Workshops

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.

How would it feel to move into a meaningful relationship with the living world? Beyond a mere passive appreciation of nature? In the long arc of human history, people across all cultures and traditions have lived in communion with the lands they called home. Though this intrinsic connection has been largely severed in our modern age, the perspectives and practices common to our respective Earth-reverent ancestors are not lost. They lie dormant in the land, among the wild beings, and in our own animal bodies, waiting patiently to be remembered and renewed.

Immersed in the beauty of the Esselen tribal lands now known as Big Sur, we will humbly walk the trails in pursuit of reunion with the wild Earth. We will set out each morning for hikes amongst ancient redwoods, golden grasslands, and fragrant chaparral. Our community and teachers will include the plants, animals, stones, and all aspects of the wild landscape. Acknowledging Big Sur to be the ancestral territory of the Esselen tribe, we will endeavor to walk as reverent and respectful guests on sacred land.

Along the trail, we will cultivate innate capacities for presence and wonder, build ecological knowledge, and explore pathways of reciprocity and connection with the natural world. Pausing together to learn from the land, we will participate in some of the most potent work of our time: rejoining our great family on this wild Earth.

Hiking notes:

• Answers to frequently asked questions about the workshop can be found here.
• Various hiking abilities can be accommodated, bearing in mind that day hikes are three to six miles long with uneven and often steep terrain. If you have any questions about your ability to participate, please read the workshop FAQs or email info@wildtender.com.

This workshop includes an additional $60 of faculty tuition and $40 park fees.

Come home to your whole body instrument and rediscover your unique sound. For over 20 years, Isaac and Thorald Koren have been guiding people back to their voices through a groundbreaking, embodied approach that invites courage, freedom, and transformation.

They believe singing and speaking are radical acts of self-expression — and science agrees. Research shows that intentional vocal toning not only creates measurable vitality and joy but also empowers us to fully inhabit our bodies and enrich our experience of life.

During this weekend journey into your Embodied Voice, Isaac and Thorald will create a safe and supportive space for you to reclaim your power and reconnect with your body. Through simple, practical, and experiential practices — designed for anyone, no matter your musical or singing experience — you’ll explore the profound connection between your voice and your whole body instrument.

You’ll discover:

• Grounded freedom: Learn how to embody your voice and tap into the gravity of your body to feel alive and grounded in your unique sound.
• Healing through voice: Move through voice-related trauma and discover how to use your voice as a sacred tool for healing and self-expression.
• Everyday integration: Whether speaking at a conference, teaching a class, or singing for joy, these joyful practices will help you find ease, freedom, and authenticity in any vocal setting.

This is not about performing; it’s about reclaiming a real-time connection to your authentic voice and expressive self. The Korens’ unique method invites you to experience your voice as a distinct, fascinating, and powerful expression of who you are.

Beginners are encouraged. No musical or singing experience is needed — just your willingness to show up and explore.

Are you ready to sing, speak, and live more freely? The invitation is yours. Join Isaac and Thorald on this playful and soulful adventure to sound out who you are and what it feels like to truly be alive. Reconnect with the resonance of life and discover the music of your soul.

Rejuvenate the body and the mind with the deep relaxation that can be found through non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) and yoga nidra. Whether you need a break from constant pressure, are navigating a life transition, or wish to delve deeper into your mindfulness and meditation practice, this retreat will provide space and time for contemplation and reflection.

Non-sleep deep rest, a term coined by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, refers to a waking state of deep relaxation with sustained awareness. Evidence suggests reaching this state through NSDR protocols, such as yoga nidra, can reset dopamine levels and provide numerous physical and mental health benefits — including better sleep and enhanced neuroplasticity.

Together, we’ll go on an inner journey to connect to both ourselves and our life paths — and emerge refreshed and deeply rested. This will be a large-group experience, and we will practice lying-down guided protocols throughout the weekend.

This is a beginner experiential course and does not require knowledge of yoga nidra theory or history. There will be lots of chances to journal and connect with one another as we enjoy the natural beauty of Esalen and our time together!

Recommended Reading: The Blind Spot Effect: How to Stop Missing What’s Right in Front of You by Kelly Boys

During this retreat, you’ll be invited to immerse yourself in your own innate wisdom to rediscover your freedom. Through Buddhist meditation, mindful movement, and time in nature, you’ll explore the spontaneous creative essence within you.

Surrounded by the beauty of the natural world, this guided retreat is an opportunity to slow down, listen deeply, and explore what it means to be truly present. By attuning to the elements and rhythms of the earth, you will have the space to cultivate a renewed sense of clarity, openness, and connection.

Explore key practices, including:

• Nature-inspired meditation: Engage in sitting practice, both indoors and outdoors, and allow the natural world to support your inner exploration.
• Mindful walking: Move with intention and cultivate presence through walking meditation, deepening your connection to the present moment.
• Elemental exploration: Experience guided meditations on the five elements (earth, water, fire, air, and space) to reflect on their qualities within you.
• Dharma teachings: Listen to talks that weave Buddhist wisdom with metaphors from nature for perspectives on the freedom already within you.
• Mindful movement: Explore gentle yoga and embodied awareness practices that support connection with the flowing, spontaneous nature of being.

During our time together, you will be able to:

• Explore ways to let go of habitual patterns and rest in innate awareness.
• Cultivate spaciousness, clarity, and ease.
• Tap into your natural creativity and intuition.
• Develop a deeper connection with the natural world and your own true nature.

Throughout the retreat, you’ll be given tools to continue nurturing this natural approach to liberation in your daily life. Join us for this transformative exploration of being natural.

This will be a week of fun, relaxation, and rejuvenation. Whatever your spiritual path or meditation experience, you are welcome just as you are. No prior experience is required. Seated and supine meditations will be offered. All are welcome.

In the words of Carl Jung, “People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.”

This immersive week-long lab is for creators of all kinds—writers, inventors, filmmakers, musicians, and entrepreneurs—anyone who wishes to integrate their spirituality and creativity to tap into the deepest source of inspiration and higher intelligence as they bring guided work into the world. By breaking down this process of allowing into three stages (Creation, Manifestation, and Transmission), we will walk together along an impactful, sacred path designed for cohesion, connection, incubation, and transformation.

We live in a world of great distraction that doesn’t encourage deep listening. It is imperative to reverse those outer-facing sensory “searchlights” and go inwards. When you dive into the field of all possibilities, ideas surprisingly find you with a very specific intention. As you attune to that purpose, you gain discernment, direction, momentum, and flow.

Over the course of the week, you’ll face the “demons” that get in the way of meaningful work, including inertia, ego, outer blocks, and inner resistance. You will discover how obstacles can become allies in your process, helping you to foster organic, sustainable partnerships, growth, and co-creation.

In this workshop, you’ll be guided through:

• Nonlinear brainstorming to invite new and deeper relationships to ideas.
• “Hotseat Exercises” and small group breakouts to foster vulnerability and creative risk-taking
• Kinetic creation, such as yoga, meditation, and energy balancing, to increase attunement
• Radical pivots and adaptivity to meet obstacles with poise and intelligence.
• Case studies.

Employing timeless principles from Vedic philosophy, this class will use myriad modalities to deepen your inspiration, along with experiential exercises that will help you flow. You will do yoga, breathwork, meditation, and movement to tap into the matrix of your creative capacity. You’ll recalibrate intentions and goals. Every step of the lab will contain practical solutions to push through whatever is in your way.

The lab is open to creators of all levels. You can attend either as an “incubator” (with a specific project or idea that you want to workshop) or as an “observer/participant” (to glean knowledge about conscious creation by watching the process unfold and also participating). If you are planning to workshop a specific project, please tell us about it briefly in one paragraph, describing where you are with it, where you want to take it, and any obstacles (including internal) that are in your way. Kindly email us at: S2S@thisiscounterpointfilms.com.

Recommended Reading: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, The Creative Act, by Rick Rubin, and Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki

We live in a world richer than description. Language reveals only by leaving out, and when words fall short — when grief overtakes us, when beauty stills us — we do not fall silent. We reach. We shape. We art.

This workshop is an invitation into the space beyond language. Guided by The Alphabet of Everything, an approach to abstraction that requires deep attention, we will explore how every mark, shape, and gesture can be seen as part of a shared, primordial visual language — a living alphabet sourced from cracks in pavement, lichen on stone, diagrams, dreams, bones, shadows, and myth.

During this week of guided creative exploration, you will:

• Discover waxed powder painting, a meditative art form developed by the instructor that employs powdered pigments and beeswax to create richly layered, textured surfaces.
  
• Work with fieldwalks, somatic prompts, and imagination-rewilding practices—all designed to complement your studio work, loosen the grip of overthinking, and awaken fresh ways of perceiving.
• Engage with the consciousness continuum and explore how different states — attention, reverie, dream, silence, awe — can serve as portals to deeper knowledge.

Our shared space will be gentle, reverent, and non-performative — no prior art experience is needed. The focus will be on presence and process rather than critique or outcomes. The studio will act as a threshold, not a factory, especially supportive for those at personal or creative crossroads.

Anyone drawn to mystery, meaning, and the quiet hum beneath the visible — whether you identify as an artist, a seeker, or simply someone ready to listen more deeply — will find practices here that nourish creativity and restore intuitive capacity. Come with open hands and eyes. Come ready to shape what cannot be said.

This workshop includes an additional $20 material fee.

Do we possess only the physical body we see, or are there multiple layers to our existence?

In the Tantric tradition, it is said we are not just one body but three: the physical body (what we see and touch), the subtle or energetic body (where thoughts, emotions, and prāṇa flow), and the causal body (the deepest layer of consciousness, often linked to karma and past lives). Each plays a distinct role in shaping how we live, feel, and respond to the world around us.

This workshop invites participants to explore these three bodies through the lens of Tantric practice and wisdom. The weekend blends historical context, contemporary research, guided meditation, visualization, and ritual to examine and experience how energy, including Kundalini energy — the coiled life force at the base of the spine — can move through and activate these layers. Together, we will immerse ourselves in the latest research on teachings and practices that challenge and reshape our traditional views of Tantra — its history, current relevance, and future potential.

Designed for both new and experienced practitioners, this workshop offers a grounded framework for understanding Tantra’s view of embodiment and how it can transform our inner and outer worlds.

Please Note: This workshop is NOT about “Tantric Sex” or experiencing enhanced sexual pleasures, although many discussions will address gender identity and sexuality.

Recommended Reading: The Serpent’s Tale: Kundalini, Yoga, and the History of an Experience, Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen

Healing ourselves is a journey of return. During this weekend workshop, you will be invited to learn about the practice and traditions of “curanderisma” (folk medicine) to bring forth awareness and attune us to our individual healing journeys. Through meditative and contemplative practices, touch, prayer, plants, and natural elements, this work honors a lineage of centuries-old wisdom to bring a sense of well-being to those seeking renewal.

This workshop will include:

• Optional morning movement and meditation practice.
• The Point of Origin, a session focused on the navel and abdominal massage for somatic release and greater self-connection.
• Barridas (plant sweepings), foraging and working with plant and herb bundles to cleanse energies.
• Empathic connection, an exploration of our intuition, revealing how to listen and connect with one another and ourselves, more deeply.
• Limpia con huevo (washing with an egg), a lesson sharing the practice of clearing and divining one’s energies with the use of an egg.
• Evening moon meditation and flowering bathing.

Through Margaret and Michael’s teachings, you’re invited to connect to your own innate healing potential and discover the ability to support others with love and intention.

Join us for a celebration of sound and light at the onset of summer, when sunlight stretches to its fullest. By honoring light in its many forms — sunlight, soul light, and vibrational light — this experiential retreat invites you to align with the light found within and through seven alchemy sound journeys, designed to support deep relaxation, gentle re-patterning of the nervous system, and embodied presence.

Composed with a dynamic collection of alchemy crystal bowls — instruments of crystalline intelligence — these alchemical sound journeys can help clear and activate your energy centers (chakras). As we journey from root to crown, you’ll receive a golden thread symbolizing the sushumna nadi, your body’s central pathway of light. Day by day, you’ll mark this thread with colors, symbols, or words that arise to create a sacred artifact — a visual map of the week’s unfolding.

Each day includes creative practices, authentic movement, nature immersion, and teachings to restore connection to Self and source. Big Sur elder Penny Vieregge will join us midweek to share the mystical poetry of Hafiz and awaken your heart chakra.

You will have the opportunity to:

• Experience how sacred sound can help release chronic tension, clear energetic stagnation, and open pathways to clarity and inspiration.
• Learn the history and science of sound healing, with an opportunity to play the alchemy crystal bowls and experience their resonance firsthand.
• Co-create a collective Flower of Life mandala, woven with individual golden threads into a living pattern of light.

Held within Esalen’s wild beauty, where the land, ocean, mineral hot springs, and towering trees invite deep renewal, this solstice retreat offers space to soften, realign, and reconnect with what matters most.

The Summer Solstice is the moment when light lingers longest — a turning point of illumination, expansion, and renewal. Just after the longest day of the year, we’ll gather on the wild cliffs of Esalen to remember this truth: The spark of your soul has never gone out. It may have flickered through the seasons of your life, but the ember remains — steady, luminous, and ready to rise.

Soulstice Soulfire is a full-body creative awakening with yoga, dance, chakra activation, sound, and ritual that both ignites and nourishes your inner fire. These practices awaken your inner light and reconnect you with the sacred healing intelligence that lives within your body.

Throughout the week, you’ll engage in:

• Dynamic somatic movement, including daily yoga practices, Kundalini kriyas, and transformational dance experiences such as Deep Exhale.
• Immersive musical guidance, with every session powered by Marques Wyatt’s live DJ soundscapes, crafted to uplift, energize, and deepen your movement.
• Supportive sonic healing, including crystal alchemy bowls integrated into yin, soma, and meditation practices for grounding, deep restoration, and amplifying your solstice vision.
• Chakra and subtle-body teachings to explore the chakras as seven flames of consciousness and to dissolve the malas, the veils that obscure inner light.
• Ritual and reflections, including Summer Solstice Vision Setting, guided journaling, contemplation, and simple practices you can bring into your daily life.
• An evening sound journey at the Esalen baths, where movement yields to stillness and sound opens portals of release, clarity, and renewal.

Allow a continuous sonic field — Marques’ hypnotic soundscapes paired with Cristi’s bowls — to carry you through activation, integration, and awakening.

This retreat welcomes all levels and all bodies. Come as you are; leave more awake, more alive, and more connected to the light within. By the end of our time together, you are invited to awaken and balance your chakra energy; reclaim your vitality, clarity, and creative flow; experience deeper embodiment, expression, and self-trust; feel nourished, inspired, and connected to inner illumination; and return home with an inner fire that sets your soul alight, along with simple, powerful tools to sustain that illumination.

Recommended Reading: Chakra Rituals by Cristi Christensen

Family photographs carry stories, both spoken and unspoken, about where we come from and who we have become. In this experiential workshop, participants will use personal family photos as catalysts for reflection, emotional awareness, and a deeper understanding of identity.

Through guided exercises, gentle inquiry, and shared witnessing, you will explore:

• The emotional signatures carried in family images.
• Patterns of belonging, loss, resilience, and connection.
• How family roles are expressed visually.
• The stories we inherited and the ones we are ready to update.
• Moments of beauty, ambiguity, and mystery that live in our lineage.

In this workshop, you’ll have the opportunity to gain new insights, renewed compassion for your family system, and an expanded sense of your own narrative. No artistic or Gestalt experience is required.

The artist is essentially a channel. — Piet Mondrian

Explore the nature of creativity — what fuels it, where it comes from, and how we live with it. Is inspiration something we receive from beyond or something we shape from within? Do artists create, channel, or both?

In this workshop, we will consider the creative process not only as a soaring flight of inspiration, but also as a grounded practice of returning, refining, and working with what lands. Through meditation, movement, writing, and dialogue, we’ll explore the terrain where art, channeling, and creation intersect. We will build upon William James’ notion that our stream of consciousness alternates between flights and perchings.

Together, we will:

• Delve into the latest neuroscientific studies that explain what happens during experiences of insight and flow.
• Discuss parallels between artists and mediums — from Jack Kerouac and Zora Neale Hurston to Edgar Cayce and Helena Blavatsky.
• Investigate techniques for overcoming blocks to creativity.
• Engage in movement and meditation practices and for creativity.
• Develop our personal “creativity lotus” by sampling multisensory activities as well as expressive writing and drawing.

This workshop holds space for those curious about the origins of creativity and for those who want to engage more fully with how inspiration appears — and disappears — in the rhythm of a creative life.

Gather with us under the waxing full moon for a weekend of embodied ritual and communal celebration. While the flowers are in full bloom, the moon is bright, and the sun reaches its highest arc in the sky, we will circle together to honor the fullness of the light with sacred ceremony, flower baths, folklore, green magic, herbcraft, sound healing, communal dreaming, self-inquiry, and sensory delight.

The first full moon after the Summer Solstice is a dreamy threshold, a liminal space to tend to our dreams and visions. Drawing on ancestral practices from Celtic, Nordic, Grecian, and respectfully informed Indigenous animistic solstice practices from around the world, this gathering is a weaving of ancestral wisdom and earth-based spirituality. Celebrate the flourishing of Summer, welcoming the light into our lives, bathing in sacred springs, making wreaths of flowers and offerings of gratitude to the earth and sky.

During our time together, we will honor the Light with:

• A ceremonial flower bath in hot spring waters
• Harvesting from the garden and hands-on herbcraft
• Adornment with herbs and flowers
• Sound healing ritual and frolicking together under the waxing solstice full moon
• Offerings of gratitude to the earth, water, and sky
• Dreams and visions to rekindle your magic

This is a space for reconnecting, nourishing, and illuminating your spirit and your dreams.

This workshop includes an additional $25 for materials.

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive. — Howard Thurman

There is a vital force in the universe — the spark of life itself.  It’s in the blade of grass bursting forth from seemingly dormant ground after a long winter. It’s the instinct that calls the baby bird to launch from the nest. It’s the aliveness that guides us to our deepest truth, the illuminator of the precious present and our truest path. When we follow its call, life begins to move through us with greater clarity, courage, and purpose.

If you’ve ever longed to feel more alive, more aligned, or simply more you, this workshop offers a space to rediscover the spark that lives within. Through a blend of writing, reflection, and somatic practices, weaving together aikido, meditation, and psychology, you’ll be guided back into a deep connection with yourself.  

In the company of a supportive community, your truth will be witnessed — gently, openly, and without judgment. These accessible practices are designed for every body and ability to help you come into direct contact with your aliveness, center into your body’s wisdom, and build the embodied presence that allows life to lead.

Have you ever felt, even momentarily, that all is well within and around you? How do we cultivate this sense of deep presence and start to sustain it?

This sense of presence is the foundation of awakening. The ancient practices of qigong, meditation, and breathwork open and harmonize the energy body so we might experience ourselves at ease and in connection with all that is.

In this five-day retreat, we will explore:

• Inner qigong, “where the mind goes, the energy flows,” including “the microcosmic orbit” and “the double butterfly.”
• Outer qigong, a 20-minute short form and a 40-minute full form of wai dan gong.
• Easy-to-learn and energizing movement, sound, and visualization exercises.
• Walking, standing, sitting, and supine(lying down) meditations, including “standing as a tree,” “the three treasures,” and “metta/loving-kindness.”
• Breath practices that strengthen the lungs, calm the mind, and rest the heart.
• Full-body meridian self-massage, including sequences for hands and feet.

No experience is necessary. All levels are very welcome. Please come with the intention to relax deeply and shine from the radiance that you are

Recommended Reading: The Way of Qigong, by Kenneth Cohen

We all have a story to tell. But turning your life into an engaging and meaningful narrative requires both keen self-awareness and a working knowledge of basic storytelling. This experiential workshop invites writers at all levels, from personal journalers to published authors, to cultivate the skills needed to tell the most compelling — and truest — story.

We’ll begin each day with a short burst of early morning free writing, taking advantage of what author Ruth Ozeki calls “the liminal state,” when the brain is most flexible and the internal judge is still asleep. Everyone will be invited to share their morning writing in small groups that foster a safe and supportive environment.

We’ll follow with a mix of craft talks, incorporating examples from published works, and several sessions of prompted free writing to help us sharpen our skills and access the deepest part of our own stories.

Time will be set aside every afternoon to share our writing with the group at large. Workshop participants will leave with a clear sense of where their story lies — and how to get it on the page.

When we experience moments of ecstasy, we taste what life is meant to be. — Gabrielle Roth

The 5Rhythms® maps hold all the information required to lead us where we want to go. What is your destination? There is a science to achieving ecstatic states, and this is the mastery we have come to share. This workshop is designed for all who want to discover these possibilities for entering altered states in a natural way.

“I want to take you to a place of pure magic … It’s the place athletes call ‘the zone.’ Buddhists call ‘satori’ and ravers call ‘trance.’ I call it the Silver Desert. It’s a place of pure light that holds the dark within it. It’s a place of pure rhythm,” wrote Gabrielle Roth. Her dance and somatic meditation can assist you in navigating your way out of resistance and into ecstasy and help you build a skill set that supports balance, ease, and joy. If you have been looking to increase appreciation, gratitude, and happiness, now is a perfect time to celebrate being alive in the wild, wondrous, natural beauty of Esalen.

This course will include:

• 5Rhythms dance both indoors and outside by daylight and moonlight
• Trauma-sensitive mindfulness, including Dharma talks, sitting and walking meditations

Lucia and Douglas, the dancing duo, invite you to join them for a week of dance and celebration. Together with our team of musicians, bring you inspiration through movement and mindfulness so you can return home feeling nurtured and alive.

Leah Song of Rising Appalachia will lead a collective community song practice! Join voices and feel the collective power of unity through song and breath!

Sanga of the Valley, master drummer and living embodiment of the 5Rhythms cosmology, will be joining along with musical savant Nick Ayers.

Recommended Reading: Sweat Your Prayers by Gabrielle Roth, Maps to Ecstasy by Gabrielle Roth, Connections by Gabrielle Roth, Dancing with the Dharma edited by Harrison Blum

This workshop has an additional $100 of faculty tuition.

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This is used as a workaround for an issue with Finsweet pagination, where the last 2-3 workshops in the CMS don't get displayed.

This is used as a workaround for an issue with Finsweet pagination, where the last 2-3 workshops in the CMS don't get displayed.