Workshops

Learn to call on your spirit guides and tap into your intuitive mind. Join us in a transformative workshop combining scientifically proven brain-enhancing techniques with intuitive guidance to help you break free from self-limiting patterns and create the life you desire.

This workshop brings together two powerful approaches to help you develop tools for personal growth and transformation. Through easy-to-learn exercises, you will learn how opening neural pathways to your higher consciousness can bring valuable insights into areas where you may feel stuck. By thinking outside the box and accessing your intuitive mind, you have the ability to unlock your creative potential and experience increased productivity and happiness.

Guest faculty Joseph Perreta, a certified psychic medium, will guide you in connecting with your support system on the other side. Joseph’s ability to channel messages directly from the spirit world offers validation, clarification, healing, and peace. His presence will enrich your experience and provide a deeper understanding of the spiritual realm.

Throughout the workshop, you will develop practical tools that you can apply whenever you face important decisions or obstacles in life. By harnessing your intuition and uncovering profound insights about yourself, you will gain the clarity and confidence needed to make positive changes.

Our intention is to empower you to unlock your intuitive mind and carry these transformative practices with you long after the workshop ends. Please come prepared with a notebook or journal and a pen to capture your experiences and reflections.

This workshop has two options on length of stay: a traditional weekend of two nights or a long weekend of three nights. The extended stay workshop will include more workshop content which is reflected in the extended stay schedule.

Recommended Reading: Thought Revolution: How to Unlock Your Inner Genius by William Donius

Are you ready to listen to the calling of your courageous heart?

This weekend yoga retreat invites you to slow down and relax into a deep knowing of your heart’s wisdom. Tap into the astrological event known as The Lion’s Gate Portal, in which Sirius, the brightest star, aligns with the Sun during our time together, and let this auspicious meeting of energy in the sky amplify your own courage to follow your heart and realign your body, mind, and spirit with your higher purpose.

During this weekend, we will:

• Take time to flow through meditative yoga practices to strengthen the body and witness consciousness.
• Experience sound healing to nurture and support the immune system and subtle energy body.
• Create a ritual on Saturday, 8/8, to honor the invisible forces that guide our spiritual paths.

Step through the portal and move with the great mystery. Come practice in community and uplift each other. Receive nourishment from the sacred land at Esalen. Return home feeling fully alive with a deeper sense of gratitude and focus.

Note: Jovinna invites you to detox from or minimize the use of all electronics during your time here. Some yoga experience is recommended. Bring a journal and pen.

This workshop includes an additional $35 in faculty tuition.

These are not gentle times. The world presses hard, fast, and loud, and many of us are carrying more than we know how to hold. Rage, fear, grief, and urgency — energies that don’t easily soothe or settle — have worn hope thin.

This workshop is an invitation to move with what feels big, unruly, and alive. Instead of shutting down, pushing through, or collapsing under intensity, we’ll explore how to meet and channel it through the body, with guidance and care.

We align with magnitude — the size and intensity of our experience. We dance with mayhem — disruption, chaos, loss of control. We open to monstrosity — the parts of us that may be hidden, inconvenient, feral, or frightening, yet deeply enlivening.

Through guided movement, music, and art-making, we practice channeling big energies into motion and form, allowing intensity to become expressive and creative, rather than overwhelming or destructive.

The space is clearly facilitated and well-contained, rooted in choice, gradation, and consent. All movements are invitational and adaptable. You choose how close you get. You choose the pace. You choose how much to share and in what form. Time will be included for grounding and integration.

Expect uncertainty, transformation, and good company.

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.

Recommended Reading: Somatics by Thomas Hanna and The Elusive Obvious by Moshé Feldenkrais

Continuing education credit is available for Physical Therapist who are licensed in CA and TX. Note that TX has reciprocity with the following states: AL, AK, AZ, AR, CO, CT,  FL, ID, IN, KY, MA , MI, MS, MO, MT, NH, NC, ND, OR, RI, SD, VT, WA. Please check with your state board to confirm.. Please see the faculty during your first workshop session for more information. OR email faculty member Melissa Krikorian info@thenexusway.com.

What would happen if you stopped editing yourself before you began?

This embodied writing workshop is designed to get you out of your head and into your body — where the stories that refuse to stay quiet live. Through writing, movement, and deep listening, participants access material often buried beneath politeness and perfection. This is where the censoring mind loosens, and something truer emerges. The stories we avoid are often the ones most worth telling.

Writers and non-writers alike are welcome. No experience is required, and sharing is always optional. Presence — not perfection — is the practice.

During this workshop, participants will:

• Learn to access their voice through guided writing exercises before the censoring mind takes over.
• Use gentle movement and experiential exercises to unlock insight held in the body.
• Explore irreverence and reverence side by side, creating safety for vulnerable material.
• Practice deep listening to self and others, cultivating trust and creative permission.

Leave emboldened, with trust in your own voice and a renewed sense of boundless creative expression. Come as you are. This is where you unmute it.

Recommended Reading: War of Art by Steven Pressfield

What would happen if you stopped editing yourself before you began?

This embodied writing workshop is designed to get you out of your head and into your body — where the stories that refuse to stay quiet live. Through writing, movement, and deep listening, participants access material often buried beneath politeness and perfection. This is where the censoring mind loosens, and something truer emerges. The stories we avoid are often the ones most worth telling.

Writers and non-writers alike are welcome. No experience is required, and sharing is always optional. Presence — not perfection — is the practice.

During this workshop, participants will:

• Learn to access their voice through guided writing exercises before the censoring mind takes over.
• Use gentle movement and experiential exercises to unlock insight held in the body.
• Explore irreverence and reverence side by side, creating safety for vulnerable material.
• Practice deep listening to self and others, cultivating trust and creative permission.

Leave emboldened, with trust in your own voice and a renewed sense of boundless creative expression. Come as you are. This is where you unmute it.

Recommended Reading: War of Art by Steven Pressfield

We’re all natural liminal dreamers. Every 24 hours, in the spaces between waking and sleep, we pass through the zones of liminal dreaming, hypnagogia and hypnopompia, where the mind meanders between daytime awareness and the depths of the dream.

Every one of us possesses the ability to maintain the crisp awareness of the waking mind while sinking into the free-associative, kaleidoscopic realms of the unconscious. It’s easy to learn to locate and linger in this unique realm of consciousness — and to plumb it for creativity, problem-solving, mental and spiritual healing, and consciousness exploration.

This workshop provides an in-depth exploration of hypnagogia and hypnopompia, integrating pioneering neuroscience with deep experiential practice. Jennifer Dumpert, author of Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep, draws on decades of work developing and teaching practices for accessing these remarkable states. Adam Haar Horowitz, neuroscientist and co-inventor of Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI) and the Dormio device, presents the underlying neurophysiology of sleep onset and demonstrates how real-time sleep sensing and precisely timed auditory cues can stabilize and extend hypnagogia.

Together, Jennifer and Adam bridge empirical and contemplative approaches, guiding participants to not only experience liminal dreaming firsthand but to understand its measurable mechanisms and transformative potentials.

Note: As we will be settling into a dreamy state throughout the weekend, you are encouraged to bring any comforting items that might assist you in relaxing: special pillow, eye mask, blanket, etc.

Recommended Reading: Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep by Jennifer Dumpert

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?—Mary Oliver

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 these four key virtues (found in the Yogic & Buddhist traditions) and ways to cultivate them, including:

• Loving-kindness (metta) practices for self-acceptance, relational healing, gratitude, forgiveness, and kinship with all beings.  
• Compassion (karuna) practices for tenderness, resilience, an open-heart to suffering, and a greater sense of our shared humanity.
• Sympathetic joy (mudita) practices for enthusiasm, authentic joy, generosity, and celebratory participation in life. 
• Equanimity (upekka) practices for wisdom, perspective, clarity, and an unwavering sense of trust.

‍Our days will follow a nourishing schedule of embodied experiences balanced harmoniously with relaxing meals, community connection, and starlit soaks in Esalen’s healing baths. Live 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.

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

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

For thousands of years across many cultures, expanded states of consciousness have been used intentionally as a strategy for meaningful transformation and self-exploration — marking life’s major transitions and rites of passage and deepening one’s connection to self, community, and the natural world.

In this workshop, we will gather in the rich field of community for an immersive experience and personal exploration of enhanced states of consciousness. Our time together will include strategies for navigating, integrating, and preparing for these experiences. Holotropic Breathwork® offers language, method, and structure for turning inward and working with deeply personal material as it emerges, uniquely, from one’s own intrinsic intelligence. We will be supported by time-honored practices that are simple, yet powerful. These unique states can offer us unmediated access to the self as a deep source of healing, insight, and evolutionary potential. Participants will experience four Holotropic Breathwork sessions, with two as “breather” and two as “sitter.” Your time assisting others in “non-ordinary state” space will complement your personal exploration. Additionally, contemplative practice, movement, expressive arts, and time in community will support the integration process throughout the week.

Originating from the pioneering psychedelic researcher, Stanislav Grof, and his late wife, Christina Grof, Holotropic Breathwork is a particularly useful practice for those interested in or training to work in psychedelic-assisted therapy.

This workshop is suited for all those of heart who are curious about exploring enhanced states of consciousness and opening to an evolutionary process of unfolding. New or novice explorers/breathers are very welcome, along with experienced navigators/breathers. The fundamental urge to grow, to heal, and to be transformed in a truly authentic way drives us not outward but inward, toward the depths of our own being, toward a deep mystery within. This inward journey strengthens and nourishes our senses in a way that can revitalize our daily lives with creative and emergent energy.

This workshop includes an additional $75 of faculty tuition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Come with an open mind and an open heart, and allow consciousness to meet you where you are.

Across cultures and throughout history, humans have reported subtle perceptual capacities — deep intuition, nonlocal connections, and heightened sensitivity to energy and emotion — that extend beyond ordinary awareness. While such experiences were once considered natural aspects of being human, modern education and cultural conditioning have narrowed our idea of perception, privileging only what can be measured and easily explained. In the process, many people may have lost access to dimensions of awareness that remain quietly present within them.

Drawing on decades of clinical work, interdisciplinary research, and personal exploration, this experiential approach to expanded consciousness emphasizes embodiment, emotional coherence, and nervous-system regulation. Rather than relying on mental effort or concentration, participants are guided to attune deeply to body, breath, sensation, feeling, and heart, forming an integrated Body–Feeling–Mind field.

Within this unified field of awareness, intuitive and so-called “extra-ordinary” perceptions can arise spontaneously — not as special abilities to be forced or performed, but as natural expressions of coherence, presence, and connection. This workshop does not ask participants to adopt any particular belief system; instead, it invites direct experience, self-inquiry, and integration.

Through guided practices, dialogue, and gentle somatic exploration, we’ll explore how expanded awareness can be accessed safely and meaningfully — and how it may be integrated into everyday life, relationships, creativity, and service. Join us for a transformative weekend of embodied exploration, community, and remembrance of the vast potential of human consciousness.

Recommended Reading: The ESP Enigma – The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena by Diane Hennacy Powell;  Space, Time and Beyond by Bob Toben

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The summer stars and sun-sparkled ocean waves—with glimpses of whale flumes—form a striking backdrop for exploring the renowned Esalen® Massage at its place of origin. This workshop offers an introduction to the foundational concepts and flow of the Esalen approach through a blend of experiential exercises, lecture-demonstrations, guided hands-on practice, and personal reflection.

Participants engage with key elements found in meaningful massage experiences: breath awareness, mindful centering, body mechanics, quality of touch, rapport, and integration. Long, flowing strokes and gentle stretches—hallmarks of Esalen bodywork—will be explored, alongside methods that may support the release of physical tension through an approach that emphasizes working with, rather than on, the body.

The workshop is open to a range of experience levels, from those encountering bodywork for the first time to professionals seeking fresh perspectives. Instruction includes at-the-table guidance, group discussion, and opportunities for participants to share and reflect on their own experiences.

The practice of Esalen Massage invites connection with one’s sense of wholeness and wonder. Teaching tools include music, charts, massage tables, and exercises designed to awaken the senses. The healing waters of the hot springs and the natural beauty of the Esalen grounds offer a supportive context for this immersive experience.

All levels of experience are welcome.

26 hours of continuing education provided by the faculty through Esalen Massage and Bodywork Association Teachers.

Fostering close and connected relationships is one of the most important things affecting the quality of our lives. Cultivating trust and openness with a loved one, whether with an intimate partner or friend, is an essential aspect of any successful, supportive relationship.

This weekend, Perry and Johanna Holloman, intimate partners and friends for over 30 years, will share the most effective tools and practices they have developed to nurture their connection to each other.

The primary tool Perry and Johanna will share is called Gestalt Inquiry. This easy-to-learn, powerful practice provides a safe context for exploring the most meaningful and sensitive aspects of relationships. Perry and Johanna like to think of it as a practice that becomes a continuing part of any successful long-term relationship because it places high value on compassion, respect, and love of truth. As we learn to discover and safely express what is true for us, individually, as a couple, or as friends, we deepen our heart’s capacity for intimacy and connection, which leads to a more fulfilling and meaningful shared life.

During our time together, you will learn practices and resources to integrate into your everyday life, such as:

• Embodied practices involving movement, breath, meditation, and awareness to develop a sense of palpable presence as the foundation upon which your relationship can flourish.
• The Art of Conscious Communication: learning to care as much about understanding our partner and what they’re communicating as we care about being heard and understood by them.
• How to express needs, feelings, and appreciations in an attuned manner to deepen relational trust.
• Understanding the “distancing behaviors” we engage in, usually as an unconscious form of defense against vulnerability and contact.
• Learning to co-regulate each other in structured exercises, emphasizing compassion and respect so presence-based relating naturally arises.

This workshop is for couples of all genders and sexual orientations. A couple may be any two people with a history who desire a better future together, e.g., friends, partners, married or divorced spouses, parent and child, siblings, and others.

This workshop includes an additional $50 for faculty tuition.

When was the last time you gave something your undivided attention? Nearly 2,500 years ago, Buddha worried we had become too distracted — and that was before paper, let alone smartphones. Today our days are filled with convenient distractions that promise happiness while mostly delivering busyness and frustration. Many of us live life in a hectic fog, working too much and noticing too little.

There is a different way. For this weekend workshop, we will disconnect, slow down, and meditate together. We will learn the ancient Zen practice of sitting still, bringing our full awareness to what is now.

Our time together will follow a gentle schedule of sitting meditation punctuated by brief lectures, group discussion, relaxing meals, and soaks in the healing baths, all while exploring the process and practice of mindful living. We’ll be listening to our own bodies, noticing the food we eat, and truly engaging with the people around us — exploring what it means to be fully present and alive.

Together we’ll discuss everything you need to start, revive, or deepen your daily meditation practice. You’ll receive instruction in traditional Zen Buddhist meditation and we’ll sit together in guided sessions, practicing what we’ve learned. We’ll work together on everything from the mechanics of sitting posture to the mental barriers we all face. We’ll discuss how to overcome common obstacles to meditation and the many ways to incorporate more mindfulness and presence into our daily lives.

Whether you’re brand new to meditation or even if you’ve been practicing for years, join us in learning how to bring meditation into your life and mindfulness to your work and home — today and every day. Come reclaim a healthier and happier way to be.

Recommended Reading: Buddha’s Office, by Dan Zigmond

We all face death, but how many of us are actually ready for it? Whether our own demise or that of a loved one comes first, how prepared are we? This workshop offers a wide array of resources and teachings to help participants address that final unfinished business and make the most out of every moment that comes before it.

All of life is held within the context of its inevitable extinction. By acknowledging and preparing for death now, we will find ourselves living more fully and fearlessly. Join us as we celebrate the preciousness of life, and ready ourselves and others for this final journey. We will explore how to die a good death and help others pass, engaging with meditations and contemplations that prepare us for letting go. As the Buddhist tradition proclaims, “If you die before you die, then when you die, you will not die.”

With preparation, we can transcend death, turning the greatest obstacle into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and even attain enlightenment. The bardo teachings lead to the death of death. The journey through the bardos is a journey into our mind, so by exploring the bardos, we are exploring ourselves. The teachings apply to any moment that ends — which means they also relate to daily life and can help you live fully within the time you are given.

Together we’ll explore:

• Meditations that prepare you for the end of life
• Teachings that support the meditations
• Discussion groups to create a sense of community  

We hope you’ll join us for this exploration into the unknown, so that we may all return — fearless, and full of compassion for ourselves and those transitioning from this life.

Recommended Reading: Preparing to Die by Andrew Holecek

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).

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.

Please note this is not a traditional art class or open studio experience. This is a guided and supportive creative process designed to help participants explore emotions through art making rather than focusing on artistic skill or creating “perfect” artwork.

Participants are asked to bring their own sketchbook so all of your retreat artwork stays in one place as a keepsake. Recommended options: 8.5″ x 8.5″ or 7.6″ x 5.3″ Watercolor paints will be provided, but you’re welcome to bring your own if you’d prefer not to share (optional). Recommended sets: Full set or Travel set

All other supplies will be provided—brushes, paper, pens, colored paper, glue, pastels, and more. A materials fee of $17.50 is included in the registration cost to cover shared materials.

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 sounded with intention, the voice carries the power to heal, connect, and transform. This is an immersive experience to return to the source of your voice — your primal, dynamic sound that lives within you. Through deep sensing, visualization, 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 as a pathway to self love.
• Awaken the imagination and open new pathways of vocal creativity and deep connection.
• Let breath and vibration guide us into dynamic, sonic liberation.
• Experience the joy of surrendering to our voice, allowing it to move through us freely with power, care and love.

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.

Please note: This workshop includes physical touch, such as a hand placed on the body to aid in sounding, as well as physical embrace within the group.

The week is simple. We walk the wilds of Big Sur, soak in the natural mineral hot springs, share good wholesome meals, and spend unhurried time in the company of ourselves, one another, and the living world. In uncertain and complex times, we move toward simplicity — not as an escape, but as a way of reconnecting with what is most essential and alive within us. With bare awareness and wilderness as our primary teacher, we practice showing up for life as it unfolds, moment to moment. Again and again, we gently inquire into what it means to get out of our own way — doing less and being more. In cultivating silence, space, and simplicity, we come into more intimate contact with the raw beauty and mystery of this world and our place within it.

Each day, the group ventures out on hikes ranging from 4 – 8 miles, exploring the rich convergence of mountain and sea. From ocean shoreline to shaded canyon to open ridgeline, Big Sur in late summer offers a direct invitation into aliveness. Along the way, simple contemplative practices are shared — ways of paying attention, of slowing, of remembering how to be “idle and blessed.” We also open to the wonders of Big Sur’s natural history, allowing the land itself to deepen our sense of connection and belonging.

Each day’s hike begins after breakfast and returns in time to enjoy the hot springs and dinner at the Lodge. Evening gatherings are informal and spacious, offering time for sharing, reflection, and simple awareness practices — ways of integrating what we are discovering in the wild back into the rhythms of our daily lives.

Please Note: All levels are welcome; however, participants should be comfortable with moderate to vigorous physical activity. Daily hikes range from 4 – 8 miles and many include sustained elevation gain and loss, as well as occasionally rugged or steep terrain. These are not fast-paced, summit-oriented treks, but invitations into deep time in nature — walking with presence, pausing often, and allowing space for silence and reflection.

More information, along with a waiver, will be sent upon registration. For frequently asked questions about Steven’s workshops, please visit the FAQs page.

This workshop has $80 of additional faculty tuition and $40 for park entrance fees.

This workshop will give you the tools to help you stop holding yourself back. Whether you have a desire to lose 20 pounds, write a book, launch a business, start a side hustle, open your heart to love, shift your relationship with money, or figure out your next chapter — whatever goal you set — this workshop will help you get out of your own way.

Through the powerful lens of shadow work, you can uncover the hidden forces that drive you and how to break through them.

During our time together, we will dive deep to:

• Set better and healthier boundaries.
• Get clear about what you really want next for your life.
• Have greater accountability.
• Leave with clear action steps to walk toward your goals.

Using a practical, evidence-based approach, Justin Michael Williams will help you understand and fully embrace your shadow so you can overcome your self-limiting patterns and step into the life you really want.

Build confidence. Break through your patterns. Let go of old stories. Shift your relationship with your inner voice. Live a life of greater authenticity and truth — with tools and a plan for action that can last well after the retreat is over.

This is your moment to reset, overcome fear and self-doubt, and say “yes” to the life that’s waiting for you.

Recommended Reading: Stay Woke, Justin Michael Williams

In an unraveling world, our senses help keep us grounded and connected. This workshop explores how embodied creative practice can open new pathways for personal and collective resilience. Whether you’re new to creative work or an experienced artist, you’re invited to join us in a creative response lab dedicated to our shared well-being.

During our time together, we will create a “living altar”— an evolving, communal space of discovery. In this laboratory, we will move, sing, grieve, dream, honor our lineages, seek guidance, draw, write, play, and rest. Each session begins with a threshold-crossing ritual to bring us into this “altar-ed” space, followed by solo, partner, and group explorations. These are supported by gentle facilitation designed to spark curiosity, creativity, and connection.

As the folk-soul duo MaMuse, we have been weaving songs into the heart of community for nearly two decades. Through circles, workshops, and retreats, we gather communities for immersive experiences that ground, heal, and reconnect us with ourselves and one another.

Our intention is that each participant leaves with a deeper sense of inner alignment and a renewed capacity to respond creatively in a world turned upside down.

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.