Esalen Institute, Residential Extended Education Program

THE SERVICE COMPONENT
A three-month on-site work program, REEP is designed to help you reset and reimagine, heal and explore, and learn about yourself — all while working in service to the community. Explore new ways of thinking and being while being paid to work at Esalen.

REEP students work in our kitchen, Farm & Garden, and as part of our Cabins housekeeping crew.

You'll spend 36 hours per week working in one of the departments, and have four hours per week dedicated to human potential curriculum and training.

Shared accommodations and three meals per day are provided at a reasonable cost.

THE STUDY COMPONENT
Under the guidance of our skilled, compassionate faculty and surrounded by a cohort of fellow students, you will be challenged to expand your personal growth edges and open up to greater discoveries of self and community through these cyclical monthly themes:

Place and Presence: Nurture a sense of place and relationship with Esalen’s foundational elements, including the land, its thought leaders, and vision for human potentialities.

Meditation and Mindfulness: Experience direct instruction and further cultivation of a personal practice, while building a mindful connection to work and community life.

Embodied Self-Expression: Foster interdisciplinary creative outlets that encourage somatic integration of the imagination.

Micha Merrick will facilitate a month of deep connection…

Weaving together meditative presence, awareness of plant life, geology, history, mythology, science and intuition into a fully explored sense of connection. Together we will explore practices to facilitate grounding and connection in deep presence with the earth, self and community.

Uplifting and self-inquiring experiential classes may include:

• Forest Bathing Meditation, deep presence with the land

• Herbal Education, native and garden medicinal plant identification, history and ethnobotanical mythology

• Practice and history of earth based herbal rituals from a multicultural non-appropriative perspective including: herbal bathing, herbal tea ritual, herbal limpia and poultice bundle self-massage, herbal smudging/smoke cleansing, personal earth-altar creation, etc.

• Movement, meditation, music/sound and creative practices with the land to experience an embodied creative sense of place

• Honor the ancestors and our Esselen first people