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 MoreDo 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.
What positive shift would create the most meaningful change in your life right now?
Your extraordinary potential is built into your DNA and awaits your discovery. In this enlivening workshop, experience the essence of Integral Transformative Practice® (ITP), a living platform for growth, well-being, and evolution. Created by Esalen Institute luminaries Michael Murphy and George Leonard, ITP focuses on the interconnectedness of all aspects of the self to support the changes you want most — for yourself and the world.
This experiential journey weaves movement, writing, and sharing circles so you can listen deeply to the wisdom of your whole being, revealing who you are, who you’re becoming, and your next natural steps. Using the body as a guide for learning, we’ll engage in solo, partner, and group energy-awareness practices developed by ITP Co-Founder and Master Aikido Sensei George Leonard. We’ll also explore a revitalizing daily practice to restore balance, boost energy, and invite deep relaxation —one that can be integrated as a supportive tool for everyday life.
You are invited to:
By applying the integral model of body, mind, heart, and soul — a portal to our innate wholeness — we’ll also explore the worldview that gave rise to Esalen Institute, where this transformative practice was developed. This evolutionary framework offers a pathway to our extraordinary potential, our individual connection to wholeness, which is ready to emerge.
Recommended reading: The Life we are Given, by Michael Murphy & George Leonard & Living an Extraordinary Life: The Magic of Integral Transformative Practice, by Christina Grote & Pam Kramer
In an economy predicated on capitalizing our attention, what if we apprenticed ourselves to ecological forces whose temporality refuses capture? How might sitting at the feet of a glacier, as our elder, liberate our presence?
Enter this five-day apprenticeship with the glacier as a teacher, following the glacier’s quality of time as a grammar for re-patterning our minds, bodies, attention, care, and labor as students of the earth.
Drawing on land-based practices created by the facilitators and their collaborative work in Southeast Alaska’s Glacier Bay, each day will begin with storytelling from the lands we study — to cultivate a collective ethos and, in the words of Martin Shaw, “attend to a world in constant disclosure.” Guided by the earth as scripture, these transmissions will orient our practices as they are translated into embodied prompts to empower our capacity to love and protect the sacred amid ecological and social crisis.
Practices will include:
On our fourth day together, participants will be invited to a half-day of silence on the land, culminating in story-sharing around the fire and soaking. Prepare to be thrilled by, and thrill the earth, with your glacial pace.
Join ceremonial leader and wisdom carrier Erika Gagnon on a sacred journey, as we gather together and explore traditional healing wisdom and the importance of ancestral lineage, ceremonies and rituals, sacred altars, medicinal plants, and the origins of dis-ease in our physical, mental/emotional, spiritual and soul 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 three traditional healing ceremonies.
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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How can those of us who yearn without belief or ritual find our way? Many of us have lost our connection to a mainstream faith, or maybe never had it. We long to find more, even if we are afraid that it may not be there. Some of us have experienced our worlds cracked open with dreams, visions, presences, or moments of mystical union — and may not know how to make sense of what has happened.
We’ll begin our time together with an open sharing of stories of spiritual search and spiritual experience, with an invitation for participants to speak about their frustrations and their hopes. During the weekend, you will be introduced to pathworkings — guided meditations that take those without traditional faith on a spiritual journey — and have the opportunity to use your voice to sing through your own journey.
This workshop is designed for those who want to more deeply understand the feeling of loss, awe, and the ineffable in the absence of a mainstream faith, and anyone who wishes they could believe, finds they can’t, and still imagines the possibility of a way forward.
What if your pleasure is the key to your liberation? What if it could be your prayer, your medicine, and your power? When was the last time you felt fully alive in your body — unapologetically?
Pleasure Alchemy is a somatic journey designed to awaken, heal, and empower you through the sacred art of sensual embodiment. By engaging all five senses through sacred touch, movement, and sound rituals, we’ll explore how to rewire shame and reclaim pleasure as a path to healing. Together, we will co-create alchemy through collective care. We invite you to experience yourself in community more fully and authentically by:
Activating the body temple through guided somatic practices, breathwork, and movement rituals designed to reconnect to your sensual body as a source of truth, beauty, and divine intelligence.
Join us for an opportunity to reclaim your pleasure as a source of personal power, liberation, and deep connection in community. Pleasure is not just indulgence — it’s medicine.
Please Note: Pleasure Alchemy is best experienced somatically — in the body — and through community ritual. We invite learning through touch and presence. You are always at choice. While sensuality will be invited into the space, no overt sexual behavior will be part of the workshop.
Recommended reading: All About Love, by bell hooks, Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown, Falling Back in Love with Being Human by Kai Cheng Thom
In play we can discover a curious version of ourselves, while balancing our light and shadow and laughing at our attachments. This workshop invites us to be soft, brave, and available to the moment. This is an immersive practice that explores our most vulnerable and creative self.
Using tools found in improvisation, meditation, altered states, and movement practice, we will explore clowning around as a spiritual practice. The work begins with exercises that help you drop into the body and descend from the mind to access the flow state. With the foundation of a sacred container, we will engage in primarily nonverbal, physical games and rituals that give birth to organic impulses inspired by the child within. There is no pressure to perform, but an invitation to get lost inside yourself, an openness to go beyond your comfort zone, and a willingness to play within the moment.
There is nothing to learn but rather much to uncover — to allow us to move through life in a more open state, with a greater connection to ourselves and the world. This workshop is physical, open, and accessible for diverse bodies. Come unravel the child within! Please come unprepared.
Recommended reading: Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir, Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey, Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle
In play we can discover a curious version of ourselves, while balancing our light and shadow and laughing at our attachments. This workshop invites us to be soft, brave, and available to the moment. This is an immersive practice that explores our most vulnerable and creative self.
Using tools found in improvisation, meditation, altered states, and movement practice, we will explore clowning around as a spiritual practice. The work begins with exercises that help you drop into the body and descend from the mind to access the flow state. With the foundation of a sacred container, we will engage in primarily nonverbal, physical games and rituals that give birth to organic impulses inspired by the child within. There is no pressure to perform, but an invitation to get lost inside yourself, an openness to go beyond your comfort zone, and a willingness to play within the moment.
There is nothing to learn but rather much to uncover — to allow us to move through life in a more open state, with a greater connection to ourselves and the world. This workshop is physical, open, and accessible for diverse bodies. Come unravel the child within! Please come unprepared.
Recommended reading: Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir, Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey, Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle
This workshop is for anyone feeling the need to slow down, reconnect with themselves, and step into the New Year relaxed and awake. Whether you’re navigating change, seeking greater balance, or simply wanting to deepen your relationship with yourself, this is an invitation to pause, breathe, and replenish through gentle movement, the healing sounds of crystal bowls, and stillness.
Throughout our time together, we’ll explore practices that soften the body, calm the mind, and open the heart. Each day, we’ll return to the present moment through qigong, gentle yoga, restorative movement, sound healing, meditation, and poetry — all held within a compassionate and nurturing container. These practices will allow us to feel deeply into our yoga sankalpa — our heartfelt intentions — for the New Year.
The rhythms of the week are designed to help reset the nervous system, create space for reflection, and support attunement to your own inner landscape. The healing vibrations of crystal singing bowls will support deep rest and spaciousness, offering opportunities for insight and integration.
This workshop is for anyone longing to:
All levels and bodies are welcome to experience this balanced blend of movement and mindfulness. To participate fully, you’ll need to be able to move independently between standing, seated, and floor-based postures — or attend with a support person who is also registered for the workshop and can assist you throughout the week.
Dance is one of the world’s most ancient transformative rituals. From the whirling dervishes to the shamans, the waltz to the rave, we dance for joy, healing, and connection — guided by wisdom that transcends the thinking brain. As the old year ends and the new begins, come to sweat, honor the past, and make space for a new beginning.
Through an alchemical combination of movement, nature, and sound healing rituals, we will reconnect our bodies, minds, and hearts to gain clarity about the past year’s journey, anchor our new intentions, and intuit our way forward with confidence and curiosity.
Over the weekend, we will:
Allow yourself to be nourished by this sacred land, the hot spring waters, the time we share together, and the friends you make. Experience the beauty, awe, and wonder of being alive so you may return home rejuvenated and inspired for this brand new year.
Bring a journal, pen, and a piece of festive clothing.
This workshop includes an additional $35 in faculty tuition.
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When we tend to and align with the cycles and seasons, we glimpse the divine. The period between the start of the calendar new year and the beginning of the lunar new year is a time of liminality. Midwinter is a time for reflection, gestation, and non-doing, while we await the birth of a new cycle. It is a beautiful phase to synchronize our minds and bodies with the phenomenal world. Within our collective work, it is an equally poignant time to mend our Western psyches to nature, tending to our disconnected and disjointed worldviews and practices.
During this five-day retreat, we will work with our minds, bodies, and nature to bring our earth-based origins and contemporary, often problematic Western psyches into greater harmony. Participants should be prepared to engage in substantial embodied practices — including meditation, taijiquan, and qigong — listen to short talks, spend time in nature, work in pairs and small groups, keep a contemplative journal, and be in respectful, compassionate community. Our work will bring the balance of the feminine water and earth as we prepare to welcome the Year of the Fire Sheep.
Participants in this workshop will experience:
Please bring clothing layers for comfort both indoors and outdoors, comfortable flat walking shoes, and a waterproof jacket in case of rain. We also recommend bringing a journal and pen.
Recommended reading: Cultivating Qi: An Introduction to Chinese Body-Mind Energetics by Jun Wang, Returning the Self to Nature: Undoing Our Collective Narcissism and Healing Our Planet by Jeanine M. Canty, Tao Te Ching (any version and suggest Stephen Mitchell’s New English Version)
What if joy isn’t something you chase but something you relax into?
Many of us spend our lives searching for happiness while carrying the very tension that keeps us from experiencing it. This workshop offers another possibility: that joy isn’t something we create but something we uncover — emerging naturally as the body softens, the heart opens, and awareness returns to itself.
During our time together, you’ll be guided through five elemental phases of unfolding. Water softens the nervous system into safety and trust. Earth restores a felt sense of grounding, belonging, and inherent worth. Wind frees the breath, mind, and emotions through movement and inquiry. Fire awakens vitality, creativity, and joyful aliveness. Space invites you to rest in open awareness — the quiet fullness of simply being.
Through guided meditation, gentle movement, somatic inquiry, partner exercises, and contemplative reflection, you’ll discover practical ways to release chronic tension, deepen presence, and allow joy to move more freely through your body and life.
By the end of the weekend, you may find yourself:
James Baraz, co-founding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center, has spent decades sharing the path of loving-kindness and awakening joy. His son, Adam, brings a complementary, body-centered approach, drawing on nearly twenty years of somatic practice and dharma study with wisdom teachers in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Together they offer an experiential exploration of the SomaWaken framework — Adam’s five-phase approach to embodied awakening — integrating somatic practice, contemplative inquiry, and Buddhist wisdom in a grounded, accessible way.
Whether you’re new to meditation or have practiced for years, this workshop offers a gentle, experiential path toward greater ease, resilience, and embodied well-being.
No prior experience is necessary. Gentle movement, seated meditation, and lying-down practices will be offered throughout. All are welcome.
Recommended Reading: Awakening Joy: 10 Steps That Will Put You On The Road to Real Happiness by James Baraz
We rarely give ourselves permission to stop and ask the hard questions: Are you showing up the way you’d like? Have you created the impact you want? Are you going in the right direction?
This workshop is for anyone who knows they are at a threshold and want more aliveness and truth in the next chapter of their lives.
Our time together will unfold through a progression of experiential exercises, including movement, reflection, intimate group work, and practical frameworks for understanding where you are and what comes next. The majority of the workshop will draw on the Esalen tradition and imaginal psychology, where we will engage embodied knowing, intuition, and the wisdom of the heart to discover what calls to us at this stage of life and begin building a vision grounded in that truth. Expect real depth and real fun.
This is not a workshop you just do alongside other people. The group itself is an essential part of our work together. The witnessing, shared vulnerability, and live coaching create a container that private reflection can rarely replicate.
The environment is carefully designed — rigorous and warm, challenging yet safe — to create a space where key questions can be explored honestly, in community with others doing the same work.
If you want a more powerful and authentic life, one lived with integrity and directed by what you truly value, this is where the work begins. Active participation is warmly encouraged. Nothing is required.
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.
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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Midwinter invites us to slow down, listen deeply, and remember what truly nourishes us. Beneath the surface of apparent stillness, roots deepen. Seeds quietly prepare. Life is already organizing itself for spring. What if our own hearts follow this same rhythm?
Join us for a restorative week of immersive sound journeys, contemplative practices, movement, creative exploration, and time in nature designed to help you remember your place within the living intelligence that connects all things.
With a rich collection of alchemy crystal singing bowls, chimes, voice, and other resonant instruments, each sound journey becomes an invitation to settle the nervous system, attune the heart, and cultivate a deeper sense of presence, wonder, and belonging. Throughout the week, we’ll explore how vibration influences the body, mind, and heart through both timeless contemplative wisdom and emerging research into sound, resonance, coherence, nervous system regulation, and emotional well-being.
Together, we’ll explore:
Held during the quiet beauty of the new moon and the ancient seasonal threshold of Imbolc — a celebration of the first stirrings of light and renewal — this retreat is supported by Esalen’s healing hot springs, ocean air, rugged coastline, and expansive night skies. Together, these elements create a spacious container for rest, reflection, and renewal.
Whether you are new to sound meditation or have an established contemplative practice, you’ll leave with practical tools for cultivating greater ease, resilience, and vitality, along with a renewed sense of belonging — to yourself, to one another, and to the living intelligence that quietly connects us all.
What if play could become a path of presence?
Mindful improv brings together the liveliness of improvisational theater with the steadiness of mindfulness practice. Improv is spontaneous, expressive, and often funny; mindfulness is quiet, attentive, and still. Though they may seem like opposites at first, both invite us into openness, curiosity, acceptance, and the freedom to meet the moment as it is.
In this experiential weekend workshop, you will explore improv as a form of mindfulness that begins within and extends into connection with others. With warmth, levity, and “serious silliness,” we will use simple improv games and mindfulness practices to explore how we relate to ourselves, one another, and the unfolding moment.
During our time together, you will be invited to:
No improv experience is needed. Discover practical ways to take mindfulness off the cushion — and tune into a lighter, more responsive relationship with yourself, others and the unfolding moment.
What lies behind today’s evidence-based mind-body practices for well-being, resilience, and purpose? This three-day workshop explores the deep lineages and sacred traditions from which many modern methods arise, guided by teachers who walk both worlds of rigorous science and timeless wisdom.
At MD Anderson Cancer Center, Alejandro Chaoul pioneered programs to support patients with chronic illness through Tibetan Yoga, meditation, and integrative medicine. At UCSF, Eve Ekman developed and researched secular, evidence-based tools to strengthen emotional resilience and prevent burnout among healthcare providers.
Together, they will share cutting-edge science and evidence-based practices alongside the sacred dimensions often missing from conventional approaches to healing and renewal.
Participants will explore:
This workshop offers practical, research-informed tools and a sacred perspective to rekindle creativity, ease emotional distress, and reconnect with meaning and purpose — for patients, providers, seekers, or anyone on the path of healing.
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 community reflection, you’ll learn how to tend life’s thresholds not as chaotic interruptions but as opportunities to make meaning, deepen understanding, and meet what life is asking of you with greater clarity and care.
Guided by renowned artist, author, and ritualist Day Schildkret, you’ll explore the four practices 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 questions, your curiosity, and your willingness to cross.
Recommended Reading: Morning Altars: A 7-Step Practice to Nourish Your Spirit through Nature, Art, and Ritual and Hello, Goodbye: 75 Rituals for Times of Loss, Celebration, and Change by Day Schildkret.
This workshop includes an additional $15 for materials.
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
How might we understand grief not simply as something to overcome, but as a source of knowledge about ourselves, our ancestors, and the lives we inherit?
Led by cultural sociologist and Gomti River ceremonialist Roksana Badruddoja, this experiential workshop explores grief through the sacred wisdom of the Akashic Records — a living and evolving field of information, memory, relationship, and spiritual intelligence — as well as embodied inquiry, ancestral memory, and reflective storytelling.
Over five days, participants will learn to access their own Akashic Records and explore the relationships among personal grief, inherited patterns, spiritual discernment, and the recovery of parts of ourselves that may have become obscured through loss, adaptation, and ancestral experience. Through guided journeys, contemplative practices, and reflective writing, we will examine what belongs to us, what we have inherited, and what we are responsible for carrying forward.
In this workshop, you will:
Rather than seeking to eliminate grief or manufacture certainty, this workshop invites participants to develop a more conscious relationship with what they carry, what they know, and what remains possible.
Please bring a journal. Full attendance is strongly encouraged because each session builds upon the previous teachings. No prior experience with the Akashic Records is necessary. Participants are invited to approach the spiritual practices with openness, reverence, and discernment. Required readings will be provided before the workshop.
Join herbalist, medicine woman, and plant spirit teacher Marysia Miernowska for a nourishing, magickal weekend journey of intimacy with the Earth to receive physical and spiritual healing from medicinal herbal infusions and awaken the energies of spring’s renewal within us and all around.
In a safe and sacred container, you will be guided in:
By communing with safe, healing, and nutritive wild medicine infusions, participants will flood their bodies with the restorative nourishment of the wild earth. While journaling and meeting plant spirits through shamanic tea meditations, we’ll create safety in the body and nervous system and receive insight, inspiration, energy, and replenishment for a personal awakening that mirrors the energy of spring.
By restoring the ancient knowledge of folk healing and plant medicine, we hope to heal the separation between ourselves and nature and awaken a collective passion to protect this Earth we all call home.
This workshop includes a $40 materials fee
Freeing yourself from conditioned patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior takes more than stillness or intellectual inquiry. Real and lasting change requires rewiring the brain — but we can’t change until we feel safe to do so. This is why learning to enter states of coherence elevates our capacity to build new patterns in their place.
Most meditation techniques ask us to focus our attention and, whenever it wanders, gently return it to an object. Other approaches invite us into spacious awareness, letting whatever arises come and go. Luminous Coherence begins from a different premise.
Patterns of rumination and reactivity are not resolved simply through transcendence or observation alone. Tantric science arrived at this understanding through contemplative inquiry; modern neuroscience reached the same conclusion through studies of the brain’s default mode network.
Luminous Coherence evolved from Rod’s practice and study within the living traditions of Tantra and Yoga — deepened through oral transmission and refined through higher states of awareness over nearly five decades. The method he developed helps meditation practitioners at any level transform deeply conditioned patterns.
Data backs this up. Validated pre- and post-assessments from prior cohorts — including meditators with a decade or more of daily practice — showed significant, measurable gains in emotional regulation, resilience, and creativity. Spending years on the cushion doesn’t guarantee that. This protocol is built for what does.
Over the course of this retreat, you’ll be guided to:
Whether you are just beginning or have been meditating for decades, if you are committed to practice, this is your invitation to move past simply observing your patterns and discover tools to reorganize the mind for actual transformation.
Learn to transform conditioned patterns — emotional, cognitive, and behavioral — not just observe them, and cultivate greater resilience, clarity, creativity, and the wholeness meditation has always promised.
Introducing Luminous Coherence | A Revolutionary New Meditation Protocol
We sleep one-third of our lifetime, an average of 20 to 25 years. Dream yoga is a practice that spans every moment, waking and sleeping. It is a powerful tool of awakening used for hundreds of years by the great masters of the Tibetan traditions. Foundational practices in dream yoga change the practitioner’s relationship to all experiences, develop conscious awareness and often lead to lucidity in dreams. Unlike in the Western psychological approach to dreams, the ultimate goal of Tibetan dream yoga is the recognition of the nature of the mind or enlightenment itself.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche will discuss the relationships between dream and waking, and dream and death. He will show how the causes of dreams are related to the six chakras, and how we can heal blocks in the chakras. He will teach the “four preparations” for sleep and the uses and methods of lucid dreaming.
Recommended reading: Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep and Rinpoche, Sleep & Awakening the Sacred Body.
We treasure this life, and yet we rarely can hear ourselves think. We are constantly being bombarded and absorbing information at a dizzying pace. In the 21st century, where stillness and silence are scarce, fast-paced living keeps us bouncing from one task to the next. What might happen if you simply sat and allowed yourself to be? What would arise in the spaces between your thoughts, your breath, and your heartbeat?
Join internationally celebrated teacher, author, and documentary filmmaker Hawah Kasat to explore the depths of silence and solitude. Hawah will guide you with a culturally sensitive soft touch and a compassionate heart toward the bounty of silence. Participants will be guided through silent meditation practices, pranayama (breathwork), asana (movement), and dharma talks, to support the following process:
This workshop is suitable for those who have never taken a vow of silence and want to explore what it feels like to observe noble silence in small doses, as well as veteran silent retreaters who want to refine their senses of awareness and perception.
NOTE: For small portions of this workshop, participants will be encouraged to take a vow of silence — during which there will be no writing, reading, or talking.
BIPOC SCHOLARSHIP: Hawah has established a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, person of color) scholarship for his workshops. For more information on receiving one to participate, please contact him at Everlutionary@gmail.com.
This workshop includes a material fee of $4.50.
What if what we experience wasn’t always a serious endeavor, but rather an invitation to play, to grow and to learn? Hindu philosophy encapsulates this idea in the Sanskrit word Lila, which means “divine play.” Lila suggests that creation isn’t an obligation but a spontaneous and joyful expression of the divine. Perhaps we’re so deeply immersed in the drama of it — like actors lost in our roles — that we’ve forgotten it’s a playful dance? Suppose existence is just a cosmic joke, a juggling act of the relative and the absolute. This experience is designed to help you learn to dance between the everyday mundane and the sacredness of now.
Each day will begin with the ancient technology of yoga and breathwork. Morning classes are designed to release stress, physical patterns, and common discomforts to help you access peace and resilience and gently unravel your authentic self.
You’ll then be guided through various exercises to develop body awareness, followed by physical games and rituals that give birth to organic impulses inspired by the child within. There is no pressure to perform, just an invitation to get lost and found inside yourself, an openness to go beyond your comfort zone, and a willingness to play within the moment.
Each day will close with the practice of Yoga Nidra and meditation. This helps to absorb the benefits, make sense of your experience, and allow for genuine healing and connection through community.
This workshop is physical, but open and accessible for all levels and diverse bodies. Practices will be adapted and tailored to support you. Please come unprepared.
Recommended reading: Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle, Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir, and Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey
Take a week-long journey into the cartography of self — mapping the terrains that live beneath language — where breath meets bone, memory lives in muscle, story shapes identity, and the future self waits patiently to be remembered.
Through breathwork, somatic movement, writing, sound, and relational mirrors, we’ll explore distinct layers of being. Each day will open a new landscape to traverse — from the dense knowing of the body to the subtle currents of emotion, from inherited stories that live in our bones to the archetypes that move us unseen. We move slowly, curiously, mapping sensation, story, memory, and meaning as they surface. This is not a week to become someone new. It is an invitation to meet the one who has been here all along — layered, complex, rhythmic, alive.
Throughout the week, each participant will be given the guidance and tools to create their own Inner Atlas: a living body-map of sensation, story, lineage, and possibility. A compass to guide them back when life asks them to choose themselves.
We live in an age of extraordinary access to information, and many of us are hungry for a deeper way back into our bodies and the felt experience of being alive. In this five-day workshop, you will explore what it means to move toward a more embodied, regenerative relationship with the world, one step, one breath, one element at a time.
The week is woven from two converging paths. One offers elemental meditation, mantra, and pranayama, with earth, water, fire, air, and space as direct doorways back into the body and nature. The other brings research on regeneration, tracked through what’s known as GDR, or Gross Domestic Regeneration, the practice of measuring what we build back rather than what we extract.
This workshop includes:
This workshop brings together contemplative practice and the leading edge of regenerative research, two paths holding the same conviction: that the shift we’re looking for won’t come from more thinking, but from more feeling. This is an invitation to practice that, together, on some of the most beautiful ground there is.
Beyond your time together, there will be ample free time to soak in Esalen’s natural hot springs, wander its cliffside gardens, rest, and take in everything else this remarkable land has to offer.
Discover the profound connection between ancient practices and modern science as we explore the transformative potential of the biofield. Western science is uncovering the power of this energy for healing, from cells to communities. Published research demonstrates how subtle energy healing can reduce pain, alleviate anxiety, shift hormone and immune function, and even prevent the spread of cancer within the body.
In this workshop, you are invited to deepen your relationship with energy and the biofield to help release stagnant emotions and pain, grow your discernment,, and open to new possibilities for your creative and spiritual expression. We’ll be illuminated by the confluences of empirical science with ancient wisdom, exploring both the research in biofield science alongside powerful energetic self-healing practices, including breathwork, vocal work, and meditation from tantric and other biofield healing traditions.
During our time together, you are invited to:
This workshop offers a space for curiosity and learning, inviting you to explore the brilliant energetic being you are and the benefits you can experience within your own presence. Leave with knowledge, tools, and a new understanding of energetic power to integrate back into your life.
You are never truly alone — loving guidance has always been by your side. Your spirit guides, part of your soul family and spiritual GPS, are waiting to assist, support, play, and dance with you. In this five-day immersion, you’ll explore how to access their wisdom with patience, trust, and an open heart, and discover how to create a steady, lasting connection with the unseen love that surrounds you.
Through guided practice, instruction, and community support, you will:
This workshop welcomes seekers who are energetically sensitive and open to receiving support from beyond the veil. Whether you are beginning to sense intuitive guidance or already feel the presence of your guides, this framework invites you to discover how to trust these connections more deeply and access your guides more dependably. A profound journey that can change how you navigate this world’s layers — emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually.
Please make sure to bring your favorite journal or notebook to capture your notes and experiences during our time together!
Note: This workshop is not suited for anyone who experiences delusions, breaks with reality, or psychosis. This meditative experience could trigger an episode.
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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 ceremonial leader and wisdom carrier Erika Gagnon on a sacred journey to look beyond the false duality of a divided self and the destructive concepts of “self versus other” and “self versus nature” to rediscover how to live in harmony within ourselves and with the world around us.
We live on a constant spectrum of choice between polarities, Black/White, Night/Day, Earth/Sky, Happiness/Sadness, Yin/Yang, Masculine/Feminine, Active/Passive. If you believe these are opposites — choices between one or the other — a separation occurs that can eventually lead to conflict. But if we understand that none of these can exist without their counterparts, we realize they are not opposites but complementary aspects. When we understand we are the wholeness that encompasses our dual nature, we move beyond duality into unity.
How can we identify what is out of balance, both within us and in our lives? What emotions, memories, and old patterns are keeping us stuck or are no longer serving us? How can we identify the social, cultural, racial, religious, and historical energies influencing our lives?
Over the course of the workshop, we will engage with healing wisdom, practices, and ceremonies to honor our gifts and continue to heal our wounds. You will have the opportunity to participate in three traditional healing ceremonies.
You will be offered tools to transform trauma and unhealthy patterns and realign body, mind, spirit, and soul as we explore the origins of dis-ease in our physical, mental-emotional, and spiritual bodies. Reconnect to your authentic wisdom and power as you find the balance within. From that wholeness, reconnect to the natural and spiritual elements of this planet in gratitude for all that we experience in life.
Note: Please bring a journal 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. Her compensation will be self-determined by each attendee. At the end of the workshop, participants will offer a donation amount that reflects their feelings 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 or to make a donation to support this scholarship, please contact her at info@erikagagnon.com
This workshop is for anyone who knows they are at a threshold and want more aliveness and truth in the next chapter of their lives.
Our time together will unfold through a progression of experiential exercises, including movement, reflection, intimate group work, and practical frameworks for understanding where you are and what comes next. The majority of the workshop will draw on the Esalen tradition and imaginal psychology, where we will engage embodied knowing, intuition, and the wisdom of the heart to discover what calls to us at this stage of life and begin building a vision grounded in that truth. Expect real depth and real fun.
This is not a workshop you just do alongside other people. The group itself is an essential part of our work together. The witnessing, shared vulnerability, and live coaching create a container that private reflection can rarely replicate.
The environment is carefully designed — rigorous and warm, challenging yet safe — to create a space where key questions can be explored honestly, in community with others doing the same work.
If you want a more powerful and authentic life, one lived with integrity and directed by what you truly value, this is where the work begins. Active participation is warmly encouraged. Nothing is required.
What if sleep could be more than just crashing into your pillow at the end of a long day? What if it could be a portal to transformation and self-discovery? In this workshop, we’ll dive into the ancient Daoist art of sleep alchemy, where the Wudang Hibernating Dragon and Five Dragons Sleeping methods teach you how to transform snoozing into a practice of subtle awareness and metaphysical transformation.
Rooted in the Wudang Daoist Sanfeng lineage, these techniques harmonize body and soul, turning your nightly shut-eye into a discipline of deep peace. The cosmic journey would be incomplete without Daoist stories like Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream and Lü Dongbin’s Yellow Millet Dream, classic tales of metaphysical gaslighting that explore just how slippery the boundaries of reality and illusion can be.
We’ll also talk about practicalities within a Daoist framework, like how your food choices, lifestyle, and daily habits can affect your sleep quality. Expect to walk away with tools for cultivating transcendent rest, resilience, and an appreciation for Daoist cosmology. Along the way, we’ll keep it relaxed — the Dao is at ease. Sleeping in class is encouraged, though snoring will be punished with five hundred years in Daoist hell.
Participants will practice introductory Wudang sleeping methods to enter, sustain, and deepen sleep states. By the end of the workshop, you will be intimately familiar with practical techniques to deepen sleep, enhance well-being, and dream the dream of life more deeply and lucidly.
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In this light-polluted and highly distracted age, it’s more important than ever to find a way to stay centered and balanced. Dark retreat offers that way.
An ancient spiritual and shamanic practice, dark retreat traditionally entails spending time — from hours to weeks — in a totally dark cabin or cave. It has been practiced for healing, insight, creativity, and preparation for the end of life. Essentially a concentrated form of meditation, dark retreat is a powerful method for exploring the depths of the unconscious mind.
This profound practice has been preserved within spiritual lineages for centuries, but it is rapidly being recognized by the scientific community as an antidote to the stressors of the modern world. This experiential workshop provides an accessible introduction to the approach, along with cutting-edge neuroscience, psychological modeling, and philosophical frameworks that bring one of the most transformative practices ever devised into the 21st century.
Every morning, using an eye mask, you’ll discover how darkness can restore your nervous system and equilibrate your body-mind. In the afternoon sessions, you’ll engage with simple visual exercises that curtail sensory overload to realign your sense faculties. Throughout the workshop, we’ll investigate how dark retreat works with the unconscious mind, what actually takes place at the neurological level.
Dark retreat is uniquely situated to address the meta-crisis, which is a crisis of touch. Blinded by the light of distraction and immersed in the dangers of AI, we’ve lost touch with ourselves, with one another, and with the planet. Going into the dark puts us back in touch — and helps us reclaim our humanity.
Recommended reading: Total Eclipse of the Mind: Unleashing the Power of Darkness for Creativity, Healing, and Transformation, by Andrew Holecek & Consciousness at the Edge of Death: Dark Retreat, Near Death Experience, and Generative Brain Dynamics, By Mark Miller et al.
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
We are living in a time when many of us are hungry for the sacred, yet no longer find ourselves at home within the boundaries of a single religious tradition. We may long for a more direct relationship with the divine — one that can meet us in the beauty, heartbreak, relationships, and ordinary moments of our lives.
Join interspiritual author and teacher Mirabai Starr for an exploration of the interconnected wisdom at the heart of all religious and spiritual traditions and reignite the sacred dimensions of your own life.
Follow the streams of mystical longing and care for creation through readings from the ecstatic poetry of the mystics — investigating sacred texts of the world’s religions, sitting in contemplative silence, chanting the names of the divine in an array of languages, and engaging in deep dialogue through conversation and writing.
Discover the unifying teachings and experience the heart-opening practices that carry us beyond an intellectual understanding of humanity’s many spiritual paths to the place where we are transformed by the love at their common core.
Whether you belong to a particular faith tradition, find nourishment in many, or consider yourself spiritual but not religious, you are welcome.
The mystic’s way is not reserved for saints and sages. It is a path available to each of us — and one we don’t need to walk alone.
Recommended reading: Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground, by Mirabai Starr and Wild Mercy by Mirabai Starr
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Hapé, a sacred tobacco preparation, has been used by Indigenous peoples across the Amazon as a medicine for clarity, presence, and connection for centuries. Blown gently into the nostrils, this finely ground blend of tobacco leaves and sacred ashes activates the senses in a unique way, opening inner vision and anchoring attention in the present moment. Traditionally used in ceremony, Hapé invites stillness, deepens awareness, and connects practitioners to both their inner landscape and the living forest.
Together, we will take part in a hands-on preparation of Hapé itself for an embodied practice that honors its lineage while creating a shared field of reverence. In preparing Hapé together, participants directly encounter the care, ritual, and mindfulness that go into its making, deepening our relationship to the medicine before it is received. Once prepared, we will enter into ceremony to experience Hapé as a mindfulness tool — to explore how this ancestral medicine can enhance meditation, sharpen presence, and open pathways of reverence, reciprocity, and inner reflection.
As interest in mindfulness and plant medicines grows in the Global North, this is a rare opportunity to build a bridge between ancient contemplative traditions and modern practices of meditation.
Participants will:
This is an invitation to experience an ancient practice through a new lens — one that connects forest wisdom and contemporary contemplative life.
This workshop includes a $25 materials fee.
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.
What becomes possible when we slow down, open our senses, and meet the living world with our full attention?
On Esalen’s spectacular Big Sur coast, this immersive, nature-based mindfulness workshop invites you to meditate amid the beauty and aliveness of the natural world. Through sensory awareness and outdoor meditation practices, we will cultivate curiosity, connection, and love, rediscovering our capacity for presence and belonging in an increasingly digital world.
During our time together, you will:
Come prepared for moments of awe, mystery, and unexpected delight as you discover nature’s capacity to inspire and awaken — and practices you can carry into everyday life.
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
Note: This workshop will take place outdoors, and the weather in Big Sur can change throughout the day. Please bring layers and/or a blanket for use during the workshop.
This workshop includes an additional faculty tuition.
What if peace in the world can be nourished by the peace we cultivate within?
Imagine five days devoted to softening the tensions you carry, quieting the noise of everyday life, and remembering the joy of being fully alive.
Gathering on Memorial Day, we honor those who have lost their lives in war while turning toward a more intimate inquiry: How might we transform our inner struggles into compassion, harmony, and peace?
As the days lengthen toward the summer solstice, immerse yourself in seven extraordinary sound journeys with alchemy crystal singing bowls, whose shimmering harmonics invite deep relaxation, embodied presence, and a renewed connection to the light within.
Through Sound Gnosis — from the Greek gnosis, meaning direct, experiential knowing — we explore sound as a gateway beyond habitual thinking and conditioned beliefs. In these spacious states of awareness, we may glimpse new possibilities for living with greater freedom, love, and joy.
Throughout our time together, you will:
Beloved Big Sur elder Damaris will join us for an intimate sharing of the mystical poetry of Hafiz.
Held within Esalen’s breathtaking landscape of ocean, mineral hot springs, and towering trees, we invite you to return home to yourself and carry the light of greater peace, love, and possibility into the world.
No prior experience with sound or movement is needed.
Get notified about new programs.
Esalen Institute
55000 Highway 1
Big Sur, CA 93920
US: 1-831-667-3000
info@esalen.org