Voices Of Esalen

Sam runs through his top 6 favorite things of 2022, including cloning his own voice, messing around with the bizarre world of ChatGPT, microdosing things other than psychedelics, intentionally being different in order to gain an outsize advantage, and being intentional and resourceful in finding new music to revitalize your soul and spirit.

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. Adam will be hosting a webinar with psychedelic pioneer and the father of modern microdosing Dr. James Fadiman, PhD, live from Esalen on January 14th. It's called Microdosing: The Safe, Surprising and Emerging Psychedelic Frontier. To sign up go to https://www.esalen.org/learn/esalen-digital-microdosing-the-safe-surprising-and-emerging-psychedelic-frontier-011423 I highly recommend it, as you’ll see from this interview, Adam is very skilled at delivering information designed to make any microdosing experience smart, secure and safe. And Dr. James Fadiman is simply an Esalen treasure. He’s been a g

Louie Schwartzberg is the filmmaker behind "Fantastic Fungi" - he's back now with a follow up film: "Gratitude Revealed." Louie has created and worked on a score of films in his life, including his own features like Mysteries of the Unseen World and Wings of Life, as well as the Netflix series Moving Art. Over the process of his career, it's fair to say that he’s revolutionized the field of time-lapse photography. Louie has also been a contributing cinematographer or visual effects artist to many idiosyncratic Hollywood movies, including Men in Black 2, Erin Brockovich, Vice Versa, The Heavenly Kid, Xanadu, Altered States, and the 1982 masterpiece Koyanisqatsi. His inventive TED talks have garnered more than 60 million views. Together we talked about how he balances a love of documentary footage shot in the wild with his continuing dedication to time-lapse footage that's shot in studio, how he sees making work as a spiritual practice, how social justice photography gave him his start in film, what Los Angeles

Chef Elle Simone is a well-known American chef, culinary producer, test cook, and food stylist. In 2013, after realizing that women and persons of color were underrepresented among chefs, she founded SheChef, a mentoring and networking organization for women of color in the culinary field. She can be seen on PBS on America’s Test Kitchen and is the first African American woman to appear as a regular host on that show. Chef Elle is also a survivor of ovarian cancer and shows up as an activist and representative in that space. Chef Elle is interviewed by S. Rae Peoples, Associate Director of Diversity & Inclusion Education at Tufts University. She has over 25 years of experience serving in leadership roles that revolve around social justice in the arts, education, political, and nonprofit sectors. She advises organizations on how best to create internal conditions that allow equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice to flourish. Her opinions and writings have been featured in The Washington Post, Oakland Post,

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 educations, and protecting and preserving the cultural heritage and ancestral sacred sites.   Stephen Arevalo is a 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 tr

Tim McKee is publisher at North Atlantic Books, an educational non-profit publishing house that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives; nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing; and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature. Tim is interviewed today by S. Rae Peoples, Associate Director of Diversity & Inclusion Education at Tufts University. She has over 25 years of experience serving in leadership roles that revolve around social justice in the arts, education, political, and nonprofit sectors. Her expertise lies in advising organizations on how best to create internal conditions that allow equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice to flourish. Her opinions and writings have been featured in The Washington Post, Oakland Post, BlogHer, and YFS Magazine. A native of California with a Midwest upbringing, S. Rae is currently rooted in motherhood, love, and community in Somerville, MA. To grou

Today our episode is an encore presentation of Michael Pollan’s keynote presentation at the 2019 Psychedelic Integration Conference at the 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.

✧༺mirrored fatality is the nonbinary Kapampangan-Pilipinx and Pakistani-Muslim performance art duo of Mango and Samar, artists in residence at Esalen during the summer of 2021. Together we discuss the difference between non-binary and trans, how they share their rituals, altars, and medicine through DIT (Do It Together) experimental and healing noise punk, why punk as a genre is their musical choice, how fashion can be weaponized, why farming is a huge part of their lives and creative practice, how capitalism functions as the backdrop for their world, what an anti-imperialist education would look like, what they love about one another, how to educate, how they might react when they are misgendered, what they hope for Esalen's future, and much more. We play selections of several of their songs throughout this episode. To support Mango and Samar, head to their bandcamp and check out their music. https://mirroredfatality.bandcamp.com/music In their words: "mirrored fatality’s performance activism allows them

Dr. Brian Pace is a lecturer who teaches Psychedelic Studies at The Ohio State University. He is trained as an evolutionary ecologist, specializing in phytochemistry, ethnobotany, and ecophysiology. He believes in grassroots drug decriminalization efforts and hopes to find alternative policies to the imperial drug war. For more than a decade, Brian has worked on agroecology and climate change. Dr. Nese Devenot is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Institute for Research in Sensing (or IRiS) at the University of Cincinnati; an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research & Education at Ohio State University; and the Medicine, Society & Culture Research Fellow with Psymposia. She also researches and teaches bioethical approaches to psychedelic medicine. She was a Research Fellow with the New York University Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study, where she participated in the first qualitative study of patient experiences. Dr. Pace and Dr. Devenot are authors of a paper entitled “Right-Wing Psychedelia:

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. Spirit Awakening Foundation: https://www.spiritawakening.org/ Donate: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/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 Ecsta

Dr. Deborah Egerton is a psychotherapist, Enneagram teacher, author, coach, and spiritual teacher. She brings a focus of inclusion, diversity, equity, and anti-racism to her enneagram work and uses that focus to help individuals and organizations release false historical narratives and open their minds and hearts to a more compassionate and connected approach to life. Her work with The Enneagram and Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Anti-racism (IDEA) is designed to help heal our fractured society one connection at a time with compassion, respect, and awareness. Dr. Egerton uses the Enneagram as a mechanism for social justice and anti-racism to reconnect people across all dimensions of diversity, acknowledging and respecting the humanity in us all. https://www.deborahegerton.com/

Reverend Erika Allison is a queer interfaith minister and the author of the memoir "Gay the Pray Away: Healing your Life, Love, and Relationships from the Harms of LBGT Conversion Therapy." We spoke about her personal journey of healing after being sent to conversion therapy as a teenager in Texas, the coping strategies she developed after experiencing the trauma of identity harm, the state of conversion therapy in the United States today, how few practices harm teens more than attempts to change their sexual preference or gender identity, how a search for her mother’s approval led to a string of serial monogamous relationships, her path to becoming an interfaith minister, how this book landed with her parents, and her current mission to empower the queer community through spiritual liberation. http://reverikaallison.com

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 transmasculinity 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. https://www.dlocokid.com

Mary Sanders is a founding board member of the People of Color Psychedelic Collective, an organization that provides psychedelic education to historically marginalized communities in order to foster empowerment and healing. She is a licensed psychotherapist who specializes in exploring the depths of transgenerational trauma and, in her words, peeling off layers of oppression and cultural conditioning. She is certified in psychedelic-assisted therapies and believes that plant medicines can serve as tools to effectively heal trauma. During our discussion we talked about her experiences as the only black person in psychedelic circles, and what constitutes a safe space for her as she attempts to explore her own healing. we also touched upon what kind of barriers have to be dismantled for BIPOC folks to access psychedelic-assisted therapy, why there’s often an earned skepticism in communities of color around psychedelics studies, how the war on drugs has affected people who might seek psychedelic therapy, what tre

Senti Sojwal and Tiffany Diane Tso are founding members of the Asian American Feminist Collective, a grassroots racial and gender justice group that works to interrogate and dismantle systems of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism, telling their stories through various modes of feminist media while providing spaces for identity exploration, political education, community building, and advocacy. https://www.asianamfeminism.org In our conversation we explored a host of topics, including the legacy of feminist activism that undergirds their work, the intersectional identities that inform the AAFC, how Black feminist thought has influenced them, their hashtag #ThisisAsianAmerica (on Instagram), how reproductive justice is key to understanding how colonial power functions, what tokenism is and how it differs from genuine inclusion, and how allyship can actually work in a useful, non-performative way. in their words, Asian American feminism in an ever-evolving practice that seeks to address the multi-dimensional

Encore : Dr. Han Ren is a practitioner of decolonial mental health: she offers liberation-oriented, anti-oppressive, culturally informed therapy, and practices from a justice-oriented, systems-informed framework. Some of her specialties include Asian-American mental health, anxiety, perfectionism, high achievers, children of immigrants/third culture kids, anti-racism, and parenting. Dr. Ren is also a force to be reckoned with on TikTok, amassing a large following on a platform she uses in an attempt to make therapy accessible and applicable to our everyday lives. Together we talked about how white supremacy can be internalized, what it looks like when you center BIPOC mental health in treatment, how one decolonizes language, the conceptual shift from a dyadic trauma perspective to a more collective, societal notion of trauma, and her struggles as a recovering perfectionist. https://www.drhanren.com

Today we celebrate Bicycle Day, a modern semi-holiday (unrecognized by official governmental agencies yet observed by psychedelic enthusiasts across the globe) that commemorates Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman’s bike ride home from his lab on April 19th, 1943, after ingesting 250 micrograms of lysergic acid diethlymide, and in the process creating the world's first recorded intentional LSD trip. When Hoffman originally synthesized the compound in 1938, in the Sandoz Pharmeacuticals laboratory, in Basel, he had deemed it next to useless, and put it up on the shelf to be forgotten - but five years later, something within him told him to take a second look. The rest, as they say, is history. Today’s Voices of Esalen episode is a treasure drawn from our extensive archives - an interview with Albert Hoffman himself, conducted by none other than Stanislav Grof, sometimes known as the godfather of LSD psychotherapy. Grof was a Czechoslovakian psychoanalyst who was enormously influenced by Hoffman’s discovery of LSD; i

Laura Mae Northrup is a somatic psychotherapist, educator, podcaster, and author. Laura has been a guest on this show before, in 2020, when we discussed her podcast "Inside Eyes", a one-season tour de force that focuses on people using entheogens and psychedelics to heal from sexual trauma. She is now the author of a new book, "Radical Healership: How to Build a Values-driven Healing Practice in a Profit-Driven World." Northrup views healing work and healing practitioners through a spiritual and political lens, as they do battle with the forces of capitalism while attempting to heal their clients and take care of themselves, all at the same time. Find Laura on the web at https://www.lauramaenorthrup.com/ Check out Radical Healership : https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/shop/radical-healership/

Xochitl Ashe is a Medicine Woman in the Peruvian Andean tradition and has worked with sacred plant medicines since the time of her initiation. At 16 years old, she became the first female of five generations of men to be initiated into the healing traditions of her Peruvian ancestral lineage. Xochitl is the founder of an Indigenous women owned retreat company that offers legal Mazatec Psilocybin Mushroom Retreats in Mexico. Her mission is to honor the traditional indigenous knowledge and ceremony of sacred plant medicine to provide authentic and powerful life changing experiences.