Next at Esalen: New Workshops, Self‑Guided Explorations, and The Subtle Body

Halfway through this strange and heavy year, it feels as if “the pillars that held up the usual are trembling under its weight,” to quote faculty member Bayo Akomolafe. It has been an unsettling and unpredictable time — globally, nationally, and even here, surrounded by the beauty of Big Sur. In many ways, this historical moment mirrors the era of Esalen’s origins, when the Institute, born in a time of disruption, started asking what transformation could look like in a world on the edge. Despite uncertainty beyond our cliffs, we are still Esalen. Workshops continue, the gardens produce food, the furnaces of the earth deliver hot water to the baths, and guests return to our spaces for messy, vital explorations of human potential — all as we reach the completion of our 2025 calendar.

In designing the 2025 calendar, we set out to continue lines of exploration — East and West, body and mind, science and soul — and honor Esalen’s lineages while attuning to new ones quietly establishing themselves. We try to present content that is not available elsewhere — or offer with a different spin. This year’s catalog moved toward more expansive ontologies and epistemologies, exploring emergent ways of knowing. It gestures beyond the rational, into the felt, the ancestral, the liminal. Across disciplines and modalities, it asks: What is asked of us in these times? What else might be possible?

Consider these offerings scheduled for the second half of the year, each of which contributes to an ecology of inquiry, exploration, and emergence: 

• ‍John Price’s guide into the art of integration, rooted in Jungian psychology and contemplative practice, as a lifelong discipline of becoming‍
• Roger Zim & Sascha von Meier reaching back to Oscar Ichazo’s original teachings of the Enneagram’s Fixations and its early Esalen roots‍
• Jeff Kripal & Kevin Cann making meaning of mystical or paranormal experiences and cosmic contact
• ‍Nancy Lunney-Wheeler & Gordon Wheeler bringing back Gestalt Relational Constellations work from the past
• ‍Angel Acosta & Yolanda’s Ruiz cultivating inner resilience
• ‍Amy Secada’s Dance of the Chakras
• ‍Jacob Towery’s tools to face fears, connect authentically, and find humans less scary
• ‍Ayodeji Ogunnaike’s exploration of Ifá Divination: The Cultivation and Embodiment of Cosmic Harmony 
• ‍Arvid Bell’s immersive experience with real-world negotiation scenarios and the Systemic Multi-Constituency Exercise (SMCE) to master negotiation
• Ayana Young & Brontë Velez’s December drop into deep and quiet rhythm with the more-than-human world (coming soon!)
• Laraaji & Arji Oceananda’s softening into ecstatic laughter, deep musical immersion, and somatic movement (coming soon!)
  

So far, 2025 at Esalen feels like a year of subtle regrowth — an ongoing process of reflection, repair, and rebuilding, and a re-orientation toward Michael Murphy’s Big Vision. The programming calendar has emerged as a collection of varied offerings that together, in myriad ways, explores and fosters the latent supernature pressing to emerge in us — some softly, subtly, quietly, others with gusto. We experimented more with form, faculty, and inquiry, trying out seminar-style conversations and expanding into less-explored territories. By the end of 2025, we estimate:

• 263 completed workshops facilitated by approximately 223 faculty
• 63 faculty who are new to Esalen, and 54 returning faculty offering new content
• 41% of workshops represent new programming, with 16% from first-time faculty and 25% new content from returning faculty
• Average workshop attendance so far is 28, ranging from 7 to over 140 participants
• 87 workshops are co-taught; 176 are by a single facilitator
• 88 Self-Guided periods and more than 1,600 guests served
• 12 Teachers-in-Residence/guest faculty
  

As part of our larger programming landscape, Self-Gujeff jeffided Explorations (SGE) doesn’t stand apart from the workshop catalog — it deepens it. It offers a spacious, self-directed mode of integration that supports guests in metabolizing insight and tracking their own rhythms of emergence. Participants move between facilitated sessions and open time as SGE allows them to make meaning on their own terms, at their own pace.

Together with our seasonal series and workshops, SGE completes a multidimensional programming ecology — one that honors diverse ways of knowing, different tempos of becoming, and the full spectrum of human potential. Where workshops generate ignition, SGE offers integration, providing the spaciousness needed for insights to land, settle, and take root. It is both a pause and a practice — and in that way, it embodies Esalen at its most essential.

As we turn toward 2026, we’re listening for what wants to emerge next, growing even more attuned to seasonal rhythms, solar and lunar cycles, and the energy of the land itself. We want our programming to resonate more consciously with time as a living force. Since 2023, SGE has been scheduled using biodynamic principles — aligned with solstices, equinoxes, and key energetic thresholds. This subtle calibration invites guests into coherence with the turning of the earth. Looking ahead, this mode of programming will begin to ripple outward — gradually informing how we schedule and shape the workshop calendar itself, bringing Esalen’s entire ecosystem into deeper relationship with time as teacher and collaborator.

Lastly, 2026 invites a reconsideration of how the Subtle Body, long explored in Esalen’s CTR gatherings, shows up in our public programming. What is the subtle body? It is not easy to define. The term refers to non-physical, energetic, or metaphysical dimensions of the human system — those that penetrate, influence, and interface with the physical body. Across cultures, the subtle body governs not just health but consciousness, emotion, and spirit. It shows up in breath, in dreams, in altered states. And it is mapped differently depending on tradition: chakra, qi, prana, meridian, auric field, and more. 

Why explore this more deeply at Esalen now? 

1. Esalen has always been a place where spirit meets inquiry. While the subtle body has long been implicit — through bodywork, meditation, psychedelics — it’s never been the subject of sustained exploration. 
2. The subtle body invites us to explore capacities outside the physicalist paradigm. It honors the intuitive, the energetic, the transpersonal. It reclaims the terrain of inner knowing often dismissed as impossible.
3. If Esalen exists to foster the flowering of human potential, then the subtle body may be one of its most direct portals. We acknowledge what many already experience: a porous world, a mysterious self, a soul that breathes beyond skin.
   

We set out to make 2025 a year of experimentation, and we did. There is always room to refine and sense new threads asking to be pulled: into subtle bodies, into seasonal consciousness, into even more spacious forms of learning.

Thank you for walking with us — and stay tuned for what comes next.