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

5Rhythms®: Grief, Loss, and the Body in Motion

March 17–20, 2023

Lucia Horan and Peter Selwyn

This is an era of chaos, change, and grief for the world. As we continue moving through these unprecedented times, we are required to face difficulties that may seem insurmountable. We invite you to a weekend retreat to hold together what should not be held alone.

Have you experienced loss and the natural emotions of sadness, anger, fear, and love? How do you process your losses and move through your life? Many of us have not yet found safe and effective ways of expressing these emotions and we can feel burdened, both emotionally and physically, with the cumulative weight of our unfinished business.

Using the tools of the 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:

  • Lucia is a dancer and meditation teacher with more than 25 years of global teaching experience. She will facilitate the 5Rhythms movement practice as a way of experientially accessing and transforming the emotional states that come with grief.
  • Peter is a physician with more than thirty years of experience in HIV/AIDS, palliative care, and grief work for caregivers, working in a community now heavily affected by Covid-19, and will facilitate an exploration of stages of grief, using story-sharing as part of releasing and working through losses.

The weekend also includes didactic and experiential sessions focused on natural and distorted emotional responses to grief, caregiving vs. caretaking, and more.

Please bring photos or other mementos of anyone whose memory you would like to bring into the workshop.

View the continuing education syllabus.

10 hours of CE credit for:

  • Massage Therapists
  • MFTs, LCSWs, LEPs, LPCCs
  • Nurses

Lucia Horan

Lucia Horan was born in 1976 on the sacred land of Esalen in Big Sur. She was raised in the Esalen community and taught the practices that were developed by those who came before her. She was certified as an Esalen® Massage practitioner in 1994. She became a Hatha & Ashtanga yoga teacher in 1997. Lucia received lifelong direct training with Gabrielle Roth in the 5Rhythms® moving meditation practice and has been teaching 5Rhythms since 1998. She also has a BA from Goddard College with a major in expressive art therapy.

Full Bio

Peter Selwyn

Peter Selwyn, M.D., M.P.H. is Chairman of the Department of Family and Social Medicine and Director of the Palliative Care Program at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York. He facilitates workshops on grief and loss, and is the author of Surviving the Fall: The Personal Journey of an AIDS Doctor.

Full Bio