Esalen is a natural sanctuary that kindles an exponential increase in your capacity for new learning to change old ways of thinking, being and feeling. Sleeping accommodations, organic farm to table food and workshop tuition included.

This course builds on your previous seven rich days of exploration in CFR® Week One. During that crucial week, you laid the foundation for releasing your childhood survival patterns and moving through life with more ease and presence physically, mentally, and emotionally.

You reorganized the stranger you once called “self” to become more objective, compassionate, curious, and hopeful, changing how you live with yourself and others.

We will continue excavating and healing old patterns that no longer serve you. You will gain more appreciation for how embodied movement can serve as a portal to your soul.  Using newly experienced body wisdom, you will uncover what has been hidden, held back, and inhibited, your fullest expression of ease, joy, and authentic self.

Bring your lingering issues, past injuries, and a desire for freedom on all levels. Leave more deeply connected to your body and present in your soul.

Please note: This is an advanced class. Participants must have taken CFR® Week 1.

JUST A FEW FINE OF THE FINE MOMENTS YOU’LL EXPERIENCE AT ESALEN

Recent brain research reveals how constant predictions based on old information can run our lives. As we are flooded with current sensory information, our brains compare past and present to identify discrepancies called “prediction errors,” updating the old predictions to create a better working model of the world.  

Inaccurate predictions are often based on unconscious habits of moving, feeling, and thinking — responses developed as childhood solutions to surviving family systems. We’ll make the big people happy so they will love us. Or we’ll try to stop them from hurting. We shift our behaviors toward pleasing or protecting. With mistreatment, we shut down. All these solutions required muscular enforcement. Later, these reactions became adult behaviors — maintained by habitual contractions in our necks, eyes, jaws, backs, and bellies —  but predictions based on protective habits are no longer needed or helpful as we recover from injuries.

We can dissolve the hold these old patterns have over us, not by willpower, leaving old instructions in place, or superimposing new commands, but by kinesthetically sensing in our body where — and how — we keep compulsively reenacting them.

CFR® increases the amount and quality of our incoming sensory information. By bringing habits into awareness through exploratory floor work, we connect them to brain areas more supportive of change. By realizing they were clever ways to survive, we develop the self-compassion essential for healing. As our predictions become more accurate, based on the present time, we can make better choices.