Workshops

This workshop invites you to enjoy Esalen in the springtime as you gain foundational skills in our famed massage modality. Senior teachers will guide you in this experience of mindful touch translated to the massage table. Through lectures, brief demonstrations, and supervised practice, they will introduce the basics: quality of touch, rapport, massage skills with “the listening hand” and effective body mechanics.

The slow-paced practice of Esalen massage sets the stage for a pleasurable natural healing process to emerge, rather than any focus on “fixing.”  You will learn how to drape and how to easily apply Esalen’s signature integrative strokes, detail,  gentle stretches, with a concluding  pause. You will be encouraged to effectively share your experience. By  the end of the week, you’ll have the tools to offer comforting massage to friends back home. You may even enjoy giving a massage  as much as receiving one.

Classroom tools include exercises designed to awaken the senses and illuminate the value of boundaries in healing work, demonstrations, and tableside guidance tailored specifically for your experience level. The class is appropriate for the new and curious as well as the professional seeking to refresh their senses and the quality of their touch.

24 hours of continuing education provided by the faculty through Esalen Massage and Bodywork Association Teachers.

Healing ourselves is a journey of return. During this weekend workshop, you will be invited to learn about the practice and traditions of “curanderisma” (folk medicine) to bring forth awareness and attune us to our individual healing journeys. Through meditative and contemplative practices, touch, prayer, plants, and natural elements, their work honors a lineage of centuries-old wisdom to bring a sense of well being to those seeking renewal.

This workshop will include:

• Optional morning movement and mediation practice.
• The Point of Origin: A session focused on the navel and abdominal massage for somatic release and greater self connection.
• Barridas (Plant Sweepings): Foraging and working with plant and herb bundles to cleanse energies.
• Empathic Connection: An exploration with our intuition, revealing how to listen and connect with each other, and ourselves, more deeply.
• Limpia con Huevo (Washing with an Egg): A lesson sharing the practice of clearing and divining one’s energies with the use of an egg.
• Evening Moon Meditation and Flowering Bathing.

Through Margaret and Michael’s teachings, you’re invited to connect to your own innate healing potential and have the ability to support others with love and intention.

Esalen Massage is a moving meditation, a practice in presence and mindfulness, and a loving healing art. When practiced with focused attention, massage comes from a deep, quiet place that resides inside each of us. This practice of meditation helps access the parasympathetic nervous system, where healing originates. As we give a massage, this healing state of mind can permeate the field that practitioner and receiver create together.

In guided sessions, we will explore the practice of sitting meditation to prepare and quiet our minds, and the fundamentals of Esalen Massage as a meditative and self-reflective practice. Special focus will be on quality of touch, breath awareness, centering, and sensitive rapport between partners. The signature long strokes will support a sense of wholeness and integration.  Instruction in detailed work for the shoulders, hips, limbs and neck will contribute to the massage experience. There will be supervised practice daily as students exchange massages, with the support of their experienced teachers.

Beginners as well as seasoned practitioners will welcome this week to explore Esalen Massage and meditation, while enjoying the natural beauty of the Esalen grounds.

This workshop is especially useful for those in the helping and healing professions in working with their clients and partners.

26 hours of NCBTMB approved continuing education provided by the faculty through the Esalen® Massage and Bodywork Association Teachers.

Misconceptions about Reiki place its origins anywhere from ancient Egypt to Tibet — even from angels and aliens — but we hold the truth in the palms of our hands. In this workshop, we’ll explore the roots of this Japanese practice and discover the transformative power of universal life energy through Reiki meditations and transmissions.

Over this weekend, students will have the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of Reiki from both historical and experiential perspectives. We will discuss how this energy-healing technique originated in Japan, find out how it was influenced by other practices and cultures, and study how it evolved over time.

Participants will have the opportunity to learn:

• Various aspects of Reiki practice.
• Meditations taught by Reiki’s founder, Usui Mikao.
• Practices to connect to Reiki’s universal source and increase the flow of Reiki through one’s body.
• Reiki’s Japanese origins and how it is practiced and taught today

Participants will receive empowerment ceremonies called reiju or Reiki blessings. We will experience the power of Reiki self-treatments, how to give full Reiki treatments to others, and how to receive Reiki from another, all within the unique Reiki-filled space that is Esalen.  

Participants interested in Reiki initiation and certification please email Diane at nycreikimaster@gmail.com, for more information.

“​​Reiki is medicine for me — both inward and outward. When I first received Reiki, it was in an inward way. It opened me and made me feel what space is, what energy is, and what the universe is.” — Shinobu Saito, a Reiki Master initiated by Hawayo Takata

This workshop includes an additional $60 faculty tuition.

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This workshop is a perfect opportunity for you to enjoy the natural beauty of Esalen’s land while gaining a foundation in Esalen® Massage. Senior teachers and staff will guide you in this experience of connection and presence translated to the massage table.

Through lecture, demonstration and practice with your fellow students, you  will be introduced to the essentials, including quality of touch, rapport, a respect for our natural impulse toward healing, and mindful body mechanics. You will listen to what is felt as well as what is said. You will learn how to comfortably drape, and how to easily apply the foundational long, integration strokes and gentle stretches. You will have plenty of time for guided practice and to effectively share your experience. At the end of the weekend, you will be able to give a simple massage to friends and family back home.

Esalen massage promotes feelings of wholeness and reconnects us with our natural state of being. Teaching tools include experiential exercises to awaken the senses, demonstrations, and tableside guidance appropriate for you. The class will enjoy an optional evening in the hot tubs, birthplace of Esalen® Massage. The class is appropriate for the new and curious as well as the professional who would like to rejuvenate their senses and the quality of their touch.

“A brain without a body couldn’t think.” — Moshe Feldenkrais

“We want to get you to a place where gravity is your friend, a nourishing force.” — Dr. Ida P. Rolf

Human beings are relational by nature. We are an intricate web of anatomy, energy, space, and time that takes shape through our life experiences. Our physical structure, function, and sense of self are reflected in our fascial layers and formed by our early development, by principles of self-organization, and by how we engage with our environment.

When we fall into habitual patterns, parts of ourselves become undeveloped, unseen. If our bodies are given a setting in which to relate to gravity, others, and our environment with curiosity and attunement, we can be free to move and relate with more choice and ease.

Using the grounds, waters, and spirit of Esalen as our laboratory, Kate and Kevin will use the Feldenkrais Method and Gestalt process as a guide to contact and nurture the influences of the subtle body – our relationship to ground, gravity, and the space between.

In this workshop, participants will:

• Identify the habitual relational patterns that prevent us from cultivating ease in our lives.
• Investigate how the subtle body is influenced by the principles of emotional anatomy, tensegrity, neuroplasticity, and self-organization through experiential movement.
• Be guided through Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement (ATM) lessons tailored toward the subtle body and creating more sophistication in functional movement.
• Explore sensation, weight, gravity, and relationship through movement and contact.
• Learn tools of Gestalt Relational Process to increase presence and awareness and integration of ourselves.

Recommended Reading: Feldenkrais, The Potent Self: A Study of Spontaneity and Compulsion; Gladis, Tales of a Wounded Healer: Creating Exact Moments of Healing; Bodywise: An Introduction to Hellerwork for Regaining Flexibility & Well-Being.

Recent brain research reveals how constant predictions based on old information can run our lives. As we are flooded with current sensory information, our brains compare past and present to identify discrepancies called “prediction errors,” updating the old predictions to create a better working model of the world.  

Inaccurate predictions are often based on unconscious habits of moving, feeling, and thinking — responses developed as childhood solutions to surviving family systems. We’ll make the big people happy so they will love us. Or we’ll try to stop them from hurting. We shift our behaviors toward pleasing or protecting. With mistreatment, we shut down. All these solutions required muscular enforcement. Later, these reactions became adult behaviors — maintained by habitual contractions in our necks, eyes, jaws, backs, and bellies —  but predictions based on protective habits are no longer needed or helpful as we recover from injuries.

We can dissolve the hold these old patterns have over us, not by willpower, leaving old instructions in place, or superimposing new commands, but by kinesthetically sensing in our body where — and how — we keep compulsively reenacting them.

CFR® increases the amount and quality of our incoming sensory information. By bringing habits into awareness through exploratory floor work, we connect them to brain areas more supportive of change. By realizing they were clever ways to survive, we develop the self-compassion essential for healing. As our predictions become more accurate, based on the present time, we can make better choices.

Bring your issues, your lingering problems from injuries, and a desire for increased joyful movement.

Please note: This is an advanced class. Participants must have taken CFR® Week 1.

Together, we will enjoy giving and receiving therapeutic touch, moving in ways that free energetic flow, settling into silence, and laughing and connecting deeply with our healing community.

During the Streams of Energy month, you will:

• Learn to give a full-body Shiatsu session. This form of Shiatsu is done on a massage table with the receiver comfortably clothed and can be integrated into other forms of massage.
• Receive the “attunements” to practice Reiki level 1 as a self-healing tool and for the hands-on healing of others.
• Practice an easy-to-learn, powerful Qigong form known as Wai Dan Gong. This practice includes meridian self massage, movements that free and harmonize Qi (life force), and standing meditations.
• Explore the joy and support of being a member of a healing community.
• Approximately 60% of class time will be for learning Shiatsu, 20% for Reiki, and 20% for Qigong.

This month is designed to open you to your innate healing potentials, for you to experience the power of safe therapeutic touch, and to be more fully present in your unfolding as a unique expression of Source.

This workshop includes a $15 material fee.

Come enjoy the beauty of Big Sur during the quiet time as the days shorten and sunsets blaze across the sky. This is a perfect season to awaken touch, our forgotten language. In this introductory massage course, participants will learn to listen to each other, gain the sensory skill of initiating touch, experience the felt sense of touch and muscle release, and close with a balanced tenderness. Seasoned instructors will offer exercises, demonstrations, and at-the-table guidance during supervised practice. The simple principles of Esalen Massage® – presence, connection, attending rather than fixing, self-care, and slow, lengthening strokes encompassing the body – will build a heartfelt experience with our partner or friend and, perhaps most significantly, ourselves.

By the final session, participants will share the basics of a classical Esalen Massage. Experienced practitioners and caregivers will find it refreshing to apply the Esalen method and notice its healing effect as their pace slows and the mind becomes focused on compassionate contact rather than technique.

Touch can evoke an opening to spirit, either to our innate ability to move into healthful balance or to a broader sense of nature surrounding us. The edgy wildness of Esalen’s grounds, canyons, hot springs, and mountain backdrop invites this deeper natural connection.