Voices of Esalen

Matthew Ingram is the author of Retreat: How the Counterculture Invented Wellness. His book is a primer covering the historical unfolding of a host of topics including Allen Ginsberg, Stanislav Grof, LSD psychotherapy, the Prague Spring, psychoanalysis, Freudian Marxism, ego dissolution, the CIA's MK ULTRA program, Tom Wolfe, Libertarians, cultural revolt, and more.

Fred Dust is a former Global Managing Partner at the acclaimed international design firm IDEO, where he worked with leaders and change agents to unlock the creative potential of business, government, education, and philanthropic organizations. Fred has worked with the US Agency for International Development, the US Office of Personnel Management, and the US Social Security Administration to create...

Today, another archive edition. We’re presenting part two of a lecture series given at Esalen in 1992 by the one and only Terence McKenna, ethnobotanist, mystic, psychedelic adventurer. The talk is entitled "Politics and Ethos," but as you’ll hear, McKenna forsakes those topics quickly in favor of a more robust discussion that includes shamanism, synesthesia, paranormal phenomena, climatology, ast...

This Archive Edition of Voices of Esalen features a talk by the inimitable Terence McKenna, delivered at Esalen in August 1992. For those not familiar with his work, McKenna was the ultimate psychedelic intellectual: an acclaimed ethnobotanist, mystic, and hyper-articulate lecturer, he spoke and wrote fluently about a variety of subjects, including entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, semi...

This archival talk was delivered at the Esalen institute in September of 1966 by famed American psychologist Abraham Maslow, best known for creating Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated around the idea that the most basic or pressing needs, like food, safety and security, must first be satisfied in order to address needs such as love and belonging, esteem, and f...

James Fadiman is known as the author of The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide and as one of America's most well-known proponents of microdosing. While a Harvard undergrad, he was the "teacher's pet" of Ram Dass, then known as Richard Alpert; as a graduate student at Stanford University, he became a research assistant at Myron Stolaroff's famed International Foundation for Advanced Study, an early non-p...

Tiffany Yu is an entrepreneur, disability advocate, and CEO and founder of Diversability, an organization that aims to rebrand disability through community. She is also the founder of the Awesome Foundation Disability Chapter, which sources monthly micro-grants for disability projects. Tiffany serves on the San Francisco Mayor’s Disability Council, appointed by San Francisco Mayor London Breed in...

Raafi Rivero is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and artist and is the creator of Unarmed, a series of printed basketball jerseys designed to commemorate victims of racist police violence. Rivero installs large-scale versions of the jerseys in urban areas, so as to honor those who have been slain, and to create awareness around ongoing violence perpetrated against people of color in America. In this two...

Karena Montag and Claire Whitmer are the co-founders of Stronghold, an organization that stewards sustainable shifts in systems and cultures towards equity and liberation through strategic consulting and restorative practices. Karena Montag has worked at the intersection of mental health and social justice for nearly twenty years in multi-stressed communities, with an emphasis the past ten on the...

Jasmine Star Horan is the author of “The Gazebo Learning Project: A Legacy of Experiential & Experimental Early Childhood Education at Esalen.” The Gazebo School is a somewhat legendary institution, encapsulated with the Esalen institute, founded in the mid-1970's by Janet Lederman, one of the early outdoor preschools. Jasmine Horan was born at Esalen - she is the daughter of foundational massage...

Kat Vellos is an author, speaker, a user experience designer, coach, facilitator, and founder of Bay Area Black Designers, Silicon Valley’s largest unofficial employee resource for Black design talent. Her new book, "We Should Get Together," is a meditation on adult friendships and how to meaningfully cultivate them. Kat spoke about her work, her writing, and about racism in contemporary society....

Eldra Jackson III is the co-Executive Director of Inside Circle, a support group that helps incarcerated men heal trauma and take responsibility for their choices. Eldra was featured in The Work, an 2017 documentary film taking place within New Folsom Prison in California, which follows a group healing intensive between members of the public and incarcerated men. It's a remarkable project, one of...

Ashanti Branch, M.Ed, was born and raised by a single mother on welfare in Oakland, California. He took the road less traveled to get out of the ghetto and attended one of California’s premier engineering colleges, California Polytechnic - San Luis Obispo, where he studied Civil Engineering and worked as a construction project manager. But after tutoring struggling students and realizing his true...

Dr. Emily Silverman is a physician located in San Francisco. She is also the host of the Nocturnists, a podcast dedicated to the project of humanizing health care professionals. We talked about the new tactic of storytelling she’s employed for this season of the Nocturnists, which entails curating audio diaries sent in by more than 250 health care workers around the country, as they report their o...

Adam Smiley Poswolsky, bestselling author of The Quarter-Life Breakthrough and the Breakthrough Speaker, speaks widely about millennials, employee engagement, and intergenerational collaboration. His writing has been published in The Washington Post, Fast Company, Time, and Business Insider, and his work has been featured in USA Today, Mashable, Forbes, VICE, CNN, CNBC, Cosmopolitan, and the World...

Archive Edition: Today we're pleased to bring you an interview conducted on August 5th, 1985, with the godfather of psychedelic psychotherapy, Stanislav Grof. At this point, Grof had been a scholar-in-residence at Esalen for more than ten years. The interview was conducted at Esalen by a young Perry Holloman, now a well-known figure at Esalen himself, having become over the course of his career an...

Johnsmith is an acclaimed folk singer and songwriter, as well as a longtime teacher of songwriting at the Esalen Institute, where he’s helped thousands of students across the years to access their creativity and their personal depths to manifest meaningful and joyful work. In an interview we recorded in early March 2020, B.P., (Before Pandemic), we chatted about his past, his process, what songs a...

Lucia Horan was born and raised at Esalen Institute. She grew up dancing with Gabrielle Roth, founder of the 5 Rhythms method. Lucia is an international teacher of 5 Rhythms and insight meditation, and leads and co-leads groups in the fields of Buddhist meditation, yoga, trauma, addiction, grief, women’s power, Motion Theater, and wild dolphins. Today, she spoke about how the coronavirus is changi...

Peter Bregman coaches CEOs and senior leaders in many of the world’s premier organizations. Ranked as a top 30 thought leader by Thinkers 50 Radar and selected as one of the top 8 thought leaders in leadership, he's also the best-selling author of "Leading with Emotional Courage: How to Have Hard Conversations, Create Accountability, and Inspire Action on Your Most Important Work." He is also a re...

Janet Stone is a yoga and meditation teacher with a global following. We spoke on March 23, 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic that is currently dominating the news and changing most our lives. Our intention was to give Janet space to offer actionable advice on how to be calmer and more grounded in the face of the unknown.

A Voices of Esalen Archive Edition: Ram Dass speaks at the Esalen Institute on October 18th, 1987. Ram Dass was born Richard Alpert in 1931. ⁠Initially famous for being part of the Timothy Leary-led LSD revolution at Harvard in the early 1960’s, he was also well known for his book "Be Here Now," a kind of illustrated counter-cultural Bible written in 1971 which drew upon many of the transformative...

Katie Hafner is the author of the memoir "Mother, Daughter, Me," the unsettling true story of how she and her daughter took in her estranged mother for a year. She is also an accomplished journalist, having written for the New York Times since 1991, as well as for Newsweek, Esquire, Wired, and the New Republic. We talked about how her background in journalism aided her in writing a difficult memoi...

Zak Dychtwald is the author of "Young China: How the Restless Generation Will Change Their Country and the World." Zak, a second-generation Esalen thought leader, came to Big Sur as part of Esalen's Conversations on the Edge Series, where we bring together leading experts and visiting teachers to explore a pressing issue of our time. Zak is a leading expert on youth culture in China. Together we d...

Chungliang Al Huang is a tai chi master, writer, philosopher, dancer, and one of the most important and enduring teachers in Esalen’s history. Born in Shanghai, China, Huang moved to the United States to study architecture and cultural anthropology. In Los Angeles, he fell into a career as a professional dancer through a chance meeting with Sammy Davis Jr. In the mid 1960’s, Huang became a close c...

Cassandra Vieten is a senior fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, as well as the Executive Director of the John W. Brick Foundation, and Scholar-in-Residence at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego. She is a psychologist, mind-body medicine researcher, author of numerous articles in scientific journals, and an internationally recognize...