Voices of Esalen

When Ellen Watson first arrived at Esalen in the summer of 1984, she expected to stay for a few months. Instead, she remained onsite for more than two decades, engaging in an immersion in the practices, teachers, and experiments that helped define Esalen during one of its most fertile eras. She has remained associated with Esalen, teaching programs and training bodyworkers and teachers of bodywork.

In this episode, Ellen remembers studying Holotropic Breathwork with Stanislav Grof, Gestalt practice, Continuum with Emily Conrad, Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms, singing Gestalt, yoga, massage, hands-on healing, and a range of spiritual and psychological traditions.

Ellen also recalls her friendships and encounters with figures including Terence McKenna and Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast, and speaks candidly about her experiences with psychedelics during a period when these substances remained closely connected to a larger culture of inquiry into consciousness, healing, and transformation.

Throughout the conversation, Ellen describes Esalen as a kind of “unaccredited graduate school”, a place where psychology, spirituality, movement, breath, touch, music, and altered or “non-ordinary” states of consciousness were allowed to inform one another.

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.

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.

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 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