Psychology & Self-Awareness
Website program category as of 2022
COME TOGETHER! A Festival of IntraConnectivity and Spirit | Day Pass
With Daniel Siegel, Elissa Epel, Little Bear Tom Nason, Rhonda V. Magee and Douglas Drummond
We live in times of high existential stress with both ever-increasing personal, societal, and global pressures and the constant pain of witnessing ecological crises and widespread social injustices. These challenges also create opportunities to reconsider our relationships to self, one another, and the planet — and to choose a life of peak purpose and interconnectedness. […]
COME TOGETHER! A Festival of IntraConnectivity and Spirit | ETMC Day Pass
With Daniel Siegel, Elissa Epel, Little Bear Tom Nason, Rhonda V. Magee and Douglas Drummond
We live in times of high existential stress with both ever-increasing personal, societal, and global pressures and the constant pain of witnessing ecological crises and widespread social injustices. These challenges also create opportunities to reconsider our relationships to self, one another, and the planet — and to choose a life of peak purpose and interconnectedness. […]
Awakening the Heart
With James Baraz
This workshop is designed to support us as we open to our own goodness and learn practices to awaken love in others. Based on timeless Buddhist principles, as well as key findings in modern neuroscience, we will explore how to cultivate and sustain certain wholesome states, which, through practice, become the perspective we embody. By […]
Designing the Life We Want: Self Renewal at the Solstice
With Mark Nicolson
Have you created the impact you want? Are you showing up the way you’d like? Are you going in the right direction? You have never before been where you are right now. You have never been the age you are today, never had the experiences you now possess. This is your time to pause and […]
SoulCollage®: An Enchanting Path to Inner Wisdom
With Kimberly Lee
Embark on an enlightening journey of self-discovery, guided by the power of intuition and creativity! In this immersive workshop, you’ll uncover your own inner wisdom through the inspiring SoulCollage® method. Developed by the late Seena Frost, this enchanting personal practice harnesses the magic of images, imagination, and intuition as a way to excavate insight and […]
Renewing Purpose: Modern Rituals to Navigate Life Transitions
With Day Schildkret
As life changes, we also must change — yet this isn't guaranteed. Too many of us get stuck at our thresholds. Ritual can help us cultivate discernment, recognize gains and losses, and conjure possibility. Join us for a transformative workshop designed to provide the skills and understanding needed to create your own modern rituals. Learn […]
Being With the Body in Depth Psychology: Trauma and its Transformation in the Unspoken Realm
With Barbara Holifield
The body is a portal to the numinous dimensions of the soul’s life. It can lead us to healing and wholeness far beyond simple relief of traumatic symptoms — and to increased access to our feelings and a renewed sense of soulful aliveness. Jungian and depth psychology orient to the deepest currents of the soul, […]
The Physics of Mystics: Thinking Impossibly after Religion and Science
With Jeffrey J. Kripal
This seminar-style workshop is part one of the Super Story Series, sponsored by the Center for Theory and Research of the Esalen Institute. The Super Story is a poetic device designed to capture all of those emergent mythologies and mystical currents that have been developing in deep conversation with the sciences over the last two […]
Think Like a Multiverse: Pathways to Wonder, Kinship, and Radical Openness
With Ramzi Fawaz
One of life’s great paradoxes is that we all inhabit the same world, yet no single person, living being, or object within it is exactly like anything else. Thus, difference — the sheer diversity of the world’s countless inhabitants — is arguably the most immediate fact of our shared reality. This seminar style workshop asks: […]
Internal Family Systems and Ancestor Wisdom: Listening When Parts Speak
With Tamala Floyd
If we carry intergenerational trauma (and we do), we also carry intergenerational wisdom. It's in our genes and in our DNA. —Kazu Haga What if your healing journey lies within you and in the wisdom carried by your ancestral line? The Listening When Parts Speak workshop is a curated experience designed to help you access […]
The Self, Reframed: An Exploration Through Breath and Somatic Self-Inquiry
With Lihi Benisty
In a world that often pulls us away from ourselves — into roles, expectations, and chronic busyness — there is power in returning to the body, the breath, and the truth of who we are. This weekend workshop offers an immersive experience in embodiment — a space to inquire, move, and breathe your way back […]
Relational Mindfulness: A Path to Personal and Collective Awakening
With Deborah Eden Tull
Relational mindfulness offers 9 principles and practices for meeting the beautiful, dynamic, and messy field of human relating as our laboratory for awakening. It offers a path for cultivating greater peace, understanding, joy, resilience, and freedom within ourselves and our world. Sitting alone on a meditation cushion is a wholly different exercise than engaging socially, […]
Chakra Rituals: Heal, Transform, and Reignite the Spark of Life
With Cristi Christensen
The chakra system is one of the greatest gifts the ancient yogis and rishis of India shared with the world: a powerful spiritual map for our healing and the awakening of our consciousness so we can fully come alive! This week is an invitation to explore this map and unlock the unbridled joy, creative power, […]
Nature and Contemplation: Cultivating Wild Mindfulness
With Steven Harper and Gary Marcoccia
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed. — Mary Oliver From the beginning of time, the natural world has called humans to pause, reflect, and reconnect with life’s essence. This workshop invites you to immerse […]
Role Mate to Soul Mate: The Art and Discipline of Love
With Warren Farrell
Since falling in love is biologically natural, but sustaining love is biologically unnatural, Soul Mate focuses on the art and discipline of sustaining love. You begin with learning how to appreciate your partner so specifically and frequently that your partner feels fully seen and loved. You then practice both the art and discipline of hearing […]
Authentic Consent: An Intimate Weekend of Play, Exploration and Clarity in Connection
With Amina Peterson
Join Amina Peterson on a transformative journey where you'll discover a revolutionary model of erotic communication. Immerse yourself in a safe and empowering space to cultivate deeper intimacy, pleasure, and connection. Through somatic tools, communication strategies, and boundary-building practices, you'll learn how to navigate relationships with authenticity and respect. This intimate weekend is a unique […]
Holotropic Breathwork®: Expanded States of Consciousness
With Stacia Butterfield
For thousands of years across many cultures, enhanced states of consciousness have been used 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 […]
Freedom Dreaming: How Daydreaming and Imagination Open a Portal for a Liberated Life
With Tricia Hersey
Daydreaming is not passive; it is an embodied, living practice—a gateway to knowledge, interconnectedness, and liberation. It is where we access deep creativity, ancestral memory, and the unseen forces shaping our lives. Across time and tradition, rest, reverie, and imagination have been essential tools for visionaries, artists, and revolutionaries. Yet in a culture that prioritizes […]
Elegant Aging: Cultivating Grace and Gratefulness During Life Transitions
With Marilyn Schlitz
How can we navigate life’s transitions with elegance, grace, and gratitude? This is a fundamental question for growth and transformation, no matter where we are in our stages of life. This workshop is designed for anyone pondering their aging process as well as active caretakers for those entering their third act. Using an experiential approach, […]
Midsummer’s Dream: Yoga, Chanting, Live Music, Meditation, and Dance
With Janet Stone
Come to Esalen for the long summer days and be greeted with a dynamic, nourishing yoga experience. We will create pathways to heal and reclaim our bodies and voices so we can share authentically. Let’s turn down the noise and tune into the heart’s rhythm with Janet Stone and DJ Drez. This will be a […]
The Shared Heart Summer Couples Retreat
With Barry Vissell and Joyce Vissell
Imagine your relationship expressing the true depths of your love and commitment. If you are in love, this retreat is an opportunity to rise even higher in love. If you are in crisis, it is an opportunity for healing on the deepest level. We all carry some degree of negative programming from our past, and […]
The Values Based Path to a Life of Purpose and Meaning
With Robert MacPhee
If your thoughts, decisions and actions are not being determined by your own highest values, they are certainly being determined by someone else's. — Living a Values Based Life Join this engaging, interactive experience designed to support the discovery, clarification, and meaningful application of your highest personal values. It's a surprising fact of life that […]
Breaking Free From the Likability Cage: A Replenishing and Empowering Workshop for the Emotionally Exhausted Woman
With Nancy Colier
Summer is the time to take a break, step off the treadmill of modern life, take care of oneself, and refill the tanks before gearing up for the busyness of fall. What does taking care of yourself really mean—for you? What do you want and need at this moment in your life; what genuinely takes […]
Clown Church: Mindfulness, Healing, and Your Deepest Self
With Jet Eveleth
Our clown is the authentic, curious, and playful version of ourselves. Clowning as a life practice is the balancing of our light and shadow while laughing at our attachments. Clown is about being soft, brave, and available to the moment. This workshop is an immersion practice that explores our deepest, most vulnerable, creative self. Using […]
Yoga Nidra Retreat: Rest, Restore, and Remember Who You Are
With John Vosler
Experience five days of deep rest, reflection, and rejuvenation through movement, guided meditation, and the profound practice of Yoga Nidra. This workshop is designed to restore the body, clear the mind, and shift the habitual patterns that keep us from experiencing a state of calm, clarity, and balance. Yoga Nidra, which translates to "yogic sleep," […]
Advanced Cortical Field Reeducation®: Five More Powerful Days for Deeper Healing
With Judy Greenman, Melissa Krikorian and Tomas Prietto
This course builds on your previous seven rich days of exploration in CFR® Week One. During that crucial week, you laid the foundation for releasing your childhood survival patterns and moving through life with more ease and presence physically, mentally, and emotionally. You reorganized the stranger you once called “self” to become more objective, compassionate, […]
Graceful Exit: Preparing for a Good Death
With Andrew Holecek
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 […]
Experiencing the Esalen Farm and Garden
With Candice Isphording, James House and Becca Gallagher
Have you ever wanted to learn how to grow your own food? Experience a dynamic week in the Esalen Farm and Garden and fully participate alongside our talented and experienced staff. Local food security is a major issue facing communities worldwide. It is said that there is no greater form of activism than growing one’s […]
Living Authentically: A Journey with Human Design
With Anne Van de Water
Imagine reaching the end and realizing your biggest regret is that you never found the courage to live authentically because you lived the life others expected. In this workshop, we will embark on a transformative journey inspired by the wisdom of Human Design and the spirit of Esalen. Human Design blends ancient wisdom from astrology, […]
Love Yourself for Everyone Else’s Sake
With Mark Abramson
Love Yourself For Everyone Else’s Sake Mark Abramson designed the course as a deep dive into self-compassion after seeing students achieve self-kindness from work with his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic at Stanford University. Thirty years of teaching have taught Dr. Abramson that bringing kindness and compassion to one’s self is truly the most altruistic of […]
Digital Liberation: Free Yourself From Attachment to Technology and Reignite Your Creative Spark
With Shannon Algeo
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 […]
Community of Selves
With Andrea Juhan and Kathy Altman
There is an inner community inside of us: a community of selves. Some have a voice, and some are quiet. Some are known through sensation, emotion, and thought. Other selves have agendas, advice, and accusations. Each of these selves has a history, an emotional state, and a felt sense in the body. Each represents a […]
Eve's Domain: Rewriting Our Inherited Stories
With Zita Tulyahikayo
We are all born into a story that is already being told. It is woven into our very being, much like the DNA passed down from Mitochondrial Eve, the mother of all humanity. Just as we inherit genetic traits, we also inherit stories, expectations, and emotional patterns that shape our lives. Like Eve in the […]
Pleasure Alchemy: Deepening Emotional Intelligence Through Rituals and Sensual Somatics
With Leah Diamond, Tony Holmes and shiloh burton
Pleasure is the measure of your aliveness. It is not frivolous — it is your birthright, your compass, and your healing. — Anonymous What if your pleasure is the key to your liberation? What if it could be your prayer, your medicine, and your power? When was the last time you felt fully alive in […]
Finding Humans Less Scary
With Jacob Towery
Do you struggle with shyness or social anxiety? Do you feel intimidated or scared to meet new people or worry others will judge you? If so, come face your fears and discover tools to connect to people authentically! In this workshop, you will learn how to enjoy meeting new people and interact more successfully with […]
Lessons in Liberation From BDSM: Power, Surrender, and Choice
With Betty Martin and Marcia Baczynski
Power without surrender is force. Surrender without power is collapse. True freedom comes from knowing how to embody both. BDSM is often misunderstood as only rough sex or kink, but at its core, it’s the consensual exploration of power dynamics. It can include play with dominance and submission, sensation, and restraint — but ultimately, it’s […]
Hardwiring Happiness: Rewire Your Mind for Calm, Clarity, and Joy
With Shauna Shapiro
Revolutionary findings in neuroscience have demonstrated that we can literally re-architect the very structure of our brains. In fact, we can even rewire our neurology to be more focused, calmer, and happier. In this workshop, Dr. Shauna Shapiro — a leading scientist studying the effects of meditation on well-being — will teach you the most […]
The Transformational Enneagram: Mindfulness, Insight and Experience
With Russ Hudson
More and more, people are discovering the Enneagram as an accurate and profound map of personality. In this workshop, we’ll explore the full scope of its power to illuminate our greatest wisdom, become our truest selves, and face life’s challenges with fortitude and grace. The nine Enneagram types are based on the three primary centers […]
Designing the Life We Want: Self Renewal at Summer’s End
With Mark Nicolson
Have you created the impact you want? Are you showing up the way you’d like? Are you going in the right direction? You have never before been where you are right now. You have never been the age you are today, never had the experiences you now possess. This is your time to pause and […]
Wild Presence: Relational Gestalt Practice in Nature
With Dorothy Charles, Noël Vietor and Fletcher Tucker
“Wilderness, by itself, has its own way of teaching. The direct experience of wilderness can spontaneously bring wholeness back into the human community.” – Manual of Gestalt Practice in the Tradition of Dick Price When we are present in the here and now, every moment in the natural world represents an opportunity to enrich, heal, […]
Moon Lodge: Honoring the Sacred Feminine
With Lucia Horan and Dr. Julie Von
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 […]
Elements of Desire: An Erotic Lab for Queer Men
With Finn Deerhart
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 […]
Resource and Renew: 5Rhythms and Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness
With Lucia Horan
Through the practices of 5Rhythms dance, mindfulness meditation, and self-care, we weave together a retreat focused on healing and celebration. Looking back over the past few years, it is clear that many of us are exhausted. In times of turmoil and change, self-care and kindness are needed to connect us to the ability to recharge […]
You Are Not Your Fault: Meeting ADHD with Mindfulness Wisdom and Compassion
With Mark Coleman
Do you face challenges with focus and time management? Do you struggle with emotional hypersensitivity or frustration tolerance? Do you find it hard to follow through on tasks or commitments? Or to be reliable and consistent? If so, you are not alone. Millions of people suffer daily from conditions associated with these executive function challenges. […]
Integrative Gestalt Practice™: Presence, Authentic Connection, and Trust in Times of Change
With Perry Holloman and Johanna Holloman
Gestalt is, at its heart, an awareness practice — one that invites us to be fully present with what is. This presence becomes the portal through which insight, inner guidance, and emotional regulation naturally emerge. Gestalt practice allows us to connect with what is real and true for us — beyond old patterns, assumptions, habitual […]
Earth-Body: An Eco-Somatic Backpacking Journey & Retreat
With Noël Vietor and Ariel Johnson
The Earth holds us, breathes with us, moves through us. Since time immemorial, human beings have lived in deep, reciprocal relationship with landscapes—our movements shaped by terrain, our nervous systems regulated by the rhythms of seasons and tides, our sense of self inseparable from the more-than-human world. Yet, in this modern, frenetic age, we are […]
Pelvic Health Self-Care Retreat: Exploring the Pelvis Through Anatomy, Nutrition, and the Nervous System
With Anietie Ukpe-Wallace and Krishna Dholakia
I think it’s the worst thing that we do to each other as women, not share the truth about our bodies and how they work and how they don’t work. —Michelle Obama The pelvis is a powerful part of our body and is foundational to our overall health. The tissues and bones of our pelvis […]
Write Your Deepest Story: Memoir, Autobiography, and the Personal Essay
With Janis Cooke Newman
We all have a story to tell. But turning your life into an engaging and meaningful narrative requires both keen self-awareness and a working knowledge of basic storytelling. This experiential workshop invites writers at all levels, from personal journalers to published authors, to cultivate the skills needed to tell the most compelling — and truest […]
Deep Rest, Recovery, and Renewal: From Burnout to Vitality
With Elissa Epel
Join us to experience deep rest and renewal! You need and deserve this. So many of us are overtaxed by constant demands, burdens, and worries, especially those of us providing extra support for others through caregiving, healthcare, activism, and other service-oriented jobs. We bring you expertise in the science, art, and practice of restoration from […]
Erotic Ecology: Awakening the Senses and Healing through Nature
With Lindsay Branham
Love is an ecological process. — Andreas Weber Most of us have lost our sensual connection to our bodies and to the living world. We have become numb to the Earth's touch. This weekend workshop offers an immersive experience in the erotic ecology pathway — a space to reawaken our sensory, pleasurable, and nourishing connection […]
Holotropic Breathwork®: Expanded States of Consciousness
With Stacia Butterfield
For thousands of years across many cultures, enhanced states of consciousness have been used 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 […]
Compassionate Leadership
With Shauna Shapiro
Great leaders encourage collaboration, promote inclusion, and make others feel seen and heard. Their greatest tool? Compassion. Compassion isn’t a static trait that people either have or don’t have; we all have the ability to grow our compassion intentionally through practice. A clinical psychologist and renowned expert in compassion, Dr. Shapiro uses her scientific and […]
Sleep Yoga: The Sleep of Clear Light
With Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
In the ancient Tibetan practice of Sleep Yoga, the primary goal is to enter the pure, luminous awareness — the clear light — that is the true nature of the mind. As a profound support for Dzogchen meditation, Sleep Yoga enhances clarity, awareness, and spiritual realization, even as the body rests. In today’s fast-paced world, […]
Souls Unfolding
With Andrea Juhan
Our sense of soul often shows up as the feeling that we are connected to and a part of something much larger than our everyday selves. Though we may manifest the self through work, relationships, and creative endeavors, we will not be fully satisfied if that deepest expression of our soul does not have its […]
Relational Gestalt Practice: Presence, Contact and Communication
With Dorothy Charles
In 1938, researchers at Harvard University began a 75-year study that addressed life’s fundamental question: What makes a good life? The Grant Study, also known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development, found strong relationships to be the clearest predictor of life satisfaction. In Relational Gestalt practice, direct and response-able communication is essential for creating […]
The Beauty of Simplicity
With Jovinna Chan
Breathe. Move. Pay Attention. These three simple actions, natural and always available to us, provide potency to our vitality. They are the legs and wings that carry us into the three worlds within us — the physical, the subtle, and the mystical. Join Jovinna on the sacred land Esalen Institute resides upon to slow down, […]
Awaken Your Extraordinary Potential with Integral Transformative Practice® (ITP)
With Pam Kramer and Max Gaenslen
Practice is a seedbed of miracles. —Esalen Institute Co-Founder Michael Murphy What positive shift would create the most meaningful change in your life right now? Your extraordinary potential is built into your DNA and awaits your discovery. In this enlivening workshop, experience the essence of Integral Transformative Practice® (ITP), a living platform for growth, well-being, […]
Accessing the Genius Within: Healing Physical and Emotional Injury With Cortical Field Re-Education®
With Judy Greenman, Tomas Prietto and Melissa Krikorian
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 […]
Gestalt Practice and Principles: Cultivating Embodied Wholeness in Daily Life
With Steven Harper
Gestalt Practice at its core is an awareness practice in which we cultivate embodied, present-moment awareness of the unfolding experience of the here and now on a journey toward authentic growth, wholeness, and aliveness. Drawing from the foundations of Gestalt Practice, wisdom traditions, and contemporary approaches that cultivate awareness, we’ll learn to become increasingly aware […]
Imagination: Exploring Your Inner World for an Extraordinary Life
With Cassandra Vieten
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them to the impossible. — Arthur C. Clarke Imagination is the foundational ingredient in problem solving – the ones in your own life as well as problems in society. Yet how many courses in imagination did you take during your K to12 education? Were you […]
The Depths of Vision: Jung, Psychedelics, and the Practice of Integration
With John W. Price
In an era fascinated by peak experiences and personal revelations, the deeper task of transformation is often overlooked. This workshop offers a grounded path for those who have touched something sacred — through psychedelics, mystical states, or profound life transitions — and are now asking, How do I live in service to what I’ve seen? […]
The Luminous Darkness: Imagination, Possibility, and Conscious Intentions for 2025
With Deborah Eden Tull
All light arises from darkness, including insight, creativity, vision, joy, and possibility. The luminous darkness is the spacious presence and receptivity through which we also access light. It is the field of all potential and emergence that we sometimes forget in the context of ordinary life and habit. In this deeply restorative retreat, at the […]