Our workshops are designed to support you in the challenging work of self exploration, in partnership with some of the leading minds of the day. Join us in discovering the next frontiers of individual and societal transformation.
Interested in a scholarship?
Learn MoreTibetan yoga is a powerful bridge between ancient wisdom and contemporary somatic healing. Rooted in movement, meditation, and subtle energetics, these practices engage not only the physical body but also the deeper layers of the subtle body — where trauma often lives.
In Tibetan yoga, the subtle body is composed of energetic pathways through which the vital winds flow, regulating both our physiology and consciousness. These winds influence the movement of thought, emotion, and life force. Within this energetic system, the vital essence — traditionally associated with reproductive health and immunity — is also key to stress regulation and emotional well-being.
By deeply understanding these channels, we can learn to work directly with these energies to clear blockages, release somatized distress, and cultivate new pathways for mind-body integration for healing from within.
In this workshop, you will be invited to:
This extended weekend workshop is ideal for those seeking a deep exploration of subtle energetics, nervous system regulation, and the intersection of ancient yogic traditions with contemporary insights from Polyvagal theory and somatic practices.
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Join ceremonial leader and wisdom carrier Erika Gagnon on a sacred journey, as we gather together and explore the healing wisdom of the “Americas.” We will learn about the importance of ancestral lineage, ceremonies and rituals, sacred altars, medicinal plants, and the origins of dis-ease in our physical, mental/emotional, and spiritual bodies.
You are your greatest healer and greatest medicine, and we will examine what this means in the context of our modern daily lives as we share healing wisdom and practices together. This is your opportunity to transform trauma and unhealthy patterns, and to realign your body, mind, spirit, and soul. You will also have the opportunity to participate in a traditional South American healing ceremony, a sound healing & “doctoring” ceremony and water blessing.
You will be invited to reconnect to your authentic wisdom and power with clarity, gratitude, and forgiveness. When you honor and heal your ancestral lineage, and connect to the natural and spiritual elements of this planet, you will strengthen your connection to the sacred in everyday life.
We are all interconnected in this giant web of life, and every day is a gift in the service of unconditional love: for yourself, your community, humanity, and our planet. If you feel the call to be a part of a new humanity that lives in harmony and balance upon this Earth, then we invite you to join us in this celebration of life.
Note: Please bring a journal to write in, and items for our altar, including photographs of loved ones and ancestors and sacred objects that have meaning for you.
Special Note on Gift Economy: For this workshop, Esalen will not be collecting the typical leader fees. Erika embraces the tradition of the gift economy and reciprocity. The leader’s compensation will be self-determined by each attendee. At the end of the workshop, participants will offer a donation amount that reflects their feeling of gratitude, value, and desire to support Erika and her ongoing work.
BIPOC SCHOLARSHIP: Erika has established a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, person of color) scholarship for her workshops. For more information on receiving one to participate, please contact her at ErikaGagnon11@gmail.com
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Revolutionary findings in neuroscience have demonstrated that we can literally re-architect the very structure of our brains. In fact, we can even rewire our neurology to be more focused, calmer, and happier.
In this workshop, Dr. Shauna Shapiro — a leading scientist studying the effects of meditation on well-being — will teach you the most powerful science-based practices for increasing the neural pathways of happiness. She’ll explain basic brain science and offer a clear roadmap for living a joyful, connected, and meaningful life. Be prepared for unexpected transformation and delight.
During this weekend workshop, we’ll learn:
Recommended Reading: Good Morning, I Love You: Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Practices to Rewire the Brain for Calm, Clarity + Joy and Good Morning, I Love You: A Guided Journal for Calm, Clarity + Joy by Shauna Shapiro.
This workshop includes an additional $375 faculty tuition. *For anyone facing financial hardship, Dr. Shauna Shapiro invites you to contact her directly for tuition scholarship at slshapiro@scu.edu.
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Join master craftsman and musician Guillermo Martinez for an unforgettable journey into the sacred traditions of Native American instrument making and music. This immersive, hands-on workshop invites you to reconnect with the spirit of sound by crafting three profound instruments: a Native American bamboo flute, a 16″ elk-hide medicine drum, and a gourd crystal rattle.
Designed for beginners and enthusiasts alike, this workshop begins with an exploration of the Native American flute. You’ll not only learn to play this sacred instrument — with guidance on breath control, finger positioning, and melodic phrasing — but you will also craft your own Native American-style flute using bamboo. Through this experiential journey, you’ll discover the flute’s power to express emotion, foster introspection, and create a deep sense of connection.
Next, delve into the sacred art of drum making as you create a 16” elk-hide medicine drum — a profound instrument that serves as the foundation of a trilogy of sacred tools in Native traditions. Guillermo will share the cultural and spiritual significance of the medicine drum and its role as a vessel of healing, rhythm, and spiritual resonance. Using traditional techniques, you will stretch the elk hide and lace the drum by hand, crafting a one-of-a-kind instrument that carries your unique spirit and purpose.
Lastly, connect with the power of resonance as you create your own crystal rattle using ethically sourced gourds, crystals, and natural materials. By blending traditional techniques with your personal intention, you’ll craft a sacred tool for healing, ceremony, and transformation.
No prior musical experience is necessary — just an open heart and a willingness to listen deeply. All materials will be provided, including tools and components for flute, drum, and rattle making.
This workshop has a $225 material fee, which covers all materials for instrument making.
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Rejuvenate the body and the mind with the deep relaxation that can be found through non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) and yoga nidra. Whether you need a break from constant pressure, are navigating a life transition, or wish to delve deeper into your mindfulness and meditation practice, this retreat will provide space and time for contemplation and reflection.
Non-sleep deep rest, a term coined by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, refers to a waking state of deep relaxation with sustained awareness. Evidence suggests reaching this state through NSDR protocols, such as yoga nidra, can reset dopamine levels and provide numerous physical and mental health benefits — including better sleep and enhanced neuroplasticity.
Together, we’ll go on an inner journey to connect to both ourselves and our life paths — and emerge refreshed and deeply rested. This will be a large-group experience, and we will practice lying-down guided protocols throughout the weekend.
This is a beginner experiential course and does not require knowledge of yoga nidra theory or history. There will be lots of chances to journal and connect with one another as we enjoy the natural beauty of Esalen and our time together!
Recommended Reading: The Blind Spot Effect: How to Stop Missing What’s Right in Front of You by Kelly Boys
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During this retreat, you’ll be invited to immerse yourself in your own innate wisdom to rediscover your freedom. Through Buddhist meditation, mindful movement, and time in nature, you’ll explore the spontaneous creative essence within you.
Surrounded by the beauty of the natural world, this guided retreat is an opportunity to slow down, listen deeply, and explore what it means to be truly present. By attuning to the elements and rhythms of the earth, you will have the space to cultivate a renewed sense of clarity, openness, and connection.
Explore key practices, including:
During our time together, you will be able to:
Throughout the retreat, you’ll be given tools to continue nurturing this natural approach to liberation in your daily life. Join us for this transformative exploration of being natural.
This will be a week of fun, relaxation, and rejuvenation. Whatever your spiritual path or meditation experience, you are welcome just as you are. No prior experience is required. Seated and supine meditations will be offered. All are welcome.
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Peak experiences and personal revelations can be dazzling, but the deeper work of transformation is often overlooked. Many have touched something sacred through psychedelics, mystical states, grief, love, or profound life transitions, yet are left with an unfinished question: How do I live in service to what I’ve seen?
Rooted in Jungian psychology, contemplative practice, and symbolic imagination, the week is devoted to the art of integration as a lifelong discipline of becoming. We will explore the crucial difference between having an experience and being changed by one.
This workshop offers a grounded, initiatory path for those who understand that an experience alone is not enough. Ecstatic experiences are often treated as events to be had or moments to be repeated. In the West, we often do not understand how to let these extraordinary states of consciousness inform a way of life. This requires a framework for integration, one that teaches us how to metabolize these encounters symbolically, psychologically, and ethically, so they reshape how we live, love, and relate.
Together, we will explore how altered states — specifically those experienced through psychedelics — can become initiatory rather than episodic. We’ll examine how these experiences shape the nervous system, constellate archetypal material, and invite us into a more conscious relationship with imagination, psyche, and the sacred.
Participants are invited to:
This course is not about chasing visions. It is about carrying them with integrity.
While this workshop explores the history and meaning of psychedelic and non-ordinary states, Esalen workshops do not involve the use, provision, or facilitation of any psychoactive substances.
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Do we possess only the physical body we see, or are there multiple layers to our existence?
In the Tantric tradition, it is said we are not just one body but three: the physical body (what we see and touch), the subtle or energetic body (where thoughts, emotions, and prāṇa flow), and the causal body (the deepest layer of consciousness, often linked to karma and past lives). Each plays a distinct role in shaping how we live, feel, and respond to the world around us.
This workshop invites participants to explore these three bodies through the lens of Tantric practice and wisdom. The weekend blends historical context, contemporary research, guided meditation, visualization, and ritual to examine and experience how energy, including Kundalini energy — the coiled life force at the base of the spine — can move through and activate these layers. Together, we will immerse ourselves in the latest research on teachings and practices that challenge and reshape our traditional views of Tantra — its history, current relevance, and future potential.
Designed for both new and experienced practitioners, this workshop offers a grounded framework for understanding Tantra’s view of embodiment and how it can transform our inner and outer worlds.
Please Note: This workshop is NOT about “Tantric Sex” or experiencing enhanced sexual pleasures, although many discussions will address gender identity and sexuality.
Recommended Reading: The Serpent’s Tale: Kundalini, Yoga, and the History of an Experience, Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen
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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, this work honors a lineage of centuries-old wisdom to bring a sense of well-being to those seeking renewal.
This workshop will include:
Through Margaret and Michael’s teachings, you’re invited to connect to your own innate healing potential and discover the ability to support others with love and intention.
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Join us for a celebration of sound and light at the onset of summer, when sunlight stretches to its fullest. By honoring light in its many forms — sunlight, soul light, and vibrational light — this experiential retreat invites you to align with the light found within and through seven alchemy sound journeys, designed to support deep relaxation, gentle re-patterning of the nervous system, and embodied presence.
Composed with a dynamic collection of alchemy crystal bowls — instruments of crystalline intelligence — these alchemical sound journeys can help clear and activate your energy centers (chakras). As we journey from root to crown, you’ll receive a golden thread symbolizing the sushumna nadi, your body’s central pathway of light. Day by day, you’ll mark this thread with colors, symbols, or words that arise to create a sacred artifact — a visual map of the week’s unfolding.
Each day includes creative practices, authentic movement, nature immersion, and teachings to restore connection to Self and source. Big Sur elder Penny Vieregge will join us midweek to share the mystical poetry of Hafiz and awaken your heart chakra.
You will have the opportunity to:
Held within Esalen’s wild beauty, where the land, ocean, mineral hot springs, and towering trees invite deep renewal, this solstice retreat offers space to soften, realign, and reconnect with what matters most.
The artist is essentially a channel. — Piet Mondrian
Explore the nature of creativity — what fuels it, where it comes from, and how we live with it. Is inspiration something we receive from beyond or something we shape from within? Do artists create, channel, or both?
In this workshop, we will consider the creative process not only as a soaring flight of inspiration, but also as a grounded practice of returning, refining, and working with what lands. Through meditation, movement, writing, and dialogue, we’ll explore the terrain where art, channeling, and creation intersect. We will build upon William James’ notion that our stream of consciousness alternates between flights and perchings.
Together, we will:
This workshop holds space for those curious about the origins of creativity and for those who want to engage more fully with how inspiration appears — and disappears — in the rhythm of a creative life.
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Gather with us under the waxing full moon for a weekend of embodied ritual and communal celebration. While the flowers are in full bloom, the moon is bright, and the sun reaches its highest arc in the sky, we will circle together to honor the fullness of the light with sacred ceremony, flower baths, folklore, green magic, herbcraft, sound healing, communal dreaming, self-inquiry, and sensory delight.
The first full moon after the Summer Solstice is a dreamy threshold, a liminal space to tend to our dreams and visions. Drawing on ancestral practices from Celtic, Nordic, Grecian, and respectfully informed Indigenous animistic solstice practices from around the world, this gathering is a weaving of ancestral wisdom and earth-based spirituality. Celebrate the flourishing of Summer, welcoming the light into our lives, bathing in sacred springs, making wreaths of flowers and offerings of gratitude to the earth and sky.
During our time together, we will honor the Light with:
This is a space for reconnecting, nourishing, and illuminating your spirit and your dreams.
This workshop includes an additional $25 for materials.
Have you ever felt, even momentarily, that all is well within and around you? How do we cultivate this sense of deep presence and start to sustain it?
This sense of presence is the foundation of awakening. The ancient practices of qigong, meditation, and breathwork open and harmonize the energy body so we might experience ourselves at ease and in connection with all that is.
In this five-day retreat, we will explore:
No experience is necessary. All levels are very welcome. Please come with the intention to relax deeply and shine from the radiance that you are
Recommended Reading: The Way of Qigong, by Kenneth Cohen
Now more than ever, it is important we build practices to strengthen our internal resolve and self-resourcing amidst a dynamically shifting society. Together, we will listen to our heart’s wisdom in this rich four-day journey (Friday to Monday) through sound, ceremony, and self-discovery.
In this intimate and transformative workshop, you will have the unique opportunity to experience multiple East Forest’s live music performances. Additionally, Radha will lead us in embodiment practices of Self-Awakening Yoga, Yin Yoga, and Breathwork to create an all-levels and accessible doorway to inner insights. Through the primacy of our own heart-opening and felt experience, we can discover the inner pathways to fortitude and healing.
East Forest and Radha would like to offer a certain amount of scholarship to those in need. Please apply with this form. If further assistance would be helpful, you may also apply for an Esalen scholarship.
Workshop Disclaimer: While some of our workshops explore the history and potential of psychedelic tools and altered states, Esalen workshops do not involve the use, provision, or facilitation of any psychoactive substances.
This workshop includes an additional $350 faculty tuition.
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I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed.
— Mary Oliver
From the beginning of time, the natural world has invited humans to pause, reflect, and reconnect with life’s essence. This workshop offers an opportunity to immerse yourself in Big Sur’s awe-inspiring wilderness and the art of authentic contemplation. Together, we will deepen our awareness of the wilds within and around us, rediscovering the simple yet profound practice of being fully present and alive.
Big Sur’s stunning landscapes — rugged cliffs, ocean breezes, and ancient forests — will serve as both our setting and our teacher. Through mindful awareness and direct experience, we can awaken our inherent connection to the elemental, allowing the magnificence of this wild world to touch our bodies, minds, and spirits.
Highlights of the Week
Nature as Teacher: Direct experience of the elements — earth beneath your feet, Pacific waves crashing, fresh coastal air, and Esalen’s healing hot springs — awakening the senses and inviting relationship with an animate world.
Daily Wilderness Hikes: Explore Big Sur’s natural beauty and rich ecological diversity through daily hikes of approximately 2–6 miles across varied terrain.
Contemplative Practices: Engage in timeless and contemporary practices of mindfulness, movement, and stillness, cultivating presence, aliveness, and deeper relationship with self, others, and the wild.
Community Connection: Share nourishing meals, heartfelt conversations, and moments of silence, fostering a sense of belonging with one another and with the living world around us.
Integration and Simplicity: Discover ways to bring what touches you here into daily life, with space for reflection on how to do less, be more, and live in alignment with what matters most.
This week is an invitation to slow down, step out of habitual patterns, and show up fully for life as it unfolds, moment by moment. Whether walking, sitting, or simply being, we will cultivate space, silence, and stillness to meet the beauty and mystery of the world — within and without.
Come ready to explore the meeting places of mountain and sea, inner and outer landscapes, and the boundless wildness of existence.
Please note: This workshop will be a larger, nature-based group experience than Steven and Gary typically lead. Mornings will be spent together as a full group, either indoors or on the Esalen grounds. After lunch, we will divide into smaller groups to explore Big Sur’s wilderness trails, returning in time for dinner at Esalen.
All levels of experience are welcome; however, a moderate level of physical fitness is recommended. Expect afternoon day hikes of approximately 2–6 miles, often with elevation gain and loss on occasionally rugged or steep terrain. These are not fast-paced or goal-driven hikes, but they do require physical engagement. Participants should be comfortable with outdoor activity and open to contemplative practices, including periods of pausing, listening, stillness, and quiet reflection.
Additional information, including a waiver, will be sent upon registration. For an equipment list and frequently asked questions about Steven’s workshops, please visit the FAQs.
An additional $40 will be added to the workshop cost to cover permit and park entrance fees
Recommended reading: The Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder
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Humanity is a transitional species, poised on a tightrope between the primate past on the one end and the coming, future “superhumans” on the other.
What is right about this image? What is wrong with it? Who, historically, has been excluded from it? Can we, should we, speak of human exceptionalism or not? And perhaps most of all: what role does language, myth, and story play in our species’ evolution? Is human evolution a matter of how we imagine ourselves and one another to be? Do mental acts have material effects? Can symbols alter reality?
This workshop will explore the historical precedents, moral anxieties, and new realities of “spiritual evolution.” We will cover a range of topics, including Darwin, Nietzsche, Aurobindo, Sylvia Wynter, psychedelics, and biology. We’ll continuously come back to the present, to Esalen itself, and ask whether we ourselves might be participating in, or even effecting, a new worldview.
The basic orientation of the workshop is to “turn around”: from believing “backwards” in someone else’s understanding of, and place in the cosmos, toward an imagined, future relationship to the universe for which no adequate language yet exists. This workshop will be about helping to create such a language — that of the superhuman.
**This seminar is part of the Super Story Series, sponsored by the Center for Theory and Research (CTR) at Esalen Institute. The series includes three thematic cycles: The Physics of Mystics, The Soul Is a UFO, and this current seminar, Biological Gods. The Super Story is a poetic and conceptual framework designed to capture the mythic and mystical narratives that have emerged over the last two centuries in deep resonance with evolving paradigms in physics, evolutionary biology, cosmology, and idealist philosophy. This project situates personal transformation within a larger cosmological and cultural re-enchantment, connecting the individual’s inner experiences to the macro-myths of science and spirit.
This workshop works with the deepest levels of ontology, before and beyond any human concepts of god. Keeping an open mind during this workshop is highly recommended.
Recommended Reading: Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal
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When we experience moments of ecstasy, we taste what life is meant to be. — Gabrielle Roth
The 5Rhythms® maps hold all the information required to lead us where we want to go. What is your destination? There is a science to achieving ecstatic states, and this is the mastery we have come to share. This workshop is designed for all who want to discover these possibilities for entering altered states in a natural way.
“I want to take you to a place of pure magic … It’s the place athletes call ‘the zone.’ Buddhists call ‘satori’ and ravers call ‘trance.’ I call it the Silver Desert. It’s a place of pure light that holds the dark within it. It’s a place of pure rhythm,” wrote Gabrielle Roth. Her dance and somatic meditation can assist you in navigating your way out of resistance and into ecstasy and help you build a skill set that supports balance, ease, and joy. If you have been looking to increase appreciation, gratitude, and happiness, now is a perfect time to celebrate being alive in the wild, wondrous, natural beauty of Esalen.
This course will include:
Lucia and Douglas, the dancing duo, invite you to join them for a week of dance and celebration. Together with our team of musicians, bring you inspiration through movement and mindfulness so you can return home feeling nurtured and alive.
Leah Song of Rising Appalachia will lead a collective community song practice! Join voices and feel the collective power of unity through song and breath!
Sanga of the Valley, master drummer and living embodiment of the 5Rhythms cosmology, will be joining along with musical savant Nick Ayers.
Recommended Reading: Sweat Your Prayers by Gabrielle Roth, Maps to Ecstasy by Gabrielle Roth, Connections by Gabrielle Roth, Dancing with the Dharma edited by Harrison Blum
This workshop has an additional $100 of faculty tuition.
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In the midst of darkness, light persists. — Mahatma Gandhi
The practice of yoga takes each of us on an interiorizing journey. Step by step we move from the outer and reactive body-mind towards the inner witnessing light of the Self. Here, we observe without judging or running away from sensations, thoughts or memories. The result is active, patient Presencing, which informs all we do and all we are.
Come for a weekend of deep, intelligent yoga surrounded by the natural beauty found at Esalen. Each practice will be a potent mix of essential alignment: body to breath, breath to energy and energy to Self. Each practitioner will be gently guided and adjusted to their own personal edge — the place where we are able to see, know, and be our truest selves. Our yoga will be strong, but infinitely adaptable to everyone’s current needs and abilities. Yoga’s strength is measured in one’s ability to stay focused and present.
Each practice will be a balance of breathwork, active and restorative asana, and meditation, blended together for a clear theme to release old patterns and awaken us to what is — like cleaning the windows to let the sunlight shine in.
10 CEUs available for SmartFlow Yoga, Yoga Alliance and AYC.
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There’s a threshold where the seen and unseen meet. A bridge between this life and the spirit world — and we can learn how to access it with openness, practice, and trust.
Join AJA Daashuur, medium and spiritual guide, for this weeklong experience designed to open the veil between worlds and deepen your personal connection to Spirit. As the creator of the CCCE Method (Connect, Channel, Clear, Embody), AJA weaves together powerful channeling, energetic healing, and soul-aligned embodiment to help you step into your highest intuitive expression.
This workshop bring you to that liminal space—a place to receive, remember, and realign. With AJA as your guide, you’ll cross into this space where messages flow, past and future selves meet, and the love of your Spirit Guides becomes undeniably real.
During your time with AJA, you will be invited to:
The Spirit Bridge is more than an experience — it’s a passage back to your deepest knowing. Step across with us. Your guides are already waiting.
Please bring your favorite oracle deck and a journal to use throughout the week.
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Breath matters. It is one of the few human capacities that is at once biological, cultural, and sacred. Every breath connects physiology with perception — and with our shared search for meaning. It is a physiological necessity, a regulator of attention and awareness, and a primary medium through which humans have explored consciousness across time.
Co-led by an embodiment educator and a neuroscientist–anthropologist, this five-day immersion offers a rare opportunity to engage breath through sustained inquiry, comparative reflection, and dialogue, alongside direct embodied practice. Drawing from long-standing contemplative canons and contemporary research on meditation, psychedelics, and the brain, the week examines how breath has been theorized, disciplined, ritualized, and transmitted — through text and instruction, as well as ceremony, sound, rhythm, and collective experience.
Throughout the week, participants will engage in:
This offering is for those curious not only about how breath works, but how humans have studied, practiced, and transmitted it — and what becomes possible when inquiry, practice, and presence are held together in the same room.
Recommended reading: Breath, James Nestor, The Breathing Book, Donna Farhi, The Heart of Yoga, Desikachar
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Have you created the impact you want? Are you showing up the way you’d like? Are you going in the right direction? You have never before been where you are right now. You have never been the age you are today, never had the experiences you now possess. This is your time to pause and reflect. We rarely allow ourselves the opportunity to stop and look at what is changing — or discover what we truly need to feel fulfilled.
This very interactive workshop will include lots of experiential exercises. Though we will cover valuable theory and there will be plenty of reflection time, this will not be a series of talks/lectures. There will be movement, coaching, a little dance, and lots of opportunity to share insights. Active participation is strongly encouraged; however, participation will always be voluntary.
Our goal is to step back from our lives and renew. We will create a courageous community to challenge, nurture and express ourselves. Participants will have the opportunity to learn what brings them joy and purpose, and then cultivate a vision to serve as a foundation for both the next year and next phase of life.
We will engage in a progression of individual and group exercises focused on reflection, movement, and listening to our inner wisdom. We’ll discover how to navigate major life transitions and learn skills to access our intuition. We will uncover the behaviors that support our overall success, and reveal which ones undermine our goals and fulfillment. If you are passionate about having a more powerful and authentic impact on the world around you, this program of renewal will be especially valuable.
Experience five days of deep rest, reflection, and rejuvenation through movement, guided meditation, and the profound practice of Yoga Nidra. This workshop is designed to restore the body, clear the mind, and shift the habitual patterns that keep us from experiencing a state of calm, clarity, and balance.
Yoga Nidra, which translates to "yogic sleep," guides you to that liminal state between wakefulness and sleep, where you can systematically release stored physical, emotional, and mental tensions. In this state, you can let go of old beliefs and habits that keep you stuck in the past and fearful of the future.
With this practice, you can fully experience your emotions while knowing that there is unchanging, unshakable ground beneath you — a calm inner presence that allows you to see clearly and navigate life with greater ease.
Throughout the retreat, we will work with our bodies and minds, creating clear intentions to shift from living by unconscious, automatic programming and find a new perspective — an aware, deliberate way of being. You'll explore how to bring this newfound awareness of your true self into your personal life, relationships, work, and moments of solitude and love.
Together, we will cultivate new tools to help us navigate when we feel lost, tired, or confused and forget who we are. These guiding instruments can help us negotiate life's challenges, welcome them as opportunities, and remember our true nature.
This workshop is a unique opportunity to recognize your wholeness, the truth of who you are, and the inner peace that has always been within you — that unchanging, unshakable ground of being that you are. All that is being asked of you is to show up, lie down, and let go. Yoga Nidra will do the rest.
What to bring: blankets, a yoga mat, an eye pillow, and anything else you need to lie comfortably on the floor for extended periods. We'll also have opportunities to practice outdoors, so make sure you have layers to stay comfortable in varying conditions.
Recommended Reading: Yoga Nidra: The Art of Transformational Sleep, by Kamini Desai; and Yoga Nidra: A Meditative Practice for Deep Relaxation Healing, by Richard Miller
Learn to call on your spirit guides and tap into your intuitive mind. Join us in a transformative workshop combining scientifically proven brain-enhancing techniques with intuitive guidance to help you break free from self-limiting patterns and create the life you desire.
This workshop brings together two powerful approaches to help you develop tools for personal growth and transformation. Through easy-to-learn exercises, you will learn how opening neural pathways to your higher consciousness can bring valuable insights into areas where you may feel stuck. By thinking outside the box and accessing your intuitive mind, you have the ability to unlock your creative potential and experience increased productivity and happiness.
Guest faculty Joseph Perreta, a certified psychic medium, will guide you in connecting with your support system on the other side. Joseph’s ability to channel messages directly from the spirit world offers validation, clarification, healing, and peace. His presence will enrich your experience and provide a deeper understanding of the spiritual realm.
Throughout the workshop, you will develop practical tools that you can apply whenever you face important decisions or obstacles in life. By harnessing your intuition and uncovering profound insights about yourself, you will gain the clarity and confidence needed to make positive changes.
Our intention is to empower you to unlock your intuitive mind and carry these transformative practices with you long after the workshop ends. Please come prepared with a notebook or journal and a pen to capture your experiences and reflections.
This workshop has two options on length of stay: a traditional weekend of two nights or a long weekend of three nights. The extended stay workshop will include more workshop content which is reflected in the extended stay schedule.
Recommended Reading: Thought Revolution: How to Unlock Your Inner Genius by William Donius
We’re all natural liminal dreamers. Every 24 hours, in the spaces between waking and sleep, we pass through the zones of liminal dreaming, hypnagogia and hypnopompia, where the mind meanders between daytime awareness and the depths of the dream.
Every one of us possesses the ability to maintain the crisp awareness of the waking mind while sinking into the free-associative, kaleidoscopic realms of the unconscious. It’s easy to learn to locate and linger in this unique realm of consciousness — and to plumb it for creativity, problem-solving, mental and spiritual healing, and consciousness exploration.
This workshop provides an in-depth exploration of hypnagogia and hypnopompia, integrating pioneering neuroscience with deep experiential practice. Jennifer Dumpert, author of Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep, draws on decades of work developing and teaching practices for accessing these remarkable states. Adam Haar Horowitz, neuroscientist and co-inventor of Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI) and the Dormio device, presents the underlying neurophysiology of sleep onset and demonstrates how real-time sleep sensing and precisely timed auditory cues can stabilize and extend hypnagogia.
Together, Jennifer and Adam bridge empirical and contemplative approaches, guiding participants to not only experience liminal dreaming firsthand but to understand its measurable mechanisms and transformative potentials.
Note: As we will be settling into a dreamy state throughout the weekend, you are encouraged to bring any comforting items that might assist you in relaxing: special pillow, eye mask, blanket, etc.
Recommended Reading: Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep by Jennifer Dumpert
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The Big Sur wilderness lives and breathes, listens, and speaks. Beneath ancient redwood trees, a shimmering creek journeys toward the sea. In the oak woodland, a polyphony of birds sings to the rising sun. Fog dances across chaparral bluffs, caressing sagebrush and sandstone cliffs. Every cove, meadow, and forest of this biodiverse landscape is alive with presences embodying agency, awareness, and beinghood.
Many of us, however, have inherited a modern Western perspective — shaped by human exceptionalism and reductionistic materialism — that dims our ability to perceive the living complexity and intelligence of our wild world. We are conditioned to see scenery instead of sentience, resource instead of relation. This objectification of the Earth has severed us from the natural world, yielding existential loneliness and environmental peril.
Animism — humanity’s foundational, pre-modern worldview — offers a different frame, regarding the cosmos and all within it as alive, awake, and irreducibly valuable. From this vantage, the world is a great family of interconnected kin, each with distinct perspectives and gifts, all possessing dignity and knowing.
Join us for five days of immersion in animism’s deeper, more ancient relational reality. Through mindful hiking on Big Sur’s trails — Esselen tribal lands — sustained time in the wild, and playful tuning of awareness, we will cultivate our attention and intuition to begin to see beyond modernity’s myopic view. Rather than approaching animism as belief, we will explore it as practice — a patient, embodied turning toward the living land as companion and teacher.
This workshop invites us to remember ourselves as kindred with all life, rooted in belonging to the Earth and our deeper-time ancestors. By encountering these older ways of being and knowing, we joyfully re-enter the enchanted, animate world.
Notes:
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Come with an open mind and an open heart, and allow consciousness to meet you where you are.
Across cultures and throughout history, humans have reported subtle perceptual capacities — deep intuition, nonlocal connections, and heightened sensitivity to energy and emotion — that extend beyond ordinary awareness. While such experiences were once considered natural aspects of being human, modern education and cultural conditioning have narrowed our idea of perception, privileging only what can be measured and easily explained. In the process, many people may have lost access to dimensions of awareness that remain quietly present within them.
Drawing on decades of clinical work, interdisciplinary research, and personal exploration, this experiential approach to expanded consciousness emphasizes embodiment, emotional coherence, and nervous-system regulation. Rather than relying on mental effort or concentration, participants are guided to attune deeply to body, breath, sensation, feeling, and heart, forming an integrated Body–Feeling–Mind field.
Within this unified field of awareness, intuitive and so-called “extra-ordinary” perceptions can arise spontaneously — not as special abilities to be forced or performed, but as natural expressions of coherence, presence, and connection. This workshop does not ask participants to adopt any particular belief system; instead, it invites direct experience, self-inquiry, and integration.
Through guided practices, dialogue, and gentle somatic exploration, we’ll explore how expanded awareness can be accessed safely and meaningfully — and how it may be integrated into everyday life, relationships, creativity, and service. Join us for a transformative weekend of embodied exploration, community, and remembrance of the vast potential of human consciousness.
Recommended Reading: The ESP Enigma – The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena by Diane Hennacy Powell; Space, Time and Beyond by Bob Toben
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Like flowing water, life is constantly changing, emergent, adaptable, and interconnected. With our bodies and the living process of the earth as our sacred laboratory, we will explore the dharma of fluidity. Through stillness and movement, contemplation and play, somatic inquiry and relational mindfulness, we will reawaken our cellular remembrance of flow.
While the dominant paradigm encourages mental effort and a mechanical/ reductionist approach to the body, we will explore the embodied and organic movement that emerges from an alternative approach — one of non-effort and getting out of the way.
What does the water element teach us about letting go and letting life flow? About maintaining our center amidst the dynamism and chaos of everyday life? How does deep embodied listening guide us to meet the ground of impermanence with creative and courageous response? How does the wisdom of curiosity, inquiry, playfulness, and levity support and resource us as we face the gravity and challenges of today’s world?
This workshop celebrates the nexus between Zen Buddhism, somatic inquiry, ecodharma, creativity, and conscious dance. You don’t have to be a meditator or dancer to participate. You just need to feel reverence toward water and curiosity about the water element within you.
Nature does not hurry and yet everything is completed. —Lao Tzu
Anyone who has sat in deep meditation, trekked up a mountain peak, spent time immersed in play with an infant, fallen in love, or experienced the stillness of prayer has experienced time that felt limitless. The more conditioned we become, the more we develop an artificial and adversarial relationship with time.
“Deep time” describes the spacious non-dual awareness that a meditative life makes available. This state can only be entered through a doorway beyond our conditioned beliefs. It invites us to return to a more embodied and vast presence of being.
In this age of accelerated change, let us consider the steady and unhurried wisdom that helps us savor this precious world and strengthen our resolve to care for it. Deep time helps ground us in our awe of geological time, beyond our human-focused calendars, and embrace the rhythms of the natural world, the seasons, the biosphere, and our subtle body more fully.
Slowing down can be a revolutionary act in which we attune to our bodies, hearts, the earth, and the more-than-human realm. By looking past the dominant paradigm’s fixation with speed, busyness, and productivity, we can remember a more authentic relationship with time grounded in interdependence, emergence, and wholeness.
We can balance stillness and action, attunement and productivity, and yin and yang for greater harmony within ourselves and in our relationships with our planet and one another. This workshop, anchored in the Zen teaching of Uji, or “being time,” includes meditation, compassionate inquiry, conscious movement/dance, dharma talks, embodied ritual, and connection with the natural world. All are welcome.
Recommended Reading: Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown by Deborah Eden Tull and Relational Mindfulness: A Handbook for Deepening Our Connection with Ourselves, Each Other, and the Planet by Deborah Eden Tull
When was the last time you gave something your undivided attention? Nearly 2,500 years ago, Buddha worried we had become too distracted — and that was before paper, let alone smartphones. Today our days are filled with convenient distractions that promise happiness while mostly delivering busyness and frustration. Many of us live life in a hectic fog, working too much and noticing too little.
There is a different way. For this weekend workshop, we will disconnect, slow down, and meditate together. We will learn the ancient Zen practice of sitting still, bringing our full awareness to what is now.
Our time together will follow a gentle schedule of sitting meditation punctuated by brief lectures, group discussion, relaxing meals, and soaks in the healing baths, all while exploring the process and practice of mindful living. We’ll be listening to our own bodies, noticing the food we eat, and truly engaging with the people around us – exploring what it means to be fully present and alive.
Together we’ll discuss everything you need to start, revive, or deepen your daily meditation practice. You’ll receive instruction in traditional Zen Buddhist meditation and we’ll sit together in guided sessions, practicing what we’ve learned. We’ll work together on everything from the mechanics of sitting posture to the mental barriers we all face. We’ll discuss how to overcome common obstacles to meditation and the many ways to incorporate more mindfulness and presence into our daily lives.
Whether you’re brand new to meditation or even if you’ve been practicing for years, join us in learning how to bring meditation into your life and mindfulness to your work and home – today and every day. Come reclaim a healthier and happier way to be.
Recommended Reading: Buddha’s Office, by Dan Zigmond
We all face death, but how many of us are actually ready for it? Whether our own demise or that of a loved one comes first, how prepared are we? This workshop offers a wide array of resources and teachings to help participants address that final unfinished business and make the most out of every moment that comes before it.
All of life is held within the context of its inevitable extinction. By acknowledging and preparing for death now, we will find ourselves living more fully and fearlessly. Join us as we celebrate the preciousness of life, and ready ourselves and others for this final journey. We will explore how to die a good death and help others pass, engaging with meditations and contemplations that prepare us for letting go. As the Buddhist tradition proclaims, “If you die before you die, then when you die, you will not die.”
With preparation, we can transcend death, turning the greatest obstacle into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and even attain enlightenment. The bardo teachings lead to the death of death. The journey through the bardos is a journey into our mind, so by exploring the bardos, we are exploring ourselves. The teachings apply to any moment that ends – which means they also relate to daily life and can help you live fully within the time you are given.
Together we’ll explore:
We hope you’ll join us for this exploration into the unknown, so that we may all return – fearless, and full of compassion for ourselves and those transitioning from this life.
Recommended Reading: Preparing to Die by Andrew Holecek
What becomes possible when we slow down enough to truly listen to the living world? How might attentive presence become an expression of care and participation — a way of remembering our place within the larger community of life? On this retreat, we explore how mindfulness in nature is a deeply relational path, inviting intimacy, reciprocity, and kinship with the more-than-human world.
Through guided meditation outdoors, nature attunement practices, and shared inquiry, we’ll explore a shift from practicing in nature to practicing with nature — allowing the land, sky, wind, and waters to become companions and teachers. We will cultivate receptive awareness and deep listening, aligning to the subtle and wordless teachings of the body, the elements, and the rhythms of the natural world.
Supported by Esalen’s extraordinary coastal landscape, we open to beauty as a doorway to presence, awe, and wonder. This intimate attunement helps open the heart and deepen our sense of loving connection.
This retreat invites you to slow down, listen deeply, and rediscover your belonging within the web of life — not as a separate observer, but as a participant in the unfolding mystery of the living earth.
Recommended Reading: Awake in the Wild: Mindfulness in Nature as a Path of Self-Discovery and A Field Guide to Nature Meditation: 52 Mindfulness Practices for Joy, Wisdom and Wonder by Mark Coleman
Join ceremonial leader and wisdom carrier Erika Gagnon on a sacred journey as we gather to look beyond the false duality of a divided self and the destructive concept of “self versus nature” to discover how to live in harmony and balance within ourselves and the world around us.
You are your greatest healer and greatest medicine, and this is your opportunity to examine what that means while sharing healing wisdom, practices & ceremonies. This workshop will offer you tools to transform trauma and unhealthy patterns and to realign your body, mind, spirit, and soul, as we explore the origins of dis-ease in our physical, mental-emotional and spiritual bodies.
How can we honor the gifts, and heal the wounds that we have inherited from our ancestors? How can we identify any social, cultural, racial, religious, and historical energies that may be influencing our lives? We will explore all of this, and discuss the importance of ceremonies, sacred altars, and medicinal plants. You will have the opportunity to participate in a traditional South American healing ceremony, a sound healing and “doctoring” ceremony, and a water blessing prayer ceremony.
You will be invited to reconnect to your authentic wisdom and power with clarity, gratitude, and forgiveness. When you honor and heal your ancestral lineage and connect to the natural and spiritual elements of this planet, you strengthen your connection to the sacred in everyday life.
We are all interconnected in this giant web of life, and every day is a gift in the service of unconditional love for yourself, your community, humanity, and our planet. If you feel the call to be a part of a new humanity that lives in harmony and balance upon this Earth, we invite you to join us in this celebration of life.
Note: Please bring a journal to write in, and items for our altar, including photographs of loved ones and ancestors and sacred objects that have meaning for you.
Special Note on Gift Economy: For this workshop, Esalen will not be collecting the typical leader fees. Erika embraces the tradition of the gift economy and reciprocity. The leader’s compensation will be self-determined by each attendee. At the end of the workshop, participants will offer a donation amount that reflects their feeling of gratitude, value, and desire to support Erika and her ongoing work.
BIPOC SCHOLARSHIP: Erika has established a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, person of color) scholarship for her workshops. For more information on receiving one to participate, please contact her at ErikaGagnon11@gmail.com
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Our awareness of energy both expands and becomes more subtle as we deepen into relaxation.
The ancient Chinese practice of Qigong, often translated as “cultivating Life Force”, is a system of movement that relaxes and energizes the body/mind. You will find this form “Wai Dan Gong” easy to learn and a powerful means of experiencing Life Force in and around you. We will enjoy moving on the Earth, under the heavens, while gazing at the Pacific. Wai Dan Gong is an excellent preparation for sitting, walking and standing meditation. Two mornings will be held as a retreat, we will keep noble silence until lunch. At other times we will share with compassion and humor our experiences of riding the wild waves of the mind.
In this rejuvenating retreat we will explore:
Please come ready to enjoy a deep sense of ease and an expanded sense of the energy body.
Recommended reading: The Way of Qigong by Kenneth Cohen
Rejuvenate the body and the mind with the deep relaxation that can be found through non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) and yoga nidra. Whether you need a break from constant pressure, are navigating a life transition, or wish to delve deeper into your mindfulness and meditation practice, this retreat will provide space and time for contemplation and reflection.
Non-sleep deep rest, a term coined by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, refers to a waking state of deep relaxation. Evidence suggests reaching this state through NSDR protocols, such as yoga nidra, can reset dopamine levels, reduce cortisol, and provide numerous physical and mental health benefits — including better sleep and enhanced neuroplasticity. We will dig into this and other research during the course.
Together, we’ll go on an inner journey to connect to both ourselves and our life paths — and emerge refreshed and deeply rested. This will be a large-group experience, and we will practice lying-down guided protocols throughout the weekend.
This is a beginner experiential course and does not require knowledge of yoga nidra theory or history. There will be lots of chances to journal and connect with one another as we enjoy the natural beauty of Esalen and our time together!
Recommended Reading: The Blind Spot Effect: How to Stop Missing What’s Right in Front of You by Kelly Boys
What if the love you’ve been searching for is already here — waiting to be remembered?
In this retreat, you’ll explore self-compassion as a lifeboat home — a steady refuge when self-criticism, striving, or overwhelm take hold.
Rather than trying to “fix” yourself, you’ll be invited to gently shift your relationship to experience, discovering the loving awareness that is already present beneath conditioned patterns that do not serve you.
Through a blend of contemplative practice and experiential inquiry, you’ll find how self-compassion can serve as a bridge — from a limited sense of self to a more spacious, connected way of being. To the heart of who you are. We’ll explore how this practice of compassion can be more than a temporary balm and can become a doorway into deeper remembrance.
During our time together, you will be invited to:
Throughout the week, you’ll be supported in reconnecting with a sense of wholeness. Rather than attempting to fix an illusory and limited self, our time together will support us in having a direct experience of remembering, not “improving,” who we really are.
Recommended reading: The Heart of Who We Are: Realizing Freedom Together, by Caverly Morgan & A Kids Book About Mindfulness by Caverly Morgan
Asanga’s Nine Stages of Staying is one of the oldest and most comprehensive systems of concentration in the Buddhist tradition. Sometimes called the Elephant Path, this approach was originated by the great Buddhist master in 506 A.D., and it is now the main method of training the mind in the Tibetan tradition.
In this weekend meditation retreat, participants will learn the stages of the Elephant Path using the body as the primary object of concentration. Students will also receive an introduction to the basic stages of ordinary insight. By the end of our time together, students will have all the instructions necessary to successfully incorporate a robust meditation practice into everyday life.
Training the mind in this way can lead to a direct experience of equanimity and can put the student in a range of practice wherein pointing out the real nature of the awakened mind is possible.
No experience with meditation is required. If you have your own preferred meditation pillow and mat, please bring them.
The Earth holds us, breathes with us, moves through us.
Since time immemorial, human beings have lived in deep, reciprocal relationship with landscapes—our movements shaped by terrain, our nervous systems regulated by the rhythms of seasons and tides, our sense of self inseparable from the more-than-human world. Yet, in this modern, frenetic age, we are conditioned to see our bodies as isolated, our healing as individual, and “nature” as separate. This retreat is an invitation to remember an older truth: to inhabit our own bodies fully is to reinhabit the living Earth.
Rooted in the Gestalt traditions of Esalen and the emergent field of eco-somatics, our four-day backpacking journey will guide us through the wilds of Big Sur—Esselen tribal territory—in an immersive exploration of belonging, awareness, and interconnection, followed by a weekend of retreat and integration at Esalen Institute.
While trekking through awe-inspiring wilderness, we will engage in somatic practices that reawaken our felt kinship with the natural world. Embracing slowness and spaciousness, we will attune to gravity, breath, and the sensuous aliveness of place. Silent hiking, intuitive movement, meditation, and earth-based ritual will dissolve the false boundary between self and landscape. Exploring embodiment as an intimate community, we will move beyond notions of individual self-care to a lived experience of healing as relational and ecological.
Through this retreat, we step into a different rhythm—one guided by the living world around and within us. As we listen with our whole bodies, we begin to sense the reciprocity woven into all things. What emerges is not just connection but remembering—a return to a relationship as ancient as our true body: the Earth.
Important Notes:
Experience with backpacking is not required. Wilderness skills will be taught before and within the program, and participants will be supported in preparations. Please see Wildtender’s program page for a more detailed hiking itinerary and backpacking eligibility criteria.
For thousands of years, autumnal holidays such as Samhain, Hallowe’en, and Vetrnætr have served as ceremonial foundations — connecting pre-modern peoples to landscape, ancestors, and ritual time. Many cultures believe “the veil thins” during this time, letting enchantment flood back into our world. The time is rife with opportunities to renew sacred relationships with the Earth, ourselves, and beings seen and unseen.
As the deciduous trees draw inward to direct energy into their roots, we too may feel drawn to our deeper inner worlds. The Big Sur wilderness — Esselen Tribal territory — is a fertile habitat for mind and spirit, and a potent domain for ritual to support transformation during this liminal season. Approaching the landscape as our teacher and guide, we will engage with the natural world in an embodied ecological context and explore the mythological and psycho-spiritual dimensions of land connectedness.
Drawing from their own European earth-based kinship traditions while holding a larger frame of pancultural land relationship, facilitators Fletcher Tucker and Micha Merrick will offer daily encounters with the medicinal, ecological, and ritual dimensions of plants found across the Northern Hemisphere. Diverse practices, including sound journeywork and guided meditations, will aid us in cultivating enhanced awareness, interconnectedness, and ceremonial reverence. Rooted in the Gestalt tradition of Esalen, we will build a container of safety and heart-centered community to connect meaningfully with ourselves and one another. Over five days of presence, play, and practice on the land, we will depart from modernity’s anthropocentric paradigm and descend into the ancient, potent, animate world of kinship and enchantment.
Important notes: This retreat will include one full day of immersion in the Big Sur wilderness, with a hike up to three miles. Please be aware that the hiking terrain can be steep, rugged, and sometimes strenuous. There may be prolonged sun exposure. Participants must be able to hike and carry what they need for the day: two liters of water, a pack lunch provided by Esalen, and sun protection. Other workshop sessions will be mostly situated outdoors on the Esalen property.
This workshop includes an additional $60 for Materials and Park fees.
Join us for a deeply nourishing sound immersion where sacred resonance becomes a gateway to transformation. In this weeklong workshop, we work with alchemy crystal singing bowls — instruments of subtle energy and crystalline intelligence — to harmonize the nervous system, soften emotional residue in the biofield, and awaken a more grounded, joyful state of being.
Each day includes spacious sound journeys designed to support theta brainwave states and foster deep relaxation, subconscious clearing, and intuitive insight. As we attune to the bowls’ harmonic field, we invite a gentle re-patterning of the nervous system and access to peace, presence, and embodied vitality.
Through practices in mantra (a Sanskrit word meaning “mind tool”), movement, voice, and reflection, we’ll explore how sound can:
You’ll experience seven alchemy crystal bowl sound journeys, heart-opening vocal practices, and a co-creative session in the Art Barn. We’ll also share journaling, partner work, and restorative space for integration.
Held within the elemental beauty of Esalen, where ocean waves, mineral springs, and towering trees invite deep renewal, this retreat offers space to soften, realign, and reconnect with your true self.
Come as you are. Leave radiant from within.
Have you created the impact you want? Are you showing up the way you’d like? Are you going in the right direction? You have never before been where you are right now. You have never been the age you are today, never had the experiences you now possess. This is your time to pause and reflect. We rarely allow ourselves the opportunity to stop and look at what is changing — or discover what we truly need to feel fulfilled.
This very interactive workshop will include lots of experiential exercises. Though we will cover valuable theory and there will be plenty of reflection time, this will not be a series of talks/lectures. There will be movement, coaching, a little dance, and lots of opportunity to share insights. Active participation is strongly encouraged, as is attending all sessions, including the final morning; however, participation will always be voluntary.
Our goal is to step back from our lives and renew. We will create a courageous community to challenge, nurture and express ourselves. Participants will have the opportunity to learn what brings them joy and purpose, and then cultivate a vision to serve as a foundation for both the next year and next phase of life.
We will engage in a progression of individual and group exercises focused on reflection, movement, and listening to our inner wisdom. We’ll discover how to navigate major life transitions and learn skills to access our intuition. We will uncover the behaviors that support our overall success, and reveal which ones undermine our goals and fulfillment. If you are passionate about having a more powerful and authentic impact on the world around you, this program of renewal will be especially valuable.
Life invites us into change, but rarely teaches us how to move through it well. Whether it’s a relationship ending, a role dissolving, a chapter closing, or a calling emerging, you may find yourself standing at the edge of what was … and unsure how to step into what comes next.
This immersive weekend retreat is a sacred pause for anyone navigating change. Through nature-based ritual, creative altar-making, reflective writing, and a circle of shared witnessing, you’ll learn how to tend life’s thresholds not as chaotic interruptions but as initiations into a deeper sense of purpose.
Held over Halloween weekend — a time often associated with the thinning of boundaries between past and present — we’ll also explore how moments of change can open us to a wider field of awareness. At times, this may include a felt sense of where we come from and what has shaped us.
Guided by renowned artist, author, and ritualist Day Schildkret, you’ll explore four notes of Threshold Literacy:
Using the acclaimed Morning Altars practice, you’ll forage for meaning, create ritual altars in nature, and experience the power of communal witnessing. This is not a weekend of quick fixes; it’s an invitation to slow down, tend what’s tender, and mark the sacred moment you are living through.
Whether you’re grieving a loss, stepping into a new role, or simply sensing that something is shifting within, this retreat is designed to support you in crafting your own modern rituals of change.
No prior experience with ritual, art, or nature work is necessary. Just bring your truth, your questions, and your willingness to cross the threshold.
Recommended Reading: Morning Altars: A 7-Step Practice to Nourish Your Spirit through Nature, Art, and Ritual by Day Schildkret and Hello, Goodbye: 75 Rituals for Times of Loss, Celebration, and Change by Day Schildkret
This workshop includes an additional $20 for workshop material.
In this five-day workshop, we will explore how sleep, dreams, and even the process of death can become gateways to deeper awareness and freedom. We’ll draw from the Tibetan contemplative traditions of dream and sleep practice to reveal how awareness continues through all states of experience.
The retreat combines traditional teachings with insights from Western psychology and contemporary understandings of consciousness. Through meditation, reflection, and experiential practices, participants will discover ways to integrate these teachings into everyday life.
Rather than remain solely in the realm of abstract philosophy, we’ll emphasize direct experience — learning how ordinary experiences such as falling asleep, dreaming, and facing life’s transitions can become opportunities for greater clarity, compassion, and inner freedom.
Recommended reading: Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche & Sleep & Awakening the Sacred Body, by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
Your Spirit Guides are speaking to you. Join the conversation.
This weeklong retreat is devoted to deepening your relationship with your spiritual team as a direct and reliable source of guidance, clarity, and transformation.
This work centers on real-time dialogue. You bring what is present in your life, and your Guides respond. The exchange reveals what is ready to be understood, addressed, and shifted. Participants learn how to stay in that dialogue long enough for it to become clear, steady, and actionable.
The retreat is anchored in Aja Daashuur’s CCCE Method™: Connect, Channel, Clear, Embody — a framework developed through years of direct work with Spirit Guides and sustained connection to the unseen.
Participants establish a grounded relationship with their spiritual team and work through their intuitive language using oracle cards, guided exercises, divination tools, invocations, meditation, and the clairs — the intuitive senses through which information is received. Seeing, hearing, feeling, and knowing. Patterns are addressed through direct engagement with Spirit. Insight is integrated into the body and carried forward through tangible change.
Throughout the retreat, Aja’s Spirit Guides lead a series of channeled journeys that move through past, present, and future. These experiences reveal how different points in your life connect and inform one another, allowing a deeper understanding of your path and your choices.
This retreat is designed for those who are ready to move beyond initial connection and begin working directly with the guidance they receive. The focus is on staying in communication, understanding what is being shown, and allowing that information to shape real movement in your life.
Discover practices for sustaining an ongoing relationship with your Guides, one that continues to offer clarity, direction, and support beyond the retreat.
This is a strong next step for those who have experienced Aja’s Spirit Bridge retreat at Esalen or for those who already recognize how their intuitive senses present within them.
Revolutionary findings in neuroscience have demonstrated that we can literally re-architect the very structure of our brains. In fact, we can even rewire our neurology to be more focused, calmer, and happier.
In this workshop, Dr. Shauna Shapiro — a leading scientist studying the effects of meditation on well-being — will teach you the most powerful science-based practices for increasing the neural pathways of happiness. She’ll explain basic brain science and offer a clear roadmap for living a joyful, connected, and meaningful life. Be prepared for unexpected transformation and delight.
During this weekend workshop, we’ll learn:
Recommended Reading: Good Morning, I Love You: Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Practices to Rewire the Brain for Calm, Clarity + Joy and Good Morning, I Love You: A Guided Journal for Calm, Clarity + Joy by Shauna Shapiro.
This workshop includes an additional $375 faculty tuition. *For anyone facing financial hardship, Dr. Shauna Shapiro invites you to contact her directly for tuition scholarship at slshapiro@scu.edu.
In a time when many men are questioning the inherited roles, social pressures, and stories that have shaped what it means to be a man, this workshop is an invitation to courageously explore masculinity. Through movement, honest self-reflection, and the profound learning that becomes possible when men gather, we’ll uncover challenges, witness one another’s vulnerability, and discover new ways of belonging, relating, and being.
Held within the healing container of Esalen Institute, this five-day immersive workshop offers a powerful space to return to the body, reconnect with inner truth, and explore more conscious, relational ways of inhabiting masculinity. Through the moving meditation practice of 5Rhythms®, guided somatic inquiry, live and DJd music, and shared witnessing, we’ll generate the conditions for honest self-discovery, deep connection, and the kind of embodied leadership the world is calling for now.
This is not about fixing men or prescribing a singular model of manhood. Rather, it is an opportunity to investigate the many ways masculinity is lived, inherited, defended, softened, and transformed. Together, we’ll explore how agency, accountability, tenderness, courage, grief, power, and presence live in the body, and how conscious movement can open new pathways toward choice, responsiveness, and relational integrity.
As the week unfolds, participants are invited to:
Rooted in trauma-informed principles, the workshop emphasizes agency, consent, personal choice, and respect for boundaries. It welcomes men of all backgrounds and movement experience. What is asked is simple, though not always easy: a willingness to arrive, listen deeply, move honestly, and meet yourself and one another with courage.
Together, we’ll discover what becomes possible when men move beyond performance and into presence, beyond separation into authentic connection.
This workshop includes an additional $100 of faculty tuition.
Do you face challenges with focus and time management? Do you struggle with emotional hypersensitivity or frustration tolerance? Do you find it hard to follow through on tasks or commitments? Or to be reliable and consistent? If so, you are not alone.
Millions of people suffer daily from conditions associated with these executive function challenges. Though commonly referred to as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), these symptoms are not limited to this single condition, and they are often exacerbated by our complex, fast-paced, high-tech lives.
ADHD and related issues often leave people with a sense of self-doubt, shame, or unworthiness. The good news is that with mindfulness, compassion, and the application of skillful techniques, it is possible to move through life more effectively with care and wisdom.
In this workshop, through engaging in various mindfulness meditations, loving kindness and forgiveness practices and contemplative inquiry, you will discover how these challenges interrupt our functioning, how to navigate them, and how we can meet ourselves with compassion, forgiveness, and a good sense of humor.
This workshop includes an additional $100 in faculty tuition.
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Esalen Institute
55000 Highway 1
Big Sur, CA 93920
US: 1-831-667-3000
info@esalen.org