Voices of Esalen

In this episode, Sam speaks with Jet Eveleth, a clown teacher, performer, writer, and integrative medicine practitioner who lives at the fertile crossroads of medicine and mischief. Jet has studied integrative medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, meditation, and psychotherapy at Harvard Medical School, while also training with legendary clown teacher Philippe Gaulier, touring with Second City,...

In this episode, Sam Stern speaks with Bill Drummond, a clinical consultant psychologist based in Wellington, New Zealand, where he serves as Clinical Leader for Youth Mental Health Services across the region. Bill has spent more than a decade working with young people and families in public mental health settings, supporting adolescents facing trauma, anxiety, depression, family instability, iden...

Brita Ostrom is the author of the new memoir "Steeped: A Bug Sur Elixir of Sulfur and Sage," a vivid, intimate, and often wonderfully unsentimental account of her life in Big Sur and at Esalen during 1967 and 1968. Brita arrived in California during a hinge moment in American culture: she landed in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco nine months before the Summer of Love, smack dab in the...

Darnell Lamont Walker is one of those people who has somehow managed to live several lives inside a single lifetime. He is a writer, filmmaker, children’s television creator, and death doula. He is also a documentary filmmaker whose work has explored Black Americans seeking refuge from injustice, Black mental health, and the global epidemic of sexual violence. His newest book, Never Can Say Goodby...

This interview is part of the Shulgin Foundation's Oral Histories Series. Voices of Esalen and Shulgin Foundation collaborated to bring you a wide-ranging interview with Mariavittoria Mangini, known to many as Maria, is a nurse-midwife, scholar, psychedelic historian, and longtime advocate for the preservation of underground psychedelic knowledge. Maria’s life intersects with several crucial strea...

Magnus Toren has been Executive Director of the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, California, since 1993. A native of Sweden, he circumnavigated the globe delivering yachts across five oceans before settling in Big Sur. Under his leadership, the Library has evolved into a vibrant cultural hub for literature, music, and community, dedicated to preserving and celebrating Henry Miller’s legac...

In the third episode of our series on the subtle body, we’re discussing the book "The Serpent’s Tale: Kuṇḍalinī, Yoga, and the History of an Experience," a sweeping and deeply researched tome by Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen, who trace Kundalini from its roots to its many reinterpretations in modern yoga and global spirituality, examining the forms by which Kundalini has been embodied acr...

Today’s episode is our second in a series where we take a deep dive into a concept that hovers just at the edge of language: the subtle body. It’s one of those ideas that seems to belong everywhere and nowhere at once -- the subtle body is part of Daoist practice, Indian yoga, Christian mysticism, and, of course, the experimental, boundary-blurring culture of Esalen itself. Depending on who you as...

Today we begin a three part series in which we explore the idea of the subtle body, a concept found in many contemplative and healing traditions around the world. From yogic energy channels to Daoist internal alchemy, the subtle body refers to the layers of human experience that lie between the physical body and consciousness, suggesting that our lives may unfold through more dimensions than the p...

Tamala Floyd is an Internal Family Systems therapist whose work focuses on ancestral healing. Internal Family Systems, or IFS, begins with the premise that we are not a single, unified self; instead we are more like a constellation of parts, where some parts protect, some are exiled. The unification and integration of parts is the crucial work of IFS. Additionally, some parts carry burdens that ne...

Joe Dolce is a writer and journalist whose work has long traced the shifting frontier of our relationship with altered states. He's the author of "Brave New Weed: Adventures into the Uncharted World of Cannabis: and his newest book, "Modern Psychedelics: a Handbook for Mindful Exploration" Is nothing short of a contemporary compendium on the subject. It's a lucid, deeply informed guide to the medi...

Pamela Hayes Malkoff is a board-certified art therapist who has spent more than three decades working at the intersection of creativity and healing. She is an internationally recognized facilitator and teacher, who supports individuals, couples, families, and communities, with particular care for people navigating addiction and recovery, questions of identity, grief, anxiety, and the terrain of re...

Over the course of this wide-ranging talk recorded live at Esalen in 1997 , Terence McKenna explores what may unfold as we begin handing the keys of what he calls a “tired, shattered planet” to a higher intelligence. He wanders through UFO belief systems, psychedelics, and the idea that the human brain itself might operate as a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum effects before they spill int...

For this episode, we spoke with five people who are engaging with AI in deeply human ways. - One is using AI in the context of dating, helping them think through attraction and communication. - Another has built a wellness app, powered by AI, and is exploring how these kind of systems can support self-inquiry and self-care. - Another works closely with organizations—primarily nonprofits—using AI t...

In this episode, we spotlight The Big Sur Big Share, a grassroots food program founded by Joseph Bradford and Helen Handshy that has quietly become essential to life in Big Sur. Every Monday, rain or shine, locals gather at the Grange to share farm-fresh produce, pantry staples, garden abundance, and maybe most importantly, time with one another. What began with two neighbors offering their extra...

Stanislav Grof, born in Prague in 1931, was among the most influential figures in the early clinical use of LSD. Sometimes referred to as the Godfather of psychedelic psychotherapy, Grof was was trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst in Prague and was on track to follow in Freud's footsteps when his path was derailed by a powerful LSD session. He changed his life path and became one of the principal...

Since 2016, Tim McKee has been the publisher of North Atlantic Books, a nonprofit press with a 50-year legacy of advancing healing, consciousness, and cultural transformation. North Atlantic Books has long been aligned with a similar spirit that animates Esalen: a commitment to somatics, trauma-informed healing, a willingness to platform voices working at the edges of personal and collective awake...

Today we revisit a 1971 talk by Dr. John C. Lilly: physician, neuroscientist, tireless psychonaut, and one of the most audacious explorers of consciousness in the twentieth century. John Lilly was a frequent teacher at Esalen and a close friend of Esalen co-founder Dick Price. He begins teaching at Esalen as early as 1968, focusing on what he called the human biocomputer and lecturing in part on “...

In June of 2001, the Esalen Institute hosted Eckhart Tolle for a weekend workshop. By that time, Tolle’s book The Power of Now had already begun an improbable ascent, exploding from a totally unknown into something of a cultural phenomenon. The central insight of Eckhart Tolle’s work is that the future doesn’t hold your salvation, and it doesn’t pay to get lost in the past, either. What we long fo...

What if AI was capable of being more than just a new and improved Google search? What if there was ways to harness its predictive powers for growth, self-realization, or even freedom? Today we'll hear from four thinkers: Larissa Conte, a leadership guide and systems healer with a focus on power, on the principle of mutual co-enactment. Then we hear from Cecilia Callas, co-founder of The AI Salon,...

The pelvis, home to our reproductive, digestive, and eliminatory systems, is responsive to stress, pregnancy, birth, hormones, lifestyle, and trauma. When balanced, it supports vitality and ease. When out of balance, it can profoundly affect quality of life. Joining the conversation are two extraordinary practitioners: Dr. Tia Ukpe-Wallace, an orthopedic and pelvic health physical therapist, yoga...

Today I’m super excited to present to you another episode from the Archives From this trove of 1/2 inch reel to reel tapes that we recently found mouldering in a storage facility near the Monterey Airport - a 1966 dialogue between Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy and philosopher Alan Watts and today is PART TWO— notable for being one of the only instances I've encountered of Michael Murphy conduct...

Today we present a rare archival conversation between Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy and philosopher Alan Watts, recorded in 1966. Watts, who taught at Esalen from its founding in 1962 until his death in 1973, was among the foremost interpreters of Eastern philosophy for Western audiences. In this wide-ranging dialogue, Watts articulates his theory of human evolutionary development through analy...

Fletcher Tucker - Big Sur artist, Esalen faculty member, independent musician, and wilderness guide - is a kind of spiritual cartographer and wild-hearted philosopher of the sonic and sacred. He has a new album, Kin, which is the focus of this conversation. Kin is a ritual, a spell, a window into the more-than-human world. It is a collection of drone-based, chant-infused compositions built with an...

Ken Robins has been part of the beating heart of Esalen for many decades. A somatic Gestalt practitioner, couples counselor, and devoted early student of Dick Price, Will Schutz, Jessica Britt and many other Esalen legends, Ken has spent his adult life exploring the transformational power of relationship, presence, and the body’s innate wisdom. In this conversation, Ken traces his unlikely journey...