Esalen Institute
★ Editor's choice
The retreat center that founded the modern retreat-center category. Big Sur, California, on a cliff above the Pacific, hot springs running into the sea. Founded 1962 by Michael Murphy and Dick Price; the place where Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow, Fritz Perls, Joseph Campbell, Stan Grof, and three generations of humanistic-psychology and consciousness teachers gathered, taught, and built the field. Today: workshops on meditation, gestalt, somatic practice, bodywork, ecology. The closest thing the western world has to a continuously operating sanctuary in the lineage tradition.
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The first luxury hotel chain built around an ecological mission rather than retrofitted to one. LEED-certified properties, reclaimed materials throughout the interiors, organic cotton bedding, low-impact food sourcing, electric-vehicle charging at every location. Locations in Brooklyn, Manhattan, West Hollywood, Miami, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Mayfair, Mexico City, Cabo, Nashville, Hanalei Bay. The proof-point that luxury hospitality and ecological responsibility are not mutually exclusive.
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The largest yoga and holistic-living retreat center in North America. Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires. Founded in 1972, now a 401(c)(3) non-profit. Programs every week of the year — yoga teacher training, Ayurveda, meditation, somatic therapy, conscious-leadership workshops. The American gateway into the residential-retreat model: arrive, hand in your phone, eat what they cook, follow the schedule.
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Thích Nhất Hạnh's monastery in southwestern France. Founded 1982, now the largest international Buddhist monastery in the Plum Village tradition — five hamlets, hundreds of monastics, retreats year-round in five languages. Mindfulness practised in the original way: silent meals, walking meditation between sessions, working meditation in the gardens. Open to anyone for a week or longer. The closest you can get in the West to actually living the practice rather than reading about it.
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Spirit Rock Meditation Center
The West Coast home of Insight Meditation (Vipassana). Founded by Jack Kornfield, Sylvia Boorstein, James Baraz, and a small circle of teachers who studied under U Pandita and other Burmese masters. 411 acres in Marin County, California. Day-long sits, weekend retreats, month-long silent retreats. The lineage place for anyone serious about the western adaptation of the Theravada tradition.
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