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 MoreRejuvenate 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.
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.
Haruki Murakami wrote that writing a novel is like running a marathon — it requires endurance, consistency, and mental discipline over a long stretch.
In this workshop, we will look at all the ways writers, both beginning and experienced, can support themselves both creatively and physically during the novel-writing process.
Using a combination of generative exercises meant to spark creativity, meditations designed to build focus, and practical advice on how to keep going, we’ll talk about how to take a fictional project from beginning to end without losing our way. We’ll also touch on the craft of creating compelling stories and characters by looking at published works and sharing our own writing.
And, we’ll discuss ways to build your own literary community to provide emotional and creative support and make the solitary process of writing a little less solitary.
By the end of the weekend, participants will leave with a road map to finishing a novel and taking care of themselves in the process.
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.
.png)
Breathing is one of the few functions in the human body that is both automatic and voluntary — happening unconsciously every moment of our lives, yet also available to conscious control. In the yogic traditions, this makes the breath profoundly significant: a bridge between body and mind, conscious and subconscious awareness, the autonomic and non-autonomic nervous systems, and ultimately, a gateway into meditation and expanded states of consciousness.
In this immersive weekend workshop, we will explore the ancient science and transformative art of pranayama through practices rooted in the Sivananda, Iyengar, and Ashtanga yoga traditions. Far beyond simple breathing exercises, pranayama has been cultivated for thousands of years as a methodology for regulating energy, refining attention, stabilizing the mind, and priming the “pump” to help us reach deeper states of meditation.
Together, we will investigate why breath has long been considered the “master key” within contemplative traditions. The techniques we will practice are designed to support:
Practices will include diaphragmatic breathing, Nadi Shodhana (alternate nostril breathing) pranayamas, ratio breathing, breath retention, cleansing techniques, subtle energetic practices, guided meditation, gentle movement, and inquiry into both the ancient philosophy and modern science of conscious breathing.
Most importantly, this retreat approaches pranayama as a practice that transcends traditional wellness goals and explores it as a doorway. A doorway into stillness. Into presence. Into deeper listening. Into meditation. And ultimately, into liberation from suffering. This weekend invites participants to slow down, breathe consciously, and reconnect with one of humanity’s oldest and most profound inner technologies.
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.
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
%2520(1).png)
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
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.
.png)
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.
.png)
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
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.
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.
.png)
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.
.png)
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
%20(1).png)
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.
.png)
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
Get notified about new programs.
Esalen Institute
55000 Highway 1
Big Sur, CA 93920
US: 1-831-667-3000
info@esalen.org