ED ESPE BROWN

Edward Espe Brown has been practicing Zen since 1965 (and yoga since 1980), and has been head resident teacher at each of the San Francisco Zen Centers: Tassajara, Green Gulch, and City Center.  He has led meditation retreats and cooking classes throughout the United States, as well as Austria, Germany, Spain, and England.  Further, he helped found and run the internationally acclaimed Greens Restaurant in San Francisco with the renowned chef Deborah Madison. He is the author of several popular and beloved cookbooks including The Tassajara Bread Book, which has been hailed as “the international best-seller that started a generation of Americans baking” (Shambhala Publications) and “the bible for Bread Baking (Washington Post).  Brown also authored Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings, and is the editor of Not Always So, a newly published book of lectures by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. He has done extensive Vipassana practice, and lives in Fairfax, California.

PHIL COUSINEAU

Phil Cousineau is a writer, teacher, editor, independent scholar, documentary filmmaker, travel leader, and storyteller. His life-long fascination with the art, literature, and history of culture has taken him on many journeys around the world. He lectures frequently on a wide range of topics--from mythology, film, and writing, to beauty, travel, sports, and creativity. He has published more than 20 non-fiction books and has more than 15 scriptwriting credits to his name. 

Cousineau's most recently published works are A Seat at the Table: Huston Smith In Conversation with Native Americans on Religious Freedom, and The Blue Museum, a long-awaited book of poems.  His screenwriting credits in documentary films, which have won more than twenty-five international awards, include: A Seat At the Table, Ecological Design: Inventing the Future, Wayfinders: A Pacific Odyssey, The Peyote Road, and The Hero’s Journey: The World of Joseph Campbell.

Cousineau is currently the host of "Global Spirit," a new thirteen-part television series on LINK TV. The series explores global issues ranging from art and music to spiritual activism, the search for ecstatic experience, and attitudes toward death and dying. 

STAN GROF

Stanislav Grof, M.D., Ph.D., is a psychiatrist with almost fifty years experience of research into non-ordinary states of consciousness and their healing potential. He is also one of the founders and chief theoreticians of transpersonal psychology. Dr. Grof received an M.D. from the Charles University School of Medicine and a Ph.D. from the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences. His early research involved the clinical uses of psychedelic substances and was conducted at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, where he was Principal Investigator of a program systematically exploring the heuristic and therapeutic potential of LSD and other psychedelic substances. In 1967, he became a Clinical and Research Fellow to the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.

Dr. Grof was invited to Esalen Institute in 1973 where he lived as Scholar-in-Residence until 1987, writing, lecturing, and developing (with his wife Christina) Holotropic Breathwork. He was the founding president of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA), which has organized major conferences on transpersonal psychology. Dr. Grof is the author of numerous books, including The Ultimate Journey (2006), Psychology of the Future (2000), The Cosmic Game (1998), When the Impossible Happens (2006), and The Holotropic Mind (1993). 

ANNA HALPRIN

Anna Halprin is highly regarded in the Bay Area and international dance scenes as a pioneer in combining improvisation, audience participation, environmental/street theater, and community-based performance in her work. Her focus on dance as a healing art can be dated to 1972, when she diagnosed her own cancer and was able to survive through a combination of surgery, conventional medical therapies, and unconventional visualization processes.

Halprin is founder of the San Francisco Dancers' workshop (1955) and co-founder, with her daughter Daria Halprin Khalighi, of the Tamalpa Institute (1978). She has received numerous awards and honors including choreographer fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Dance Guild Award, the Balasaraswati Award from the American Dance Festival, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She continues to perform and teach both locally and internationally. 

MICHAEL HARNER

The founder and president of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, Dr. Harner pioneered the introduction of indigenous shamanism to the contemporary West – through his fieldwork and research, experimentation, writings, and original development of the core methods of shamanism.

Dr. Harner began learning about shamanism in 1956-57 while studying with the Shuar (Jivaro) tribe of the Ecuadorian Amazon, and started practicing shamanism during his 1960-61 stay with the Conibo people of the Peruvian Amazon. He subsequently returned to the Shuar for additional practical training in shamanism, and became recognized as a shaman by the indigenous shamans of the many peoples with whom he worked.

He received his anthropology Ph.D. in 1963 from the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at various institutions, including UC Berkeley, Columbia University, Yale University, and the Graduate Faculty of the New School in New York, where he was chair of the anthropology department. His books include The Way of the Shaman, Hallucinogens and Shamanism, and The Jivaro.

DR. RACHEL NAOMI REMEN

Rachel Naomi Remen is one of the earliest pioneers in the mind/body holistic health movement and the first to recognize the role of the spirit in health and the recovery from illness. She is Co-Founder and Medical Director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program featured in the Bill Moyers PBS series, Healing and the Mind and has cared for people with cancer and their families for almost 30 years.

Dr. Remen is Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine and Director of the innovative UCSF course The Healer's Art, which was recently featured in US News & World Report. As a master story-teller and public speaker, she has spoken to thousands of people throughout the country, reminding them of the power of their humanity and the ability to use their lives to make a difference. Dr. Remen has a 48-year personal history of Crohn's disease and her work is a unique blend of the viewpoint of physician and patient. 

She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal, Riverhead Books, 1996, and My Grandfather's Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge and Belonging.

HUSTON SMITH

Huston Smith is internationally renowned as one of the most eloquent and accessible contemporary authorities on the world's religions. He is Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, Syracuse University. For fifteen years he was Professor of Philosophy at M.I.T. and for a decade before that he taught at Washington University in St. Louis. Most recently he has served as Visiting Professor of Religious Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

Holder of twelve honorary degrees, Smith’s fourteen books include The World’s Religions, a classic in the field which has sold over 2 ½ million copies, and Why Religion Matters, which won the Wilbur Award for the best book on religion published in 2001. In 1996 Bill Moyers devoted a 5-part PBS Special, The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith, to his life and work. His film documentaries on Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Sufism have all won International awards, and The Journal of Ethnomusicology lauded his discovery of Tibetan multiphonic chanting, Music of Tibet, as “an important landmark in the study of music."

MICHAEL MURPHY

Michael Murphy is the co-founder and chairman of Esalen Institute and the author of both fiction and non-fiction books that explore evidence for extraordinary human capacities. During his forty-year involvement in the human potential movement, he and his work have been profiled in the New Yorker and featured in many magazines and journals worldwide. After graduating from Stanford University, he did graduate work there in philosophy, practiced meditation at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in South India in 1956 and 1957, and co-founded The Esalen Institute in 1962. In the 1980s, he helped organize Esalen’s pioneering Soviet-American Exchange Program, which became a premiere vehicle for citizen-to-citizen relations between Russians and Americans. In 1989, Boris Yeltsin's first visit to America was initiated by Esalen.

Murphy is author of The Future of the Body, The Life We Are Given (with George Leonard), In the Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports (with Rhea White), The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation (with Steven Donovan), God and The Evolving Universe (with James Redfield and Sylvia Timbers), and four novels: Golf in the Kingdom, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons, Jacob Atabet, and An End to Ordinary History.