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

The Luminescent Body: Moving Like the Ocean, Sitting Like a Mountain

August 27–29, 2021

with Zuza Engler and Scott Engler

… Be inspired by the flame

where everything shines as it disappears.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

After the past 18 months, what in your life could use some breath, space, movement, flow, and a sprinkle of humor? And where in your life are you called toward a more passionate participation – or toward a deeper letting go?

What if you had ways in which to “show up” with change, impermanence, loss, and the whole everyday mess of the human condition while remaining in touch with the deathless presence in which everything dances?

Join us on a leading-edge path that integrates conscious movement, body-based inquiries of Gestalt Practice, and the stillness of nature into a transformative process that touches body, heart, and spirit.

During this weekend together, we will …

  • Dance, inspired by a wide range of music and the great sound of silence, supported by the benevolent presence of earth and sky.
  • Build resonance with the movements of life around us by moving from the inside out – alone, in pairs or trios, and as a group; sometimes indoors, sometimes in nature.
  • Explore and express what is alive inside us through movement, awareness practices, and sharing in pairs and in circle.
  • Experience through movement all the landscapes of relating – to self, to the world, and to the great Mystery that we also are.
  • Learn skills for stress reduction, relaxation, and renewal through awareness-based conscious movement and stillness.
  • Spend time on the land in sitting and walking meditation, allowing ourselves to dissolve a little into space.

Relating to each other in real time in the presence of the natural world, we can not only return to a semblance of sanity but also find ourselves held and healed in the great heart of Belonging.

Open to every body willing to move, pause, listen, and relax, relax, relax … one timeless movement moment at a time.

CE hours for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and LEPs available; see Faculty.

Zuza Engler

Zuza Engler has been on the spiral path of kinesthetic investigation into consciousness for close to three decades, through motion, stillness, and process inquiry. She is a teacher of Soul Motion® and Open Floor Movement, creatrix of Embodied Inquiry, and a long-term Buddhism and Gestalt practitioner.

Full Bio

Scott Engler

Scott Engler, a longtime student of presence and healing, supports adults, children and infants through Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy and workshops in trauma resolution for the family. He holds a third-degree black belt in aikido.

Full Bio