Workshops

If you are capable of living deeply one moment of your life, you can learn to live the same way all the other moments of your life. — Thich Nhat Hanh

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:

• Begin the New Year with more presence, ease, and self-awareness.
• Reconnect with their body and breath through mindful movement, including qigong, gentle yoga, and restorative stretching.
• Release long-held tension and cultivate deeper rest.
• Reflect on and clarify heartfelt intentions in a supportive space.
• Experience the benefits of sound healing and meditative stillness.
• Gently replenish their energy and return to daily life with more resilience.

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.

Join us for a celebration of sound and light at the onset of summer, when sunlight stretches to its fullest. By honoring light in its many forms — sunlight, soul light, and vibrational light — this experiential retreat invites you to align with the light found within and through seven alchemy sound journeys, designed to support deep relaxation, gentle re-patterning of the nervous system, and embodied presence.

Composed with a dynamic collection of alchemy crystal bowls — instruments of crystalline intelligence — these alchemical sound journeys can help clear and activate your energy centers (chakras). As we journey from root to crown, you’ll receive a golden thread symbolizing the sushumna nadi, your body’s central pathway of light. Day by day, you’ll mark this thread with colors, symbols, or words that arise to create a sacred artifact — a visual map of the week’s unfolding.

Each day includes creative practices, authentic movement, nature immersion, and teachings to restore connection to Self and source. Big Sur elder Penny Vieregge will join us midweek to share the mystical poetry of Hafiz and awaken your heart chakra.

You will have the opportunity to:

• Experience how sacred sound can help release chronic tension, clear energetic stagnation, and open pathways to clarity and inspiration.
• Learn the history and science of sound healing, with an opportunity to play the alchemy crystal bowls and experience their resonance firsthand.
• Co-create a collective Flower of Life mandala, woven with individual golden threads into a living pattern of light.

Held within Esalen’s wild beauty, where the land, ocean, mineral hot springs, and towering trees invite deep renewal, this solstice retreat offers space to soften, realign, and reconnect with what matters most.