begin to move our attention away from the long list of “lack” that can consume our days.

To support the cultivation of this state of being, we will include daily practices to create suppleness in mind, spirit, and body:

• Breathwork
• Meditation
• yoga asana
• Philosophy
• Journaling
• Yoga nidra

We will return to the present to reclaim and embrace ourselves in our wholeness as enough. We will attend to all the ways we are enough, give enough, get enough, and have enough so we can lay claim to the power of life pulsing through us.

Each day will be an exploration of practices and tools that can cultivate and make space for a sense of contentment —and a chance for “giving” to ripple out into the world with grace and gratitude.

This workshop includes $175 additional faculty tuition.

This Thanksgiving week, you are invited into a living inquiry of what it means to be fully, authentically human in a deeply mysterious world. In a season of reflection and gathering, we step gently beyond the familiar and into the immediacy of direct experience, meeting life as it unfolds.

In these ever-changing times, we are reminded of the impermanence of what once seemed stable and known. As the ground shifts, uncertainty naturally arises, often bringing us to the edge of what we feel ready to meet. Yet within this movement, there is an invitation — to turn toward our experience rather than away, and to discover an innate resilience, an embodied capacity to meet the unknown with presence and openness.

This workshop offers a gentle, experiential exploration of how to cultivate curiosity, courage, and compassion in relationship with life’s unfolding mystery. Mystery moves in both directions, drawing us toward awe, wonder, and the magical, while also opening us to the unsettling edges of the unknown where fear and uncertainty live. Together, we begin where we are, learning to embrace “what is” through a deepening awareness of moment-to-moment experience. As we stay present with the discomfort of not knowing, it can become an intimate source of vitality, awakening the intelligence of body, heart, and mind.

Drawing from wisdom traditions, contemplative practices, and somatic and neuropsychology, we will explore:

• How to live more fully in the presence of mystery.
• Embodied emotional and somatic intelligence.
• Practical tools for nervous system regulation, resilience, and responsive presence.
• Movement, grounding, and centering practices that support being with the unknown.
• A deepened connection to self, others, and the more-than-human world.

Embracing the great mystery of life invites a softening of our need for certainty and a willingness to make space for the unexpected. With an open heart, body, and mind, we begin to sense the deeper rhythms of interconnectedness, allowing life to live through us as we navigate an ever-changing world.

Join this grounded and spacious exploration, where we learn, gently and courageously, to join the dance — saying “yes” to life.

Recommended reading: The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety by Alan Watts