Workshops

Now more than ever, it is important we build practices to strengthen our internal resolve and self-resourcing amidst a dynamically shifting society. Together, we will listen to our heart’s wisdom in this rich four-day journey (Friday to Monday) through sound, ceremony, and self-discovery.

In this intimate and transformative workshop, you will have the unique opportunity to experience multiple East Forest’s live music performances. Additionally, Radha will lead us in embodiment practices of Self-Awakening Yoga, Yin Yoga, and Breathwork to create an all-levels and accessible doorway to inner insights. Through the primacy of our own heart-opening and felt experience, we can discover the inner pathways to fortitude and healing.

• Intimate live musical performances by East Forest
• Group co-creative musical process with East Forest
• Yoga and meditation practices
• Awe-inspiring time in nature
• Breathwork
• Meditation and group insight exercises
• Journaling
• Dance party

East Forest and Radha would like to offer a certain amount of scholarship to those in need. Please apply with this form. If further assistance would be helpful, you may also apply for an Esalen scholarship.

Workshop Disclaimer: While some of our workshops explore the history and potential of psychedelic tools and altered states, Esalen workshops do not involve the use, provision, or facilitation of any psychoactive substances.

This workshop includes an additional $350 faculty tuition.

For thousands of years across many cultures, expanded states of consciousness have been used intentionally as a strategy for meaningful transformation and self-exploration — marking life’s major transitions and rites of passage and deepening one’s connection to self, community, and the natural world.

In this workshop, we will gather in the rich field of community for an immersive experience and personal exploration of enhanced states of consciousness. Our time together will include strategies for navigating, integrating, and preparing for these experiences. Holotropic Breathwork® offers language, method, and structure for turning inward and working with deeply personal material as it emerges, uniquely, from one’s own intrinsic intelligence. We will be supported by time-honored practices that are simple, yet powerful. These unique states can offer us unmediated access to the self as a deep source of healing, insight, and evolutionary potential. Participants will experience four Holotropic Breathwork sessions, with two as “breather” and two as “sitter.” Your time assisting others in “non-ordinary state” space will complement your personal exploration. Additionally, contemplative practice, movement, expressive arts, and time in community will support the integration process throughout the week.

Originating from the pioneering psychedelic researcher, Stanislav Grof, and his late wife, Christina Grof, Holotropic Breathwork is a particularly useful practice for those interested in or training to work in psychedelic-assisted therapy.

This workshop is suited for all those of heart who are curious about exploring enhanced states of consciousness and opening to an evolutionary process of unfolding. New or novice explorers/breathers are very welcome, along with experienced navigators/breathers. The fundamental urge to grow, to heal, and to be transformed in a truly authentic way drives us not outward but inward, toward the depths of our own being, toward a deep mystery within. This inward journey strengthens and nourishes our senses in a way that can revitalize our daily lives with creative and emergent energy.

This workshop includes an additional $75 of faculty tuition.

Join ceremonial leader and wisdom carrier Erika Gagnon on a sacred journey as we gather to look beyond the false duality of a divided self and the destructive concept of “self versus nature” to discover how to live in harmony and balance within ourselves and the world around us.

You are your greatest healer and greatest medicine, and this is your opportunity to examine what that means while sharing healing wisdom, practices & ceremonies. This workshop will offer you tools to transform trauma and unhealthy patterns and to realign your body, mind, spirit, and soul, as we explore the origins of dis-ease in our physical, mental-emotional and spiritual bodies.

How can we honor the gifts, and heal the wounds that we have inherited from our ancestors? How can we identify any social, cultural, racial, religious, and historical energies that may be influencing our lives? We will explore all of this, and discuss the importance of ceremonies, sacred altars, and medicinal plants.  You will have the opportunity to participate in a traditional South American healing ceremony, a sound healing and “doctoring” ceremony, and a water blessing prayer ceremony.

You will be invited to reconnect to your authentic wisdom and power with clarity, gratitude, and forgiveness. When you honor and heal your ancestral lineage and connect to the natural and spiritual elements of this planet, you strengthen your connection to the sacred in everyday life.

We are all interconnected in this giant web of life, and every day is a gift in the service of unconditional love for yourself, your community, humanity, and our planet. If you feel the call to be a part of a new humanity that lives in harmony and balance upon this Earth, we invite you to join us in this celebration of life.

Note: Please bring a journal to write in, and items for our altar, including photographs of loved ones and ancestors and sacred objects that have meaning for you.

Special Note on Gift Economy:  For this workshop, Esalen will not be collecting the typical leader fees. Erika embraces the tradition of the gift economy and reciprocity. The leader’s compensation will be self-determined by each attendee. At the end of the workshop, participants will offer a donation amount that reflects their feeling of gratitude, value, and desire to support Erika and her ongoing work.

BIPOC SCHOLARSHIP: Erika has established a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, person of color) scholarship for her workshops. For more information on receiving one to participate, please contact her at ErikaGagnon11@gmail.com

For thousands of years across many cultures, expanded states of consciousness have been used intentionally as a strategy for meaningful transformation and deepening one’s connection to self, community, and the natural world.

In this workshop, we will gather in the rich field of community for an immersive experience and personal exploration of  these unique states. Our time together will include strategies for navigating, integrating, and preparing for these experiences. Holotropic Breathwork® will be our experiential modality offering a dynamic method for turning inward and working with deeply personal material as it emerges, uniquely, from one’s own intrinsic intelligence.

We will be supported by time-honored practices that are simple, yet powerful. These unique states can offer us unmediated access to the self as a deep source of healing, insight, and evolutionary potential. Participants will experience four Holotropic Breathwork sessions, with two as “breather” and two as “sitter.” Your time assisting others in “non-ordinary state” space will complement your personal exploration. Additionally, contemplative practice, movement, expressive arts, and time in community will support the integration process throughout the week.

Originating from the pioneering psychedelic researcher, Stanislav Grof, and his late wife, Christina Grof, Holotropic Breathwork is a particularly useful practice for those interested in or training to work in psychedelic-assisted therapy.

This workshop is suited for all those of heart who are curious about exploring enhanced states of consciousness and opening to an evolutionary process of unfolding. New or novice explorers/breathers are very welcome, along with experienced navigators/breathers. The fundamental urge to grow, to heal, and to be transformed in a truly authentic way drives us not outward but inward, toward the depths of our own being, toward a deep mystery within. This inward journey strengthens and nourishes our senses in a way that can revitalize our daily lives with creative and emergent energy.

This workshop includes an additional $75 of faculty tuition.

Our oldest traditions carry the same instruction for this moment, the winter solstice, the longest night of the year: go in.

Many who have touched the sacred through mystical states, grief, love, or a profound life transition carry an unfinished question: How do I live in service to what I have seen?

This workshop is devoted to that question, approaching it through the logic of descent. Rooted in Jungian depth psychology, contemplative practice, and symbolic imagination, our time together follows the ancient pattern of the katabasis. Inanna goes down before she can return. Orpheus descends before he can bring anything back. The structure is older than any single tradition. What transforms us is rarely the encounter at the height. It is the slow, unglamorous work of sitting with what the dark has shown us and letting it rearrange how we live. The mystery traditions built their initiatory structures around descent. The solstice is the hinge. We gather here to do that work.

Together, we will:

• Work with Jungian frameworks, including shadow work, archetypes, and symbolic amplification, as the psychological ground for metabolizing what has been opened by the visionary or peak state.
• Practice anchoring insight into daily life through journaling, somatic inquiry, dreamwork, ritual, and sacred conversation.
• Examine the risks of spiritual inflation and spiritual bypass — what goes wrong when experience outpaces integration, and how humility and discipline protect what the vision opened.
• Reframe psychedelic and non-ordinary experience as one expression within a larger soul journey, asking what it means when altered states become initiatory rather than episodic.
• Return to the values that inner work produces — love, accountability, and the relational responsibility that is the fruit of any spiritual encounter.

This gathering is the winter companion to the June workshop. Whereas the June work carries the quality of ascent, of doors opening and light expanding, this workshop honors the opposite movement. The winter solstice calls us into descent: into the dark, into what the earth knows when it turns inward. Integration, understood this way, is not a summer task. It is the slow work of the long night, the composting that happens below the surface before anything can grow again.

The work is to carry what you’ve seen with honesty, with discipline, and with the kind of reverence that does not require drama to sustain itself.

Note: While this workshop explores the history and meaning of psychedelic and non-ordinary states, Esalen workshops do not involve the use, provision, or facilitation of any psychoactive substances.

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