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.
Mary Sanders is a founding board member of the People of Color Psychedelic Collective, an organization that provides psychedelic education to historically marginalized communities in order to foster empowerment and healing. She is a licensed psychotherapist who specializes in exploring the depths of transgenerational trauma and, in her words, peeling off layers of oppression and cultural conditioning. She is certified in psychedelic-assisted therapies and believes that plant medicines can serve as tools to effectively heal trauma.
During our discussion we talked about her experiences as the only black person in psychedelic circles, and what constitutes a safe space for her as she attempts to explore her own healing. We also touched upon what kind of barriers have to be dismantled for BIPOC folks to access psychedelic-assisted therapy, why there’s often an earned skepticism in communities of color around psychedelics studies, how the war on drugs has affected people who might seek psychedelic therapy, what trends in psychedelic research and psychedelic training education she finds especially intriguing, and what she wishes a majority white populace might do to create a more easeful experience around psychedelic healing for folks of color.
Senti Sojwal and Tiffany Diane Tso are founding members of the Asian American Feminist Collective, a grassroots racial and gender justice group that works to interrogate and dismantle systems of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism, telling their stories through various modes of feminist media while providing spaces for identity exploration, political education, community building, and advocacy.
In our conversation we explored a host of topics, including the legacy of feminist activism that undergirds their work, the intersectional identities that inform the AAFC, how Black feminist thought has influenced them, their hashtag #ThisisAsianAmerica (on Instagram), how reproductive justice is key to understanding how colonial power functions, what tokenism is and how it differs from genuine inclusion, and how allyship can actually work in a useful, non-performative way. In their words, Asian American feminism in an ever-evolving practice that seeks to address the multi-dimensional ways Asian American people confront systems of power at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, disability, migration history and citizenship status.
Check out their amazing zines and resource page:
www.asianamfeminism.org/resources
Instagram: @aafc.nyc
Twitter: @aafcollective
Laura Mae Northrup is a somatic psychotherapist, educator, podcaster, and author. Laura has been a guest on this show before, in 2020, when we discussed her podcast "Inside Eyes", a one-season tour de force that focuses on people using entheogens and psychedelics to heal from sexual trauma. She is now the author of a new book, Radical Healership: How to Build a Values-driven Healing Practice in a Profit-Driven World. Northrup views healing work and healing practitioners through a spiritual and political lens, as they do battle with the forces of capitalism while attempting to heal their clients and take care of themselves, all at the same time.
Find Laura on the web at www.lauramaenorthrup.com.
Check out Radical Healership.
Ismail Lourido Ali, J.D. is the Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Ismail advocates to eliminate barriers to psychedelic therapy and research, develops and implements legal and policy strategy, and supports MAPS’ strategy, organizational development, and ethics work. Ismail is a founding Board member of the Psychedelic Bar Association and also presently serves on the Board of Directors for Sage Institute in the California Bay Area. Ismail advises, is formally affiliated with, or has served in leadership roles for numerous organizations in the drug policy reform ecosystem, including Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Chacruna Institute, and the Ayahuasca Defense Fund. In addition, Ismail works with clients on legal matters related to the religious use of psychedelics as sacrament.
Together we talked about the remaining legal hurdles before MDMA-assisted therapy is FDA approved, why state legislatures (like Texas!) are beginning to experiment with psychedelic policy, why the DEA just proposed adding five more psychedelics to the list of Schedule 1 controlled substances, and much more. Great interview, great guy, so much to learn.
Dr. Adele Lafrance is a clinical psychologist, research scientist, and a leader in the research and practice of psychedelic medicine. Currently, she is the clinical investigator and strategy lead for the MAPS-sponsored MDMA-assisted psychotherapy study for eating disorders and a collaborator on the Imperial College study for psilocybin and anorexia nervosa.
We talked about her history as a clinician, and why she believes psychedelics may offer a different and perhaps more successful way of treating eating disorders than traditional methods. We also spoke about a system she developed known as emotion-focused family therapy. Dr. Lafrance believes emotion-focused family therapy can used effectively in conjunction with psychedelic therapy to treat eating disorders.
"All of these sort of regular things that biotech companies do, like snapping up patents so that they can get investor dollars moving forward, they’re intersecting with this culture in the psychedelics world, which is sort of anti-ownership. These forces will clash. They oppose with one another.” –Shayla Love, Vice Media
Shayla Love is a senior staff writer at Vice Media whose writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, and more. Her recent focus has been the field of psychedelics and how they exist and interact with the forces of what some refer to as late-stage capitalism. Shayla discussed whether there is a way to corporatize psychedelics responsibly, who has the most to gain in the new landscape of psychedelic capitalism, why the for-profit entity known as Compass Pathways attempted to patent a form of synthetic psilocybin, how and why the accompanying challenge to this patent from a group called FTO, or Freedom to Operate, originated, whether state decriminalization of psychedelics is at odds with federal medicalization, and more.
A glimpse under the hood at Voices of Esalen. Host Sam Stern interviews himself, entertaining questions including:
Listen in and learn about the show's evolution.
Jon Hopkins is a Grammy-nominated electronic musician and producer who’s collaborated with the likes of Brian Eno and Coldplay, scored award-winning films such as Gareth Edwards’ Monsters, and has recently released his sixth studio album, Music For Psychedelic Therapy, which aims to function as a trusted and luminous guide for an hour-long psychedelic experience. We unpack his creative process and hopes for this hour-long album, which is specifically designed to mirror the length of a therapeutic ketamine journey. We also got into a fascinating conversation about what other recording artists provided inspiration for creating music for psychedelic journeys.
Sandor Katz has taught hundreds of workshops demystifying fermentation and empowering people to reclaim this transformational process. His book, The Art of Fermentation, received a James Beard award and was a finalist at the International Association of Culinary Professionals. In 2009, he was named one of Chow magazine’s top “provacateurs, trendsetters, and rabble-rousers.” This self-described "fermentation fetishist" treats us to a discussion of his new book, Fermentation Journeys. We talk about food writing and favorite food writers, the benefits of fermentation, being an adventurer in the kitchen, and what's fermenting in his refrigerator.
Vivien Sansour is the founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. Trained in the field of Anthropology, Vivien has worked with farmers worldwide on issues relating to agriculture and independence. She is a 2020-2021 Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative Fellow at Harvard University where she is working on an autobiographical book documenting her work saving seeds in Palestine and around the world. Together we discussed how food sovereignty aligns with the struggle of Palestinian resistance, how biodiversity reflects and intersects with cultural diversity, how the military occupation of Palestine affects the farming practices that go on there, and how love is the greatest form of resistance to colonial oppression. She's brilliant.
Sansour teaches Becoming Of The Land: Right Relationship Without Dominance - Understanding The Terrains We Inhabit, December 17–20.
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