Workshops

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

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:

• Shamanic tea meditations.
• Drinking herbs for the spring.
• Entering restorative states of embodied meditation.
• Connecting to the land and elements.
• Making herbal medicine from the land and Esalen gardens to take home.
• Making flower essences.
• Plant identification of nourishing medicinal herbs, many likely growing around you.
• Earth-based rituals and journal prompts.
• Wildcrafting and gardening.

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

What happens when we look beyond the familiar boundaries of the mind and begin to explore what psychedelics can teach us about consciousness, mental health, and healing?

Through science, dialogue, embodiment, music, and direct human experience, this educational journey will explore a groundbreaking new paradigm for mental healthcare: one that sees psychological suffering not simply as a chemical imbalance, but as a state of excessive mental rigidity. We’ll examine how these substances can disrupt entrenched patterns of thought and perception, opening new possibilities for understanding and treating some of the most difficult mental illnesses.

At the heart of the workshop is an exploration of the hidden mind. We’ll look at how psychedelics can illuminate aspects of our inner world that are ordinarily difficult to see, including the beliefs, narratives, and habitual patterns through which we construct our experience of ourselves and reality.

Neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris will lead us through his groundbreaking exploration of how psychedelics may unlock long-held mysteries of the mind and how these revelations can help treat some of the most crippling mental illnesses.

Alongside Carhart-Harris’s teachings on the neuroscience of the psychedelic state, this weekend includes live musical performances by East Forest, whose sound work has long been intertwined with psychedelic ceremony and contemplative practice. Radha will lead embodiment practices of meditation, self-awakening yoga, and breathwork to create accessible doorways to inner insight.

The weekend includes:

• Teachings and dialogue with Robin Carhart-Harris on the neuroscience of psychedelics and mental rigidity
• Intimate live musical performances by East Forest
• Group co-creative musical process with East Forest
• Yoga, meditation, and breathwork practices with Radha
• Awe-inspiring time in nature
• Deep rest
• Journaling for personal integration
• Dance party for collective celebration

This is an invitation to hold science and ceremony, intellect and embodiment, together. To investigate how rigidity might give way to openness, how new perspectives can illuminate what was previously hidden, and how a deeper understanding of the mind may point toward new possibilities for mental health and human flourishing.

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.

Recommended Reading: How Psychedelics Work by Robin Carhart-Harris

This workshop includes an additional $350 in faculty tuition. 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.

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