Esalen Video Shorts

Rod Stryker’s new program, Luminous Coherence: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, Lasting Freedom, invites you into a state of unified awareness where old patterns soften and the deeper self comes into view. Blending tantric practice with modern neuroscience, this workshop offers a rare chance to rediscover coherence, intuition, and the possibility of real transformation.

Dorothy Charles has been teaching Gestalt at Esalen since the 1980s, carrying forward a lineage deeply connected to the work that Dick Price once practiced and taught. For Charles, Gestalt is a way of meeting one another with enough presence, honesty, and support that something old can finally be seen, felt, and integrated. “We develop in relationship and we heal in relationship,” she says, echoing Gregory Bateson’s insight that “it takes two people to know one person.” In this work, participants explore both “what happened that shouldn’t have happened” and “what did not happen that should have happened.” Within the supportive field of the group, old wounds can be witnessed in a new way: as openings into deeper contact, repair, and growth.

In his playful and thought-provoking workshop coming up June 1–5, 2026, Ramzi Fawaz invites us to explore life’s inevitable moments of change, loss, and disorientation as openings into greater freedom, adaptability, and emotional ease. Through film, philosophy, psychology, embodied practice, and group dialogue, discover how groundlessness can become a thrill to embrace.

You already spend a third of your life asleep. Might as well get good at it.⁠ Daoist sleep practices are part dreamwork, part body awareness, part subtle shift in how you relate to being alive, even when you’re not fully awake. Rooted in the Wudang Daoist Sanfeng lineage, these techniques harmonize body and soul, turning nightly shut-eye into a discipline of deep peace. ⁠

What if creativity was something you learn to receive? Explore the rhythm of inspiration and refinement with Erin Prophet — author, scholar, and student of spiritual experience — who will guide you through a renewed engagement with your creative process, drawing on neuroscience, artistic lineage, and lived practice.

The award-winning author, internationally acclaimed speaker, and interspiritual teacher returns to reveal the sacred in the everyday. Mirabai Starr shares thoughts on her upcoming workshop, Ordinary Mysticism: Reclaiming the Landscape of Your Life as Sacred Ground. “Time together at Esalen is an opportunity to refill the cup that has been drained by the fire of suffering,,” says Starr. ”We can be a source of steadiness and nourishment in the world.”