Voices of Esalen

Esalen Institute
  • 4.7 (165)
  • Religion & Spirituality
  • Updated Monthly

"Voices of Esalen" features provocative, in-depth interviews with the dynamic leaders, teachers, and thinkers who reflect the mission of the Esalen Institute. For more about the Esalen Institute, head to esalen.org Follow Esalen on Facebook and Twitter

  1. 12h ago

    Adam “Smiley” Poswolsky on Belonging, Loneliness, and the Human Advantage

    Adam “Smiley” Poswolsky is a workplace belonging expert, internationally recognized keynote speaker, and bestselling author whose work explores friendship, loneliness, human connection, and the ways technology is reshaping our relationships with one another. In this conversation, Sam and Smiley trace a line from the early digital-detox movement and Camp Grounded to the present moment of AI, hybrid work, and widespread social disconnection. Smiley speaks about the loneliness crisis, the particular struggles facing young people and men, and why belonging and friendship have become increasingly important both inside and outside the workplace, arguing that organizations need to design intentionally for human connection, and that belonging cannot simply be handed off to an HR department - instead, it has to become part of the everyday culture of a workplace. The conversation also turns to artificial intelligence and the temptation to automate increasingly large parts of our creative and professional lives. Smiley makes the case for using AI thoughtfully while preserving the kinds of distinctly human practices—conversation, presence, intuition, personal storytelling, friendship, and simply spending time thinking—that technology can easily crowd out. Along the way, Sam and Smiley explore the value of “weak ties,” the difference between belonging and mattering, the difficulty of genuinely listening to another person, and why our most personal stories may become increasingly valuable in an age of machine-generated content. They close with Smiley’s practice of moving from comparison toward care: when ambition, social media, or creative anxiety starts to take over, turn toward friendship, community, and service. About Adam “Smiley” Poswolsky Adam “Smiley” Poswolsky is an internationally recognized keynote speaker, workplace belonging expert, and bestselling author of The Quarter-Life Breakthrough, The Breakthrough Speaker, and Friendship in the Age of Loneliness. He has spoken for organizations including Apple, Google, Verizon, JPMorgan Chase, and the U.S. Navy, and his work has appeared in publications including Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Learn more about Smiley at smileyposwolsky.com, through his Substack newsletter Friends with Smiley, on LinkedIn as Adam Smiley Poswolsky, and on Instagram at @whatsupsmiley.

    Adam “Smiley” Poswolsky on Belonging, Loneliness, and the Human Advantage

  2. Jul 31

    How We're Really Using AI, Vol. 3

    Artificial intelligence has become deeply embedded in everyday life, and way too nuanced to describe as a single phenomenon. In this third installment of How We’re Really Using AI, Sam attempts to create clarity through specificity, speaking with people whose work and lives reveal distinct corners of the emerging AI landscape. Nina and Shoshana, founders of the Aged Intelligence Society, introduce the communal and unexpectedly playful world of AI parties for women of "a certain age," where they gather in person to experiment with new tools. Eliza discusses her work developing an AI companion app for teenagers, including the difficult questions that arise when young people form relationships with artificial personalities. Seth, a longtime virtual-reality enthusiast, gives his story of what happened when he began frequenting immersive digital environments. Sam tries viewing AI through the lens of the human potential movement, asking what this turbulent technological moment may reveal about the continuing experiment of being human. Finally, AI ethicist Federico explains how he helps schools determine whether their use of AI reflects their educational goals and institutional values.

    How We're Really Using AI, Vol. 3

  3. Jul 17

    In Trees: Robert Moor on the Ethical Force of Wonder, Kinship, and the Art of Co-Flourishing

    In this live conversation recorded at Esalen in the spring of 2026, author Robert Moor joins Andrew Castle, weaver of Esalen’s Treenet, to explore the ideas at the heart of Moor’s new book, In Trees. Moor describes trees as a way of being: branching outward into curiosity and experimentation, pruning what no longer works, adapting around difficulty, and remaining deeply rooted in place and relationship. Together, Moor and Castle consider what it means to “stay branchy” in a culture that increasingly pushes people toward specialization, simplification, productivity, and extraction. Moor proposes that the trunk of a meaningful life may be found in co-flourishing—the long, slow practice of flourishing with others over time. Robert Moor is the author of On Trails and In Trees. https://www.robertmoor.com/

    In Trees: Robert Moor on the Ethical Force of Wonder, Kinship, and the Art of Co-Flourishing

  4. Jul 1

    Jet Eveleth: Sacred Clowning and the Medicine of Play

    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, and performing in the spectacular Las Vegas show Absinthe. Together, Sam and Jet explore clowning as a spiritual practice, the power of embarrassment, and the difference between comedy and clowning. Jet reflects on her teachers, including Philippe Gaulier, Paola Coletto, Eckhart Tolle, and Wim Hof, and discusses how improvisation, Daoism, acupuncture, meditation, and the body all inform her work. They also talk about Clown Church, the ritual power of clown names, the importance of reading the room as a teacher, and why Esalen may be one of the most natural places to practice this kind of work. Links: Jet Eveleth online improv classes: https://jeteveleth.wixsite.com/my-site-2/about-2 Instagram: @Clownchurchla Jet is also launching a new company, Presence in Play, which will include her classes in Los Angeles, Clown Church, retreats, and online improv workshops. The website is expected to launch around mid-July 2026. Jet's workshop at Esalen, January 1 -3, 2027 https://www.esalen.org/workshops/sacred-clown-presence-in-play-010127

    Jet Eveleth: Sacred Clowning and the Medicine of Play

  5. Jun 19

    Whole Self Health: Bill Drummond on Youth Mental Health, AI, Diagnoses, and Healing Through the Body

    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, identity confusion, and complex mental health challenges. His work spans acute care, community-based mental health, schools, hospitals, state care systems, private practice, and clinical supervision. Together, Sam and Bill explore -what is happening in the inner lives of young people today — especially in a world where diagnoses, social media, algorithms, and AI can offer instant explanations for pain that may still need time, relationship, and embodied attention to fully understand. -the rise of diagnostic identity - the difference between “I have anxiety” and “I’m feeling anxious" - why he approaches young people with curiosity rather than correction - the appeal of AI and social media as sources of validation, particularly for adolescents who may already be biologically primed toward threat perception, self-consciousness, and emotional intensity. https://www.wholeself.health

    Whole Self Health: Bill Drummond on Youth Mental Health, AI, Diagnoses, and Healing Through the Body

  6. Jun 4

    Steeped in Big Sur: Brita Ostrom on Early Esalen, Her New Memoir, and the Wild Work of Becoming

    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 middle of the psychedelic revolution and the early flowering of the human potential movement. From there, she made her way down the coast to Big Sur, and eventually to Esalen. During this conversation, Britt talks about sleeping outside on the land, about all the local music that seemed to appear everywhere, the early days of Gestalt and encounter, the role of psychedelics, the emergence of Esalen massage, the complicated freedoms of sexual liberation, and the ways women at Esalen began to find one another as allies in a community that was still very much shaped by male teachers, male authority, and male mythology. Brita’s perspective neither romanticizes the period nor flattens it into critique. She remembers the beauty, the wildness, the tenderness, the bad behavior, the spiritual ambition, the confusion, and the sheer strangeness of a place where a person might dance under the stars one night, confront their childhood wounds the next morning, give massage in the baths that afternoon, and then end up in a conversation that night with someone who had just wandered in from the outer edge of American culture.

    Steeped in Big Sur: Brita Ostrom on Early Esalen, Her New Memoir, and the Wild Work of Becoming

  7. May 22

    Darnell Walker: The Life of a Death Doula and the Art of a Peaceful End

    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 Goodbye: The Life of a Death Doula and the Art of a Peaceful End, grows out of his work supporting people and families at the end of life. In this conversation, Darnell talked about what a death doula actually does, how storytelling can become a form of legacy work, how families can begin having honest conversations long before crisis arrives, and the near-death experience at age 22 that changed his life . He also spoke about laughter at the bedside, the role of ritual in grief, the silence many Black men inherit around vulnerability and death, and how to speak with children plainly and tenderly about dying. Darnell also shared why he asks people to write their own obituary, how families can tell the truth about the dead without flattening them into saints, and why his work — whether with children, the dying, or the grieving — so often comes down to finding the empty space where healing is needed, and stepping into it. https://www.darnellwalker.com/never-can-say-goodbye

    Darnell Walker: The Life of a Death Doula and the Art of a Peaceful End

  8. May 7

    Yes, Mom Took Acid: Maria Mangini on Psychedelic Elders, Hidden Histories, and the Shulgin Farm

    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 streams of modern psychedelic history: early LSD culture in the Bay Area and at Millbrook, the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, Esalen in the 1970s, the work of Stanislav Grof, the emergence of midwifery and nursing as practices of care, and the long, complicated passage from psychedelic prohibition into the current renaissance. In this conversation, we explore: • Maria’s first encounter with LSD as a teenager, • The strange mixture of recklessness and reverence that shaped early psychedelic exploration. • Her years at Esalen and her encounters with figures such as Stanislav Grof, Gregory Bateson, Leo Zeff, and others. • The relationship between birth, death and psychedelic experience • Her doctoral work, Yes, Mom Took Acid, and what long-term psychedelic users told her about social responsibility, and care for the larger world. • Her work in medical cannabis, and what today’s psychedelic movement might learn from the successes and failures of cannabis legalization. • The founding of the Women’s Visionary Council • Her relationship with Ann and Sasha Shulgin, whose partnership helped shape the modern psychedelic imagination. • This talk was originally recorded in a live format created by the Shulgin Foundation, and hosted by Stacie Blanke. The shulgin foundation is an organization dedicated to preserving and extending the legacy of Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin and Ann Shulgin. Sasha Shulgin was of course a visionary chemist credited with creating more than 150 psychedelic compounds and helping identify the distinctive psychological properties of MDMA. Ann Shulgin was a writer, artist, Jungian lay therapist, and an early practitioner in psychedelic-assisted therapy, especially known for her work with the Shadow. Please enjoy this conversation with Maria Mangini. Learn more about the Shulgin Foundation at https://shulginfoundation.org/

    Yes, Mom Took Acid: Maria Mangini on Psychedelic Elders, Hidden Histories, and the Shulgin Farm
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4.7
out of 5
165 Ratings

About

"Voices of Esalen" features provocative, in-depth interviews with the dynamic leaders, teachers, and thinkers who reflect the mission of the Esalen Institute. For more about the Esalen Institute, head to esalen.org Follow Esalen on Facebook and Twitter

Information

  • Creator
    Esalen Institute
  • Years Active
    2016 - 2026
  • Episodes
    235
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © All rights reserved
  • Show Website
    Voices of Esalen

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