Esalen Video Shorts

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.

He didn’t think connection was possible, until he felt it.

Wuya has lived many lives already. His path has taken him through many worlds, studying Spanish in Puerto Rico, picking fruit and working construction in New Zealand, herding sheep and woodworking in Mexico, farming in Japan, mentoring youth in Taiwan. In California, he worked as a Cantonese and Mandarin interpreter in Monterey Bay, while also doing elder care and food delivery, supporting others as he searched for something more aligned, and for a sense of home.

When he arrived at Esalen, he was “in transition… looking for something more meaningful.” He didn’t expect much. “I thought it was just a tiny stepping stone,” he said. “I didn’t think I would have American friends. But it turned out to be the most amazing period of my life.”

One night, dancing with others for the first time, something shifted. He felt free in his body, open in a new way. He began to meet parts of himself he had long kept at a distance, and found they did not need to be pushed away. He let people in.

Now back in China, caring for his grandmother in her final chapter, Wuya carries that openness forward with a different sense of what’s possible.