This workshop is more than a learning experience — it’s an invitation to connect deeply with yourself and others in a supportive and creative space. Together, we’ll explore the profound potential for healing and growth that arises when art and psychology converge. No artistic experience is necessary; this workshop is about creative expression, not perfection.

Integrating art therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), this workshop combines two evidence-based emotional and psychological growth approaches. Creating art stimulates your brain, unlocking new pathways and possibilities. Art therapy offers a dynamic way to visually explore your thoughts and emotions, providing a unique outlet for self-expression and growth. CBT complements this process by helping you identify and challenge dysfunctional thought patterns, empowering you to shift your mindset and embrace change.

• Bring your inner monster to life through art, and then engage with it through conversation to gain clarity and understanding.
• Delve into themes of control, shifting perspectives, and transformation through the power of poetry.
• Draw your own emotional landscape and gain practical tools to continue your healing journey long after our time together.
• Compose your personal Declaration of Independence (to free yourself from what keeps you stuck) and collage your flag representing your new state of mind.

Led by a board-certified art therapist, this fully interactive workshop combines drawing, collage, painting, writing, and group dialogue. Together, we’ll explore the fears, anxieties, and barriers holding you back, empowering you with tools to create meaningful and lasting change.

From breath to sensation to emotion, this experience is an embodied approach to movement generation and artistic expression. Theatre and dance are combined with somatic and embodiment coaching to help you unlock your emotional and vocal potential, deepen your connection to your body, and develop your unique groove and movement style.

Each day begins with meditation and visualization to awaken your senses, followed by continuous improvisational exercises and instinctual games that integrate both movement and voice. You’ll explore emotional expression, finding balance between slow introspection and explosive release. Designed to deepen body-sense listening, impulse work, vocal awareness, and emotional range, these techniques create a playful, safe, and supportive environment for self-discovery and growth.

Throughout the week, you’ll work collaboratively in pairs and small groups to learn from one another and establish a sense of community. You will be invited to develop a movement vocabulary you can call your own and integrate your skills into a mini-solo piece, which you’ll have the option to perform.

Bring a notebook and pen, your curiosity, and a sense of play to uncover past limiting habits and amplify your emotional range through sound and movement.

Step away from the noise of daily life and reconnect to the sanctuary of your own heart, where love — in its purest, most expansive form — resides. This retreat invites you to reconnect with the boundless love that lives within you, a love that transcends conditions, circumstances, and partnerships.

Through yoga, sound healing, chanting, breathwork, dance, and community connection, we will journey together, rediscovering the boundless love that remains constant and unwavering. Whether in partnership or standing alone, this is an opportunity to experience “capital L” love — the love that never fades.

Join us on this sacred journey back to love, where the mind quiets and the soul reawakens so you may carry this timeless, unwavering love with you into all that you do.

Since time immemorial, movement, dance, and the expressive arts have provided individuals and communities with a sense of soulful expression, healing, inspiration, spirit, and connection. We now need to reconnect with these ways more than ever.

The Life/Art Process®, developed by Anna Halprin and Daria Halprin, bridges body awareness, art expression, and psychological processes, providing people with an opportunity to experience dance and the expressive arts as a way to learn, heal, expand creativity, and develop new strategies for personal and professional life. This groundbreaking, innovative approach to human development, embodied creativity, and transformative learning began in the 1950s, and the tradition continues today.

Daria Halprin’s work connects dance, somatics, psychology, and artistic practices to foster personal, group, and community development and creativity. In this workshop, movement, dance, drawing, poetic dialogue,  reflective exchanges, and witnessing practices will generate new thresholds of exploration and expression, catalyzing new resources for daily life.

Morning sessions will focus on somatic awareness and individual and group movement exploration to tune the physical body to sensation and feeling. Afternoon sessions will facilitate creative encounters through dance, drawing, and spoken and written narratives to explore our life experiences. Evening sessions will be devoted to questions generated by the day’s work, reflection, and releasing activities, including creative play and meditative art practices.

Participants will be invited to:

• Experience how movement, dance, and expressive arts can be applied to their personal and professional practices.
• Develop body/mind awareness and connection.
• Expand creative expression.
• Experience improvisation and performance.
• Explore old material in new ways and generate new resources to bring into daily life.
• Play with artistic expression as a psychological tool.

Daria will be joined by Guest Musician Miles Lassi. Miles has performed in over 150 cities throughout North America, Europe, and Asia with many different ensembles, ranging from the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall to national Broadway tours like the Tina Turner Musical. He has also recorded with many award-winning artists.No previous artistic experience is necessary. This workshop is designed for everyone!

.Recommended Reading: The Expressive Body in Life, Art and Therapy by Daria Halprin

Discover the profound connection between ancient practices and modern science as we explore the transformative potential of the biofield. Western science is uncovering the power of this energy for healing, from cells to communities. Published research demonstrates how subtle energy healing can reduce pain, alleviate anxiety, shift hormone and immune function, and even prevent the spread of cancer within the body.

In this workshop, you are invited to deepen your relationship with energy and the biofield to help release stagnant emotions and pain, sharpen focus, and open to new possibilities for your creative and spiritual expression. We’ll be illuminated by the confluences of empirical science with ancient wisdom, exploring both the research in biofield science alongside powerful energetic self-healing practices, including breathwork, vocal work, and meditation from tantric and other biofield healing traditions.

During our time together, you are invited to:

• Engage in breathwork and movement practices to amplify your felt sense of energy and vitalize your body and mind.
• Learn energy psychology techniques to release anxiety, stress, and pain.
• Explore Eastern-based vocal opening practices and Shakti mantras to feel and free your energy, ground in your power and authority, and open to creative flow.
• Practice divine feminine meditations to heal your ancestral karmas and stop the flow of trauma patterns, deepen your spiritual connection and intuitive capabilities, and manifest possibilities for yourself with less “efforting.”
• Explore how systems and complexity science, along with breakthroughs in quantum research, show us how shifting our energy and consciousness can shift the fabric of our inner and outer worlds, including our relationships with others and the possibilities of our life’s trajectory.
• Hear about the healing power of the biofield and how research shows our mind and energy can facilitate healing down to our cells, beyond placebo effects.

This workshop offers a space for curiosity and learning, inviting you to explore the brilliant energetic being you are and the benefits you can experience within your own presence. Leave with knowledge, tools, and a new understanding of energetic power to integrate back into your life.

Continuing education credit is available for professionals through the Spiritual Competency Academy, an approved sponsor of CE by the American Psychological Association. If you plan to apply for CE credit, please notify the faculty during your first workshop session. Additional Continuing Education information here.

When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence? —Gabrielle Roth

Your life is not simply a task to be managed but a mythopoetic mystery to be lived. Take a break from the mundane and let yourself be enchanted again. This workshop offers a profound opportunity to commune with the deeper aspects of Self through movement, inquiry, and mythology. To dream. To play. To feel alive.

Since the beginning, humans have looked to stories to make meaning of our lives. Revered mythologist and 1960s Esalen faculty Joseph Campbell wrote, “Mythology is the penultimate truth — penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words.” On this retreat, we’ll engage with daily stories that have the power to help us make sense of our lives, nourish, teach, inspire, empower, and heal us.

Experiential practices include:

• Archetypal wisdom and nondual yogic mythology
• Breathwork and meditation
• Yoga (all levels), dance, and somatic journeys
• Self-inquiry and writing
• Rewilding, song, and nature ceremony

Music, nature, poetry, connection, and ritual are exquisitely curated for your hero/heroine’s journey. Our nourishing schedule is balanced harmoniously with relaxing meals, community care, and soaks in Esalen’s healing baths.

Whether you’re searching for renewed meaning in life, navigating life’s complex transitions, or simply enjoy being enchanted, this workshop will help awaken your spirit to courage, gladden your heart, calm your mind, and widen your perspective to vast possibilities. You might just fall in love with existence again.

Grace awaits.

What will you do with your one wild and precious life? — Mary Oliver

Do you yearn to spend less time scrolling online and more time being present, creative, and embodied in your real life? In just two decades, technology has rapidly reshaped our psyches, relationships, and communities. The average person now spends the equivalent of 61 to 80 days a year on their smartphones. Apps increasingly hijack our attention while human empathy has steadily declined.

Though living a phone-based life can be overwhelming and feel hopeless, the power is in your hands. This workshop invites you to recover your focus, creativity, and humanity. In community, we will reckon with the impact of the digital age and remember the wisdom of our somatic and ensouled selves.

Psychology, attachment theory, neuroscience, and ancient wisdom all affirm the same truth: There is regenerative power when we go offline together.

New research reveals that insecure attachment styles (anxious or avoidant) make us more vulnerable to compulsive smartphone use as we seek a digital "secure base" over human connection. By rebuilding our capacity to turn toward one another, we can re-parent ourselves and repair relational ruptures from our past.

During our time together, we’ll explore how to rewire our neuropsychology and rekindle our creative potential. Your hands are the living hands of your ancestors. What wants to be expressed through you?

Each day will include:

• Morning meditation to connect to the inner self.
  
• Lectures on the psychological and relational impacts of technology.
  
• Guided exercises to reflect on our attachment histories and “styles.”
  
• Interpersonal practices to replace screen time with real connection.
  
• Collective ritual for going offline intentionally.
  
• Practices in poetry, movement, ritual, song, and nature-based meditation to re-engage and reignite the creative spark.
  
• Community gatherings to rest and restore, including Yoga Nidra for attuning to the technology of the heart.
  

The digital age calls for re-humanization. Join us to discover the tools, strategies, and community needed to make a meaningful change and reclaim your whole self.

Recommended reading: Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, Trust Your Truth by Shannon Algeo

The voice is calling me, to come home, to the river that is flowing within me. — Sophia Tuv

The voice is more than sound — it is the breath of our being made audible, the vibration of our essence moving through space. It is our most innate instrument, a direct channel between the soul and the world. When freed from inhibition, the voice carries the power to heal, connect, and transform. This is an immersive experience to return to the source of your voice — the primal, unbridled sound that lives within you. Through deep listening, somatic exploration, and playful vocal exercises, we will release the blocks that stifle expression and awaken the pleasure, power, and resonance of our true voice.

Together, we will:

• Explore vocal embodiment, using the body as a resonant chamber for sound.
• Engage in practices that dissolve tension, unblocking emotional and physical expression.
• Awaken the imagination and open new pathways of vocal creativity.
• Let breath and vibration guide us into dynamic, liberatory self-expression.
• Experience the joy of surrendering to our voice, allowing it to move through us freely.

This is an invitation to become your voice, to reclaim its raw beauty and medicine, and to honor the deep impact of speaking, singing, and sounding with love and intention. When we free our voice, we free ourselves — our capacity to express, to connect, to be fully seen and heard. This practice strengthens our confidence, deepens our relationships, and supports our ability to move through the world with clarity, presence, and truth. By attuning to the natural resonance of our voice, we cultivate authenticity, self-trust, and a profound sense of belonging within ourselves and our communities.

Awaken the voice you arrived with. Open the portal. Come home to your sound.

This interactive workshop is designed to ignite your creativity and foster connections through the transformative power of improvisation, play, and imagination. Embark on a captivating journey in which science and spontaneity collide, delve into the world of improvisation, and discover its transformative impacts on the brain.

Find out how engaging in playful activities can stimulate the neural pathways linked to flow, enhance cognitive flexibility, and build emotional resilience. Through scientifically grounded interactive exercises, you’ll learn how improv can shape your mindset and improve your well-being.

Together, we’ll experience the delight of collaborative exploration and engage in partner exercises and group games. You’ll forge meaningful connections with fellow participants as you create spontaneous stories and navigate laughter-filled challenges. Through an unforgettable blend of science, creativity, and connection, we will unleash the imagination and welcome the unexpected with open arms!

Whether you’re new to improv or a seasoned performer, our workshop provides an open and encouraging space for exploration, learning, and growth. Join us for this adventure of self-discovery through play that will leave you feeling inspired, energized, and ready to embrace change.

This workshop includes an additional $12 for materials.

Dance is one of the world’s most ancient transformative rituals. From the whirling dervish to the Shamans, the waltz to the rave, we dance for joy, healing, and connection — guided by wisdom that transcends the thinking brain.

This five-day retreat is an invitation to come together to awaken the forgotten wild, ignite your creativity, and dance our way to wholeness. Through an alchemical combination of movement, nature, and sound healing, we’ll reconnect our bodies and minds,  digest our feelings and emotions, and open ourselves to the wisdom of our hearts. Most of all, we’ll expand our vision to include a bigger perspective on our spiritual and human interconnectedness.

The practices we’ll cultivate this week will help you:

• Release fear, inhibition, and judgment.
• Trust your body’s innate wisdom to guide you.
• Revive a sluggish nervous system.
• Clear energetic blockages.
• Step into your uniqueness and self-expression with confidence.

Allow yourself to be nourished by this sacred land, the hot spring waters, the time we share together, and the friends you’ll make. Experience the beauty, awe, and wonder of being alive so you may return home rejuvenated and inspired to continue walking your unique life path.

This workshop includes an additional $55 in faculty tuition.

Join master craftsman and musician Guillermo Martinez for an unforgettable journey into the sacred traditions of Native American instrument making and music. This immersive, hands-on workshop invites you to reconnect with the spirit of sound by crafting three profound instruments: a Native American bamboo flute, a 14″ elk-hide medicine drum, and a gourd crystal rattle.

Designed for beginners and enthusiasts alike, this workshop begins with an exploration of the Native American flute. You’ll not only learn to play this sacred instrument — with guidance on breath control, finger positioning, and melodic phrasing — but you will also craft your own Native American-style flute using bamboo. Through this experiential journey, you’ll discover the flute’s power to express emotion, foster introspection, and create a deep sense of connection.

Next, delve into the sacred art of drum making as you create a 14” elk-hide medicine drum — a profound instrument that serves as the foundation of a trilogy of sacred tools in Native traditions. Guillermo will share the cultural and spiritual significance of the medicine drum and its role as a vessel of healing, rhythm, and spiritual resonance. Using traditional techniques, you will stretch the elk hide and lace the drum by hand, crafting a one-of-a-kind instrument that carries your unique spirit and purpose.

Lastly, connect with the power of resonance as you create your own crystal rattle using ethically sourced gourds, crystals, and natural materials. By blending traditional techniques with your personal intention, you’ll craft a sacred tool for healing, ceremony, and transformation.

No prior musical experience is necessary — just an open heart and a willingness to listen deeply. All materials will be provided, including tools and components for flute, drum, and rattle making.

This workshop has a $200 material fee, which covers all materials for instrument making.

How empowered do you feel as a woman navigating this world? What is your relationship to the feminine? And to female wisdom? Join us inside the Moon Lodge, a place for exploration — for women to find tribal and ritual healing.

The 5Rhythms is a map that teaches us how energy moves. It shows us the patterns, rhythms, and cycles of life — Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness — and can be a direct path to the embodiment and empowerment many of us do not feel in a time of patriarchy.

This workshop will be about celebrating the body of Woman and the sacred feminine within us all. Through dance, meditation, massage, acupressure, and ritual baths, we will share in the Sisterhood of humanity. We will poultice our wounds and celebrate the great gifts of our ancestors.

This workshop includes:

• 5Rhythms moving meditation
• Mindfulness meditation
• Restorative acupressure techniques
• Women’s health practices
• Women’s counsel
• Group sharing

Dr. Julie Von, a specialist in women’s health, will present the Chinese Medicine perspective on the five elements, psychosomatic process, restorative acupuncture, and self-care. She will teach us to prioritize these pillars and recognize when we are out of balance.

Lucia Horan will integrate the stillness of Buddhist mindfulness meditation with the moving meditations of the 5Rhythms®. In sitting meditation, we have the opportunity to observe the mind and body at rest through silent introspection. In the practice of the 5Rhythms, we engage in mindfulness while in motion. Together, these two polarities mirror the dance of life and open the door to peace, well-being, and balance.

This workshop includes an additional $100 faculty tuition.

Designed for yoga and embodiment teachers who feel the ache of fragmentation, stagnancy, or disconnection in their teaching, this five-day immersion invites you to sit in and ultimately teach from what philosopher Bayo Akomolafe calls “the warmth of the fracture” — where insight dawns, and deeper presence becomes possible. It is a call to those who sense that teaching is not merely a practice, but a sacred act of co-creation, transmission, and care. In a world aching for wisdom, clarity, and connection, the art of true teaching has never been more vital, nor more rare.

Set against the breathtaking backdrop of Esalen in Big Sur, this immersion invites you to step beyond method and mimicry — into the electrifying territory of presence. Here, you’ll remember yourself as a living instrument of purpose, practice, presence, and power.

Rooted in the philosophy and practice of yoga, this experience is for sincere embodiment educators— and for facilitators, guides, and space-holders seeking to align their inner life with their outward offering. Whether you’re a seasoned teacher or simply curious to bring more coherence, confidence, and vitality to your work, you are welcome.

Each day unfolds in dialogue with the land and one another, weaving asana, breath, meditation, somatic inquiry, ritual, and improvisational teaching labs into a living curriculum. Together, we will name and tend the invisible currents that shape our teaching: the hopes, fears, doubts, and devotions that live beneath the surface. We will wrestle with the temptation toward performance, and return instead to the more difficult, more vital task of presence.

Let us reclaim teaching as a radical art form: part discipline, part devotion, all jazz. You’ll learn to riff with reality to transmit something alive. This isn’t about mastering new techniques, but about transmuting the raw material of your life into something that speaks and serves. The process is intimate, catalytic, and grounded in the understanding that the most impactful teachers are those in right relationship with their own unfolding.

Through this journey, you will be invited to:
• Root yourself in the four pillars of transformative teaching: Purpose, Practice, Presence, and Power
• Reclaim your personal story, passions, and practices as instruments— not obstacles— of your offering
• Dismantle the invisible barriers— shame, doubt, contraction— that mute your authenticity
• Learn to teach not from choreography, but from the wellspring of lived, embodied knowing
• Awaken the poetic intelligence, relational agility, and magnetic presence that make teaching transformational rather than transactional

This is not another training, but an initiatory laboratory of becoming — a space to re-encounter your voice, clarify your offering, and remember what only you can teach, how only you can teach it.

Recommended reading: The Courage to Teach, Parker J. Palmer; Let Your Life Speak, Parker J. Palmer; Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living, Donna Farhi; The Second Circle, Patsy Rodenburg; Human Becoming, David Richo; Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks

Join us for a deeply nourishing sound immersion where sacred resonance becomes a gateway to transformation. In this weeklong workshop, we work with alchemy crystal singing bowls — instruments of subtle energy and crystalline intelligence — to harmonize the nervous system, soften emotional residue in the biofield, and awaken a more grounded, joyful state of being.

Each day includes spacious sound journeys designed to support theta brainwave states and foster deep relaxation, subconscious clearing, and intuitive insight. As we attune to the bowls’ harmonic field, we invite a gentle re-patterning of the nervous system and access to peace, presence, and embodied vitality.

Through practices in mantra (a Sanskrit word meaning “mind tool”), movement, voice, and reflection, we’ll explore how sound can:

• Clear energetic stagnation.
  
• Cultivate inner calm and self-trust.
  
• Interrupt and rewire habitual stress loops.
  
• Open pathways to awe, clarity, and inspiration.
  

You’ll experience seven alchemy crystal bowl sound journeys, heart-opening vocal practices, and a co-creative session in the Art Barn. We’ll also share journaling, partner work, and restorative space for integration. Midweek, we’ll be joined by Big Sur elder Damaris (Penny Vieregge), who will bring luminous presence and the poetry of Sufi mystic Hafiz to uplift our hearts.

Held within the elemental beauty of Esalen, where ocean waves, mineral springs, and towering trees invite deep renewal, this retreat offers space to soften, realign, and reconnect with your true self.

Come as you are. Leave radiant from within.

Embody the power of fall this Halloween as we explore the many ways to let go, let loose, release, and be at ease with yoga, movement, and stillness.

With an internal focus on fall, turn your thoughts and attention inward and toward the earth and trust in the process and practice of letting go to replenish the body with deep rest, grounding energy, and calm.

In the spirit of the season, we will “mask and unmask,”  bridging the contrasts of form and formlessness, holding and releasing for greater harmony in the process of asana and Savasana, the cycle of life, day and night, light and dark. We’ll contrast stillness with movement and long-held yoga poses with fluid vinyasa. We’ll awaken positive muscle memories with relaxation and alignment techniques and learn how to lean deeper into the bones for inner strength and support while practicing a multitude of ways to expand our breath capacity naturally.

This fall, mirror the trees and awaken inner peace by standing tall through the process of release.

What if you could use your voice to feel alive and present in your body? What would it look like to discover your own voice and fulfill its unique potential? This November, join sound therapy pioneer Eileen McKusick and transformational voice leaders and international recording artists Isaac and Thorald Koren of the Brothers Koren in a workshop designed to help you find the electric power in your voice.

Eileen, Isaac, and Thorald will combine their disciplines to create an electrified, liberated, embodied experience of vocal expression and play. This program is designed for those with and without previous musical experience — useful for seasoned professionals and first-time explorers of voice.

Using the power of new awareness, breath, sounding, and tuning with interactive immersion into the innate musicality of your human instruments, you will:

• Explore the 12 tones of our sonic anatomy, the resonant zones and the emotional spectrum of your voice.
• Express the range of your emotions with sound and play with musical modes and archetypes
• Learn to use music to express and balance our feelings, bodies, and biofields.
• Learn practical, playful, simple vocal exercises to support your vitality, freedom, and sense of well-being.
• Stretch the boundaries of your expression and liberate your greatest sound healing tool, your own voice!

Leave the immersive retreat feeling recalibrated, uplifted, and sonically invigorated. Previous participants noted dramatic changes in their freedom of voice after this safe and fun experience.

No vocal ability or musical experience required!