In Trees: Robert Moor on the Ethical Force of Wonder, Kinship, and the Art of Co-Flourishing

In Trees: Robert Moor on the Ethical Force of Wonder, Kinship, and the Art of Co-Flourishing

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/

Jet Eveleth: Sacred Clowning and the Medicine of Play

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

Whole Self Health: Bill Drummond on Youth Mental Health, AI, Diagnoses, and Healing Through the Body

In this episode, Sam Stern speaks with Bill Drummond, a clinical consultant psychologist based in Wellington, New Zealand, where he serves as Clinical Leader for Youth Mental Health Services across the region. Bill has spent more than a decade working with young people and families in public mental health settings, supporting adolescents facing trauma, anxiety, depression, family instability, identity confusion, and complex mental health challenges. His work spans acute care, community-based mental health, schools, hospitals, state care systems, private practice, and clinical supervision. Together, Sam and Bill explore -what is happening in the inner lives of young people today — especially in a world where diagnoses, social media, algorithms, and AI can offer instant explanations for pain that may still need time, relationship, and embodied attention to fully understand. -the rise of diagnostic identity - the difference between “I have anxiety” and “I’m feeling anxious" - why he approaches young people with curiosity rather than correction - the appeal of AI and social media as sources of validation, particularly for adolescents who may already be biologically primed toward threat perception, self-consciousness, and emotional intensity. https://www.wholeself.health

Steeped in Big Sur: Brita Ostrom on Early Esalen, Her New Memoir, and the Wild Work of Becoming

Brita Ostrom is the author of the new memoir "Steeped: A Bug Sur Elixir of Sulfur and Sage," a vivid, intimate, and often wonderfully unsentimental account of her life in Big Sur and at Esalen during 1967 and 1968. Brita arrived in California during a hinge moment in American culture: she landed in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco nine months before the Summer of Love, smack dab in the middle of the psychedelic revolution and the early flowering of the human potential movement. From there, she made her way down the coast to Big Sur, and eventually to Esalen. During this conversation, Britt talks about sleeping outside on the land, about all the local music that seemed to appear everywhere, the early days of Gestalt and encounter, the role of psychedelics, the emergence of Esalen massage, the complicated freedoms of sexual liberation, and the ways women at Esalen began to find one another as allies in a community that was still very much shaped by male teachers, male authority, and male mythology. Brita’s perspective neither romanticizes the period nor flattens it into critique. She remembers the beauty, the wildness, the tenderness, the bad behavior, the spiritual ambition, the confusion, and the sheer strangeness of a place where a person might dance under the stars one night, confront their childhood wounds the next morning, give massage in the baths that afternoon, and then end up in a conversation that night with someone who had just wandered in from the outer edge of American culture.

Darnell Walker: The Life of a Death Doula and the Art of a Peaceful End

Darnell Lamont Walker is one of those people who has somehow managed to live several lives inside a single lifetime. He is a writer, filmmaker, children’s television creator, and death doula. He is also a documentary filmmaker whose work has explored Black Americans seeking refuge from injustice, Black mental health, and the global epidemic of sexual violence. His newest book, Never Can Say Goodbye: The Life of a Death Doula and the Art of a Peaceful End, grows out of his work supporting people and families at the end of life. In this conversation, Darnell talked about what a death doula actually does, how storytelling can become a form of legacy work, how families can begin having honest conversations long before crisis arrives, and the near-death experience at age 22 that changed his life . He also spoke about laughter at the bedside, the role of ritual in grief, the silence many Black men inherit around vulnerability and death, and how to speak with children plainly and tenderly about dying. Darnell also shared why he asks people to write their own obituary, how families can tell the truth about the dead without flattening them into saints, and why his work — whether with children, the dying, or the grieving — so often comes down to finding the empty space where healing is needed, and stepping into it. https://www.darnellwalker.com/never-can-say-goodbye