Workshops

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,” guides you to that liminal state between wakefulness and sleep, where you can systematically release stored physical, emotional, and mental tensions. In this state, you can let go of old beliefs and habits that keep you stuck in the past and fearful of the future. With this practice, you can fully experience your emotions while knowing that there is unchanging, unshakable ground beneath you — a calm inner presence that allows you to see clearly and navigate life with greater ease.

Throughout the retreat, we will work with our bodies and minds, creating clear intentions to shift from living by unconscious, automatic programming and find a new perspective — an aware, deliberate way of being. You’ll explore how to bring this newfound awareness of your true self into your personal life, relationships, work, and moments of solitude and love.

Together, we will cultivate new tools to help us navigate when we feel lost, tired, or confused and forget who we are. These guiding instruments can help us negotiate life’s challenges, welcome them as opportunities, and remember our true nature.

This workshop is a unique opportunity to recognize your wholeness, the truth of who you are, and the inner peace that has always been within you — that unchanging, unshakable ground of being that you are. All that is being asked of you is to show up, lie down, and let go. Yoga Nidra will do the rest.

What to bring: blankets, a yoga mat, an eye pillow, and anything else you need to lie comfortably on the floor for extended periods. We’ll also have opportunities to practice outdoors, so make sure you have layers to stay comfortable in varying conditions.

Recommended Reading: Yoga Nidra: The Art of Transformational Sleep, by Kamini Desai; and Yoga Nidra: A Meditative Practice for Deep Relaxation Healing, by Richard Miller

Learn to tap the source and break through creative barriers during this hands-on workshop. Together, we’ll explore a variety of mediums and techniques to find entry into creative expression, including:

• Color blocking
• Watercolor sketching
• Observational image making
• Timed free writing
• Abstracting from nature

The poet Rumi speaks of a river of joy that courses through the world. Through these creative practices, we invite that river to flow freely through us and the powerful energy of Esalen’s natural environment to fill us, dissolving internal blocks and flowing through our hands onto the page.

The core of this workshop is inspiration and energy, but we’ll explore techniques and design principles that will inform your aesthetic and native mark-making language in an intuitive way, without fear of criticism or failure.

We’ll provide multimedia sketchbooks to fill with your artistic experiments. They’ll serve as a repository, a totem, a teacher, and a reminder of what you can achieve when you dip into the river of joy.  The blank white pages, which you will fill with a treasured collection of artistic ideas, will be a metaphor for our process.

Whether you are a seasoned professional in the arts or you’ve never picked up a paintbrush, these immersive sessions will awaken the artist within and help you make peace with your inner critic.

There is a $60 material fee for this workshop. All essential materials, including acrylic paints, watercolors, paintbrushes, writing pens, collage materials, sketchbooks, and painting surfaces — everything you need to participate fully in each exercise. Feel free to bring your favorite pens, brushes, or other art-making tools.

Recommended Reading: Drinking From a Cold Spring, a Little Book of Hope, and Color Duets by Erin Lee Gafill

Part writing workshop and part tantric retreat, this unique practice week explores the relationship between personal writing and subtle body practices.

Religious historian and Tantric practitioner Sravana Borkataky-Varma will lead experiential sessions largely stemming from Hindu Goddess Tantra practices. Award-winning author and scholar Erik Davis will then guide the group in reading and writing exercises, developing skills and techniques that will help us creatively express our embodied experiences.

Exercises and opportunities will include:

• Chakra and subtle body meditations.
• Reading short texts to understand how writing engages subtle embodied experience.
• Using elements of writing, including metaphor, poetry, and spontaneous  language, to capture and express your own inner work.
• Techniques to develop an ongoing writing practice that supports a deepening engagement with meditation and embodied life.

Over the days, we will collectively cultivate a feedback loop between writing, discussion, and inner work. Through this alchemical process, participants will learn to more intimately and poetically clarify their subtle experiences, while at the same time using the power and energy of such practices to fire up and inspire their writing life.

This workshop has an additional $50 of faculty tuition.

In the mountains east of Esalen, an enchanting, ecologically diverse, and psycho-spiritually fertile wilderness awaits. Over four nights and five days, we will engage in a contemporary form of pilgrimage, backpacking as reverent seekers through these ancestral lands of the Esselen Tribe, now known as the Big Sur backcountry. Our journey will conclude at the coastal grounds of Esalen Institute with a weekend of reflection and integration.

Since time immemorial, people have taken time away from the patterns and demands of daily life to walk with intention on sacred trails — pursuing embodied spiritual wisdom, expansion, and community. In our modern era of profound ecological degradation and severance from place-based ways of life, wilderness pilgrimage is a powerful practice for restoring relationship with the Earth and the depths of our shared humanity.

Each day of our wild pilgrimage, we will rise with the sun, carry only what we need, and walk with presence and curiosity to meaningfully encounter our inner and outer landscapes. As we hike and camp, we will learn foundational wilderness ethics and skills to feel at home in the wild. When night falls, we will share stories and meals by the fire and sleep beneath a blanket of stars.

Inspired by Esalen’s co-founder Dick Price, who found healing in the Big Sur wild and the Esalen community, our intimate and intergenerational cohort will embrace mutual support — engaging relational practices from Price’s Gestalt lineage to authentically connect with ourselves and one another.

Our pilgrimage community will include the more-than-human world: ancient redwoods, sandstone boulders, surging springs, playful jays, and all the countless beings of Big Sur. Through guided mythopoetic, ecological, and somatic inquiry, we will expand our literacy of wild nature, awaken our senses, and cultivate embodied awareness of our interconnection.

May the ardor and intentionality of our trek, across 30 miles of rugged terrain, wash away calcified layers from our essential selves to reveal bright resilience and aliveness. When we arrive at Esalen, we will turn our attention toward integration and service. In accord with the ancient spirit of pilgrimage, how will we carry what we’ve gathered on this journey into our lives, communities, and lands back home?

Important Notes:

• The full experience takes place over seven days, from Monday, April 28th to Sunday, May 4th, 2025.
• Experience with backpacking or Esalen/Gestalt is not required.
• This is a partner program with Wildtender, an organization working at the intersection of wilderness and wisdom traditions. Prior to registering with Esalen, you will need to register and pay tuition fees through Wildtender for the wilderness portion of the program. For more details and to register, visit wildtender.com/esalen2025