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 MoreEmbody and reconnect with your unique ancestral wisdom with the Five Elements of Yoga and Chinese medicine through nature, movement and art. Experientially learn Five Element philosophy and tools– from two similar yet divergent traditions– to apply in daily life. Discover your unique relationship with each Element, and come home to the wild beauty of your inner radiance!
Enjoy five nourishing days connecting with ourselves, each other, and the sacred Esalen landscape. Begin each morning with gentle yoga asana, pranayama, and meditation. Then root your understanding with engaging presentations, dynamic discussions, nature connection, journaling, and creative play.
Dive into the Five Elements of Yoga on Tuesday, explore the Five Elements of Chinese Medicine on Wednesday, then integrate on Thursday with group discussion, creative explorations, and restorative group acupuncture. Each day, we will:
Reconnect with your unique ancestral wisdom through the Five Elements of Yoga and Chinese Medicine. Take home tangible skills and practices to align with seasonal rhythms in your daily life. Connect with the beauty of your inner and outer wilderness, resourcing abundant wild, creative, infinite potential to fully thrive.
We warmly welcome all levels of experience in yoga. We will have daily movement sessions, with modifications offered for most levels of mobility. This workshop is not appropriate for someone in a wheelchair.
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.
Now more than ever, it is important we build practices that 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 through sound, ceremony, and self-discovery.
In this intimate and transformative workshop, you will have the unique opportunity to experience multiple East Forest ceremony performances. These deeply meditative experiences will include both live and unreleased East Forest recorded music. Additionally, Radha will lead us in embodied movement, based upon the principles of self awakening yoga, somatic experiencing, and yin yoga, to create an all-levels and accessible doorway to inner insights. Radha will also use her training with Transpersonal Psychology and with Thomas Hubl while working with participants.
We can discover the inner pathways to fortitude and healing through the primacy of our own heart-opening, felt experience, and:
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.
Please note: While the retreat space and exercises are conducive to deep inner work, the facilitators and Esalen do not condone the use of or provide substances of any kind.
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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.
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Winter is coming…
Falling on the heels of the hibernal solstice, WITHIN is an invitation to turn inward — an opportunity to go deeper within ourselves in order to create new and to enhance existing practices that enliven creativity and curiosity burning within.
Traditional yogic wisdom speaks of pratyahara, which is best understood as "going to the source of the senses." We are embracing the idea that cocooning toward generative ends leads to better connection and relationships, heightened synergies to cultivate our creative impulses, and nurturance of the self and of others. Winter solstice celebrations are steeped in meaningful symbolic dualities: fire and light, life and death, the rising and setting sun and moon.
Go Within is a campus-wide winter festival, for all who seek the light that inspirationally pours through the darkness. Like our brother and sister wild animals, when we are drawn into the earth, into our bodies, we can welcome sleep to search and discover the cavernous parts within us. Through the embrace of the arts and our own creativity, we unleash the pulsating, reverberating inner curiosity that fuels imagination and sparks innovation.
To create and turn things outward, we must first look inward to explore with a greater heightened sense the great depths of what our hidden potentials hold. Winter is our mysterious season— she can be kind and soft. Rather than fear and avoid her, let’s celebrate her (and our own) complexity. To find and uncover our light, let’s together and individually embrace the dark, far reaches and prepare to launch into a new year ever more illuminated.
What to expect over this metamorphosing week:
We hope you’ll join us.
Bring in the New Year with a rejuvenating week filled with meditation, music, and the time and space to release the old and welcome the new. We’ll slow down and experience the benefits meditation, gentle yoga, and music offer the body, mind, and soul. Buddhist teacher and author Lopön Chandra will share expert meditation guidance to help you release into grounded presence with ease and comfort.
In this workshop, you will have the opportunity to:
Musician and guest teacher Adrienne Shamszad will lead meditative musical experiences to support your release into grounded presence. You will learn centering breathing techniques, empowering vocal exercises, and sweet, memorable prayer songs that will accompany you throughout your journey at Esalen and as you transition into the new year.
This will be a week of fun, relaxation, and rejuvenation to get you recharged for the coming year. Whatever your spiritual path or meditation experience, you are welcome just as you are. No prior experience is required. Seated and supine meditations will be offered. All are welcome.
Winter is coming…
Falling on the heels of the hibernal solstice, WITHIN is an invitation to turn inward — an opportunity to go deeper within ourselves in order to create new and to enhance existing practices that enliven creativity and curiosity burning within.
Traditional yogic wisdom speaks of pratyahara, which is best understood as "going to the source of the senses." We are embracing the idea that cocooning toward generative ends leads to better connection and relationships, heightened synergies to cultivate our creative impulses, and nurturance of the self and of others. Winter solstice celebrations are steeped in meaningful symbolic dualities: fire and light, life and death, the rising and setting sun and moon.
Go Within is a campus-wide winter festival, for all who seek the light that inspirationally pours through the darkness. Like our brother and sister wild animals, when we are drawn into the earth, into our bodies, we can welcome sleep to search and discover the cavernous parts within us. Through the embrace of the arts and our own creativity, we unleash the pulsating, reverberating inner curiosity that fuels imagination and sparks innovation.
To create and turn things outward, we must first look inward to explore with a greater heightened sense the great depths of what our hidden potentials hold. Winter is our mysterious season— she can be kind and soft. Rather than fear and avoid her, let’s celebrate her (and our own) complexity. To find and uncover our light, let’s together and individually embrace the dark, far reaches and prepare to launch into a new year ever more illuminated.
What to expect over this metamorphosing week:
We hope you’ll join us.
Winter is coming…
Falling on the heels of the hibernal solstice, WITHIN is an invitation to turn inward — an opportunity to go deeper within ourselves in order to create new and to enhance existing practices that enliven creativity and curiosity burning within.
Traditional yogic wisdom speaks of pratyahara, which is best understood as "going to the source of the senses." We are embracing the idea that cocooning toward generative ends leads to better connection and relationships, heightened synergies to cultivate our creative impulses, and nurturance of the self and of others. Winter solstice celebrations are steeped in meaningful symbolic dualities: fire and light, life and death, the rising and setting sun and moon.
Go Within is a campus-wide winter festival, for all who seek the light that inspirationally pours through the darkness. Like our brother and sister wild animals, when we are drawn into the earth, into our bodies, we can welcome sleep to search and discover the cavernous parts within us. Through the embrace of the arts and our own creativity, we unleash the pulsating, reverberating inner curiosity that fuels imagination and sparks innovation.
To create and turn things outward, we must first look inward to explore with a greater heightened sense the great depths of what our hidden potentials hold. Winter is our mysterious season— she can be kind and soft. Rather than fear and avoid her, let’s celebrate her (and our own) complexity. To find and uncover our light, let’s together and individually embrace the dark, far reaches and prepare to launch into a new year ever more illuminated.
What to expect over this metamorphosing week:
We hope you’ll join us.
Winter is coming…
Falling on the heels of the hibernal solstice, WITHIN is an invitation to turn inward — an opportunity to go deeper within ourselves in order to create new and to enhance existing practices that enliven creativity and curiosity burning within.
Traditional yogic wisdom speaks of pratyahara, which is best understood as "going to the source of the senses." We are embracing the idea that cocooning toward generative ends leads to better connection and relationships, heightened synergies to cultivate our creative impulses, and nurturance of the self and of others. Winter solstice celebrations are steeped in meaningful symbolic dualities: fire and light, life and death, the rising and setting sun and moon.
Go Within is a campus-wide winter festival, for all who seek the light that inspirationally pours through the darkness. Like our brother and sister wild animals, when we are drawn into the earth, into our bodies, we can welcome sleep to search and discover the cavernous parts within us. Through the embrace of the arts and our own creativity, we unleash the pulsating, reverberating inner curiosity that fuels imagination and sparks innovation.
To create and turn things outward, we must first look inward to explore with a greater heightened sense the great depths of what our hidden potentials hold. Winter is our mysterious season— she can be kind and soft. Rather than fear and avoid her, let’s celebrate her (and our own) complexity. To find and uncover our light, let’s together and individually embrace the dark, far reaches and prepare to launch into a new year ever more illuminated.
What to expect over this metamorphosing week:
We hope you’ll join us.
How we sit, stand, move, and respond to our inner and outer world reflects deeply ingrained patterns wired into our nervous systems since childhood. They reflect our early solutions to physical survival in our family system. Out of awareness, these beliefs and strategies can still run our adult lives, limit our choices, and prevent physical ease and emotional healing.
If you still have pain or limitations from a past injury, it is usually because many other areas in your body had to overwork to protect and avoid using the injured area while you were recovering. These unconscious compensations can create an imbalanced workload and, eventually, new issues elsewhere in our body that prevent complete healing.
Using CFR®, we slowly explore and deeply sense small, gentle movements that bring these hidden patterns into awareness. When our genius nervous system becomes aware of a habit that is no longer useful, it extinguishes it. A greater experience of self-trust and self-worth is uncovered. A new sense of self-love, which comes from paying attention to your details without judgment, usually emerges.
This workshop is for the sedentary who want to become more active, the highly active who want to avoid injury and gain a competitive edge, and the chronically tired and stressed who want to improve breathing, posture, and flexibility. It is for those who have experienced physical injury or emotional trauma and those in helping professions who wish to enhance outcomes for clients and patients.
You will leave equipped with simple yet effective tools for continued self-healing. Your discoveries will lead to a state of awe about what is possible in your body, your movement, and your life.
Devotion is the Divine streaming through you, from that place in you, before time. — Vijnana Bhairava Tantra
A beautiful longing for the sacred lives in each of us, awaiting our surrender to the currents of devotion. In this workshop, song, story, and yoga connect us to the great mystery and imbue our hearts with deep remembrance. By learning the stories and songs of the ancestors, we reclaim a sense of belonging. Nature ritual initiates a fresh spiral of rebirth for our wild hearts. Meditation and embodiment drench us in the divine. With equal parts courage and tenderness, we’ll hone our beings to be vessels for devotion to move through.
Together, we’ll explore:
Our nourishing schedule of experiential practices will be balanced harmoniously with relaxing meals, community connection, and starlit soaks in Esalen’s healing baths. Music, nature, poetry, and relational play will be woven together artfully throughout. We lovingly invite you to discover the way of devotion, offering a pathway home to the vastness of your being.
Grace awaits.
This workshop includes an additional $25 faculty tuition.
Through the practices of 5Rhythms dance, mindfulness meditation and self care, we weave together a week of healing and celebration. In times of turmoil and change, self care, compassion and kindness are qualities required to help us resource and renew. Looking back at all we have, it is clear that many of us are exhausted. In order to begin to move forward with energy, passion and creativity, it is important we can seed these qualities in our daily life.
How much self care do you integrate into daily life? Would you like to be better resourced and have more energy? If the answer is yes to either of these questions, then you are in perfect alignment to participate in this workshop.
The 5Rhythms is an externalization process that through movement, releases and balances the systems of the body. It is a method focused on presence versus performance. While seated meditation offers us a process of quieting the heart and mind, allowing for stillness and integration. Bringing both practices together mirrors the dance of life. We come together to create an environment that cultivates and nurtures joy, calmness and ease.
Each session will be primarily focused on Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms moving meditation practice. We will complete each practice with a 10-15 seated meditation. Included will be a discourses on 5Rhythms, Dharma & self-care. All practices taught during this course lend to the experience and wisdom of resourcing and renewing our vital life energy.
No experience is necessary. All workshop hours contribute to 5Rhythms® Teachers Training.
This workshop includes $100 additional faculty tuition.
After the holiday season, it's time to return inward to focus on your inner artist. Whether you are just beginning or returning to your creative journey, this workshop utilizes approachable yoga, meditation, and writing modalities to unlock the creative within.
Using humor and mindfulness, you are invited to affirm your inner artist, recognize your creative blocks, and understand your process. We will disconnect from our devices and default-world lives to immerse ourselves in the open air of Esalen. Move your body, find your breath, observe your mind, and fill pages with your words while being guided to relinquish fear and live fully in your creativity.
This workshop will include:
As educators, storytellers, and human do-ers, Darnell and Cara believe in growth, happiness, and the powerful symbiosis between storytelling and movement — and they invite you to lean into the magic of that relationship. This workshop will foster an encouraging environment designed to cultivate techniques and rituals, fuel creativity, and provide the confidence to integrate it all into your daily life and discover your identity as an artist.
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 2024.
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 to support continued health and well-being.
In this workshop, all participants are invited:
“I have never seen anyone who took a huge risk for growth that was not rewarded 10,000 times.” — John O’Donohue
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.
20 CE units available for full attendance of this course
• CE credits for psychologists are provided by the Spiritual Competency Academy (SCA) which is co-sponsoring this program. The Spiritual
Competency Academy is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Spiritual Competency Academy maintains responsibility for this program and its content.
For questions about CE, contact Spiritual Competency Academy at info@spiritualcompetencyacademy.com.
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By slowing down and tuning in, we can allow sound, wonder, and movement to usher us into an altered state of consciousness. Many physicists call this the quantum field; other scholars and shamans refer to it as “unity” or “cosmic consciousness.” Sound journeys with alchemy crystal singing bowls can transport us into a deep state of inner tranquility and lighten the way by clearing and releasing the stress and tensions held within.
We welcome you to join us for a wonderful experience of renewal, healing, and love as we gather together to restore body, mind, and spirit. Authentic movement will invite us to embody the vibrational qualities of the heart. As these grace states are elevated, we can begin to transform the world within and around us.
Each day will include a blend of nourishing sound journeys, experiential activities, movement, bespoke teachings, and group discussion. Together, inspired by the beautiful earth, healing mineral waters, ancient redwoods, fresh ocean air, and starry skies, we’ll find connection and wonder. Come away with new practices and inspiration for the journey ahead.
Special guest Damaris (Penny Vieregge) will join us to share the poetry of Hafiz as we join together to celebrate World Sound Healing Day and send out a sonic Valentine to our beautiful world!
Come away with a renewed sense of peace, gratitude, and love, as you return home with new practices and inspiration for the journey ahead.
Recommended Reading: The Ancient Language of Sacred Sound: The Acoustic Science of the Divine by David Elkington; Sound Medicine: How to Use the Ancient Science of Sound to Heal the Body and Mind by Kulreet Chaudhary, MD
Awaken the codes of radiant love with yoga, nature, and community. In the yoga tradition, there are seven key energy centers called chakras that support transformation in body, mind, and heart. Each chakra helps to transform wounds into wisdom and pain into love.
Learn how to activate these seven centers with breath, movement, and sound currents. The chakras help us to embody prosperity, intimacy, courage, love, clarity, intuition, and connection. They support us with greater vitality and healing energy. Think of the chakras as portals through which we unlock gifts in body, psyche, and life.
Together, we’ll explore the alchemical practices of:
Alchemize from root to crown on this journey through the seven chakras uniting the mystical and physical forces within you. Key practices include asana (physical postures of yoga), pranayama (breathing techniques), mantra (healing sound vibration), mudra (energy seals), meditation (expanded states of awareness), and vichara (self-inquiry).
In this Alchemy of Love retreat, Sianna and Masood will share stories, music, and practices to amplify the love frequency in your life. There will be four thematic journeys:
Friday: Radiance — a welcoming practice with breath and asana, grounding energies, root support, setting the foundation, calling in intentions, and soaking in deep rest for full-body restoration. This session focuses on the first two chakras connected to earth and water.
Saturday: Power to Transform — a more up-tempo practice of dynamic breathing techniques, core work, functional movement, introduction to backbends, and creative patterns of movement. This session focuses on the chakras connected to fire and air.
Saturday: Renewal and Rejuvenation — a more relaxed practice to explore deep hip openers, forward folds, and twists with expanded states of consciousness through mantra and meditation. This session focuses on the upper three chakras to the elements of space, unification, and transcendent energies.
Sunday: Alchemy of Love — a soulful practice with deep breath, heart fire vision, standing poses, backbends, and community connection. Culminating with a Chakra Radiance dance party with mantra, music, and love frequency!
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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 $110 faculty tuition.
Restore.
It can take time and great effort to move away from the ego affirming busyness of modern day life toward a reflective stillness. In this workshop we will cultivate this slowing, deepening, and going within.
In a community setting, we will allow ourselves to dive below the surface of our thoughts and identities to know ourselves more intimately and untether from the chords that hold us to old behaviors and belief structures. Our practice will include:
With the power of this land, the healing waters, strength of community, and nourishment of slowing down, we will move toward a listening, supple, healing body.
Please bring an eye pillow, and if you are driving, please also bring a bolster and sandbag.
CE Credit Available: 25 hours Continued Education credit for Registered Yoga Teachers (RYT) available through Yoga Alliance; see leader.
This workshop includes an additional $220 faculty tuition.
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The body is a living narrative, an interconnected web of our physical, emotional, and intellectual experiences. Every organ, bone, body part, and movement holds an energy, a feeling, a memory that calls our attention and seeks expression. With curiosity and care to the stories our bodies hold, we become embodied artists, choreographers of our life experience.
This workshop will be a creative exploration and discovery of what truly matters in your life through movement and art making, listening to the body, and listening to the heart. When we don’t take time or know how to be creative listeners, the body will tell its stories in disabling ways. Encountering our bodies creatively, we discover artful ways to re-story ourselves, bringing new vision to the life themes that matter to us.
A process called Body Mapping will lead participants through an art based journey with each body part. Challenges and resources will be identified and explored as rich material for movement, art making, group collaboration, and ritual. Participants will explore personal and group creativity, body-mind connections, and engage with psychological themes relevant to our historical and everyday lives.
Morning sessions will focus on somatic awareness – individual and group movement exploration to tune the physical body to sensation and feeling. Afternoon sessions will facilitate creative encounters with the art mediums of dance, drawing, and spoken and written narrative. Evening sessions will be devoted to presentations of the work created, reflection, and questions generated by the day’s work, releasing activities and meditative art practices.
Participants will explore:
Expanding body awareness through somatic movement experiences.
Utilizing the creative arts to explore life narratives. Learning methods for movement/dance and expressive arts that can be applied to their personal and professional practices.
Practicing approaches to improvisation and performance designed for the beginner and the experienced alike.
Employing the arts as a psychological process and communication tool.
The Halprin Life Art Process developed at Tamalpa Institute innovated groundbreaking work in the fields of somatics, psychology and artistic practice. Anna and Daria both worked with Fritz Perls, Ida Rolf, and Will Schultz in the early experimental days of Esalen.
This is an approach to movement/dance as a healing art that is accessible to everyone and is offered in underserved communities. 20% of faculty tuition goes to Tamalpa ArtCorps social justice programs.
Recommended reading: The Expressive Body in Life, Art & Therapy, by Daria Halprin
Nature heals. Water is life. The motion of our bodies is a tool to map our inner and outer landscapes as we navigate our life’s journey on Mother Earth.
People have always come to water and nature to receive guidance, clarity, and healing. Our weekend experience weaves the philosophy of the 5Rhythms® with sacred natural teachings inspired by the waters at Esalen Institute. We will journey together on a deep dive into the infinite source of creativity that resides within us all to balance the mind, body, and spirit. We will use the plant medicine of cacao in ceremony with the 5Rhythms movement practice to reconnect us to the flow and sacredness of water.
Together, we will:
Utilizing the power of the elements, we’ll practice fluidity and call upon ourselves to turn inwards, with clarity to express our outer nature, with courage to surrender to those forces bigger than ourselves, with ease to be effortless, and in the spirit of stillness to integrate our instinct and intuition.
Recommended Reading: Sweat Your Prayers by Gabrielle Roth
This workshop has an additional $60 of faculty tuition.
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 $45 faculty tuition.
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The Brahmavihārās (divine abodes) are profound practices that uncover your natural capacity to live your life easefully with love, connection, wisdom, and joy. In this experiential workshop, we’ll use daily guided meditation practices, storytelling, song, relational mindfulness practices, self-directed neuroplasticity, yoga, and somatic play to explore the classical Buddhist Heart practices known as the “boundless states” or the “four immeasurables.”
In this workshop, we will explore the four Buddhist virtues and ways to cultivate them, including:
Our days will follow a nourishing schedule of experiences and reflections balanced harmoniously with relaxing meals, community connection, and starlit soaks in Esalen’s healing baths. Music, nature, poetry, shadow work, journaling, breathwork, and ritual will all be artfully woven into our time together.
Whereas some spiritual practices are aimed at otherworldly enlightenment, the four divine abodes help us awaken to the beauty, clarity, and vast possibility available right here in our complex, often messy, mundane, and wholly sacred human experience. They are a pathway to unburdening ourselves of self-doubt, resentment, and regret. They guide our way home to that wellspring in our hearts from which unconditional love flows, where we contact our wholeness, discover radical acceptance, and remember our belonging in this world.
No matter who you are, where you are on your spiritual path, or what you’ve been through, discovering renewal is possible. Join us if you long for a deep, playful, tenderizing workshop that may touch your heart and leave you forever transformed.
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We will become our opposite if we do not learn to accommodate the opposite within us.” – Carl Jung
At the heart of contemplative life is the archetypal journey – returning home to our true nature, our “ground of being.” Buddhism teaches that when we split from this ground, we can either take the path of remembrance (nirvana) or forgetting (samsara). Whether we experience nirvana or samsara depends on our own minds, they are not two different places – they are states of mind.
Meditation is one of the most impactful tools we have for cultivating positive mental states, states of being that enable us to experience the ground as it truly is. We will also complement our meditation practice with shadow work called Feeding Your Demons® (FYD), an exquisite five-step process whereby we offer attention and compassion to our inner obstacles, our “demons.” In this context, demons are those thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that block our experience of freedom and our capacity to return to the ground of being. A 2018 FYD pilot study found that working through this process was associated with increased self-compassion, emotional awareness, and self-regulation, satisfaction with life, and decreased stress, craving, depression, and intolerance for uncertainty. FYD transcends spiritual constructs, serving as a meaningful tool for anybody, regardless of religious affiliation or personal philosophy.
In this retreat, you will experience:
Please bring comfortable clothing, a journal, writing implements, and if you have art supplies, such as paper, colored pencils, pens, pastels, and/or watercolor, feel free to bring them. Paper and art supplies will also be provided.
Suggested reading: Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict by Tsultrim Allione.
This workshop includes an additional $5 for materials.
Wouldn’t it be nice to feel comfortable in your own skin? How do you “do” you?
Return to Source is a dance and movement-based deep dive into the 5Rhythms® movement meditation practice to explore, celebrate, and connect to the beautiful authenticity that is you. Your authentic presence is as unique as your own fingerprint. It is a source of great potential that requires courage, curiosity, and support to harness. The motion of our bodies in alignment with our intentional breath is an accessible tool to sculpt, hone, and discover your unique self.
During this impactful weekend, you will have the opportunity, through movement, group shares, and sensory awareness, to explore your edges, move with intention, and unearth your own relationship to authentic being.
In this dynamic program, we will explore:
The 5Rhythms® can be a powerful lens through which we can track, express, and embrace how sensation moves and is felt within the body. Return to Source honors the maps of the 5Rhythms® practice through authentic expression of the body, in all shapes and forms.
No prior experience necessary.
Recommended Reading: Sweat Your Prayers by Gabrielle Roth
This workshop has an additional $60 of faculty tuition.
This is an era of chaos, change, and grief for the world. As we continue moving through these unprecedented times, we are required to face difficulties that may seem insurmountable. We invite you to a weekend retreat to hold together what should not be held alone.
Have you experienced loss and the natural emotions of sadness, anger, fear, and love? How do you process your losses and move through your life? Many of us have not yet found safe and effective ways of expressing these emotions and we can feel burdened, both emotionally and physically, with the cumulative weight of our unfinished business.
Using the tools of the 5Rhythms movement practice combined with a process of grief work grounded in emotional presence, non-judgment, and supportive witnessing, participants will come together in a safe space to help heal mind, body, and spirit:
Lucia is a dancer and Trauma Sensitive mindfulness teacher with more than 25 years of global teaching experience. She will facilitate the 5Rhythms movement practice as a way of experientially accessing and transforming the emotional states that come with grief.
Peter is a physician with more than thirty years of experience in HIV/AIDS, palliative care, and grief work for caregivers, and was certified as a 5Rhythms teacher in 2021. He will facilitate an exploration of stages of grief, using story-sharing as part of releasing and working through losses.
The weekend also includes didactic and experiential sessions focused on natural and distorted emotional responses to grief, caregiving vs. caretaking, and more.
Please bring photos or other mementos of anyone whose memory you would like to bring into the workshop.
Suggested Reading: Surviving The Fall by Peter Selwyn, Dancing With the Dharma Edited by Harrison Blum, Maps to Ecstasy by Gabrielle Roth
This workshop includes an additional $75 faculty tuition.
For more information about 5Rhythms, click here.
Spring brings renewal to our lands. After the isolating winter chill, it is time to expand, bloom, and gather in community. During this full moon week, including Earth Day, we’ll celebrate with a campus-wide event that will weave together our most potent offerings: the 5Rhythms® dance, mindfulness, meditation, and art!
Together, we’ll honor our common ground as living beings and our interconnection with Mother Earth. We will dance in nature and be danced through the 5Rhythms, Gabrielle Roth’s map of the earth’s primary energies and their movement through our bodies and in the world around us. Working with this system helps us to attune and align with ourselves, one another, and the earth. Dance supports neuroplasticity and uses the body’s intelligence to help us experience reality in a more balanced and healthy way.
We will be accompanied by world-famous musicians Sanga of the Valley and Nick Aryes. With Tracy Powell, our artist-in-residence, you will bring into being a series of community-made, “created in nature” pieces. In addition, TED speaker and environmental psychologist Renee Lertzman will discuss the importance of “attunement” with the environment and how to inspire and create a better future.
This course will include:
In this fiercely changing landscape, some may feel emotionally called to grieve or may be disconnected and numb from all that is happening. These practices will offer a pathway into conversation with the natural forces. In the splendor of nature, we will celebrate the gift of life on this Earth. Join us for a week of celebration of the Earth and our bodies!
Recommended Reading: Sweat Your Prayers by Gabrielle Roth, Maps to Ecstasy by Gabrielle Roth, Connections by Gabrielle Roth, Dancing with the Dharma Edited by Harrison Blum
This workshop includes $100 of additional faculty tuition.
The seemingly opposing forces of stability and chaos are powerful currents we navigate daily. The dance between the two can become an intense emotional process that leaves us yearning for a sense of balance and ease.
Without inner stability, chaos can easily overwhelm, flood, and leave us feeling lost. We must redefine chaos, which is often compared to a natural disaster: a hurricane of emotion, a tsunami of details, a whirlwind schedule. These descriptions denote a quality of being out of control and unsafe. Learning to stabilize ourselves in an embodied way provides grounding, safety, a means to pace ourselves, and a resilient inner core. It transforms chaos from hazard to opportunity.
When we can meet chaos with an embodied sense of stability, we can expand our curiosity and delight in the unknown and unpredictable. This workshop will equip you with the physical and emotional tools needed to navigate the storms we encounter both within and outside ourselves.
10 CE units available for full attendance of this course
For questions about CE, contact Spiritual Competency Academy at info@spiritualcompetencyacademy.com.
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Join us for a total reset done the Esalen way: seven powerful days tending to heart, mind, body, and spirit. Reconnect with your sense of purpose and power while immersed in the medicine of our iconic, energized setting within a community of similarly minded seekers.
Not for the faint of heart, this deep retreat experience is a heroic dose of Esalen. You’ll engage daily with our lineage practices (Sensory Awareness, breathwork, intuitive movement, Gestalt process, and more) as never before — intensely, purposefully, and under the close and compassionate care of our world-class resident faculty to usher you toward the most expansive version of yourself yet.
Each morning begins with embodied movement and seated meditation practice, followed by a silent communal breakfast. You’ll spend the first part of your day experiencing Sensory Awareness and Gestalt process. After some integration time and a nourishing lunch, you’ll transition to a yoga-based therapeutic movement session.
Afternoons are devoted to one-on-one, presence-based coaching sessions and bodywork with expert practitioners and gifted energy workers. A communal dinner is followed by either the balancing, down regulating practice of transformational breathwork accompanied by music at the silent baths — an experience reserved for this group — or the sublimely transportive modality of Yoga Nidra.
Prior to arrival, you’ll connect privately with a faculty member to set your intentions for the week. During your time at the Institute, you will experience:
We’ll follow up with you after your experience, and you’ll have the opportunity to join a remote reintegration session and receive guidance to help you stay on the path.
This experience is most appropriate for those in sound health. The activity level, while accessible and adaptive, is high.
This workshop includes an additional $500 tuition fee.
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Esalen Institute
55000 Highway 1
Big Sur, CA 93920
US: 1-831-667-3000
info@esalen.org