Workshops

When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence? —Gabrielle Roth

Your life is not simply a task to be managed but a mythopoetic mystery to be lived. Take a break from the mundane and let yourself be enchanted again. This workshop offers a profound opportunity to commune with the deeper aspects of Self through movement, inquiry, and mythology. To dream. To play. To feel alive.

Since the beginning, humans have looked to stories to make meaning of our lives. Revered mythologist and 1960s Esalen faculty Joseph Campbell wrote, “Mythology is the penultimate truth — penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words.” On this retreat, we’ll engage with daily stories that have the power to help us make sense of our lives, nourish, teach, inspire, empower, and heal us.

Experiential practices include:

• Archetypal wisdom and nondual yogic mythology
• Breathwork and meditation
• Yoga (all levels), dance, and somatic journeys
• Self-inquiry and writing
• Rewilding, song, and nature ceremony

Music, nature, poetry, connection, and ritual are exquisitely curated for your hero/heroine’s journey. Our nourishing schedule is balanced harmoniously with relaxing meals, community care, and soaks in Esalen’s healing baths.

Whether you’re searching for renewed meaning in life, navigating life’s complex transitions, or simply enjoy being enchanted, this workshop will help awaken your spirit to courage, gladden your heart, calm your mind, and widen your perspective to vast possibilities. You might just fall in love with existence again.

Grace awaits.

What if sleep could be more than just crashing into your pillow at the end of a long day? What if it could be a portal to transformation and self-discovery? In this workshop, we’ll dive into the ancient Daoist art of sleep alchemy, where the Wudang Hibernating Dragon and Five Dragons Sleeping methods teach you how to transform snoozing into a practice of subtle awareness and metaphysical transformation.

Rooted in the Wudang Daoist Sanfeng lineage, these techniques harmonize body and soul, turning your nightly shut-eye into a discipline of deep peace. The cosmic journey would be incomplete without Daoist stories like Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream and Lü Dongbin’s Yellow Millet Dream, classic tales of metaphysical gaslighting that explore just how slippery the boundaries of reality and illusion can be.

We’ll also talk about practicalities within a Daoist framework, like how your food choices, lifestyle, and daily habits can affect your sleep quality. Expect to walk away with tools for cultivating transcendent rest, resilience, and an appreciation for Daoist cosmology. Along the way, we’ll keep it relaxed — the Dao is at ease. Sleeping in class is encouraged, though snoring will be punished with five hundred years in Daoist hell.  

Participants will practice introductory Wudang sleeping methods to enter, sustain, and deepen sleep states. By the end of the workshop, you will be intimately familiar with practical techniques to deepen sleep, enhance well-being, and dream the dream of life more deeply and lucidly.

You are never truly alone — loving guidance has always been by your side. Your spirit guides, part of your soul family and spiritual GPS, are waiting to assist, support, play, and dance with you. In this five-day immersion, you’ll explore how to access their wisdom with patience, trust, and an open heart, and discover how to create a steady, lasting connection with the unseen love that surrounds you.

Through guided practice, instruction, and community support, you will:

• Explore ways to recognize the guides you were born with and engage with them more steadily and reliably.
• Experience meditations that quiet doubt, expand awareness, and open your intuitive channels.
• Participate in interactive exercises designed to illuminate how guidance shows up in clarity, synchronicity, and inspiration.
• Invite your guides into daily life for creativity, healing, and spiritual restoration.
• Share insights within a supportive circle of seekers, strengthening both confidence and connection.

This workshop welcomes seekers who are energetically sensitive and open to receiving support from beyond the veil. Whether you are beginning to sense intuitive guidance or already feel the presence of your guides, this framework invites you to discover how to trust these connections more deeply and access your guides more dependably. A profound journey that can change how you navigate this world’s layers — emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually.

This workshop includes a $40 materials fee.

In the mountains east of Esalen, an enchanting, ecologically diverse, and psycho-spiritually fertile wilderness awaits. Over four nights and five days, we will engage in a contemporary form of pilgrimage, backpacking as reverent seekers through these ancestral lands of the Esselen Tribe, now known as Big Sur’s Ventana Wilderness. Our journey concludes at the coastal grounds of Esalen Institute with a weekend of reflection and integration.

Since time immemorial, people have taken time away from the demands of daily life to walk with intention on sacred trails — pursuing embodied spiritual wisdom, expansion, and community. Wilderness pilgrimage is a powerful practice for restoring connection with ourselves, the Earth, and the depths of our shared humanity.

Each day of our wild pilgrimage, we will walk with presence and curiosity to meaningfully encounter our inner and outer landscapes. As we hike and camp, we will learn foundational wilderness ethics and skills to feel at home in the wild. When night falls, we will share stories and meals by the fire and sleep beneath a blanket of stars.

Inspired by Esalen’s co-founder Dick Price, who found healing in the Big Sur wild and the Esalen community, our intimate and intergenerational cohort will embrace mutual support – engaging relational practices from Price’s Gestalt lineage to authentically connect with ourselves and one another.

Our pilgrimage community will include the more-than-human world: ancient redwoods, mossy boulders, surging springs, morning bird-song, and all the countless beings and aspects of Big Sur. Through guided mythopoetic, ecological, and somatic inquiry, we will cultivate kinship with the wild, awaken our senses, and expand embodied awareness of our interconnection.

May the ardor and intentionality of our trek, across 30 miles of extraordinary terrain, wash away calcified layers from our essential selves to reveal bright resilience and aliveness. At Esalen, we will turn our attention toward integration and service: how will we carry what we’ve gathered on this journey into our lives, communities, and lands back home?

Important Notes:

• The full experience takes place over seven days, from Monday, April 20th to Sunday, April 26, 2026.
• Experience with backpacking or Esalen/Gestalt is not required.
• This is a partner program with Wildtender, a non-profit organization working at the 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. Scholarship funds are potentially available. For more details and to register, visit wildtender.com/esalen2026

Learn how mindfulness and self-compassion can change everything about how you feel, how you relate and how you live ― for good.

In this workshop, Dr. Shauna Shapiro ― a leading scientist studying the effects of mindfulness + compassion on well-being ― shows us that acting with compassion toward ourselves is the key. She explains basic brain science and offers powerful science-based practices to alleviate anxiety, boost creative thinking and deepen our sense of belonging and purpose. With practice, we can literally rewire our brains for greater feelings of calm, clarity, connection and joy.  We will immerse ourselves in the natural beauty of Esalen, allowing the sounds of the ocean, the magnificent views  and delights of the gardens to nourish and support us.

This workshop is appropriate for anyone curious about mindfulness + compassion and how to deepen our connection with the beauty and mystery of life. All are welcome.

Recommended Reading: Good Morning, I Love You: Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Practices to Rewire Your Mind by Shauna Shapiro.

*For anyone facing financial hardship, Dr. Shauna Shapiro invites you to contact her directly for tuition scholarship at slshapiro@scu.edu.

This workshop includes $390 in additional faculty tuition fee.

The wound is the place where the light enters you. – Rumi

This workshop is designed for men to help you recharge and reset your body and mind, easing the heaviness of life's challenges — whether they involve self-worth, career, or relationships.

We will focus on your future vision, cultivating intuition, trust, resilience, and confidence through movement, dynamic breathwork, guided meditation, and lighthearted yet meaningful conversations. Practice with shadow work tools to access your inner wisdom and power, aiding you in overcoming blocks like fear, doubt, rejection, or self-sabotage.

“Rasa” is Sanskrit for “essence.” So, soak your icy armor in healing hot springs, walk amidst spectacular nature and ocean air, eat nourishing food, activate, and reveal the Rasa Heart Warrior of you.

You are invited to:

• Explore the archetypes of warrior, magician, lover, king, your shadows and wounds. This illumination can help shift your mindset and break free from outdated conditioned patterns to cultivate clarity, discover your purpose, know boundaries, and encourage genuine leadership development for true freedom.
• Participate in drumming, vocalizing, and mantras, and share in a circle to nurture your emotional skills, imagination, and intuition to foster deeper connections.
• Boost your energy and back strength with functional movements from Rasa Yoga, Foundation training, and dynamic breathwork. 
• No army drills here, but you might sweat.

Leave feeling refreshed and embodied, enriched by the camaraderie among men, with skills for resilience, emotional presence, and awareness. 

This workshop is specifically designed to create a space for sacred brotherhood for participants who identify as male. 

Recommended Reading: Bringing Your shadow out of the dark and To Be A Man by Robert Augustus Masters

Join us for this weeklong wild clay pottery intensive. As a group, we will go through the process of making pottery from the wild, including processing clay, mixing wild clays, and finding and testing clay in the field. We’ll learn how to hand-build pots using various techniques, including pinch pots, slab work, coil and scrape, corrugation, and more. We will find and refine mineral paints from the landscape and make our yucca brushes to design and paint our pots with our own artistic expressions. Finally, we’ll prepare a kiln to fire the pots and go over several different methods for firing earthenware pottery.

Together, we’ll enjoy daily discussions about the metaphysical nature  of pottery, working with the clay, and balancing the elements. We will slow the process down to see what lessons emerge and what energy and opportunities the materials draw from us, both as individuals and as a group — an opportunity for personal growth and team building through the creation process!

While seated on the grounds of Esalen, we will connect to and draw inspiration from the landscape and the ancient ones who came before us and may have also made pots for function and beauty with the same materials long ago.

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.

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.