Our podcast showcases in-depth interviews with the dynamic teachers and thinkers who are part of Esalen Institute. Hosted by Sam Stern, a former Esalen student and current staff member, the podcasts have featured engaging conversations with authors Cheryl Strayed and Michael Pollan, innovators Stan Grof and Dr. Mark Hyman, teachers Byron Katie, Mark Coleman and Jean Houston, Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy, and many more.
These podcasts are made possible in part by the support of Esalen donors and are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.
Listen to the latest episodes here, and subscribe to Voices of Esalen on Spotify, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts.
In this episode of Voices of Esalen, Sam speaks with spiritual teacher, author, and nonprofit founder Caverly Morgan about the nature of personal ego as well as the collective ego that shapes our culture, relationships, and our sense of separation.
Named one of 2025’s powerful women in the mindfulness movement, Caverly brings a rare combination of Zen training, modern nondual wisdom, and deep relational insight to questions of identity, suffering, and awakening. In this episode she speaks about what it means to wake up together, the challenges of remaining present in a world built on distraction, and the role of contemplative practice in societal transformation.
Caverly is the founder of Peace in Schools and Realizing Freedom Together, and the author of The Heart of Who We Are and A Kids Book About Mindfulness. Her presence is clear, warm, and radically hopeful.
Last year we brought you a real Esalen check-in (episode one). Some months later, a follow up episode dropped. This practice of the check-in is rooted in the Gestalt therapy that evolved at Esalen over the years. It's an authentic cornerstone of the Esalen experience, often described as a catalyst for self-awareness, connection, and personal growth.
Today's episode is the logical continuation - Episode 3, feat. Rossano Shepherd, Peggy Horan, Jess Siller, Sawyer Lavelle, Shira Levine, and Sam Stern.
What you'll hear is real, authentic, and unscripted. While our participants were aware of being recorded, they spoke from the heart. We've made every effort to preserve the intimacy and rawness of the experience with only minimal editing.
In this lively episode, psychiatrist Dr. Jacob Towery invites us into the heart of his upcoming Esalen workshop on overcoming shyness, releasing shame, and embracing authentic connection. A Stanford-trained psychiatrist, Dr. Towery works with adolescents and adults in private practice. His approach blends evidence-based therapy with playfulness, skillful vulnerability, and social courage.
Here, he guides live shame-blocking and flirtation exercises with two brave Esalen staff members, Liz Lea and Wuya Xu. What unfolds is a real-time demonstration of how presence, lightheartedness, and risk-taking can unlock more joy in our interactions.
Whether you’re looking to meet someone new, rekindle romance, or simply feel more at ease around other humans, this episode offers some practical tools and a fresh take on what it means to be fully yourself in relationship.
Jacoby Ballard is a trans yoga teacher, social justice educator, and author of A Queer Dharma: Yoga and Meditations for Liberation. In this episode of Voices of Esalen, Ballard shares reflections on how contemplative and wellness spaces can deeply support queer and trans communities, especially in a time of heightened visibility, vulnerability, and political resistance.
The conversation moves through themes of embodiment, parenthood, and liberation. Ballard offers insights into the experience of raising a trans child, discusses the role of anger as both a signal and a sacred force, and explores what freedom actually feels like in his body.
Grounded in decades of practice and activism, Ballard's perspective invites listeners to consider how personal healing and collective liberation are intertwined. This episode is for anyone interested in the intersections of spirituality, identity, justice, and what it means to truly show up for one another, in body, mind, and heart.
Anaïs Nin was a literary pioneer who wrote boldly about the inner lives of women long before it was culturally accepted. Her work, including Delta of Venus, Little Birds, The House of Incest, and her 16-volume diary, continues to influence generations of writers.
Nin’s life was as unconventional as her prose. She trained in psychoanalysis with Otto Rank, conducted passionate affairs with both Henry Miller and his wife June, and for a time maintained two simultaneous marriages on opposite coasts. Her diaries chronicle these transgressions with brutal honesty and no small amount of poetic insight.
She also had a deep connection to Big Sur and to Esalen. She once described this coastline as “a curving hand cupped around a secret." In many ways, she was a secret, too: mysterious, erotic, intuitive and ahead of her time.
This is Anaïs Nin in her own voice, in 1972, with the original Q and A / audience interaction.
In this episode of Voices of Esalen, host Sam Stern sits down with two members of the Esalen community, Sarah Lavelle (also known as Sawyer) and Abigail Barnes (also known as Bo), for a heartfelt conversation about non-binary identity, self-expression, and the journey of living beyond the binary.
Topics include personal stories, pronouns, the evolving language of gender, and the beauty and difficulty of being one’s authentic self in a world still learning how to understand.
Sawyer is a longtime full-spectrum doula, facilitator, and devoted practitioner of meditation, Buddha-dharma, and Relational Gestalt Practice in the tradition of Dick Price and Dorothy Charles. A seeker of liberation for all beings, they embody presence and compassion in all they do.
Abigail is a teacher at Big Sur Park School and a beloved presence in the Esalen lodge. Passionate about solitude, Kaula Tantric yoga, and the study of Gestalt, they will soon continue their journey in Stockholm, Sweden, exploring consciousness and education across cultures.
Whether you’re deeply familiar with non-binary experiences or just beginning to learn, this conversation offers something for everyone: insight, openness, and the radical courage of being.
Additional Resources:
Who's Afraid of Gender on bookshop.org
Understanding Nonbinary People: How to Be Respectful and Supportive
Supporting the Transgender People in Your Life: A Guide to Being a Good Ally
Get the Facts about Bans on Sports Participation By Transgender & Non-Binary Students
Ari Kuschnir is a filmmaker, creative strategist, and the founder of the production company m ss ng p eces. His work is driven by themes of empathy, consciousness, and transformation.
In this episode, Ari joins Sam for a wide-ranging conversation on the future of storytelling, particularly in the arena of AI filmmaking. They explore the ethical and emotional landscape of generative AI, and his new Esalen-inspired short video, a surreal time-traveling narrative conjured through text-to-video tools.
Also included:
This is a rich and intimate conversation with a trailblazing artist that centers around what it means to create meaningful media in a time of profound transformation.
We sit down with Dr. Elizabeth Philipose to trace the roots of modern patriarchy back to the “1492 paradigm” of Euro-colonialism and its enduring assault on femininity, the body, and the earth. Elizabeth unpacks how ideas of weakness, passivity, and scarcity were written into our social, political, and economic institutions, and how those same systems still drive homophobia, environmental destruction, and today’s surge of authoritarian fear.
Dr. Philipose also lays out the foundations of decolonial wellness, showing how trauma is embedded in our bodies, and offering practices, from guided journeying to radical self-love, that awaken a more expansive sense of self. She explores the “boomerang effect” of imperial violence at home and abroad, the radical potential of mothering and “original love,” and why reclaiming the Divine Feminine is essential to building societies grounded in peace and wholeness.
Ramzi Fawaz is an award-winning queer cultural critic, public speaker, and educator. He is the author of two books, including The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016), and Queer Forms (2022). In 2019-2020, Fawaz was a Stanford Humanities Center fellow. He is currently a Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Please be warned: this conversation is a firehose of brilliance. We cover a frankly outrageous number of topics, including: The politics and poetics of gender/ The radical imagination of the 1960s and 70s/ What happens when college students of today read manifestos from the 1970s and discover just how fiery, and fearless those voices actually were/ How feminist and gay liberation were deeply intertwined... and yet different/ The dark seduction of wounded identity and the political dead-end of suffering as a personality/ What the Beatles, postwar masculinity, and femme androgyny have to do with trans desire and cultural anxiety/ How trans liberation actually predates gay liberation in the U.S. / Teaching as ego dissolution: what it means to use the classroom like a psychedelic space. / And the idea that pluralism — true, radical pluralism — begins by accepting that you will be changed by contact with people who are radically different from you.
Ramzi Fawaz is bold, funny, passionate about teaching, absurdly articulate, and I think you’ll find he is deeply attuned to the moment we’re living in.
A quick note on AI: I use LLMs (often the multi-purposse ChatGPT, sometimes other models) to help me with various tasks associated with podcast production, including help with writing my intros, generating questions for my guests, and episode titles. Occasionally I create episode graphics, too. I almost never take the AI output as-is; I subscribe to Ethan Mollick's notion of co-intelligence, in that I edit what's been given me, add my own creativity, and aim for the best possible output in the end. My hope is that this will create a better Voices of Esalen. - SS
Today, we're opening the vaults to share a rare and remarkable recording from Esalen’s rich historical archive: a 1967 lecture and live demonstration by none other than Dr. Ida Rolf, the pioneering founder of Structural Integration—more commonly known today as Rolfing.
But what is Rolfing? Often described as intense (and sometimes even painful), Rolfing is a powerful form of bodywork that focuses on the manipulation and realignment of connective tissue—fascia—to promote structural balance and physical freedom. Ida Rolf believed that by methodically reorganizing the body’s structure in gravity, not only could chronic pain and postural issues be resolved, but profound emotional and psychological healing could also occur.
This archival gem features Dr. Rolf in her element—lecturing with intellectual precision, delivering her insights with wit and candor, and guiding a live demo with such vivid specificity that, even without visuals, you feel transported into the room beside her. It’s a masterclass in both bodywork and presence.
A little backstory: Ida Rolf first came to Esalen in the 1960s at the invitation of famed Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls, who would become one of her earliest champions. According to The Upstart Spring, Rolf worked on Perls daily for a week. On the seventh day, during a neck session, he passed out—briefly. When he came to, he recounted a deeply buried trauma: a therapist twisting his neck under anesthesia decades earlier. The memory, and its accompanying tension, had haunted him for years. He credited Rolf’s work with helping to release it.
After that, Perls became an ardent supporter of Rolfing, and Ida returned to Esalen again and again. Esalen Institute would become the West Coast hub for her method, just as it had for Gestalt therapy.
This episode is a rare opportunity to hear Dr. Rolf in her own voice, offering not just a window into the origins of Rolfing, but a taste of the charisma, intellect, and force of will that helped her change the way we think about the body, healing, and human potential.
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