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Esalen Institute

Esalen Institute

Founded in 1962, Esalen is a nonprofit organization exploring human potential through experience, education and research. Esalen sponsors pioneering initiatives and offers personal, spiritual and social transformation practices for workshop participants and residential staff. Located on California’s scenic Big Sur coast, Esalen welcomes more than 12,000 students, seminarians and visitors each year. It works toward the realization of a more just, creative and sustainable world. For more information, visit www.esalen.org.www.esalen.org

Search complete. 160 mentions across 57 episodes found for "Esalen Institute".

Sep 23, 2026

Andrew HornGUEST
56:12
And, uh, Gestalt therapy is kind of a, a right now, uh, an esoteric therapeutic modality.
Andrew HornGUEST
56:20
It was turned into a facilitation practice at the Esalen Institute, and fundamentally, it was all about how to communicate transparently about what's real for you in this moment.
Andrew HornGUEST
56:31
That's what it was about.
Andrew HornGUEST
56:32
And I got invited to this workshop, and, uh, I go to the Cleveland Institute of Gestalt, and I get there, and I had some guy I had met at the Conscious Capitalism Summit who sponsored my ticket.
Erik Anders LangGUEST
37:21
And I just started kind of putting together this film about, like, golf and this, you know, like, this spiritual journey.
Erik Anders LangGUEST
37:27
And I got into meditation through just reading Dr. Parent's book, and I was, like, going on retreats with him and not talking and, like, doing incense stuff and, like, going to Big Sur and sneaking into Esalen because, you know, because there was a book about golf that was written by the guy that started it.
Erik Anders LangGUEST
37:43
I mean, it's just like, it was just this like, like, f-full overload, overdose of the game.
Erik Anders LangGUEST
37:50
And I don't think I ever really even touched this exclusive game at that point.
Ramzi FawazGUEST
61:12
We have a second season coming out in April.
Ramzi FawazGUEST
61:15
And then lastly, I am teaching a course, a five-day workshop at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California at the beginning of June.
Ramzi FawazGUEST
61:24
And people can find that on my website, RamseyFawaz.com. It's all about what we've been talking about.
Ramzi FawazGUEST
61:28
It's called The Thrill of Groundlessness, Flowing Through Life Without Absolutes.
Mark ColemanGUEST
29:08
I taught a day long recently at Spirit Rock called Meeting ADHD with Mindfulness, Wisdom, and Compassion.
Mark ColemanGUEST
29:15
I'm teaching at Esalen about it in this fall.
Mark ColemanGUEST
29:17
I'm going to actually start writing about it this winter because it's very painful.
Mark ColemanGUEST
29:22
And, you know, millions of people have it and millions of people feel bad about themselves, feel a lot of self-judgment or embarrassment or shame.
Raghu MarkusHOST
0:46
This is episode three hundred and thirteen, "Touching the Sun." So this is an early one.
Raghu MarkusHOST
0:53
It's 1969, and it's at the Esalen Institute in California.
Raghu MarkusHOST
0:58
And just two years earlier, Ram Dass had this powerful LSD journey, and that method of psychedelics, it had gotten him someplace so real, but he wanted to know how to live it, how to integrate it, how to bring it into his life.
Raghu MarkusHOST
1:17
So he did what you do when you don't know what to do.
Neil SandersGUEST
23:17
It's, uh, it's English, but it's started by a gentleman called Hugh Cranton Miller, John Rawlings Reese, and then Kurt Lewin, who was involved in both the Frankfurt School and the starting of the OSS.
Neil SandersGUEST
23:28
Um, basically, uh, uh, the, the Frankfurt School went on to, to found certain, uh, things that you might have heard of, like MIT, Stanford Research Institute, National Institute, uh, Institute of, uh, Hypnosis, Esalen, RAND, Wharton School of Economics.
Neil SandersGUEST
23:43
Uh, it helps with blue chip companies like Unilever, BP, IBM, CBS, N, uh, NBC, Shell, Hewlett-Packard, the FBI, the CIA, Naval Intelligence, Department of Defense, United States government.
Art BellHOST
23:55
Okay.
Don LattinGUEST
37:14
I mean, it was this was in the 40s.
Don LattinGUEST
37:16
So this was like before all this stuff got very popular in the 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond, you know, and it's actually I mean, Esalen Institute at Big Sur, which is kind of the grandstand.
Don LattinGUEST
37:25
any of the human potential movement, you know, centers.
Don LattinGUEST
37:28
The guys who founded Esalen, Mike Murphy and Richard Price, were inspired after meeting with Hurd and hearing him talk about Chabuco College, which had already folded.
Don LattinGUEST
37:36
But Hurd was very influential in a lot of different ways.
Don LattinGUEST
37:39
You can see him behind Esalen Institute.
Don LattinGUEST
37:41
You can see him behind, of course, Bill Wilson.
Don LattinGUEST
37:43
So one of the reasons I wrote the book was to sort of revive people's interest in Gerald Hurd.
AndrewHOST
46:55
And his brother was Eugenicist, who was Julian Huxley.
AndrewHOST
46:58
And he literally goes over to Esalen Institute, which is where like Terrence McKenna comes out of.
AndrewHOST
47:03
And that's where the Joe Rogan shit comes out of.
AndrewHOST
47:04
So it's this you can see this draw this the kind of evolution all the way from, you know, Malthus to, you know, Margaret Sanger with Planned Parenthood to Scientology with this spiritual eugenics, which is what they practice.

26 MINS LATER

AndrewHOST
73:02
And now they're doing it again.
AndrewHOST
73:03
And you can find Rockefeller funding all the way through.
AndrewHOST
73:06
Esalen Institute he funded the Richard Admiral bird expedition he funded eugenics with the Nazis he funded The first iteration of AI he gave a hundred million to so he's everywhere, you know the Rockefellers He's got the seed bank with Bill Gates.
AndrewHOST
73:20
So like yeah, it's crazy whenever you dig into this shit It's not saying he even funded the technocrats in Columbia University in Canada which led to the technocratic, you know political system and Anyway, so all over this shit.
AndrewGUEST
10:56
And so you had the genesis come out of that.
AndrewGUEST
10:58
And then Aldous Huxley took the spiritual side of things and he ended up teaching a lot at Esalen.
AndrewGUEST
11:04
And so he did, you know, the doors of perception where he took a bunch of mescaline and went into, you know, a different world.
AndrewGUEST
11:11
Right.
AndrewGUEST
11:12
And he was in Esalen Institute teaching these things.
AndrewGUEST
11:16
And I think it's important to point out that he mentioned one day that there will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorships without tears, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will, in fact, have their liberties taken away from them, but rather enjoy it.
AndrewGUEST
11:41
And so it's really important.

14 MINS LATER

StevenHOST
26:09
Let
Shannon AlgeoGUEST
58:43
So yeah, I'm just standing with you in the inquiry of like, how can we stay connected to the power to feel and the power to grieve.
Shannon AlgeoGUEST
58:53
One more thing I'll share is that when I lead these, facilitate these five-day offline workshops and retreats at the Esalen Institute and coming up in Ireland next year, last year, a year ago in August of 2025 at Esalen, Everyone puts their phones, we turn our phones off, we put them into a box, we do a whole ritual, we make an altar, we set intentions, we go off for 72 hours together.
Shannon AlgeoGUEST
59:22
And on the first full day in the circle, I never know what's going to happen because it's a real human experiment and it's sacred.
Shannon AlgeoGUEST
59:32
And oftentimes I don't know some of the people and I'm meeting these new beings.

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