Show Notes
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.
More from Voices of Esalen
Today, we return to that stack of dusty reel to reels, discovered a couple of years ago, as a part of the storied Esalen archives. This one turns out to be a gem: a conversation that was recorded in 1976, not at Esalen, but at the Bel Aire School in Tiburon, California, likely recorded and preserved by Esalen archival legend Paul Herbert. This talk features two famous thinkers - psychologist Rollo May and author of the pentagon papers, Daniel Ellsberg. Their subject is good and evil. Rollo May was a pioneering figure in American existential psychology as well being as an early teacher at Esalen institute. Earlier in life, May had been a Protestant minister and had studied with the prominent theologian Paul Tillich. By the time of this recording, he had published some of his pivotal books, including Love and Will, Power and Innocence, and The Courage to Create. In those texts he explored human beings creative possibilities and their capacity for destruction. Daniel Ellsberg was a former Marine as well as a Harvard-trained economist who worked as a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation and served in the Defense Department, where he helped shape nuclear war planning and American policy in Vietnam. He rose to great prominence in 1971 when he provided the Pentagon Papers to the press, where he exploded the classified history of American involvement in the war. He faced charges carrying a possible sentence of 115 years; the case was dismissed in 1973 because of government misconduct. So when these two men met in 1976 at the time of this talk, the Vietnam war had only been over for one year. Ellsberg’s prosecution was only a few years behind him. Rollo May had recently published a book on creative courage. Listening today, we might keep those lives in mind as we encounter a world that remains as difficult, and full of urgent moral themes, as ever.
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.
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.
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.
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.