http://berkeleyalembic.org/, https://linktr.ee/TheAlembic

The Alembic, 2820 7th Street, Berkeley, CA (2025)

11/12/2025

Join us for a night of music, prayer, and transcendence. Kailash: An Evening of Devotional Music weaves song and story into an exploration of the tantrika’s path. A devotee of Shree Maa, the saint of Kamakhya, Kailash shares music inspired by time spent in the guru’s presence — songs Shree Maa herself loves to sing and meditate upon.
Drawing from Western classical, jazz, and both Hindustani and Carnatic Indian traditions, Kailash reimagines the kirtan experience with improvisational depth and devotional fire. He will be joined by tabla maestro Tushar Gupte, disciple of Aditya Kalyanpur, along with Swami Adaityananda and Shankar Baba of the Devi Mandir.

At 14 years old, Kailash is recognized by many around the world as a musical prodigy. In 2021, Kailash was nominated “Best New Artist’ by the International Reggae and World Music Awards. In his short time as a professional touring musician, Kailash has performed at a number of esteemed venues including The Great American Music Hall in S.F., Petco Park in San Diego, and Red Rocks Music Amphitheatre in Colorado.

Kailash is also a student of Vedanta and a devotee of the ta***ic mystic, Shree Maa. In the Spring of 2025, Kailash was invited to India to perform at the iconic Kamakhya Devi Temple in Guwahati, Assam. His time in India was punctuated by intense sadhana including daily recitation of the Durga Saptashati, and hours spent in meditation at the cremation grounds.

With an infectious enthusiasm and an unmatched musical sensibility, Kailash captivates a crowd like no other. Blending traditional kirtans and bhajans with high-level musical improvisation, Kailash guarantees to leave the listener in a state of awe-inspiring appreciation.

11/12/2025

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11/12/2025

Deconstructing Yourself is a weekly drop-in guided meditation (approximately one hour) plus Q & A with Berkeley Alembic founding teacher Michael Taft. Deconstructing Yourself is all about sharing the life-changing force that is meditation. We extend beyond any particular religion or technique in order to welcome any and all who are interested. Deconstructing Yourself strives to encourage, inform, and inspire your meditation practice towards ongoing awakening. Meditations are archived on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/michaeltaft108

Alembic founding teacher Michael W. Taft is a maverick meditation teacher, bestselling author, and podcaster. As a mindfulness coach, he specializes in secular, science-based mindfulness training in retreats, groups, corporate settings, and one-on-one sessions. Michael is the author of several books, including the bestselling The Mindful Geek, Nondualism: A Brief History of a Timeless Concept, and Ego (which he co-authored), as well as the editor of such books as Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson and The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young.

He has often taught meditation at Google, worked on curriculum development for SIYLI, and is currently core faculty at Wisdom Labs, in San Francisco. Michael is also a featured teacher on the Simple Habit app, and an official advisor to the Therapeutic Neuroscience Lab. He was previously editor-in-chief of Being Human, and was the long-time editorial director of Sounds True.

11/12/2025

As the world faces the rise of a new nuclear arms race, this event revisits one of humanity’s greatest existential threats through the lens of consciousness, activism, and the psychology and treatment of addiction.

Dr. Howard Kornfeld and Dr. Roger Walsh will trace a lineage of thought that connects medicine, psychiatry, and recovery movements to the addictive dimensions of power and the ultimate quest for peace. By drawing from the insights of thinkers such Gregory Bateson, Robert Lifton, Joanna Macy, join us in continuing California’s legacy of challenging the status quo and imagining a more conscious, compassionate world free of nuclear escalation.

11/12/2025

Join Simon Cox, religious scholar and martial artist, as he traces the strange and spiraling path of Daoist alchemy as it moves across time, culture, and geography. Beginning with the quiet persistence of Chinese ritual traditions in 19th-century California, we follow Daoism’s reemergence in the Bay Area counterculture of the 1950s and 60s — reimagined as a philosophy of flow, artistic revolt, and psychedelic insight.
From there, we turn toward post-Mao China, where cave hermits, mountain temples, and long-hidden alchemical lineages have reawakened. Once nearly extinguished, these practices now blaze anew, entering a global circuit of embodied transmission.
The evening blends lecture, storytelling, and internal practice, offering participants a new perspective on how alchemy migrates, mutates, and returns — across continents, through bodies, and out of time.

About your Facilitator:

Simon Cox is a martial artist, scholar, and teacher who spent six years training at Wudang Mountain, the spiritual home of Daoist culture and internal arts. Under Master Yuan Xiugang 袁修刚, he immersed himself in the Sanfeng lineage, studying tai chi, qigong, and Daoist meditation. His intensive training combined rigorous daily practice with rich cultural experiences, including performances and participation in Daoist events across China.

Following his time in Wudang, he earned a PhD in religion from Rice University, where his research focused on the history of the subtle body in Western intellectual traditions. His dissertation, The Subtle Body: A Genealogy, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022 and explores the history of the idea of the subtle body.

11/12/2025

Alembic presents the first public showing of Dope Dealer: A Matter of Dosage (the Rough Cut), by drug edutainer Sheldon Norberg. Directed by Oakland filmmaker Jacob Nasim and filmed before an audience of psychedelic and cannabis industry thought leaders, this hilarious solo performance dives into the cultural archetype of the dope dealer through Norberg’s own youthful adventures selling drugs on the black market.
Immerse yourself in the thrill of exposing drug war myths and exploring consciousness. Journey through the pitfalls of masking emotional pain behind a chemically inflated persona, and into the ego-splintering chaos of an L*D- and nitrous-fueled search for... God? As Norberg says, this films rated I — for insane.
All ticket sales from this rare showing benefit the Berkeley Alembic, with proceeds matched by Alembic board vice president Sravana Borkataky-Varma. Your laughter keeps the Alembic cooking.

Sheldon Norberg is an American author, performer, theatrical producer, entrepreneur and filmmaker, best known for his autobiographical book and solo-performance, Confessions of a Dope Dealer, the film version of which, DOPE DEALER: A Matter of Dosage, is currently in production.

Co-creator of Dick Dines Out and The Underworld Opera Company in the late 80s, he left the stage to pursue his interests in consciousness and health, earning his BA in Psycho-Spiritual Healing from SF State University. His concurrent study of Chinese Medicine, attendance at SF Medical Society lectures, and work with San Francisco’s nascent ma*****na clubs led to a deepened interest in its health benefits, history, government vilification, and anti-scientific elimination by the pharmaceutical industry, all of which led him to pen his book, launch his performance, and build his career as a Progressive Drug Educator, a near impossible task in the Bush 2 era.

11/12/2025

What happens when meditation meets movement — when stillness learns to dance?
Through mindfulness, loving-kindness, and focused attention, meditation teaches us to see clearly what is, as it is. Through movement, touch, and listening, Contact Improvisation reveals how structure can arise naturally from presence.
In this workshop, co-facilitators Amma Thanasanti and Nick Smith invite participants into an embodied exploration of what unfolds when these two practices meet. Bring your curiosity, your breath, and your presence — let’s discover how meditation begins to dance.

About the Facilitators

Amma Thanasanti has been practicing meditation for over 45 years. Her early teachers include Ajahn Chah, Dipa Ma, and the Dalai Lama. She spent 26 years as a Buddhist nun, including two decades in Ajahn Chah monasteries, and has been teaching since 1989.

As the Spiritual Director of Awakening Truth, a 501(c)(3) founded in 2009, she integrates traditional Buddhist teachings with trauma-informed and nature-based approaches. Her Integrated Meditation Program addresses core patterns that meditation practice alone may not shift.

A Contact Improvisation dancer since 1976, Amma finds in the form an expression of presence, attunement, joy, and collaborative flow. Her teaching weaves together Buddhist insight, wilderness wisdom, and embodied awareness—all pointing toward the same inquiry: what is happening now, and how does the space between us shape experience?

awakeningtruth.org

Nick Smith
Nick Smith is a facilitator, organizer, and bodyworker whose work centers on improvisation, somatics, communication, touch, and relational practice. A long-time meditator and dancer, Nick offers bodywork sessions throughout the Bay Area and teaches regularly at The Alembic, The Finnish Hall, The Athletic Playground, and Breathing Room Alameda.

11/12/2025

In this movement-based practice we explore the water element and fluid embodied states as sources of support, ease, and inspiration. Through guided solo and collective experience we find a sense of flow within our bodies that moves us through states of freeze and stuckness back into our organic and essential nature as coherent and creative beings. This practice draws on a variety of modalities including Continuum, Noguchi Taiso, Feldenkrais, Body-Mind Centering, and contemplative movement.

I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.
– John O’Donohue

About Moveshops
Moveshops are in-person, movement-based gatherings exploring embodiment as a pathway to expression, connection, and liberation. Through guided solo and group experiential and improvisation-based practices, we cultivate an expansive and creative partnership with our breath, voice, and body. Moveshops are playful, body-positive, and meant for every body — no prior movement experience necessary. Each gathering is responsive to the group and follows a loose structure:
-Welcoming circle & theme introduction
-Experiential warm-up for the voice, breath, and body
-Solo and group embodied exploration (scores, body puzzles, creative play)
-Closing circle

Rachael Sharkland is a Certified Hakomi Practitioner (CHP), Certified Mind-Body Coach, dancer, and movement educator. She offers individual and group embodiment and expressive arts sessions that are nourishment-based and trauma-informed, combining psychotherapeutic frameworks with hands-on, somatic support. She is dedicated to embodiment as a creative and healing force on the path toward liberation and wellbeing for all life. More about her somatic and expressive arts coaching practice here: https://rachaelsharkland.com/

As a life-long dancer, Rachael brings a reverence for the body to all her endeavors. Her experience includes formal training in contemporary dance and performance, improvisation, West African dance, Body-Mind Centering, Feldenkrais, Pilates, Qi Gong, and professional bodywork.

11/12/2025

Tonight’s Chalice will feature a lecture-presentation from cohost Erik Davis, fresh from a research visit to the Harvard Divinity School. Davis begins by noting the growing conversation about psychedelics within American Christianity, as deep believers and faithful soldiers especially embrace the healing powers of M**A and ibogaine. Behind this development lies a largely overlooked figure: the psychedelic Jesus of the counterculture. Alongside gurus and witchcraft circles, Jesus Christ was also deeply entangled in the era’s spiritual experimentation, appearing in acid visions, underground comics, and esoteric hippie circles. For some young people immersed in drug culture, however, Christ became more than a symbol of longhaired spirituality—he opened a path toward conversion into a so-called Jesus Freak, a militant and passionate Christian identity that exploded in the very late 1960s. Jesus People intensified some hippie values while rejecting much (though by no means all) of the spiritual ethos of psychedelia. Some Jesus People made powerfully heavy psychedelic music, which we will explore tonight along with the visual work of Rick Griffin, one of the most influential illustrators of California psychedelia. Griffin’s 1970 conversion to Christianity produced a remarkable body of visual work that continues to shape the intersection of faith, art, and underground culture.

The Chalice is a recurring psychedelic salon held at the Berkeley Alembic the first Wednesday of every month. Instead of the mainstream focus on clinical trials, legal frameworks, and psychotherapy, the Chalice will draw from the deeper humanistic wells of history, poetry, the gods, ethnobotany, humor, and mystery. We are less interested in fetishizing psychedelic substances or psychedelic experiences than in cultivating psychedelic culture and exploring what it means to be psychedelic people.

The co-hosts for Chalice are Erik Davis, author and Alembic co-founder; Maria Mangini, co-founder of the Women’s Visionary Council and old-school head; and Christian Greer, currently a lecturer on counterculture at Stanford University.

11/11/2025

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