Esalen Institute is open! However, Highway 1 to the south is closed — please review the current travel advisory.
Learn More.

Learn more.

Due to road closures along Highway 1 to our north and south, Esalen is closed through April 11.
Esalen Institute is open! However, Highway 1 to the south is closed — please review the current travel advisory.
past workshop

Heart Of Listening: A Relational Mindfulness Retreat

August 30 – September 1, 2024

Deborah Eden Tull

While we sometimes draw a division between sitting meditation and how we show up to the beautiful and messy field of socializing and relationships, relational mindfulness helps us bridge this divide. Every relationship we will ever have begins with our relationship with ourselves. Beyond the myth of separation, conditioned beliefs, and false divisions that feed human consciousness, belonging is the radical wholeness that leaves no part out. It awakens us to authentic power — shared power rather than “power over.”

Belonging is the state of freedom in which we know, sense, and feel ourselves both as whole and part of the whole. Belonging is a remembrance of who and what we already are — and a recognition of the unconditional and all-welcoming nature of the living intelligence that holds and animates us. The quality of our life experience is determined by the focus of our attention. This retreat is an opportunity to let everyday life — from the easy moments to our greatest challenges — be our sacred laboratory for belonging to ourselves and one another more deeply.

Through embodied meditation and the nine principles of relational mindfulness from Eden’s Relational Mindfulness: A Handbook for Deepening Our Connection with Ourselves, Each Other, and Our Planet, we will deepen our capacity for receptivity, deep listening, attunement, ease, joy, reciprocity, earth connection, collaboration, and co-creativity with life. By softening effort and getting out of the way, we will allow life to guide us home to our natural state of belonging.

Our exploration will include meditation, relational mindfulness and inquiry, deep time in nature, somatic awareness, and conscious dance. This work spans personal and collective transformation.

All are welcome — from experienced meditators and those new to practice.

Recommended Reading: Relational Mindfulness: A Handbook for Deepening Our Connection with Ourselves, Each Other, and Our Planet, by Deborah Eden Tull

Deborah Eden Tull

Deborah Eden Tull, founder of Mindful Living Revolution, is a Zen meditation and mindfulness teacher, author, activist and sustainability educator. She bridges personal awakening with collective transformation. Her latest book is Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown.

Full Bio