Voices of Esalen

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/

✧༺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 a safe space to release their bubbling, fermenting primal rage rooted in the settler colonialism, transphobia, racism, xenophobia, and intergenerational ancestral trauma they experience daily as nonbinary people of color. mirrored fatality’s intentions for their art is for Queer Trans Black Indigenous People of Color to embody their rage, disrupt the silence and isolation from existing in a white supremacist capitalistic apocalyptic world, and harness collective care, catharsis, and holistic healing. Join them in imagining the future we’ve been fighting for and experience mirrored fatality’s reflections to witness our highest, truest selves."

A glimpse under the hood at Voices of Esalen. Host Sam Stern interviews himself, entertaining questions such as How and why did you start Voices of Esalen - What was the first episode of the show and what was it about ? - Were the first episodes popular ? How many people listened to them? - What are your favorite podcasts and who are your favorite hosts? - Who have been some of your favorite people to talk to? - What is the most challenging thing about hosting a podcast ? - What episode gave you some simple practical advice? - What concepts have you most appreciated being exposed to while talking to your guests? - Who would you consider your wisest teacher? - What is your recording set up like ? - Who created your theme music? - What mistakes did you use to make as a host that you don’t make now? - What have been the hardest interviews you did, hosting Voices of Esalen ? - Do you have any advice for folks who might want to start their own podcast ? - And what will you be focusing on for most of this year’s interviews? Listen and learn about the show's evolution. . . .

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 Ecstasy, the Laundry. Trudy Goodman has devoted much of her life to practicing Buddhist meditation. She is one of the earliest teachers of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and co-taught with Jon Kabat-Zinn at the MBSR clinic at University of Massachusetts Medical School. In 1995 she co-founded the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, the first center in the world dedicated to exploring the synergy of these two disciplines. From 1991 to 1998, Trudy was a resident Zen teacher at the Cambridge Buddhist Association. She then moved to Los Angeles and founded InsightLA, the first center in the world to combine training in both Buddhist Insight (Vipassana) Meditation and nonsectarian mindfulness and compassion practices. After becoming a mother, Trudy co-founded a school for distressed children, practicing mindfulness-based psychotherapy with children, parents, teenagers, couples and individuals. She has trained a generation of teachers, mindfulness humanitarians who make mindfulness and meditation classes available for professional caregivers, social justice and environmental activists, unsung individuals working on the front lines of suffering – all done with tenderness, courage and a simple commitment to holding hands together. (Side note: She is also the voice of “Trudy the Love Barbarian” on the Netflix series Midnight Gospel.) This is an wonderful talk. They cover so much, including how we may misuse mindfulness, how thought is a great servant but not a great master, how we may navigate living in this life of 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. Also, Jack and Trudy are married, for those who don’t know, and they comment insightfully on their relationship during the question and answer section of this talk. A final note: at one point, Jack and Trudy comment on an Esalen community member who died unexpectedly in 2018. They are in fact referring to Weston Call, who was a friend to so many people at Esalen and in Big Sur. This episode is dedicated to his memory.

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 ways Asian American people confront systems of power at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, disability, migration history and citizenship status. Check out their amazing zines and resource page: https://www.asianamfeminism.org/resources Instagram: @aafc.nyc Twitter: @aafcollective

“All of these sort of regular things that biotech companies do, like snapping up patents so that they can get investor dollars moving forward, they’re intersecting with this culture in the psychedelics world, which is sort of anti-ownership. These forces will clash. They oppose with one another.” - Shayla Love, Vice Media Shayla Love is a senior staff writer at Vice Media whose writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, and more. Her recent focus has been the field of psychedelics and how they exist and interact with the forces of what some refer to as late-stage capitalism. Shayla discussed whether there is a way to corporatize psychedelics responsibly, who has the most to gain in the new landscape of psychedelic capitalism, why the for-profit entity known as Compass Pathways attempted to patent a form of synthetic psilocybin, how and why the accompanying challenge to this patent from a group called FTO, or Freedom to Operate, originated, whether state decriminalization of psychedelics is at odds with federal medicalization, and more. Coming Soon at Esalen: Live and learn at Esalen for 4 weeks as part of our Live Extended Education Program or L.E.E.P.  Under the guidance of our skilled faculty and surrounded by a cohort of twelve other learners, students will be challenged to expand their personal growth edges and open up to greater discoveries of self and community. Learn more and apply, at https://www.esalen.org Integration From the Core: Embodiment through Yoga, Dance, and Sound Meditation. Drawing on the embodied practices of yoga, pranayama , sound meditation, and conscious dance, reconnect your bodies and minds, digest your feelings and emotions, and open yourselves to the wisdom of your heart. Led by Jovinna Chan. Learn more or apply now at https://www.esalen.org.

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, BlogHer, and YFS Magazine. S. Rae is currently rooted in motherhood, love, and community in Somerville, MA.

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/

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 was like in the early 1970’s, why he split town after graduation from UCLA and moved to a tiny town in Northern California, where he started retrofitting 35mm movie cameras to enable them to take high-resolution time-lapse photos. Louie also talks about how he lent his own take on psychedelic iconography to the film Altered States in the early stages of a film career that has always existed in a fiercely independent realm. And I couldn't let him leave without talking a bit about how Esalen continues to inspire a sense of wonder in him. Watch Louie's new film at https://gratituderevealed.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; in his research in Czechoslovakia he oversaw tens of thousands of supervised therapeutic LSD trips. Grof would emigrate to the United States in the late 1960’s, a move precipitated by the Soviet invasion of his country. Grof spent more than ten years as a teacher in residence at the Esalen Institute during the 1970’s and 80’s, where he developed the practice of holotropic breath work and became one of the founders of the school of transpersonal psychology. In this interview, Grof and Hoffman explore a host of topics, including Hoffman’s discovery of LSD and how on his first trip, Hoffman freaked out and thought he was going insane, then thought he was dying; how Hoffman then became aware that his new discovery would have immense significance to the field of psychiatry; why Hoffman believed LSD could be used as a model psychosis and a way to study schizophrenia; how Hoffman collaborated with amateur mycologist R. Gordon Wasson to create a synthetic version of so-called magic mushrooms, which would be known as psilocybin; how Hoffman traveled to Mexico to deliver this modern version of mushrooms to the famed curandera Maria Sabina, who had introduced Wasson to the mushrooms in the first place, and more. They end this interview by speaking about Hoffman’s reaction to the way LSD escaped the laboratory and infiltrated culture during the turbulent 1960s. This interview was conducted at Esalen Institute in 1984 - just one part of the ever evolving and complex tapestry of history that unfolded here in Big Sur.