Voices of Esalen Podcast

Bill Donius is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book, Thought Revolution. In this book, Donius explains the science behind non-dominant handwriting and teaches how to incorporate this powerful technique into your personal life. Through the simple process of non-dominant hand writing, you can discover how to connect more fully with your subconscious right brain, unlocking hidden talents, reducing stress, and even healing from trauma. This episode is a bit different, in that we feature a process that Bill goes through with a Voices of Esalen listener, oncology nurse and meditation teacher Nicole Longbine.

Bill is also a member of the Esalen Board of Trustees. He spent 30 years in corporate America in a number of industries, including health care, television production, and banking. He rose through the ranks to become chairman and CEO of Pulaski Bank in St Louis, growing it eight-fold to $1.4 billion in assets. He serves on a number of boards including the St. Louis Art Museum, Maryville University, and Venture Cafe, and served a two-year term on the U.S. Federal Reserve Board as a banker appointee.

Adam Bramlage is Founder and CEO of Flow State Micro, a functional mushroom company and microdosing education platform. Adam has helped hundreds of people, from professional athletes to people suffering from addiction and depression, achieve results through microdosing in his private practice. This interview gives the basics of microdosing; it's a great primer for anyone just at the beginning of their journey.

Today we’re sharing a conversation that took place in October, 2022, between members of the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County and the Esalen Institute. Representing the Esselen tribe are Jana Nason and Stephen Vicente Arevalo.

Jana Nason is an Esselen and Rumsen descendant, and an enrolled tribal member of the ETMC. She is the nonprofit secretary, and serves on the Tribal Council as Tribal Administrator and Secretary, Publications Chair, and Cultural Resource Committee member. She also manages the Cultural Archeological Monitoring program and serves her Tribe in that capacity. She is dedicated to education, and protecting and preserving the cultural heritage and ancestral sacred sites.

Stephen Arevalo is an Esselen and Rumsen descendant. He currently serves on the ETMC Tribal Council as well on the Cultural Resource Committee. Stephen serves his Tribe on many levels and is a tribal cultural archeological monitor. He is deeply passionate about his ancestry and has started a language re-learning class for tribal members. He is an educational speaker, and an active community member.

Representing Esalen Institute is Douglas Drummond. Douglas serves as the Director for Healing Arts and Somatics and the Director of Community Alliance at Esalen Institute. He is also faculty. Douglas is originally from Aotearoa New Zealand and now makes his home in Big Sur, California in Esselen Territory, with his family.

Learn more about the Esselen Tribe at www.esselentribe.org/.

Today our episode is an encore presentation of Michael Pollan’s keynote presentation at the 2019 Psychedelic Integration Conference at Esalen Institute. Pollan is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, including 2018’s How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. This tome has become a four-part Netflix show, also entitled How to Change Your Mind.

Pollan gives a great speech here, touching upon the pervasiveness of the human tendency to want to change consciousness, the ways that noetic understanding can add to healing on the psychedelic journey, the radical ways that plants can change us and change consciousness, and the ways that he remains a skeptic to some of the more grandiose claims of the psychedelic movement. A must-listen for fans and for newbies alike.

Akuyoe Graham is founder of the Spirit Awakening Foundation, an arts-based non-profit dedicated to helping underserved youth in the juvenile justice system. Since its inception in 1995, SAF has been a pioneer in developing and offering restorative, trauma-informed, prevention and intervention programs to underserved, incarcerated, and systems-involved youth in Los Angeles County.

Akuyoe speaks about how difficult and broken the juvenile justice system is, what tools she gives the participants in her program to empower them, including meditation, writing, and dramatic arts, and how the young people of Spirit Awakening Foundation have come several times to Esalen Institute for a leadership retreat of their own. This episode contains bonus material from a recent conversation that is a follow-up to the original 2021 interview.

Donate now to Spirit Awakening Foundation.

Welcome to a Voices of Esalen archive edition. Our featured lecture was delivered at Esalen as a part of a weeklong training in 2018, by wise teachers Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman.

Jack Kornfield is one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. He trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, and Burma, and has taught meditation internationally since 1974 .After graduating from Dartmouth College in Asian Studies in 1967 he joined the Peace Corps and worked on tropical medicine teams in the Mekong River valley. He later met and studied as a monk under the Buddhist master Ajahn Chah. Returning to the United States, Jack co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and the Spirit Rock Center in Woodacre, California, with fellow meditation teachers Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein. His books have been translated into 20 languages and sold more than a million copies. They include A Wise Heart; Living Dharma; and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.

Trudy Goodman has devoted much of her life to practicing Buddhist meditation. She is one of the earliest teachers of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and co-taught with Jon Kabat-Zinn at the MBSR clinic at University of Massachusetts Medical School. In 1995 she co-founded the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, the first center in the world dedicated to exploring the synergy of these two disciplines.

From 1991 to 1998, Trudy was a resident Zen teacher at the Cambridge Buddhist Association. She then moved to Los Angeles and founded InsightLA, the first center in the world to combine training in both Buddhist Insight (Vipassana) Meditation and nonsectarian mindfulness and compassion practices.

After becoming a mother, Trudy co-founded a school for distressed children, practicing mindfulness-based psychotherapy with children, parents, teenagers, couples, and individuals.

She has trained a generation of teachers, mindfulness humanitarians who make mindfulness and meditation classes available for professional caregivers, social justice and environmental activists, unsung individuals working on the front lines of suffering – all done with tenderness, courage and a simple commitment to holding hands together.

(Side note: She is also the voice of “Trudy the Love Barbarian” on the Netflix series Midnight Gospel.)

This is an wonderful talk. They cover so much, including how we may misuse mindfulness, how thought is a great servant but not a great master, how we may navigate living in this life of 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. Also, Jack and Trudy are married, for those who don’t know, and they comment insightfully on their relationship during the question and answer section of this talk.

A final note: at one point, Jack and Trudy comment on an Esalen community member who died unexpectedly in 2018. They are in fact referring to Weston Call, who was a friend to so many people at Esalen and in Big Sur. This episode is dedicated to his memory.

D’Lo is a queer/transgender Tamil Sri Lankan-American actor/writer/comic whose work ranges from stand-up comedy and solo theater to plays, films, short stories, and poetry. His acting credits include: LOOKING, TRANSPARENT, SENSE 8, Mr. ROBOT and Issa Rae-produced MINIMUM WAGE. His solo show “To T or Not to T” premieres June 25th at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles.

Together we talked about trans masculinity and what it’s like being a trans man in a world dominated by toxic masculinity, his relationship with his mother and father, his journey from gender nonconforming to someone who passed as male, what cis gender folks should never EVER ask about being trans, who he makes his work for, what solo performers inspire him (Whoopi and Leguziamo!), how hip hop was his ally, how he became politicized as a kid growing up in Lancaster, California, and what is his secret superpower as a comic.

www.dlocokid.com

Dr. Adele Lafrance is a clinical psychologist, research scientist, and a leader in the research and practice of psychedelic medicine. Currently, she is the clinical investigator and strategy lead for the MAPS-sponsored MDMA-assisted psychotherapy study for eating disorders and a collaborator on the Imperial College study for psilocybin and anorexia nervosa.

We talked about her history as a clinician, and why she believes psychedelics may offer a different and perhaps more successful way of treating eating disorders than traditional methods. We also spoke about a system she developed known as emotion-focused family therapy. Dr. Lafrance believes emotion-focused family therapy can used effectively in conjunction with psychedelic therapy to treat eating disorders.

Sandor Katz has taught hundreds of workshops demystifying fermentation and empowering people to reclaim this transformational process. His book, The Art of Fermentation, received a James Beard award and was a finalist at the International Association of Culinary Professionals. In 2009, he was named one of Chow magazine’s top “provacateurs, trendsetters, and rabble-rousers.” This self-described "fermentation fetishist" treats us to a discussion of his new book, Fermentation Journeys. We talk about food writing and favorite food writers, the benefits of fermentation, being an adventurer in the kitchen, and what's fermenting in his refrigerator.

Vivien Sansour is the founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. Trained in the field of Anthropology, Vivien has worked with farmers worldwide on issues relating to agriculture and independence. She is a 2020-2021 Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative Fellow at Harvard University where she is working on an autobiographical book documenting her work saving seeds in Palestine and around the world. Together we discussed how food sovereignty aligns with the struggle of Palestinian resistance, how biodiversity reflects and intersects with cultural diversity, how the military occupation of Palestine affects the farming practices that go on there, and how love is the greatest form of resistance to colonial oppression. She's brilliant.