Berkeley Alembic

Events at The Alembic on May 17th Sunday Sacred Garden Sunday Service 5Rhythms® Sweat Your Prayers The Psychedelic History of the Shulgins: An Archival Retrospective Discovering Vividness: Meditation and Movement with Evolving Ground Monolith: Butoh-Inspired Movement Meditation with Maya Kaufmann Learn to Levitate – A Workshop on Posture & Presence with Andrew Davis

What is happening at the Alembic May 12-15 Tuesday Weekly Half-Day Retreat Alembic Community Co-Working Office Hours with a Mage with Sam Webster Wednesday Relatefulness with Josh Rosenberg and Daniel Ricciardelli Thursday Alembic Community Co-working Deconstructing Yourself Silent Sit (no Michael Taft) The Present Moment Game with Alli Magidsohn Friday Wisdom Healing Qigong with Hiromi Vardy Guided Ambient Music Journey for Deep Rest with Sophia Shu Wang Sacred Dance Journey: A Monthly Women’s Circle for Dance, Ritual & Embodied Healing with Miriam Peretz Cover image from Thesaurus of Alchemy, ca. 1725

“From Molecule to Movement - A Psychedelic Love Story” Hanif Wondir - 2026 . 18ftx8ft Analog&Digital Illustration utilizing mixed media tools: Pen&Ink, VR/3D Modeling and Texturing, archival photographic montage, digital painting. . • scroll ➡️ Illustrating the deep love story between Sasha and Ann Shulgin, accentuating the way their 2 paths & unique perspectives create an infrastructure of care and knowledge, that come together in Love. . Created for @shulginfoundation ‘s “From Molecule to Movement “ Archive Exhibit, on display NOW at @berkeleyalembic ! 1❤️ . . #hanifwondirdesign #shulginfoundation #hdproductions831 #digitalillustration

This one-day workshop follows our evening lecture, offering a direct experience of the concepts presented. Employing a bio-intelligent paradigm we will explore felt-sensed primal gestures. When we perceive and experience our spine through an embryological and biomorphic paradigm, it is the nexus of our being—the source from which all aspects of self, flow – a life shaping central channel of fluid embodiment. Whether referred to as a channel, axis, midline, primitive streak, or central nervous system, the spine has oceanic and cosmic origins. Sensed as micro-undulations and spirals that echo through tissue, all life is touched by the planetary rhythms of vibrating water. Primal gestures stimulate innovative expressions. Discover how engaging in the fluid field changes stress signals and impulses, awakens creativity, and evokes neuroplasticity. Movement is the mother of innovation. This is an experiential day of movement. We will meet 10am-1pm and 2pm-4pm with a one hour lunch break. Liz is doing a lecture on Friday which has an option for a combined ticket: /l/x9h6e550 Liz Koch is a conceptual artist exploring the deep sensory system and the bio-intelligence of our primal core as a means for developing human potential and igniting creative impulses. An international educator, author, and creator of Core Awareness™, she focuses on awareness as key for developing human potential and awakening consciousness. With over 45 years of experience specializing in the tissue called Psoas, Liz is recognized in the somatic, bodywork, and fitness professions as an authority on what is referred to in Daoist healing traditions as the "muscle of the soul." Her teaching includes developing racial, social, and cultural awareness of BODY not as an object but as a living process. Nationally and internationally published, her major works include The Psoas Book, Core Awareness: Enhancing Yoga, Pilates, Exercise & Dance, Mother, Maiden, Crone: Our Pleasure Playlist and Stalking Wild Psoas: Embodying Your Core Intelligence.

Class I — Monolith Stone / Monument / Immovable A deep study in slowness, density, and the architecture of the body. We enter the terrain of stone; becoming structure, weight, and presence, where movement emerges millimeter by millimeter. Through guided Butoh-fu, the spine becomes a granite pillar, the body a statue slowly waking, held in tension between stillness and internal pressure. We explore endurance, resistance, and what it means to take up space fully, allowing cracks to form from within without collapsing the form. This class can be taken on its own or as part of the full Monolith → Mist arc. Butoh is a slow, surreal movement practice rooted in deep listening, imagination, and transformation. In these guided movement meditations, we explore the body as landscape, myth, and memory, softening habitual patterns and awakening new ways of being. No dance experience is needed, only a curiosity and openness to move, feel, and enter the unknown. Each class begins with a gentle opening circle to arrive, ground, and set intention together. We move into a somatic warm-up, awakening sensation, breath, and subtle awareness in the body. From there, you’ll be guided through a butoh-fu score, poetic, image and/or narrative based original prompts that invite transformation from the inside out, allowing the body to become something other than itself. We’ll also explore simple butoh exercises that deepen presence, perception, connection, and imaginative embodiment. We close with a soft landing: time to integrate, reflect, and share (if desired), leaving you resourced, expanded, and a little more in touch with the mysterious intelligence of your body. Come as you are, and leave having touched something vast, intimate, and unknowably alive within you. Maya Kaufmann is a movement artist, educator, and ritualist prayerformer whose work is rooted in the belief that the body is a site of knowledge, devotion, and transformation. #butoh #movementmeditation #embodiment #somatics

5Rhythms® is a dynamic movement meditation that invites us to return to our true selves through instinctual, intuitive dance. Guided by the map of Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness, the practice opens a portal into embodied presence, emotional honesty, and creative expression. There are no steps to follow and no performance to give—only a ritualized space to offer the body’s prayer and witness the mystery of being alive as it unfolds, moment by moment, breath by breath. This practice is an elixir for the body, mind, heart, soul, and spirit. People often leave the dance feeling cleansed and resourced, reconnected to their bodily wisdom and a deeper sense of awareness. To dance this way is to practice loving oneself and to remember our innate wholeness. 5Rhythms® is for every body. If you’ve never had any dance training before, hooray—that’s often a gift. Come with curiosity and a willingness to be surprised by your own magic and mystery. Teacher Bio: Qibei is a 5Rhythms® teacher, holistic healer, and Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (AMFT) - though boxes like these never quite hold her. She moves between worlds: the clinical and the mystical, the tender and the fierce, the silent knowing of the bones and the unspeakable beauty of Spirit cracking open. Qibei has spent her life listening, deeply, to what aches, what awakens, and what wants to come alive. Dance, for her, is not performance. It’s prayer, medicine, and creative laboratory. Her work invites people out of numbness and into their own raw aliveness: the place where everything dances, where the wild heart remembers itself. She believes embodied presence is what makes life juicy and magical. The sacred art of coming home to ourselves, through breath, movement, and the primordial intelligence pulsing through our veins. In her movement classes, Qibei creates a trauma-sensitive, inclusive place for all bodies, inviting the dynamic emergence of real human and beyond-human interplay. More info at www.Qibei.be. #5rhythms #dance #improvisation #dynamicmovementmeditation

Another sneak peek into the @shulginfoundation ‘s “From Molecule to Movement” exhibition, up NOW and throughout May at @berkeleyalembic ! It’s been an amazing experience deep diving into these archives with the squad, discovering so much rich history, and helping to artistically translate pieces of these stories through loving collaboration. . Check out for more details and schedule for exhibit tours! . Look out for more coming soon, and if you’re in the Bay Area, GO check it out!! . #hanifwondirdesign #shulginfoundation #collaborativeart #hdproductions831

What is happening at The Alembic May 18-22? Monday - Cultivating Emotional Balance: Monthly Practices for Making Our Tender, Messy Emotions the Path with Eve Ekman Tuesday Weekly Half-Day Retreat Alembic Community Co-Working Living the View: Non-Dual Tantric Meditation for Daily Life with Lisa Witter Office Hours with a Mage with Sam Webster Wednesday Emotional Surfing with Brian Basham Sufi Whirling Workshop with Anna Whirling Thursday Alembic Community Co-working Deconstructing Yourself with Michael Taft Circling for BIPOC Homies with Ahran Lee Friday Wisdom Healing Qigong with Hiromi Vardy

Creative expression is a way to integrate phenomenon and visions experienced in altered states of consciousness, whether they be meditative or entheogenic in nature. From the very first forms of mark-making to the caves of Lascaux to the works of Pablo Amaringo and Alex Grey, humanity has sought to understand our internal landscapes through visual expression. Alligator Lizards in the Air: Healing and Integration through Creative Expression, is a once a month chance to bring these experiences to life through two dimensional mark making. Art mediums from paint to colored pencils, crayons to markers, will be available for everyone to use along with paper and canvas. Krisztina Lazar will be your visionary guide in creativity and will help you realize your experience before your eyes. No art background needed for this class. All you need is an open mind and a willingness to explore. No one turned away for lack of funds. If this applies to you, please pay at the door. Krisztina Lazar is a visionary artist primarily working in oil paint, watercolor and drawing. She is a Mische Technique lineage holder, a mixture of oil and egg tempera painting invented during the Dutch Renaissance and revolutionized by modern master, Ernst Fuchs. This technique creates an opalescent under painting that the colors are then glazed over, rendering each painting out of light rather than shadow, bringing the images to life with fractal clarity. Utilizing this transformative style that she learned from visionary pioneer, Brigid Marlin, her current body of work explores painting a hybrid of Mische and Alla Prima to render hyperealistic sacred art. With these two techniques combined, Krisztina creates images of Pop Shamanism, portals and visions that speak to today’s cultural climate of the occult, magic, fantasy, psychedelics, meditation, pop, nostalgia, and the environment movement. Originally from Cleveland, OH, she completed her BFA at Carnegie Mellon University in 2004 and her MFA graduate degree in 2011 at the San Francisco Art Institute New Genres department. #artintegration #visionaryart #creativeexpression

Learn the practice of Sufi whirling, using body movements and chanting to open the heart. In this workshop we will be doing movement exercises and begin learning the practice of Sufi whirling. This is a physical practice that uses body movements and chanting to open the heart, and experience the Unity of Love in the human body. This workshop is open to all levels of experience. Come with an open heart, comfortable clothing, and socks Anna Whirling is from Ukraine. In the beginning of the war, she moved to Turkey and then to the United States. Anna has practiced whirling since her childhood. She has performed on stage for 20 years. #sufiwhirling #whirling #chanting #openhearted

Each month, we explore a different emotional terrain through the lenses of contemporary emotion science, Tibetan contemplative traditions, and the core principles of Cultivating Emotional Balance. Sessions weave together guided meditation, reflective inquiry, and shared discussion, helping us recognize the arc of an emotion, including its triggers, bodily signals, thoughts, and action tendencies. By mapping these emotional episodes, we learn to meet experience with clarity rather than confusion, compassion rather than avoidance, and enough inner balance to choose how we respond. As the practice deepens, emotions that once felt destabilizing begin to reveal their inner resources — tenderness within sadness, clarity within anger, wisdom within fear. When met directly and held with awareness, each emotion becomes its own medicine, guiding us toward steadiness, insight, and a more open heart. We will work with a different emotion each month. May' s theme is Happiness. Moving beyond fleeting pleasure toward genuine well-being. Savoring, appreciating, and recognizing sources of joy we often overlook. #happiness #meditation #emotionalbalance #tibetanpractices

Join us for an afternoon featuring psych-del!c academics and luminaries, reflecting on the powerful legacy of Sasha & Ann Shulgin. The Shulgins were pioneers in the field of psych-del!c chemistry and psych-del!c-assisted therapy, and left behind an incredible legacy of community, alchemical exploration, and academic and scientific rigor. 🗓️ Sunday, May 17, 2026 ⏰ 1 PM PT 📍 Berkeley Alembic The Retrospective will be an afternoon of two panels, featuring historical, academic, scientific, and archival perspectives. Hosted by author Erik Davis, this event is not to be missed! Panelists will include: 👉 Dr. David Presti, distinguished professor neuroscience at UC Berkeley, known for his work on drvgs in the brain and consciousness, and longtime Shulgin community member. 👉 Dr. Benjamin Breen, Associate Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz 👉 Maria Mangini, FNP, PhD, writer, scholar, co-founder of the Womens Visionary Council, co-founder of The Chalice, and longtime Shulgin community member. 👉 Earth and Fire Erowid, historians, trusted Shulgin archivists, and co-founders of the Erowid Center 👉 Alysiana Carter, Shulgin Archival Fellow, second year PhD student at the Graduate Theological Union, focusing on psych-del!c phenomenology. Register at the link in bio. We hope to see you there!