Yoga & Movement
Website program category as of 2022
Altered States: Pathways to Expansion | Day Pass
With Sravana Borkataky-Varma, Lucia Horan, Xochitl Ashe, East Forest and Marisa Radha Weppner
You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. —Terence McKenna Since time immemorial, we humans have been curious […]
Finding Lila Through Yoga and Divine Play
With Jet Eveleth and Alex Halenda
What if what we experience wasn’t always a serious endeavor, but rather an invitation to play, to grow and to learn? Hindu philosophy encapsulates this idea in the Sanskrit word Lila, which means “divine play.” Lila suggests that creation isn’t an obligation but an ongoing, spontaneous, joyful expression of the divine. Perhaps we’re so deeply […]
Body of Research: Meditation and Dance
With Manoj Dias and Max Vallot
Mindfulness can help us understand the patterns of the mind. Movement can help us understand the patterns in the body. By bridging the two, we begin to develop a clearer, more embodied understanding of who we are. In this three-day retreat, we’ll explore meditation, breathwork, and improvised movement as an integrated toolkit. We’ll approach these […]
Tibetan Yoga and the Subtle Body
With James Bae
Tibetan yoga is a powerful bridge between ancient wisdom and contemporary somatic healing. Rooted in movement, meditation, and subtle energetics, these practices engage not only the physical body but also the deeper layers of the subtle body — where trauma often lives. In Tibetan yoga, the subtle body is composed of energetic pathways through which […]
Mythic Yoga Flow®: A Full Moon Retreat
With Sianna Sherman and Masood Ali Khan
Be inspired and transform your yoga practice with the stories of yoga and the power of myth. Awaken the hero’s journey within you as you explore the legends, lore, and archetypes of the yoga tradition. Deepen your love of yoga, elevate your creativity, and infuse your practice with mythic codes that support your purpose in […]
Bare Bones: The Architecture of Embodiment
With Andrea Juhan
All knowledge / until it's in the body / is still a rumour. — Anonymous In a world that constantly pulls us away from ourselves, this is an invitation to return to the living intelligence of the body. Through movement, awareness, and curiosity, we’ll explore the physical architecture of embodiment: the foundation upon which all […]
Cancelled | Healing, Rest, & Embodied Liberation for Men of Color
With Danny Fluker and Darnell Lamont Walker
Immerse yourself in a restorative workshop designed specifically for male-identifying people of color. This unique experience offers a sanctuary for growth and self-discovery, fostering a supportive community where participants can connect and build meaningful relationships. Black boys and men of color have limited opportunities to engage in mind-body healing practices, and there are not nearly […]
Transpersonal Breath Practices: Hologenic Breathwork™ and Integrative Gestalt™
With Perry Holloman and Johanna Holloman
Join us for an immersive five-day experience where ancient breath practices intersect with contemporary psychology to unlock the transformational power of your breath. For millennia, diverse yogic and spiritual traditions have harmonized breathwork with mindfulness to foster psychological healing and spiritual growth. Today, science validates the profound impact of breathwork and embodied awareness on stress […]
Sacred Groove: An Ecstatic Dance Ceremony
With Adam Clark
Our ancestors explored spirit-led movement to embody ecstatic states for generations. Whether as a form of celebration, mourning, or prayer, ecstatic dance has long served as sacred medicine, healing the hearts of individuals and communities. Join us on this sacred land for a transformative weekend of ecstatic dance ceremony — a journey to tap into […]
Soulstice Soulfire: Embodied Awakening Through Yoga, Dance, and Sound
With Cristi Christensen
The Summer Solstice is the moment when light lingers longest — a turning point of illumination, expansion, and renewal. Just after the longest day of the year, we’ll gather on the wild cliffs of Esalen to remember this truth: The spark of your soul has never gone out. It may have flickered through the seasons […]
Resting Into Radiance: Qigong, Breath, and Meditation
With Jim Gallas
Have you ever felt, even momentarily, that all is well within and around you? How do we cultivate this sense of deep presence and start to sustain it? This sense of presence is the foundation of awakening. The ancient practices of qigong, meditation, and breathwork open and harmonize the energy body so we might experience […]
In(ter)dependence Weekend
With Janet Stone
Through yoga and intentional music crafted from ancient beats, we’re thrilled to gather for our annual celebration of our inter-dependence. We’ll dive into meditation, pranayama, chanting, yoga asana, dance, hot baths, lovingly prepared food, open time, and space for connection, creativity and collaboration. Meet us at sacred Esalen on the cliffs, in the hot baths, […]
Journey Space: Music, Movement and Ceremony
With East Forest and Marisa Radha Weppner
Now more than ever, it is important we build practices to strengthen our internal resolve and self-resourcing amidst a dynamically shifting society. Together, we will listen to our heart’s wisdom in this rich four-day journey (Friday to Monday) through sound, ceremony, and self-discovery. In this intimate and transformative workshop, you will have the unique opportunity […]
Bhakti Yoga Summer Gathering
With Janet Stone
Join us at Esalen — where land, sky, and sea meet — and gather at the height of summer in devotion to movement, music, and one another. This retreat is a celebration of bhakti: the yoga of love made tangible through asana, chanting, rhythm, story, and shared presence. Together, we’ll practice beneath the sun, listen […]
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 […]
Maps to Ecstasy: A 5Rhythms® Mindfulness Celebration
With Douglas Drummond and Lucia Horan
When we experience moments of ecstasy, we taste what life is meant to be. — Gabrielle Roth The 5Rhythms® maps hold all the information required to lead us where we want to go. What is your destination? There is a science to achieving ecstatic states, and this is the mastery we have come to share. […]
Body Poetic and The Life/Art Process®
With Daria Halprin
Imagine that your body has a voice. What would it say? The body speaks through movement, where each breath, feeling, and memory becomes a metaphor — a living story longing to be heard and danced. Begin by digging, fearlessly and with tenderness, into the fertile soil of soft skin. Touch bone. Listen to the heart, […]
Ayurveda and Emotional Wellness
With Siva Raakhi Mohan
The latest research clearly demonstrates the powerful impact emotional experiences have on our health and longevity. While we know this to be true, we don’t always know how to be emotionally well. During this weekend, we’ll open the door to greater emotional intelligence and perception. With a combination of lectures, interactive exercises, live music, breathwork, […]
From Practice to Freedom: Let Your Inner Lion Roar
With Jovinna Chan
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 […]
Magnitude, Mayhem, and Monstrosity
With Andrea Juhan and Vic Cooper
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, […]
Metta and the Divine Abodes: Meditation, Yoga, and Wisdom to Live a Better Life
With Hannah Muse
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, […]
The Inner Atlas: Mapping the Self through Somatic Self-Inquiry
With Lihi Benisty
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 […]
Cancelled | Follow Your Tao: Embodying the Five Spirits Through Qigong and the Elements
With Stephanie Nosco
This weeklong immersion explores the Five Spirits of Chinese medicine — Shen, Hun, Yi, Po, and Zhi — as a living map of body, emotion, and destiny. Through qigong, meditation, meridian stretching, healing sounds, and reflection, participants are invited to follow the current of their own Tao — the natural unfolding of life within and […]
On the Altar: A Creative Response Lab for a World Turned Upside Down
With Sorah Nutting and Karisha Longaker
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 […]
Pulse and Presence: A Somatic Rite of Passage to Freedom
With Danielle Rubio
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 […]
Love Your Body Now: A Therapeutic Yoga Approach to Joyous, Full-Body Awareness as We Age
With Tracy Lease
You deserve to feel ease and joy in your body as you age. Movement, time in nature, breath, quiet contemplation, and “Aha!” moments all contribute to expanding happiness and delight in life. Though this is true, you may face challenges. Changes to our bodies — aches and pains, joint replacements, osteoporosis, heart issues, and other […]
Into the Field of Possibility: Meeting Your Essence Through Dance
With Jovinna Chan
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, […]
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 Embodied Compass: Resilience Through Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness and 5Rhythms®
With Lucia Horan and David Treleaven
This retreat invites you into a rich, integrative journey of embodiment, where movement and mindfulness come together to deepen emotional resilience and self-awareness. Embodiment is not just a conceptual idea but a lived practice — an ongoing conversation between the body, emotions, and mind. By blending the dynamic, fluid language of 5Rhythms® with the grounded, […]
RITUAL: Harvest Moon Women's Retreat
With Sianna Sherman
Alchemize your life with ritual, earth ceremony and the wisdom of the 13 moons. This is a spirited call to soul sisters, magic makers, and wise women of all ages. If you feel called to awaken and amplify your magic, this is for you. Women throughout the ages have gathered under the light of the […]
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 […]
Vibrant Silence: Qigong, Breath and Meditation
With Jim Gallas
Our awareness of energy both expands and becomes more subtle as we deepen into relaxation. The ancient Chinese practice of Qigong, often translated as “cultivating Life Force”, is a system of movement that relaxes and energizes the body/mind. You will find this form “Wai Dan Gong” easy to learn and a powerful means of experiencing […]
The Turning Season: Aligning with Autumn’s Sacred Rhythms
With Jillian Pransky
Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are. —Chinese Proverb Join us for deep release and renewal as we pause to align with autumn, acknowledge the sacred cycle of life, and move gracefully through this transitory season. Autumn is a time of letting go and accepting the impermanence of things. […]
The Mythical Body
With Kerri Kelly
The myths that built this world — the ones that tell us who belongs, who leads, and who is worthy of care — are losing their hold, and the body knows it. Long before the mind catches up, the body has been carrying the weight of these stories: in the armor we wear, the patterns […]
Contacting the Space Between: Gestalt, Feldenkrais, and the Subtle Body
With Kate Flore and Dwight Pargee
“A brain without a body couldn’t think.” — Moshe Feldenkrais “To feel is to heal. To contact is to awaken.” — Dick Price Human beings are relational by nature. We are an intricate web of anatomy, energy, space, and time that takes shape through our life experiences. Our physical structure, function, and sense of self […]
Moving Men: An Embodied Inquiry
With Douglas Drummond
In a time when many men are questioning the inherited roles, social pressures, and stories that have shaped what it means to be a man, this workshop is an invitation to courageously explore masculinity. Through movement, honest self-reflection, and the profound learning that becomes possible when men gather, we’ll uncover challenges, witness one another’s vulnerability, […]
Primordial Qigong: Vibrant Health, Harmony with the Tao
With Kenneth Cohen
Primordial Qigong is meditation in motion and includes the two most famous forms of Taoist Meditation: the Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Energy Circulation, in which the solar (yang) and lunar (yin) energies flow in harmony, an essential key to vitality and longevity. You will also be given the tools on how to recharge the three dan […]
Gratitude Retreat
With Janet Stone
We gather on this powerful land for a weekend to remember — with our bodies, minds, and spirits — all that we have to be grateful for. Amidst all of the turmoil, we come together in community to remember that we are enough as we are. Through yoga, meditation, reflection, cliff side baths, and walking […]
Giving Thanks: A Yoga Retreat
With Janet Stone
“Enoughness” is the starting point of any journey toward gratitude. We begin to fully take in the profound gift of all that is unfolding only when we recognize that we are enough. With Esalen as our transformative container, let’s meet during the week of Thanksgiving. Let’s honor the land and the Esselen people, the indigenous […]
The Essential Qigong of China: The Energy, the Movement, and the Stories
With Chungliang Al Huang
Master Chungliang “Uncle Al” Huang, one of Esalen’s most cherished faculty members, brings 50+ years of teaching experience to welcome you into China’s ancient practice of qigong. During this workshop, Master Huang will teach the most essential qigong exercises — guiding students through energetic practices of movement, storytelling, and subtle energy work. This is an […]
The Stories Behind the Poses: Mythology in Motion
With Raj Balkaran
Every yoga posture embodies a story. Every story embodies a posture. The warrior's focused intention, the divine monkey's formidable leap, the lotus's sacred stillness — these are not mere ideas but encapsulations of physical practice. Encoded in each āsana is a mythic psychology: a map of consciousness, a demand on the practitioner, a doorway into […]
Creative Tai Ji Experience: Change, Transformation, Metamorphosis
With Chungliang Al Huang
To be truly creative, to let go of preconceived restrictions, is to allow yourself the freedom to flow. Taoist wisdom calls this Wu Wei — the art of not interfering with what is already happening. During this weeklong workshop, we will playfully reinvent Tai Ji forms with ancient Tai Ji rituals, Five Moving Forces of […]
Soul Motion®: Tenderness at the Heart of the Dance
With Zuza Engler and Scott Engler
Soul is flow. It’s an ever-changing play of sensations and feelings. It’s how the deathless presence meets and moves our finite human body. In this workshop, we will reclaim the body-in-motion as a doorway to the life unfolding just under the surface of everyday forgetting. A formless dance form, Soul Motion® allows for passionate, full-bodied […]