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.