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.

This November, you’re invited into a living field of practices that have supported Israelis and Palestinians in meeting across some of the most profound lines of conflict. Through compassionate communication, listening partnerships, and small-group exploration, you’ll have space to slow down, connect, and experience what becomes possible when we meet one another with curiosity instead of certainty.

Whether you’re a facilitator, educator, healer, or simply someone longing for more authentic connection in divided times, The Heart Remembers: Healing Across Divides offers both personal transformation and practical tools. It invites you to deepen your capacity to navigate conflict with presence, build trust across differences, and reconnect with a sense of hope.

Esalen Massage, born on the cliffs of Big Sur, is today practiced by a worldwide community of bodyworkers and healers. Over the decades, it has become one of the world's most respected forms of bodywork. This practice of listening through the hands continues to evolve while remaining rooted in its founding principles of presence, compassion, and embodied awareness.

Rooted in Internal Family Systems, narrative therapy, and somatic practice, October’s Transforming the Shame Triangle: From Shame to Love Using Parts Work explores the inner cycle of shame and how these protective patterns can keep us disconnected from ourselves and one another. Through guided practice, relational exercises, and live demonstrations, participants will learn to transform these parts into allies.

He gives back to the place that helped shape him.

Some experiences stay with us for a lifetime. For Joseph, Esalen has been the setting for some of the most meaningful chapters of his life. He first arrived in 1980 as a teenager and soaked in the baths beneath the stars, an experience that left, as he describes it, “a lasting imprint on my psyche.”

Three decades later, at a difficult crossroads, he found his way back to Esalen. What began as a return became an ongoing relationship with Esalen as a workshop participant, work scholar, volunteer, and devoted member of the community.

As a work scholar, Joseph has worked in the Kitchen, Farm & Garden, and CABinS departments. As a workshop guest he often brings friends and family. As a volunteer, he contributes his time and energy to a place that has given him so much.

“Esalen Institute has given me so much and really changed the trajectory of my life,” Joseph says. “I’ve received so much from here and, at the same time, I want to give back, and it is my pleasure and honor to be able to give back to the Institute and the place that has given me so much.”

She burned out trying to change the world, and learned transformation begins inside the body.

Marea came following years of environmental and social justice organizing during and after her studies at UNC Charlotte, where she studied Public Advocacy Communication and Urban Studies. She worked in student organizing and on grassroots campaigns, mobilizing students around environmental issues, including efforts to ban plastic grocery bags in California. The work was intense and became unsustainable. She felt burnout.

When Marea came to Esalen, she was carrying exhaustion and grief for our strained ecological systems. She could no longer override her depletion. A severe illness consumed her mere days before her scheduled arrival on the land. An experience that was for her an intense physical and spiritual purge. As she landed and began to heal, Marea learned to slow down. She began to notice her fear instead of pushing through it. “I have been living with a lot of fear,” she shared.

Something shifted in how she understood her work. She began to see that external change and internal transformation were inseparable. Now she carries that understanding forward, building a different foundation for the change she wants to bring into the world.