Esalen Institute is a beacon of spiritual workshops. Big Sur is beautiful in itself and Esalen is right on the coast with natural hot springs that look out on the water. The workshops are led by experts who take their teaching seriously. It’s pricey but the experience is transformative.
My decision to go to a Esalen workshop this September started with a birthday tarot reading. I stopped in a store on Haight street and booked a half-hour session. One thing she said was that a new writing self was emerging and that I needed a vacation, even just a few days would help. I immediately thought of Esalen in Big Sur because it’s a three-hour drive from San Francisco. It had been years since I was last there, but I remembered how life-altering it had been. I’d conveniently forgotten how difficult it was too, but I’m convinced we forget so that we’ll be ready when we need to be.
When I got home from the tarot reader, I found a workshop happening the next week on Chakras and Embodied Writing taught by Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Vikram Chandra. I didn’t know what embodied writing was, but I’d been thinking about a new way to relate to my writing that was coming from more feeling, less thinking, and more connection. Plus the reading had mentioned a new writing self so I thought it fit. Everything fell into place and I was driving down the coast six days later.
The intensity of the pandemic makes workshops intense too
I’d been to Esalen a few times but not since the pandemic. Sometimes it seems life is back to normal but other times, like this week, life is intense and I wonder if the introspective lens of the pandemic continues to encompass us.
The workshop opened with a meditation that stirred up big feelings
We started with an introductory meditation that focused on the five elements: earth, fire, water, air, and space (or ether). The homework that day was to wake up and look at our bodies in the mirror for five entire minutes. To set an alarm if we needed to but what was most important was that we not turn away. We wrote the thoughts that came up, the judgments if they did, and were told to ask where they came from, and who was thinking them.
The meditation was only twenty-two minutes. Innocent enough on the surface, but later in the day when I woke up from an afternoon nap, a rush of feelings overwhelmed me. As if a gift, I recalled Srvanda saying we had a choice, to hide away from what we see or to open up to the world. To feeling. To nature inside and out. I chose to go to the hot springs that look out on the Pacific. The space softened around me with each step. It was only day one. The foundation was set for revelation.
The land at Esalen is sacred
The 100-acre stretch of land along the coast in Big Sur was sacred land for Esselen people. Instructors say people lived in the hills behind it, coming to the shore for worship. Three types of water meet there: natural hot springs, fresh mountain water, and saltwater of the Pacific, which was believed to be sacred in itself.
There’s a common understanding that the grounds are still sacred and speak to everyone that comes there. Our instructors told us that many people turn around at the gate and never even attend the workshops they paid for or leave in the middle because the experience brings up feelings they don’t want to face.
The workshop balanced writing and meditating each day
We wrote and meditated each day, opening up to ourselves. Vikram led us through character development and story structure asking what we felt as we listened to what each other had written. We meet for two hours three times a day with a long break in the afternoons. There was no plan for the week or even the day, we were only told where to show up for the next session. In the middle of the week, Srvanda announced we’d be doing a long meditation and told us to leave all technology outside the room.
There was a fetal meditation mid-week that birthed a new way of being
At the front of the room, she had a pile of sheets and told us to sit where we had room to spread out. We’d be doing a fetal meditation, which no one in the room had done before. Rather than explain it, she told us to get started. We curled into fetal positions with the sheets tucked around us, ensuring we were completely covered and at least a little uncomfortable.
Once she started, we were transported to another world. She led us from being universal golden specs to birth and finding the spec within our bodies. When we finished, we shared a few experiences but most of us had no words for it.
There was a lot of silence because there were no words for the experience
Often, we were silent. Floating in the space before words form. As I thought about the workshop subject, I came to feel that this was what embodied writing meant. It was a process of becoming. Being the blank page in front of us and letting the story unfold. That meant being uncomfortable and allowing for the story to come on its own time, as we listened to the pieces and strung them together to make sense of them. Before we shared them with anyone else.
That was an intense day. A day of opening up to what we were there for, whether we understood or not. I may have thought I was there to develop a new writing process, but what I left with was much more. A friend once told me a burning man saying, you go for the burn you want, but you leave with the burn you need. I was leaving with what I needed, making sense of it would happen later.
Esalen workshops take a natural course that lighten at the end
By the end of the week, the air had lifted. I joined my group for our last lunch together overlooking the ocean and we said our goodbyes. It was a typical end to an untypical week. I had new friends and we’d been through something together. We were changed but I wouldn’t really understand the impact for a few weeks, when I got back to my usual life.
