Voices of Esalen Podcast

Our podcast showcases in-depth interviews with the dynamic teachers and thinkers who are part of Esalen Institute. Hosted by Sam Stern, a former Esalen student and current staff member, the podcasts have featured engaging conversations with authors Cheryl Strayed and Michael Pollan, innovators Stan Grof and Dr. Mark Hyman, teachers Byron Katie, Mark Coleman and Jean Houston, Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy, and many more.

These podcasts are made possible in part by the support of Esalen donors and are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

Listen to the latest episodes here, and subscribe to Voices of Esalen on Spotify, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts.

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Bayo Akomolafe on Tricksterism, Post Activism, and Artificial Intelligence
March 27, 2024
0:42:24

Bayo Akomolafe is an author, teacher, and modern philosopher whose work challenges the boundaries of conventional thought. Bayo was born in 1983 into a Christian home to Yoruban parents in western Nigeria. Soon after he was born, his family moved to Bonn, Germany, to accommodate his diplomat father. While in Zaire, Bayo’s father passed away suddenly, leaving a teenaged Bayo to grapple with the painful loss.

As a young, restless academic, Bayo studied psychology and notions of healing, eventually meeting with scores of traditional shamans in a quest to better understand the notion of trauma, healing, and well-being. His concerns for decolonized landscapes congealed into a life spent exploring the nuances of a “magical” world he describes as “too promiscuous to fit neatly into our fondest notions of it.”

I think you’ll find that Bayo's work is deeply rooted in the trickster archetype, which above all else encourages us to reconsider the solidity of things: of our understandings of reality, identity, and activism. He’s an advocate for a world beyond fixed boundaries, where his only clear allegiance is to emergence, to a perpetual becoming rather than being.

I had such a wonderful time talking to Bayo — and I’ll mention that his ideas, so rich in density and expressed with a true poetic grace — might not unfold their meanings upon first listening. Let the buyer beware. Yet, as we navigate this conversation, the layers begin to reveal themselves, and in the end, they present a convincing argument for reconceiving reality, not as a static entity but as a dynamic unfolding of relations.

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Stephen Dubner: Freakonomics, Feynman, AI, and the Future of Work
March 15, 2024
0:39:52

Stephen Dubner is the New York Times best-selling author and host of the podcast Freakonomics. I met Stephen when he and his Freakonomics crew came to Esalen for an on-site interview that centered around deceased Nobel Prize winner and occasional Esalen lecturer Richard Feynman. Feynman assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II; later in his career, he investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
During the 1980s, in Big Sur, three women who had experience with underground psychedelic therapy — Debby Harlow, Barbara Berg, and Cheryl Haley — initiated Feynman through the psychedelic experience. Now, the Freakonomics team was interested in interviewing these three women at Esalen, where they had initially met Feynman.

We gathered together in the famed Fritz room at the southern-most tip of the Esalen property, and I got to see Stephen do his work. He seemed fascinated with Feynman, not just as an intellect, but as a human being. And in many ways, as a person, Feynman exemplified the human potential project — he pursued expansion and fulfillment, right up to the very end of his life.

I am thankful for Feynman, if only because he linked me to Stephen Dubner, one of my favorite writers, thinkers and interviewers alive today. In our conversation, we delve into the life of Feynman, but save a little time to talk AI, job loss, storytelling, the future of work, and the critical role of community. In this episode, I play some short clips from one of the recent Freakonmics episodes: "Mr Feynman Takes a Trip — But Doesn’t Fall." I also play a few brief segments from one of Feynman’s talks at Esalen Institute in 1984, which he called Tiny Machines.

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Our Ancient Kinship with the Wild: A Conversation with Noël Vietor & Fletcher Tucker of Wildtender
February 2, 2024
1:00:24

In this particular moment, there is a call to reawaken our inherent belonging to the Earth and to cultivate a relationship with the land that is based on mutual respect, deep listening, and coexistence. Wildtender answers that call.

Noël Vietor and Fletcher Tucker are co-founders of Wildtender. They offer immersive wilderness programs that cultivate intimacy with the natural world, connect with wisdom traditions, and nurture human wholeness. In this conversation, Noël and Fletcher guide us through their philosophy, which is rooted in the ancient paths of kincentric animism, embodied awareness, and the deep, interconnected wisdom of living beings. They also dig into their history at Esalen Institute, including the deep influence that Gestalt had on them, and mention some of their most profound Esalen influences, including but not limited to the work of Dick Price, Dorothy Charles, and Steven Harper. Additionally, they acknowledge the Esselen Tribe. With great respect and admiration for the Esselen (ancestors and descendants alike), Wildtender vows to operate as reverent and respectful guests on their sacred tribal lands, and to honor them in action and intention.

For more information and to see all their current offerings, visit www.wildtender.com.

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Do you feel called?

Join Wildtender for Wild Pilgrimage: Backpacking Journey to Esalen, April 29 – May 5, 2024.

Embark on an intentional wilderness journey through the sublime and seldom-traveled backcountry of Big Sur, concluding at the coastal grounds of the Esalen Institute May 3–5. Among the fleeting gifts of Spring — free-flowing creeks, boundless wildflower fields, and vibrant wildlife — immerse in the wild with an intimate cohort (up to twelve participants), practice awareness and community, and learn fundamental skills to feel at home on the earth. Over the course of five nights and four full days on the trail, we will embody a contemporary form of pilgrimage, traveling as reverent guests through this sacred wilderness (historic Esselen tribal territory). Inspired by Esalen’s co-founder Dick Price, who found healing and transformation wandering the Big Sur wild, we will engage Gestalt practices from the Esalen lineage — including group check-ins to help us connect with ourselves, each other, and the land.

Learn More.

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Vertical Vibrations: Laraaji's Dance with Time, Music, and Cosmic Laughter | Live at Esalen
January 16, 2024
1:11:08

Laraaji is often thought of as one of progenitors of new age music. He was discovered by Brian Eno while playing meditational music in Washington Square Park in the early 1980's. After studying classical composition at Howard University’s College of Fine arts from 1962 to 1964, Laraaji was initially drawn to the world of stand-up comedy, which he excelled in. He was featured in the movie Putney Swope, but though the career path of an actor did not blend well enough with his interest in spirituality, laughter remained a key trope in the composition of his life. His playful, trickster persona pleasantly offsets the meaningful koans of wisdom he gifts throughout his work.

Laraaji’s approach to creating music and to making speech is not just an art form; it's a deep, meditative process that invites both the performer and the listener into a state of present-moment awareness. In doing so, Laraaji bridges the gap between the terrestrial and the cosmic, awakening a dormant understanding that everything in the universe is interconnected, and playing out simultaneously.

Beyond his unique perspective, Laraaji is quite simply a musical genius, very very prolific, with more than 50 albums to date and a full 2024 performance schedule. His music provides a wonderful companion to meditation, to journeying, to walking, to breathing, to being.

Laraaji was at Esalen as part of Esalen’s inagural Go Within series, curated and hosted by Sadia Bruce, which also featured performances from Mary Lattimore and Snow Raven.

Laraaji and Voices of Esalen host Sam Stern sat down and did this in front of a live studio audience in late December 2023. We began with a beautiful micro concert, performed by Laraaji and Arji Oceananda.

See Laraaji's 2024 tour schedule and more.

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Harmonizing with the Uncanny: Sam Recaps 2023 and AI's Surreal Audio Innovations
December 29, 2023
0:41:44

Good gracious. 2023 was a heck of a year: Not only did Voices of Esalen pass the 1 million download marker, yes indeed, but we had a host of superb guests, and I managed to make friends with the AI and not get replaced — yet.

Beyond the walls of Esalen, 2023 was a little terrifying. By all accounts it was the hottest year in recorded history; according to European Union scientists, global temperatures have not been this high in 125,000 years. Ukraine’s counteroffensive fizzled, and in the United States, Ukraine fatigue set in among lawmakers who dug in their heels against sending more aid to Kyiv. Civil war broke out in Sudan. US China tensions rose. Israel and Hamas embarked upon a bloody conflict that threatens to spread further throughout the Middle East. India became the world’s most populous country — not China. Elon Musk bought Twitter, changed it’s name to X, tanked it’s stock price, and in the name of so-called free-speech absolutism replatformed a host of dangerous conspiracy theorists, including snake oil salesman and Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting denier Alex Jones. Tucker Carlson got fired from Fox. Sam Bankman-Fried was charged with wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering as well as defrauding investors in his crypto exchange, FTX. Hawaii wildfires burned 17,000 acres of land in Maui, killing 100; in Canada, 68 % of the Northwest Territories were forced to evacuate to other regions of the country in their own enormous set of wildfires. Oregon rolled out the United State’s first legal psychedelic services program, while MAPS inched closer and closer to an FDA-approved MDMA therapy program.

But alongside this cavalcade of geopolitical news, AI made great strides. In this episode, we'll explore the AI tools that apply to audio, including voice cloning, voice translation, audio dubbing, automatic song creation, voice to voice chatting with Chat GPT for educational purposes, and voice to voice connecting with Pi for advanced emotive and brainstorming purposes.

Much love to you and to yours in 2024. Thank you so much for being on this Voices of Esalen ride. Your support and interest means so much to Esalen and so much to me. Peace.

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Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham: Trialogue at Esalen, 9/8/89 Pt. 1
December 21, 2023
0:54:53

Drawn from the prodigious Esalen archives, this delightful episode is actually part one of a really long, cool, strange conversation between Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, and Ralph Abraham that would eventually lead to a book authored by these three great minds titled Trialogues at the Edge of the West.

Please note that Terence McKenna spools forth a kind of complicated, highly erudite babble of text that is designed to be imbibed or absorbed in an almost osmotic fashion. His words don’t necessarily need to be decoded; they can simply be enjoyed, for their texture, for their sound, and absolutely for their message, though the message is often so abstract or so dense or so inventive as to render it difficult to comprehend. Here are his words, from a random Terence talk delivered at Esalen in 1992: “Our task is not to understand. It is to appreciate.” Yes indeed.

Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist and author, sometimes accused of being a new age author, who’s achieved some level of notoriety primarily due to his widely-debated concept of “morphic resonance.” Morphic resonance essentially suggests that there is a kind of collective memory in nature. According to Sheldrake, similar forms — or morphic units — resonate with and influence each other through time and space. For example, he suggests that if rats learn a new trick in one part of the world, rats elsewhere will learn it more quickly, as the morphic field of rats has been "tuned" to this new behavior. In Sheldrake’s words, natural systems ... “inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind." This collective memory is responsible for "telepathy-type interconnections between organisms.” Critics have cited a lack of evidence for the concept of morphic resonance, and noted the ways that it contrasts with established thought in genetics, embryology, neuroscience, and biochemistry. Yet this is precisely the sort of reasoning that a man like Terence McKenna, who was highly scientific and precise in his thinking yet wildly out of the box and creative when it came to systems of thinking, would be fascinated by.

Ralph Abraham is a mathematician and pioneer in the study of chaos theory. What is chaos theory? Simply put, chaos theory explores how any action, no matter how small, can lead to complex and unpredictable behavior in physical systems. Abraham founded the Visual Math Institute in Santa Cruz and continues to teach there now. His work, like McKenna’s and Sheldrake’s, examines consciousness, the nature of reality, and the intersection of science and spirituality. He is the author of a great number of books that tackle a variety of subjects, including the tome Foundations of Mechanics, the Evolutionary Mind, written with McKenna and Sheldrake, as well as Hip Santa Cruz: First-Person Accounts of the Hip Culture of Santa Cruz, California in the 1960s. Like the other two persons showcased in this episode of Voices of Esalen, he is undoubtedly a really smart person.

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Voices of Unity: Advancing Psychedelic Justice with Bia Labate
December 8, 2023
0:51:06

Dr. Bia Labate is a queer Brazilian anthropologist and Executive director of the Chacruna Insitute for Plant Medicines. She also serves as Public Education and Culture Specialist at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Chacruna promotes reciprocity in the psychedelic community, and supports the protection of sacred plants and cultural traditions. They advance psychedelic justice through curating critical conversations and uplifting the voices of women, queer people, Indigenous peoples, people of color, and the Global South in the field of psychedelic science.

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Mindful Inclusivity: Rahshaana Green on Bridging Equity and Embodied Practices
November 27, 2023
0:48:00

Rahshaana Green is the Director of Equity and Contemplative Psychotherapy at the Nalanda Institute. After receiving her BA in Biophysical Chemistry from Dartmouth College and an MBA from University of Texas-Austin, Rahshaana combined her passion for science and business skills to spend 15+ years in marketing and business development for medical device and life science companies.

One day, a car accident helped her find her way to a yoga mat as a means of recovery, and it opened her eyes to the power of embodied practices as a tool for self-discovery, self-care and self-healing. Rahshaana got trained in Forrest yoga to help bring these tools to others. She then pursued personal study in meditation, mindfulness, and compassion practices to deepen her own growth and to empower others to cultivate well-being and resilience. When she’s not teaching or coaching, Rahshaana is a global explorer, continuously seeking new methods of movement to enrich her life and the lives of those she teaches.

In this conversation, we really drilled down into what makes diversity initiatives successful versus unsuccessful, potent versus ineffective. We discussed how and why code switching functions, what are some of the key traits of a truly inclusive leader, what she believes is the future of diversity and equity work, and how she’s able to stay positive, focused and radiantly alive while pursuing what can be a challenging career path.

Visit Rahshaana on the web.

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Neil Baldwin on Esalen of the '80's: Gestalt, Gazebo, and Psychic Phenomena
November 14, 2023
0:40:16

Neil Baldwin is a longtime Esalen community member and preschool teacher, first with Esalen's Gazebo Preschool, established 1977, and now with Big Sur Park School, still located at Esalen. Neil came to Esalen from England in the early 1980’s at the behest of a psychic named Jenny O’Connor. He would end up living at Esalen for more than two decades, working in a great many capacities over the years, and finally settling into his zone of genius, at the Gazebo preschool, where he held sway as a trusted and beloved park keeper and teacher. In this chat, Neil and I discuss the Esalen of the 1980’s, with its profound emphasis on many flavors of Gestalt psychology, as well as the influence of Dick Price before his untimely passing in 1985, Werner Erhard's est, the work of Paula Shaw, his friendship with Dick Price's son, David, the ways that Esalen assisted his own personal growth, his experiences with dolphins and whales, and much more.

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Sadia Bruce: Exploring the Synergy of Breath, Land, Yoga, Creativity, and Intimate Connection
October 27, 2023
0:52:40

Sadia Bruce is head of experiential programming at Esalen Institute, where she also teaches yoga in the tradition of Krishnamacharya but enjoys drawing from rich array of teachers, a panoply of movement modalities, and indeed the entire spectrum of human experience to share an understanding of yoga that is integrative, sensorial, and enlivening.

Sadia’s work revolves around creating energized, radically-inclusive learning environments that are guided by breath and driven by inquiry. She is also deeply committed to bringing yoga-based practices to non-traditional environments and underserved populations, to mentoring new teachers, and to reaching economically, ethnically and culturally diverse populations.

This interview was conducted live at Esalen on October 18, 2023.

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