How Esalen Workshops Impact Our Lives: Perchance to Dream

What happens at Esalen rarely stays here. The work we do continues after we leave. In the coming weeks, we’re sharing stories of transformation that extend long after returning home. In this first installment, Esalen Director of Storytelling Shira Levine on her decades of disordered sleep and how healing practices from a Daoist Sleep Alchemy workshop are helping change both her nights and days. (Part 1)

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Four years working at Esalen has taught me that transformation doesn’t arrive on a schedule. It happens when the conditions are right, and often when you’ve run out of ways to avoid it. After witnessing other seekers’ transformations, I finally stepped into my own. Last month, I attended Sleep Alchemy: Secrets of Daoist Sleep Practices for Inner Peace and Renewal, led by Simon Cox and Jeff S. Reid, alongside fourteen others who had come, in their own ways, to learn how to rest.

I have been tired for thirty years. The kind of tired that lives just underneath a functional, relatively joyful life. The kind I’ve watched countless guests arrive here carrying in their own way. The kind where a friend casually reminds me that I didn't even sleep well back in high school. It’s a pattern that has shaped me for decades, including my relationships. 

I joke that I carry the weight of the world on my shoulders. Money, career, love, the ongoing negotiation with my own ambitions. Everything surfaces between 1:30 and 4:30 in the morning.  My therapist recently said something that shifted the frame entirely: “Your life’s circumstances awaken you.” It was a small distinction that contained everything.

Circumstances are specific. They have names and faces and unpaid invoices. They don’t wait for a reasonable hour. They find you in the dark, when the body is supposedly at rest and the mind has nowhere left to hide, and they present themselves for review. I’ve also got an unhealthy behavior at play in response: I reach for my phone. Pavlov would have something to say about this. So would my cortisol levels.

I can drop easily into a 3AM research spiral, where I tell myself I am factchecking by toggling between Claude and ChatGPT. This deep research led me to what feels like the most accurate diagnosis of my problem yet: a compromised parasympathetic nervous system, likely expressed as dysregulated cortisol. My body isn’t winding down at night so much as it is on guard. The circadian rhythm isn’t broken; my threat-response system never fully clocks out. Everything I have tried over the years makes a kind of dark sense in that light.

Benadryl worked until it didn’t. Then, I learned its daily use is linked to Alzheimer’s. Melatonin worked until it didn’t. Seven years of cannabis gummies, starting at 2.5mg Kiva chocolates, ending somewhere around 20mg of passionfruit Good Tides and still waking up at an ungodly hour. I fully stopped the gummies last fall, which led to a withdrawal that was brutal and, unexpectedly, clarifying.

I emerged from it with the particular clarity that comes when you’ve stopped softening everything. The emotions were savage. My sensitivities were operatic. But underneath all of it was a steadiness I hadn’t felt in years. There is a specific relief when a nervous system is no longer chemically managed, and, finally, is just its raw self. What I was beginning to understand is that sleep disturbances are rarely just about sleep.

At Esalen, that understanding shows up in many forms. This year alone, our workshop schedule has included my Sleep Alchemy workshop, The Art of Non-Sleep Deep Rest with Kelly Boys; Yoga Nidra: Rest, Restore, and Remember Who You Are with John Vosler; Nourish with Janet Stone, focused on adrenal repair through slow yoga and breathwork; Exploring the Mind Through Liminal Dreaming with Jennifer Dumpert and Adam Haar Horowitz, Resting in Radiance: Qigong, Breath and Meditation with Jim Gallas, and Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche’s Sleep, Dream, Death, and Liberation: Exploring the Continuity of Awareness, which approaches sleep as a conscious spiritual practice. I had spent years recommending these experiences to others. And finally, in April, I went myself.

My therapist, who has been on a roll lately, named a pattern she’d been watching me carry: martyrdom. Not the theatrical, self-pitying kind, but the largely unconscious willingness to suffer inside relationships that aren’t working, and require extreme accommodation.

For more than twenty years, I found myself inside a friendship where I was constantly cringing and calibrating. I was always bracing myself, making myself smaller, less, to whatever version of me felt least threatening. I mistook contraction for loyalty, care, even maturity. It produced a sustained arrangement in which I disappeared in order to maintain closeness.

By the end of last year, the relationship finally ended. It wasn’t explosive. There was no great demolition. It was simply a slow cancellation. Earlier that year, she had given me a card marking the Year of the Snake, encouraging me to shed old skin. At the time, it felt generic, maybe even performative. In retrospect, it was exact. Once the friendship was gone, something shifted physiologically and I slept better. Removing the constant strain of a dynamic that no longer served me noticeably altered my nervous system’s baseline. My body was no longer as continuously held in a state of defense. 

My current state is increasingly free from toxic excess. My cocktail of choice is one of a magnesium glycinate and tart cherry blend, and occasionally followed with a passionflower tincture. It is working, mostly. I recently took a DUTCH hormone panel with my naturopathic doctor. I wanted to understand what is actually happening in my body rather than keep guessing in the dark, under the glow of my 3AM Dr. Google visits. The results reflected a pattern associated with chronic stress dysregulation: my body was producing cortisol, but metabolizing it rapidly, leaving me suspended in the strange state of being simultaneously depleted and over-alert. Tired but wired. Exhausted, but never fully at rest.

A deeper problem, though, is behavioral. So many nights grabbing my phone in the dark has programmed my body to treat 3AM as a creative studio. Wake up, reach for the device, begin. Create ten pages of screenplay, a new concept, the perfect three-act structure for an essay. My parasympathetic nervous system may be compromised, but I have also trained myself, with considerable devotion, to be a night-shift genius. Undoing that is not just a supplement fix, it’s a behavioral transformation.

Watching people arrive here wrung out by their lives, nervous systems, and accumulated circumstances, I also get to also see them leave Esalen, differently. Not fixed, but different. I have witnessed and written about that transformation with genuine belief, while still finding ways to exempt myself from it. Esalen exists “to explore the latent potential pressing to emerge in us,” writes cofounder Michael Murphy. People come here to work on the things they’ve been carrying. The sleep they haven’t gotten. The patterns they haven’t named. The life that keeps waking them up at 3 am. When they are ready.

I have taken exactly one workshop for my own sleep: a weekend of yoga nidra. I attended with sincere intention. As I lay in the designated stillness, I mentally reorganized a marketing campaign, solved several interpersonal communication problems, and outlined at least two future essays. I left no more rested than when I arrived. The workshop was not the problem.

By the time I walked into Sleep Alchemy last month, I understood something I hadn’t understood before: exhaustion is not always a failure to sleep. Sometimes it is a failure to stop guarding yourself against your own life. Apparently, in Daoist philosophy, my kidneys knew this already.

(Stay tuned for Part 2 on June 4)

Shira Levine is the Director of Communications & Storytelling at Esalen Institute.