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 MoreJoin us for deep release and renewal as we pause to align with autumn, acknowledge the sacred cycle of life, and move gracefully through this transitory season.
Autumn is a time of letting go and accepting the impermanence of things. For many spiritual traditions, it has long been an opportunity to slow down and reflect — to consciously participate in the process of closing one chapter and starting anew.
During this period of great change, our yoga and meditation practices can help us feel more grounded, rooted, supported, and nourished. We can create more intentional pauses and open to the sacred present moment as it is while we also fortify our inner resources, nourish our health and wellbeing, and expand our capacity for compassion and connection.
With an emphasis on rooting while opening change, we will work with multiple practices to meet this moment of transition and transformation. Each class will focus on balancing the nervous system while weaving together heart-based practices with slow flow yoga, somatic movement, deep restorative relaxation, and Metta meditation. Plus, we’ll incorporate inner reflection, seasonal rituals, and journaling options to help us flow through fall with reverence and ease.
More than ever, we can benefit by pausing, releasing stress and tension, and restoring our energy and nurturing ourselves in order to better nurture our world.
Garth Stevenson will add deeply healing vibrations with his double bass to help us cultivate the balance between grounding and releasing into the spaciousness of the season.
Throughout this retreat, we will practice outdoors and embrace the Autumn elements to truly be with life’s changes and arrive more fully in the present moment.
Recommended Reading: The Power of the Pause By Jillian Pransky
This workshop includes an additional $125 in faculty tuition.
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:
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.
“To feel is to heal. To contact is to awaken.” — Dick Price
Human beings are relational by nature. We are an intricate web of anatomy, energy, space, and time that takes shape through our life experiences. Our physical structure, function, and sense of self are reflected in our fascial layers and formed by our early development, by principles of self-organization, and by how we engage with our environment.
When we fall into habitual patterns, parts of ourselves become undeveloped, unseen. If our bodies are given a setting in which to relate to gravity, others, and our environment with curiosity and attunement, we can be free to move and relate with more choice and ease.
Using the grounds, waters, and spirit of Esalen as our laboratory, Kate and Dwight will use the Feldenkrais Method and Gestalt process as a guide to contact and nurture the influences of the subtle body – our relationship to ground, gravity, and the space between.
In this workshop, participants will:
Identify the habitual relational patterns that prevent us from cultivating ease in our lives.
Investigate how the subtle body is influenced by the principles of emotional anatomy, tensegrity, neuroplasticity, and self-organization through experiential movement.
Be guided through Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement (ATM) lessons tailored toward the subtle body and creating more sophistication in functional movement.
Explore sensation, weight, gravity, and relationship through movement and contact.
Learn tools of Gestalt Relational Process to increase presence and awareness and integration of ourselves.
Recommended Reading: Feldenkrais, The Potent Self: A Study of Spontaneity and Compulsion; Gladis, Tales of a Wounded Healer: Creating Exact Moments of Healing; Bodywise: An Introduction to Hellerwork for Regaining Flexibility & Well-Being.
Stuckness often lives deeper than thought. Many of us sense we are capable of more: more freedom, impact, honest expression, more generative relationships, more alignment with the life and work calling us forward. And yet, inherited rhythms live in the body: rhythms of culture, survival, and belonging that shape what feels safe, possible, or forbidden.
Join this weekend workshop on noticing the grooves you have inherited, shifting the patterns that no longer serve, and practicing new ways of being. In music, rhythm organizes movement, feeling, and attention. In life, our rhythms shape how we relate, create, lead, heal, and become.
During our time together, we will:
This experience is for anyone feeling stuck, limited, under-expressed, or ready to ask what’s next with more courage and clarity. It is for those seeking to move beyond inherited grooves and practice a more embodied, communal, and choiceful life. One rooted in creative healing and collective possibility.
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.
Primordial Qigong is meditation in motion and includes the two most famous forms of Taoist Meditation: the Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Energy Circulation, in which the solar (yang) and lunar (yin) energies flow in harmony, an essential key to vitality and longevity. You will also be given the tools on how to recharge the three dan tians, the body’s primary energy “batteries,” to increase your storehouse of resilient qi (life force) as a buffer against stress and other challenges to well-being. During discussion time, we’ll discover how science explains the benefits of qigong and how the practice is redefining our understanding of health. Primordial Qigong is the legacy of Ken’s teacher Madame Gao Fu, in direct lineage from the founder of the “medical qigong” movement in modern China. The course is perfect for beginners and all levels.
In this weeklong workshop, you’ll have the opportunity to:
Recommended Reading: The Way of Qigong: The Art and Science of Chinese Energy Healing, by Kenneth Cohen
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.
Have you ever held the wind? Or been held by the wind? There is a vitality in all life that is ancient, intuitive, and always accessible. This energy, like the wind, formless yet moving in all directions, creates and sustains life. The body is the doorway through which to meet this energy of being. It is alive inside us, ever-changing, and knows its way around.
Come home to your body to reconnect, remember, and reclaim this vitality. Embrace the knowledge that our lives are much more than a linear unfolding of accomplishments; life is an extension of nature, and our well-being blossoms when we realign with the rhythm of this ancient life force.
During our week together, we’ll slow down and move through an alchemical combination of practices to soothe the senses, quiet the mind, balance the nervous system, and become fully embodied.
Our practices will include:
Let the beauty of this sacred land and the power of community restore your strength and deepen your experience of interconnectedness with everything and everyone. We are not alone. Embrace the awe and wonder of being alive so that you may return home rejuvenated and inspired to continue walking your unique life path.
Note: Please bring a journal. Jovinna invites you to detox from or minimize the use of all electronics during your stay at Esalen.
This workshop includes an additional $55 in faculty tuition.
.png)
We gather on this powerful land for a weekend to remember — with our bodies, minds, and spirits — all that we have to be grateful for. Amidst all of the turmoil, we come together in community to remember that we are enough as we are. Through yoga, meditation, reflection, cliff side baths, and walking on Esalen’s healing land, we will return to our hearts. We’ll be joined by incredible guest teachers and musicians, sharing their expertise, wisdom and gratitude with us.
Together, we’ll explore dynamic yoga asana, pranayama, chanting, meditation, and yoga nidra. Let’s recognize each breath as a gift, as we’re nourished by delicious organic meals, the natural hot springs, walks among the majestic redwoods, or simply curling up in an ocean-view chair. Whether you come alone or with loved ones, you are sure to return to your daily rhythm with a newfound sense of ease, inspiration, and deep gratitude for the life you’re living.
This weekend is about community connection. Opening and closing sessions will be cozy, with more spacious workshops offered on Saturday. In addition, a professional photographer will be part of this experience, and a photo set of the experience will be shared with participants.
This workshop includes an additional $100 faculty tuition.
“Enoughness” is the starting point of any journey toward gratitude. We begin to fully take in the profound gift of all that is unfolding only when we recognize that we are enough.
With Esalen as our transformative container, let’s meet during the week of Thanksgiving. Let’s honor the land and the Esselen people, the indigenous stewards of this place, as we remember the awe of the natural world around us and the life force within us.
Throughout the week, we will practice giving thanks for the world around us. We’ll cultivate curiosity and wonder for the life we have here and now. We’ll begin to move our attention away from the long list of “lack” that can consume our days.
To support the cultivation of this state of being, we will include daily practices to create suppleness in mind, spirit, and body:
We will return to the present to reclaim and embrace ourselves in our wholeness as enough. We will attend to all the ways we are enough, give enough, get enough, and have enough so we can lay claim to the power of life pulsing through us.
Each day will be an exploration of practices and tools that can cultivate and make space for a sense of contentment —and a chance for “giving” to ripple out into the world with grace and gratitude.
This workshop includes $175 additional faculty tuition.
Master Chungliang “Uncle Al” Huang, one of Esalen’s most cherished faculty members, brings 50+ years of teaching experience to welcome you into China’s ancient practice of qigong.
During this workshop, Master Huang will teach the most essential qigong exercises — guiding students through energetic practices of movement, storytelling, and subtle energy work. This is an experience for those who wish to sustain a daily practice for the mind, body, and spirit.
Master Huang will teach easy-to-absorb, adaptive exercises and assist you through metaphors, visualization, sonic chanting, meditation, and deep circular breathing methods. Participants will hear about the great history of this ancient practice as Master Huang shares his vast wealth of knowledge.
A fun, joyful weekend for all ages and levels of practitioners! We will learn to incorporate this healthy practice as a consistent habit: Wei Wu Wei — “doing by not doing, spontaneously.”
Beginners and “advanced beginners” are welcome.
Every yoga posture embodies a story. Every story embodies a posture.
The warrior’s focused intention, the divine monkey’s formidable leap, the lotus’s sacred stillness — these are not mere ideas but encapsulations of physical practice. Encoded in each āsana is a mythic psychology: a map of consciousness, a demand on the practitioner, a doorway into the living tradition from which yoga emerges.
Drawing on Raj Balkaran’s The Stories Behind the Poses, this weekend renders myth experiential rather than informational. Participants will not study these stories from the outside; they will enter these enchanted storyworlds so that the stories, in turn, will inhabit the practitioner.
Each session moves through a thematic arc — from the qualities that make practice possible, through the tensions that deepen it, to the surrender that completes it. Stories of Śiva, Hanumān, Indra, and the great sages are the primary texts, read through breath, posture, and relational presence. Mythic narrative and physical form illuminate one another: posture becomes story enacted in the body; story becomes posture enacted in consciousness.
No background in mythology or Sanskrit required. What is needed is willingness to meet ancient India’s wisdom traditions not as history but as living tradition.
Recommended reading: The Stories Behind the Poses, by Raj Balkaran
To be truly creative, to let go of preconceived restrictions, is to allow yourself the freedom to flow. Taoist wisdom calls this Wu Wei — the art of not interfering with what is already happening.
During this weeklong workshop, we will playfully reinvent Tai Ji forms with ancient Tai Ji rituals, Five Moving Forces of Nature, and traditional Tai Ji motifs. We will explore, improvise, and evolve to find renewed and refreshed ways to dance the open structures of this ancient wonder of movement meditation.
With more than fifty consecutive years of teaching experience at Esalen, Master Huang creates a unique Tai Ji class for practitioners at all levels. Come prepared to enjoy “Uncle Al’s” storytelling, energy practices, and qigong mastery in this creative “Living Your Tao” Tai Ji experience.
Winter solstice is a time to reflect — to cultivate vitality and nurture ourselves. The dark days of winter are an opportune time to slow down and make space for self-care. This winter solstice yoga retreat will focus on cultivating inner awareness. By practicing in community, we build inner vitality and brightness to return home renewed.
During this retreat, we will combine three healing practices to revitalize the body and calm the mind in the exquisite and rejuvenating natural environment of Esalen.
Together, we will focus our attention on being by using:
The word solstice is derived from the Latin words sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still) because the seasonal movement of the sun’s path appears to come to a stop before reversing direction at the solstices. Moving into stillness, we can return to our lives refreshed and strengthened for the new year to come.
All levels are welcome.
This workshop includes an additional material fee $20.
%25252520(1).png)
Winter Solstice marks a sacred turning point — the threshold where darkness begins to yield to the returning light. As nature grows quiet and the earth turns inward, we are invited to slow down, listen deeply, and tend the inner flame.
Guided by the wisdom of the chakra system, this immersive retreat explores the seven chakras as flames of radiance and portals of awakening for our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual lives. Throughout our time together, we journey through these inner landscapes, exploring both the luminous gifts and shadow expressions held within each energy center.
Each day we weave transformative practices — meditation, kundalini kriya, asana, dance, yin and somatic movement, sound healing, writing, creativity, and seasonal ritual — designed to nourish the body, support restoration, awaken the heart, quiet the mind, and rekindle the sacred fire within.
Sound and voice also become an integral part of our exploration. Guest musician and teacher Daphne Tse joins us to share the healing practice of SoulSongs through live music, seed mantras, chakra toning, guided vocal meditation, and gentle vocal exploration. Together we’ll experience how sound moves through the body’s energy centers, awakening the flame within each chakra and giving voice to what has long lived beneath the surface.
This retreat includes:
In yogic philosophy, radiance is not something we acquire; it is something we uncover. Like a flame sheltered beneath ash, our inner light remains present even in seasons of challenge, transition, or uncertainty.
Together, we gather at Winter Solstice to honor both the darkness and the returning light, tending the sacred flames within and awakening more fully to the joy, mystery, vulnerability, and wonder of being alive.
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.
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.
This workshop includes an additional $350 in faculty tuition.
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.
Soul is flow. It’s an ever-changing play of sensations and feelings. It’s how the deathless presence meets and moves our finite human body. In this workshop, we will reclaim the body-in-motion as a doorway to the life unfolding just under the surface of everyday forgetting.
A formless dance form, Soul Motion® allows for passionate, full-bodied movement as well as mindful inner explorations, art-making, ritual, and luscious lounging. Together, we will integrate conscious movement, body-based inquiries of Gestalt Practice, and the stillness of nature for a process to transform body, heart, and spirit.
Soul Motion is a meeting between self and other in a dance that is deeply creative, nourishing, and transforming. It is a movement toward the dynamic stillness at the center of all things — the place of rest at the heart of sound and motion.
During this week together, we will:
Open to anybody willing to move, pause, listen, and truly relax into one timeless moment. This workshop is especially helpful for people in the healing professions who work with clients, patients, and students.
We are living at speeds the nervous system was never designed to sustain. In a culture organized around acceleration, optimization, and constant responsiveness, the present moment increasingly becomes something to manage rather than inhabit. Over time, this accumulates in the body as urgency, fragmentation, exhaustion, and the persistent feeling of being unable to fully arrive inside one’s own life.
In wild times such as these, steadiness becomes essential. Not as retreat from reality, but to provide the capacity to remain in responsive relationship to it — to stay grounded, perceptive, and connected amid intensity, uncertainty, and continual change.
This immersive exploration of yoga, breathwork, meditation, rhythm, and embodied presence is designed to cultivate this capacity from the inside out. Drawing from the science of nervous system regulation, contemplative practices, and the body’s innate intelligence, the workshop offers participants an opportunity to experience a different relationship to time, attention, and internal pace.
Before productivity and clock time became the dominant organizing forces of human life, experience moved differently — through rhythm, repetition, seasonality, ritual, and cycles of return. The body still recognizes this language, even if modern life has trained us to override it. Through intentional practice, participants begin reconnecting with these deeper rhythms, discovering what becomes possible when urgency loosens its grip on the nervous system.
Throughout the weekend, participants will explore how acceleration operates internally — shaping breath patterns, posture, attention, thought, emotional response, and one’s relationship to self and others. Through intelligently sequenced practices ranging from grounding yoga and restorative stillness to rhythmic breathwork and guided meditation, the body becomes both laboratory and teacher.
Rather than treating regulation as a fixed achievement, this work approaches steadiness as a trainable, dynamic skill — one that develops through practice, attention, and lived experience.
This is not an escape from modern life, nor a nostalgic return to an imagined past. It is an experiment in reorganization — an opportunity to cultivate steadiness within the conditions of contemporary life itself.
What becomes possible when groundedness is no longer accidental, but practiced? When presence becomes sustainable enough to accompany you beyond the retreat space and into the realities of daily life?
Bring in the New Year with a rejuvenating week of meditation, music, and gentle yoga, guided by Buddhist teacher and author Lopön Chandra. As winter invites us to slow down and turn inward, we’ll explore “wintering” — the art of embracing rest, renewal, and the quiet gifts of this season.
Enjoy meditation sessions, both indoors and outdoors, while gazing over the Pacific Ocean, perhaps even spotting migrating whales. Learn techniques for developing shamatha, meaning “calm abiding,” and concentration, including mindfulness of breathing and Buddhist-based awareness practices. Experience the healing benefits of mantra recitation and devotional music, along with gentle, therapeutic yoga to support deeper states of relaxation and insight.
This week is designed for fun, reflection, and restoration. Whether you’re new to meditation and yoga or an experienced practitioner, you’ll find accessible practices, supportive accommodations, and a welcoming community. Seated and supine meditations will be offered for all bodies and abilities.
Throughout the week, guest musicians Cassian Rose and Robert James Ryan III of Sorelia bring decades of experience in improvisatory music and the contemplative arts, weaving violin, percussion, flute, vocals, looping, and subtle sound design into rich, immersive soundscapes for ceremony and ritual space.
Come as you are and leave refreshed, carrying winter’s quiet wisdom and renewed inspiration into the New Year. All are welcome.
The gateway of the body is a powerful vessel that allows us to move and be moved. During this unique seven day retreat, we will dance into and through the gateway of the new year, crossing the thresholds of past, present, and future. We will honor the darkness of this season while igniting the light of prayer and hope for the future, dancing out of distraction and into the focused space of collective movement medicine.
If we have the courage to move the body, the heart and mind can follow. Come open the gateway of your body by unlocking presence and potential. Join us and find out what is waiting for you on the other side.
The 5Rhythms®, a moving meditation practice, teaches us skills and tools to use in our everyday lives that help us facilitate the union of presence-based awareness. The rhythms — Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness — allow us to explore the true nature of who we are and how our energy moves in this world.
In the 5Rhythms, we engage in mindfulness while in motion as a pathway to externalize energy and activate the nervous system. Seated meditation allows the space for quiet integration of the nervous system. The two polarities of moving and sitting meditation together mirror the dance of life and open the door to cultivate peace, well-being, and balance.
No experience is required. All workshop hours contribute to 5Rhythms teacher training prerequisites.
Recommended reading: Maps to Ecstasy, Connections, & Sweat Your Prayers, by Gabrielle Roth, Dancing with the Dharma Edited by Harrison Blum, Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness by David Treleaven
This workshop includes an additional $120 of faculty tuition.
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.
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)
This workshop invites you to explore the creative spirit that resides within each of us. Whether you are an experienced artist or simply seeking to uncover your potential, this meditative experience promises to be enriching.
We will begin with colored pencils to open our hearts and let creativity flow naturally. Then, with acrylic paints, participants will create a personal mandala (an integrated image of wholeness), Sri Yantra (a mystical diagram used in Hinduism that represents the union of the masculine and feminine divine energies), or designs of their choice. By the end of the workshop, you will have finished a unique and beautiful piece of art.
The practice of painting is both healing and meditative, and this journey is meant to expand our consciousness and ability to deepen our connections with nature and our inner selves. It is a gentle entry into the left brain hemisphere to open our capacity for creative experiences. Our time together is designed to provide the foundation for painting as a sacred art, to introduce participants to their possibilities as an artist, and to help them walk down the artist’s path — one paved with joy, insight, and awareness.
.png)
A journey to heal oneself and awaken deeply from within. Through meditation, yoga, and time in nature, we will tap into the stories our bodies have to tell and develop skills to nourish ourselves in 2027.
This workshop focuses on the transition from one year to the next as an opportunity to purposefully cultivate a sense of renewal. During our time together, you will be guided to explore and experience what this means for you personally.
Ritual invocations of energy and the power of the Esalen grounds themselves will support your healing journey by providing an intentional space for you to reflect on all you have experienced individually and collectively within your community during the past year.
Throughout the weekend, we will share new ways of grounding and connecting to the sacred energy of nature and the elements constantly surrounding us. This supports the act of renewal, cultivates greater presence, and creates capacity to build and replenish energy throughout the coming year.
In this workshop, all participants are invited:
.png)
To encounter someone, something, or someplace implies that it’s unexpected or a surprise. Encountering the moment means coming face-to-face with the unknown. In movement practice, we train ourselves to stay open, curious, centered, and responsive at the front edge of any encounter — counterbalancing those innate primal reactions to fight, flee, freeze, or please.
Rather than withdrawing, playing it safe, or tolerating things you shouldn’t, imagine being adept at staying present and standing your ground clearly and authentically. Picture a world where we are able to express opinions, feelings, discontents, and appreciations skillfully while remaining wholeheartedly open to outcome and change.
In this workshop, within a supportive and challenging environment, we will create “safe emergencies” — situations intense enough to command our attention that are managed with care and support, to help us risk moving beyond habitual self-defeating patterns. Participants can receive real feedback and gain plenty of practice making new choices in relation to others.
Recommended Reading: https://www.andreajuhan.com/content/open-floor-encounter-dance-therapy-and-transformation
20 CE credits available for full attendance of this course
For questions about CE, contact Spiritual Competency Academy at info@spiritualcompetencyacademy.com.
.png)
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.
What if everything you’ve experienced in your life could be danced? What if an image drawn carried a message for healing? What if a dance inspired a drawing that sparks words for a poem and the poem transforms a difficult story that needs to be told into beauty?
Grounded in the Halprin Life Art Process™, this workshop’s approach enlivens dialogues between body and imagination, life experience and art making, and creativity and healing. With creative explorations of the expressive arts — movement, drawing, and poetic writing — participants will be guided in creative encounters with the symbolic and metaphoric life of the body.
Each day begins with somatic awareness and movement to awaken and attune the physical body. From there, you’ll navigate your personal material through a model that interweaves movement/dance, visual art, poetic narrative, performative ritual, and witnessing.
Together, we’ll work with Body Part Mapping and the Self Portrait Process: visual and narrative maps to lead us into the themes, memories, and dreams that inform our lives. Individual and collective life narratives will provide material to generate encounters and inspire embodied models for change.
Participants can expect to explore:
Please make sure to bring a writer’s journal and a box of varied and well-supplied Craypas pastels.
Somatic warm-ups will be guided by guest faculty Natan Dascal, with live music provided throughout the workshop by guest musician Miles Lassi.
Recommended reading: The Expressive Body in Life, Art & Therapy by Daria Halprin
Human beings are relational by nature. We are an intricate web of anatomy, energy, space, and time that takes shape through our life experiences. Our physical structure, function, and sense of self are reflected in our fascial layers and formed by our early development, by principles of self-organization, and by how we engage with our environment.
When we fall into habitual patterns, parts of ourselves become undeveloped, unseen. If our bodies are given a setting in which to relate to gravity, others, and our environment with curiosity and attunement, we can be free to move and relate with more choice and ease.
Using the grounds, waters, and spirit of Esalen as our laboratory, Kate and Dwight will use the Feldenkrais Method and Gestalt process as a guide to contact and nurture the influences of the subtle body – our relationship to ground, gravity, and the space between.
In this workshop, participants will:
Recommended Reading: Feldenkrais, The Potent Self: A Study of Spontaneity and Compulsion; Gladis, Tales of a Wounded Healer: Creating Exact Moments of Healing; Bodywise: An Introduction to Hellerwork for Regaining Flexibility & Well-Being.
Join Janet in this nourishing and revitalizing weekend, designed to replenish the nervous system and adrenals, boost the immune system, and ground our hearts and minds in simplicity. We will drop down through body-mind-spirit to find space between effort and surrender, allowing our internal systems to release toxins and integrate the powerful wellness generated by our bodies through our physical practices. Slow and fluid movement, restorative postures, meditation, pranayama (breathwork), and chanting will refill the mind, body, and spirit.
We will create space in our body for introspection and move out of the cyclical fight-or-flight response to cultivate sustainable power, rest, and healing.
We’ll practice:
Please bring an eye pillow. If you are driving, please also bring a sandbag and bolster.
CE Credit Available: 10 hours Continued Education credit for Registered Yoga Teachers (RYT) available through Yoga Alliance; see leader.
This workshop includes an additional $100 faculty tuition.
In a world that asks us to move faster, produce more, and stay continually switched on, there is another rhythm waiting beneath the noise — the steady pulse of our own being. As an act of protest, we invite ourselves to slow down, listen inward, and remember what it feels like to feel and heal.
Through slow, nourishing yoga, restorative practices, Yoga Nidra, meditation, chanting, breathwork, and the deeply resonant medicine of live sound healing, we will explore the art of shifting from effort into receptivity. We will work with the nervous system rather than against it, cultivating greater regulation, spaciousness, resilience, and ease.
Our practices will support the body in releasing habitual patterns of tension and hypervigilance while inviting deep restoration. Gentle movement will awaken circulation and vitality without depletion; restorative postures and Yoga Nidra will create space for profound rest; breath, chanting, and sound will offer pathways into resonance and vagal toning.
At the heart of our time together is a simple question: What becomes possible when we stop pushing and begin listening? Together, we will cultivate the capacity to move between activation and rest, effort and surrender, movement and stillness — building strength not only through doing, but through the profound intelligence of rest.
Through the alchemy of live sound, accompanied by world-renowned sound-healing musician Christian DiMarco, we will allow vibration, rhythm, silence, and resonance to carry us somewhere words cannot: a return to the sanctuary within.
This workshop includes an additional $220 in faculty tuition.
Most people don’t actually fear failure; they fear their own brilliance. In this weeklong journey, we’ll explore how subtle self-sabotage, shrinking, and doubt prevent us from claiming our gifts. Through coherence coaching, embodied exercises, and radical self-honesty, you’ll discover the courage to live as the powerful being you already are.
Participants will:
When we embrace our greatness, we move beyond fear into freedom, clarity, and contribution. You’ll receive practical tools and experience a supportive community for the embodied confidence to live your dopeness with courage and joy.
Enter the innate intelligence of your body — a space to soften the pressures of daily life, unwind habitual stress patterns, and reconnect with the subtle language of sensation, movement, and presence. Across ten hours of experiential somatic practice, you’ll be led through a blend of nervous system regulation practice, intuitive movement, memory reprocessing, dance as ritual, and Eastern mindfulness traditions.
Through rhythm, stillness, and the language of sensation, we’ll explore the “pulse” — the subtle currents of stress, emotion, and instinct that shape our lived experience — and the “presence” that allows those currents to reorganize into clarity, steadiness, and embodied freedom. Expect gentle and profound movement sessions, somatic inquiry, experiential healing work, and spacious reflection as you meet the places within you that have been bracing, hiding, or holding.
Together, we’ll enter a somatic journey of arriving more fully in the body, listening to the stories held beneath layers of tension, and exploring how embodied expression can support emotional unwinding and restoration. Participants are invited to explore the relationship between sensation, emotions, and the body’s natural capacity to process what has been carried beneath the surface of daily stress and unconscious bracing.
This immersive offering is experiential in nature and may include moments of emotional depth and personal reflection. Participants are encouraged to move at their own pace and honor their individual needs throughout the process. No prior experience with somatic work or movement practices is necessary — only a willingness to be curious, present, and open to exploring the body’s innate wisdom.
The March equinox, a time of transition and harmony, is a wonderful opportunity to deepen our practice of yoga. The light is returning from the dark days of winter, and balance is our theme — both on the yoga mat and for our emotional and spiritual selves. Just as the plants are beginning to bud, our own dreams, visions, and creativity are emerging from their winter gestation. The fertile and dynamic land of Esalen is a perfect setting to hold us for this exploration of Spring.
During this retreat, we will combine three healing practices to revitalize the body and calm the mind in the exquisite and rejuvenating natural environment of Esalen. Together, we will focus our attention on the practices of:
This immersive weekend will leave us balanced, revitalized, and ready for the full and active days of Spring and Summer.
This workshop includes an additional $20 fee for workshop materials
Our ancestors explored spirit-led movement to embody ecstatic states for generations. Whether as a form of celebration, mourning, or prayer, ecstatic dance has long served as sacred medicine, healing the hearts of individuals and communities.
Join us on this sacred land for a transformative weekend of ecstatic dance ceremony — a journey to tap into the body’s ancestral wisdom, alchemize stored emotions, and liberate the spirit. Supported by live music provided by an award-winning ecstatic dance DJ, we’ll surrender to freeform movement, awaken our power, and manifest hope.
Together, we will explore:
Jungle Haus, an ecstatic dance DJ, will weave Afro rhythms, percussion, and worldly sounds, inviting us to move, connect, and awaken through the healing power of dance.
Gabriel Logan Braun, a sound healer, will create soundscapes to welcome our energetic balance and integration.
Let’s cultivate collective empowerment and create a fully inclusive dance community rooted in presence, reverence, and prayer to groove with the divine as an offering of love. No dance experience required.
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:
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.
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.
Join this weekend of joyful exploration into the distance between the head and the heart with teachings that bridge dance and meditation. One releases energy outward, the other inward. One explores the freedom we express and let be witnessed, and the other the inner courage to reimagine ourselves, our past, and our future.
The retreat goes beyond traditional practice and invites you to discover the intelligence inherent in all forms of movement: movement of the body, of perspective, of breath and air.
Together, we’ll blend imaginative, expressive movement (Bohemian) with grounding, introspective practice (Gravity) into a holistic, adaptable approach open to anyone, regardless of age or experience. Through dance, intuitive movement, guided meditation, breathwork, and other somatic practices, we’ll move between dynamic and deeply restful states, carried by curated music drawn from ethical, electronic, and instrumental sources.
Sessions are designed to awaken awareness, deepen creativity, expand personal freedom, and align head, heart, and gut. Participants often experience the release of long-held tension rooted in unconscious patterns, opening space for imagination, joy, and inner freedom.
.png)
Revamp, reinvigorate, and polish your luminous self this Spring with innovative yoga practices for body, mind, and spirit! This yoga renewal workshop includes energizing movement, flow yoga, core activations, meridian sequencing, tapping, rejuvenating holds, and cleansing rituals based on the five elements.
Yoga for the skin sloughs off the old with a potent five-step cleansing ritual. Revitalizing and fluid yoga sequences stimulate the body before thoughtfully weaving muscles and mind together into a recreated and radiant being. We will even take advantage of the potent Esalen springs with specific bathing rituals. The daily practices of the sparkling Yoga Spring Renewal workshop will be fresh, fun, and rejuvenating — and will leave you feeling the same!
Certified in Anusara Yoga and the Halprin Life Art Process, Ulrika blends holistic practices of yoga, somatic movement therapy, and Swedish skin rituals with the elements of nature for movement medicine. The many layers and systems of the body are addressed, with balanced attention given to the physical and the energetic, the form and the formless, the unique individual and the collective universal patterns.
Participants should bring a dry brush, coconut oil, and a facial clay mask.
This workshop encourages at least three months of a yoga practice.
The most practical thing you can do for yourself is remember how to feel again, and be able to express it. Many men are running on empty, tense in the body, stuck in their heads. This weekend utilizes movement, breath, rhythm and voice to bring you back into your body and into real community with other men.
The what, why, and how of our time together:
Discover practices you can use, plus more presence, connection and ease.
This workshop is specifically designed to create a space for sacred brotherhood for participants who identify as male.
Recommended Reading: Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark and To Be A Man by Robert Augustus Masters
.png)
Get notified about new programs.
Esalen Institute
55000 Highway 1
Big Sur, CA 93920
US: 1-831-667-3000
info@esalen.org