Workshops

The Big Sur wilderness lives and breathes, listens, and speaks. Beneath ancient redwood trees, a shimmering creek journeys toward the sea. In the oak woodland, a polyphony of birds sings to the rising sun. Fog dances across chaparral bluffs, caressing sagebrush and sandstone cliffs. Every cove, meadow, and forest of this biodiverse landscape is alive with presences embodying agency, awareness, and beinghood.

Many of us, however, have inherited a modern Western perspective — shaped by human exceptionalism and reductionistic materialism — that dims our ability to perceive the living complexity and intelligence of our wild world. We are conditioned to see scenery instead of sentience, resource instead of relation. This objectification of the Earth has severed us from the natural world, yielding existential loneliness and environmental peril.

Animism — humanity’s foundational, pre-modern worldview — offers a different frame, regarding the cosmos and all within it as alive, awake, and irreducibly valuable. From this vantage, the world is a great family of interconnected kin, each with distinct perspectives and gifts, all possessing dignity and knowing.

Join us for five days of immersion in animism’s deeper, more ancient relational reality. Through mindful hiking on Big Sur’s trails — Esselen tribal lands — sustained time in the wild, and playful tuning of awareness, we will cultivate our attention and intuition to begin to see beyond modernity’s myopic view. Rather than approaching animism as belief, we will explore it as practice — a patient, embodied turning toward the living land as companion and teacher.

This workshop invites us to remember ourselves as kindred with all life, rooted in belonging to the Earth and our deeper-time ancestors. By encountering these older ways of being and knowing, we joyfully re-enter the enchanted, animate world.

Notes:

• Answers to frequently asked questions about the workshop can be found here.
• This workshop will consist of numerous, outdoor, physical practices and a great deal of walking, including two long-form hikes and one half-day hike. Various hiking abilities can be accommodated, bearing in mind that our long hikes are up to seven miles in length, over uneven and often steep terrain. Participants must be able to sit on the ground, practice outside in all weathers, and get a little dirty. If you have any questions about your ability to participate, please read the workshop FAQs or email info@wildtender.com.
• An additional $100 fee to cover parks permits and parking fees is included in the workshop cost.

Let’s be real — queer men are already masters of reinvention. We’ve learned to shapeshift, decode signals, seduce with a glance, armor up when needed, and sometimes dissociate in the name of survival. Our sexuality has been a battlefield and a playground — sometimes both in the same night. Sexuality offers a lens through which we may examine and deeply experience ourselves and our connection to all of existence. By fully immersing yourself in your sexual experiences, there is more — more pleasure, more presence, more freedom — hiding in plain sight. In your hips. Your breath. Your belly. Your no. Your yes. Your body.

This weekend is a playful deep dive into what it means to live in a queer male body — cis or transmasculine — with curiosity, with courage, and in relation to society and one another.

Together, we’ll explore the wild terrain of gender and sexuality — not from a textbook, but from the inside out. Through guided practices, embodied rituals, and communal reflection, you’ll get to ask big, juicy questions like:

• What kind of man am I when I stop trying so hard? If I move past the “masc” persona and its acceptable coded behaviors to embrace an energy that is both boundless and de-gendered?
• How much of my desire is mine, and how much is performance?
• What would it feel like to inhabit my sexuality without apology — or choreography?

We’ll explore how shame, culture, trauma, and liberation show up in our movements, our fantasies, our ability (or inability) to receive touch. We’ll stretch out of binary thinking and into something more fluid, more alive, more you. You’ll be invited to experiment with different ways of relating, touching, and expressing — from the tender to the wild, the sacred to the silly.

This is not about being “good at sex.” It’s about being honest in our sexuality. And maybe even finding new ways to experience it as medicine, mischief, and art.

Why this, why now? Because queer men are still carrying a lot — even in all our glittering freedom. We’ve inherited both boldness and bruises. While we celebrate open sexuality in our culture, we rarely get the space to slow down and feel what it all means in our bodies. This is that space. Join us to make meaning together — with breath, touch, and truth.

Please note: This workshop, designed specifically for those who identify as queer men (cis or trans), includes partial nudity, guided touch, roleplay, and somatic exploration of gender and sexuality. All activities are optional. The space we create together centers safety, sovereignty, and presence, prioritizing your agency and comfort at every turn. Your consent leads the way. Although we will explore touch and sensuality, no sexual acts of any kind will be instructed or included in this workshop. It will not include full nudity, nor anything you do not enthusiastically consent to.

Recommended Reading: Urban Tantra by Barbara Carrellas; The ManTantra Letters by Victor Bliss & Nathan James

Like flowing water, life is constantly changing, emergent, adaptable, and interconnected. With our bodies and the living process of the earth as our sacred laboratory, we will explore the dharma of fluidity. Through stillness and movement, contemplation and play, somatic inquiry and relational mindfulness, we will reawaken our cellular remembrance of flow.

While the dominant paradigm encourages mental effort and a mechanical/ reductionist approach to the body, we will explore the embodied and organic movement that emerges from an alternative approach — one of non-effort and getting out of the way.

What does the water element teach us about letting go and letting life flow? About maintaining our center amidst the dynamism and chaos of everyday life? How does deep embodied listening guide us to meet the ground of impermanence with creative and courageous response? How does the wisdom of curiosity, inquiry, playfulness, and levity support and resource us as we face the gravity and challenges of today’s world?

This workshop celebrates the nexus between Zen Buddhism, somatic inquiry, ecodharma, creativity, and conscious dance. You don’t have to be a meditator or dancer to participate. You just need to feel reverence toward water and curiosity about the water element within you.

Nature does not hurry and yet everything is completed. —Lao Tzu

Anyone who has sat in deep meditation, trekked up a mountain peak, spent time immersed in play with an infant, fallen in love, or experienced the stillness of prayer has experienced time that felt limitless. The more conditioned we become, the more we develop an artificial and adversarial relationship with time. 

“Deep time” describes the spacious non-dual awareness that a meditative life makes available. This state can only be entered through a doorway beyond our conditioned beliefs. It invites us to return to a more embodied and vast presence of being.

In this age of accelerated change, let us consider the steady and unhurried wisdom that helps us savor this precious world and strengthen our resolve to care for it. Deep time helps ground us in our awe of geological time, beyond our human-focused calendars, and embrace the rhythms of the natural world, the seasons, the biosphere, and our subtle body more fully. 

Slowing down can be a revolutionary act in which we attune to our bodies, hearts, the earth, and the more-than-human realm. By looking past the dominant paradigm’s fixation with speed, busyness, and productivity, we can remember a more authentic relationship with time grounded in interdependence, emergence, and wholeness. 

We can balance stillness and action, attunement and productivity, and yin and yang for greater harmony within ourselves and in our relationships with our planet and one another. This workshop, anchored in the Zen teaching of Uji, or “being time,” includes meditation, compassionate inquiry, conscious movement/dance, dharma talks, embodied ritual, and connection with the natural world. All are welcome.

Recommended Reading: Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown by Deborah Eden Tull and Relational Mindfulness: A Handbook for Deepening Our Connection with Ourselves, Each Other, and the Planet by Deborah Eden Tull

We are erotic primates living in culturally imposed domestication. We have the lineage and bodies of hunter-gatherers, but we exist in a modern context that is deeply afraid of Eros. Like other domesticated animal species, we have been removed from the wild to live a more settled life. For many of us, this has had the unfortunate effect of cutting ourselves off from the somatic and erotic aliveness within our own bodies, both in our relationships and from the whole of our lives.

In this modern world, we are often left wondering, Why does my sexuality feel so difficult, unsatisfying, and limited? Why do my erotic relationships seem unsustainable and challenging? How do I access my erotic aliveness? Am I sexually broken, and how do I fix…me?

You are not broken! It’s not you. It’s the domestication — the context that cuts so many of us off from our bodies and aliveness.

In this workshop, you will be invited to:

• Develop a working understanding of what it means to ReWild Eros and un-domesticate the erotic body.
• Creatively explore the foundation of somatic erotic sovereignty.
• Discover the role of internalized and social shame in interfering with erotic connection to your body.
• Understand how Grief and Eros are connected and the role of moving grief in reclaiming and liberating erotic expression.
• Use playful, connective, and experiential somatic practices to build erotic energy and aliveness.
• Learn how to integrate these practices to create erotic sustainability in your life and relationships.

Together, we’ll explore traditional, experiential, and somatic learning, including exercises with movement, consensual touch, and group interaction. Participants will have agency to modify any exercise for their boundaries and safety. Although erotic healing and growth are part of this experience, this workshop will not be supportive for people with unaddressed primary sexual or somatic trauma.

This workshop is for individuals, couples, and people of all relationship orientations. People of all sexual and gender identities are welcome and celebrated. This workshop is sex-positive and erotic-inclusive and will rest on a foundation of embodied consent and boundaries practices. Though Eros is invited into the space, no overt sexual behavior will be part of the workshop.  

You are invited to bring a couple of small items for a shared altar that we will build together. The first item could connected to your family, lineage, or ancestors and the second could be connected to your body or sexuality. All items will be returned at the end of the workshop.

Recommended Reading: Come As You Are, by Emily Nagoski,  The Spirit of Intimacy, by Sobonfu Somé, The Body is Not An Apology, by Sonya Renee Taylor, Reviving Kinship and Sexual Abundance, Dr. Kim Tallbear on For the Wild podcast

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

Since falling in love is biologically natural, but sustaining love is biologically unnatural, Soul Mate focuses on the art and discipline of sustaining love. You begin with learning how to appreciate your partner so specifically and frequently that your partner feels fully seen and loved.

You then practice both the art and discipline of hearing your partner’s criticisms without becoming defensive. For example, so you don’t have to fear “walking on eggshells” before sharing a concern, your partner first learns how to prepare her or himself to emotionally associate your criticism with an opportunity to be more deeply loved.

Soul Mate is designed as the next evolutionary shift beyond active listening. Active listening allowed the criticizer to feel heard, but failed to teach the person hearing the criticism how to emotionally associate the criticism with an opportunity to be more deeply loved. The problem? Unless the receiver of criticism feels safe the person sharing their concern cannot feel safe.

You will learn a series of practices you may integrate into your everyday life:

• Six methods of sustaining a “conflict free zone” for 166 hours of your 168-hour week.
• A “Caring and Sharing Time” the remaining two hours by practicing six mindsets that allow you to not feel defensive when criticized.
• “Eleven Wisdoms” as a foundation for deepening your love.
• The four “depleters of love,” aka the “Four C’s” (Criticisms, Complaints, Controlling, and Complacency)
• How to use your new skills with your children, parents, work colleagues and people you differ with politically.
• How to use music and dancing to revitalize your love (to be practiced by dancing before each session)

To sustain your practice after the workshop, I invite you to free, ongoing, group follow-up calls to resolve stumbling blocks. If you wish to review the insights and exercises at any time, you will also have the option of purchasing a Zoom and book version of the course.

This workshop is for couples of all genders and sexual orientations.  Developed over the past 30 years, the workshop is also used by many health professionals in their work with clients and patients.

Recommended Resources: Role Mate to Soul Mate by Warren Farrell (BenBella: July 2024); additional video content on warrenfarrell.com.

The myths that built this world — the ones that tell us who belongs, who leads, and who is worthy of care — are losing their hold, and the body knows it. Long before the mind catches up, the body has been carrying the weight of these stories: in the armor we wear, the patterns we embody, and the creativity we withhold.

This workshop is an invitation to go beyond the veil and begin the ancient, necessary work of returning to yourself. Over the course of our time together, you will be guided through a layered journey of the myths that have shaped us and the medicine waiting on the other side.

Our journey weaves in four directions:

• Unlearn — surface the cultural stories embedded in your posture, your patterns, and your pain, and begin to loosen their grip.
• Transform — reorganize the patterns of control, scarcity, and separation that have run your inner life, and feel what opens when they no longer do.
• Recover — reclaim the wisdom, histories, and ways of knowing that dominant culture has obscured or erased.
• Co–create — practice, together, what it actually feels like to move from a different story entirely.

This is the work that makes the other work possible — the foundation beneath every vision, every relationship, every act of courage toward a different future. Designed for those who sense that the world will not change until we do.

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.

Conflict is inevitable. The health of a relationship depends not on whether conflict happens but on how skillfully we repair. The Art of REPAIR is a practical, embodied, and deeply relational process that transforms rupture into connection, clarity, and trust.

In this workshop, relationship facilitator Hazel-Grace Yates will guide you through the six-step REPAIR Process™. Grounded in an integrative approach, The Art of REPAIR blends somatic and nervous system intelligence, authentic relating and relational attunement practices, power dynamics, trauma-informed communication, interpersonal neurobiology, attachment theory, and restorative justice principles. This multidimensional framework helps participants approach conflict not as a threat but as a portal to deeper intimacy, collaborative problem-solving, and long-term relational health.

To integrate your learning, we will weave in movement, songs, playful connection games, guided reflection, and time in nature, supporting not only cognitive understanding but a full-bodied, lasting transformation.

Through guided practices, interactive exercises, and real-life application, you will learn to:

• Regulate your nervous system to meet conflict with clarity, presence, and care rather than reactivity.
• Create a shared reality in complex disagreements so both perspectives are heard and understood.
• Explore five actionable pathways to restore integrity, rebuilding trust and connection.
• Strengthen courage and boundaries to speak your needs without defensiveness or collapse.
• Turn conflict into connection by replacing avoidance or resentment with repair conversations that foster intimacy.

Open to individuals, couples, and groups of all kinds. Come ready to practice, play, and expand your capacity for love. You will leave with tools you can use for life and perhaps discover that conflict, when navigated well, can be one of your greatest access points to connection.

Listen as Hazel-Grace shares about the REPAIR Process in a short video, or explore a 20-minute overview for a deeper understanding of the work.

Recommended Reading: Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship by Terry Real

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.

Imagine your relationship expressing the true depths of your love and commitment. If you are in love, this retreat is an opportunity to rise even higher in love. If you are in crisis, it is an opportunity for healing on the deepest level.

We all carry some degree of negative programming from our past, and there are loving and effective ways to transform this programming into a positive and vibrant celebration of our connection.

During this workshop, you and your partner will take part in guided exercises, experience therapeutic coaching from the Vissells, and connect with the support of other couples, with time set aside for sharing after each practice.

This weekend offers a collection of tools for deeper appreciation and communication building. Themes include healthy communication of feelings, understanding and respecting each other’s differences, navigating conflict resolution, healing past hurts, exploring sexual wellness, connecting with the inner child and inner parent, taking responsibility and developing a true inner connection. Participants are encouraged to explore how these practices might apply to their lives together, both during the retreat and beyond. For more information, visit www.SharedHeart.org.

This workshop welcomes couples of all gender and sexual orientations.

Recommended Reading: To Really Love a Man by Joyce and Barry Vissell & To Really Love a Woman by Joyce and Barry Vissell