Join us for a free webinar on May 10:
Tap Into Your Unshakeable Trust with Alchemic Yoga Practices
Learn more
Esalen is a holistic educational institute offering comfort and space for emergent transformation and internal exploration within the wild of Big Sur’s majestic mountainscape and glittering coastline. The nonprofit was established in 1962, operating as a refuge for exploration while taking risks and healing vulnerabilities. Learn more about our mission and vision.
We welcome visitors with reservations to our California campus and retreat center, which boasts cliffside natural hot springs, an organic farm and garden, serene, rustic guest suites, and more, all set on over 100 acres along the gorgeous Big Sur coast.
Book Your Visit
To explore transformation and experience healing is to enjoy unparalleled access to leading minds of the day, both on campus and virtually.
Anchored by the inspiring beauty of Mother Nature and an incomparable intellectual history, Esalen is a place to negotiate nuance, tangle with complexity, and sit inside contradiction. Here, we embrace the messy, imperfect practice of moving toward our highest humanity.
Drawing on the embodied practices of yoga, pranayama (breath practice), sound meditation, and conscious dance, this week with Jovinna Chan is designed to help you reconnect your body and mind, digest your feelings and emotions, and open yourself to the wisdom of your heart. Together, we’ll gently expand your vision to include a bigger perspective on the suffering of the world.
Learn more.
The Radiance Sutras are a fresh version of a classic tantric text, inviting you to approach life with wonder, awe, and gratitude by recognizing the sacred in the midst of the everyday. Through a variety of meditation and movement practices, time in nature, and techniques that allow for profound restfulness, Lorin Roche and Camille Maurine teach you to combine the passionate flow of your life energy with the serenity that comes from being grounded in rich body awareness. No prior meditation experience is needed.
Through a combination of experiential exercises and deep inner work, Russ Hudson and Dr. Deborah Egerton show you how to use the Enneagram and IDEA (inclusion, diversity, equity, anti-racism) to uncover your hidden wounds, implicit biases, and reveal opportunities for connection. Supported with new tools and knowledge, you’ll have the opportunity to explore how to be together in community through connection and inter-relatedness.
We all have personal spirit guides who offer us support and guidance from the Other Side. Most people are unaware of the guides they are born into this world with — let alone how to connect with them. This course is designed to introduce and connect you with your unique, individual, and personal Spirit Guides while teaching you a framework to help you engage with them reliably. Highly interactive sessions include instruction and meditation practice to ensure your experience is expansive and supportive.
Self-Guided Explorations are an evolution of programming designed to function outside of the group structures of our workshops. These experiences are for those who want to immerse themselves in the peace, space, and natural beauty of our campus to do the work of their own personal growth, with the freedom to attend open classes taught by visiting faculty and teachers in residence.
Blending philosophy teachings with a variety of experiential exercises, this workshop led by Hannah Muse will explore the Brahmavihārās (Divine Abodes): loving-kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita), and equanimity (upekka). These profound, classical Buddhist Heart practices help you awaken to the beauty and possibility available in your complex, often messy, mundane, yet wholly sacred human experience.
Guided explorations are an evolution of programming designed to function outside of the group structures of our workshops. These experiences are for those who want to immerse themselves in the peace, space, and natural beauty of our campus to do the work of their own personal growth. The beauty of our Big Sur campus supports serenity for the mind, the body, the spirit, and offers nourishment for all three.
Guided by Deva Munay, learn to aid your healing processes, improve your well-being, and embrace higher consciousness with this deep dive into the world of sound using alchemy crystal singing bowls. Restore balance and connectivity to yourself and the world around you through a blend of transformational sound journeys, experiential activities, breathwork, movement, journaling, and group discussion.
Drawing on the embodied practices of yoga, pranayama (breath practice), sound meditation, and conscious dance, this week with Jovinna Chan is designed to help you reconnect your body and mind, digest your feelings and emotions, and open yourself to the wisdom of your heart. Together, we’ll gently expand your vision to include a bigger perspective on the suffering of the world.
At the baths, have you ever thought…I wish I could bottle this up? Our newest addition to the Esalen store taps you into a bit of healing at home. Learn about the Bathing & Spa collection inspired by local woods, meadows, and historical bathing rituals.
All purchases made at the Esalen Store, both in person and online, go directly to support Esalen programs and the land. Thank you for giving back to our community!
In this era of chaos, change, and grief for the world, you may find yourself facing difficulties that seem insurmountable. Lucia Horan and Peter Selwyn invite you to a weekend retreat to hold together what should not be held alone. Using the tools of 5Rhythms movement practice combined with a process of grief work grounded in emotional presence, non-judgment, and supportive witnessing, participants will come together in a safe space to help heal mind, body, and spirit.
Join us April 23 - 26, 2021 for a live-streamed event that is the first in an 8-part Entheowheel series. Your guides for this inaugural journey The Ceremony & Science of Psilocybin include: Jyoti Ma, Paul Stamets, Xochitl Ashe, East Forest, Robin Earhart-Harris, Dream Mullick, James Fadiman, Millana Snow, Justin Boretta, Allan Badiner, Grace Oh, Rhada Weppner, Sachin Patel and a digital pre-recorded transmission from Francoise Bourzat, and more to be announced. This event is designed as an educational opportunity to nurture a sense of belonging while you move through the arc of preparing, experiencing, and integrating a future sacred plant medicine experience.
The first installment of our new, free quarterly digital summit, The Way Forward: How To Stay Inspired, Reintegrate, and Find Hope in the Shadow of the Pandemic will explore the concept of collective trauma, how it both unifies and divides us, and most importantly, how we can face it together to heal on a local and national level. Offered for a sliding scale contribution, the two-day program includes multiple tracks to dig into, from interviews with incredible thought leaders and activists to a session on prolonged somatic grief processing through dance and movement. Each interview will be followed by a live Q&A with the speaker, and every attendee is welcome to join in connecting with our luminaries. In true Esalen style, we will open the event on Saturday and close it on Sunday with a group awareness practice.
Join us for a free webinar on May 10:
Tap Into Your Unshakeable Trust with Alchemic Yoga Practices
Learn more
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