Voices of Esalen

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.

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.

https://www.darnellwalker.com/never-can-say-goodbye

This interview is part of the Shulgin Foundation's Oral Histories Series. Voices of Esalen and Shulgin Foundation collaborated to bring you a wide-ranging interview with Mariavittoria Mangini, known to many as Maria, is a nurse-midwife, scholar, psychedelic historian, and longtime advocate for the preservation of underground psychedelic knowledge.

Maria’s life intersects with several crucial streams of modern psychedelic history: early LSD culture in the Bay Area and at Millbrook, the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, Esalen in the 1970s, the work of Stanislav Grof, the emergence of midwifery and nursing as practices of care, and the long, complicated passage from psychedelic prohibition into the current renaissance.

In this conversation, we explore:
• Maria’s first encounter with LSD as a teenager,
• The strange mixture of recklessness and reverence that shaped early psychedelic exploration.
• Her years at Esalen and her encounters with figures such as Stanislav Grof, Gregory Bateson, Leo Zeff, and others.
• The relationship between birth, death and psychedelic experience
• Her doctoral work, Yes, Mom Took Acid, and what long-term psychedelic users told her about social responsibility, and care for the larger world.
• Her work in medical cannabis, and what today’s psychedelic movement might learn from the successes and failures of cannabis legalization.
• The founding of the Women’s Visionary Council
• Her relationship with Ann and Sasha Shulgin, whose partnership helped shape the modern psychedelic imagination.
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This talk was originally recorded in a live format created by the Shulgin Foundation, and hosted by Stacie Blanke. The shulgin foundation is an organization dedicated to preserving and extending the legacy of Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin and Ann Shulgin. Sasha Shulgin was of course a visionary chemist credited with creating more than 150 psychedelic compounds and helping identify the distinctive psychological properties of MDMA. Ann Shulgin was a writer, artist, Jungian lay therapist, and an early practitioner in psychedelic-assisted therapy, especially known for her work with the Shadow.

Please enjoy this conversation with Maria Mangini.

Learn more about the Shulgin Foundation at https://shulginfoundation.org/

Magnus Toren has been Executive Director of the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, California, since 1993. A native of Sweden, he circumnavigated the globe delivering yachts across five oceans before settling in Big Sur. Under his leadership, the Library has evolved into a vibrant cultural hub for literature, music, and community, dedicated to preserving and celebrating Henry Miller’s legacy. In addition to hosting A Big Sur Podcast, Toren writes and speaks widely on Big Sur’s cultural history, Henry Miller, and the arts. He lives in Big Sur with his wife Mary Lu.

In the third episode of our series on the subtle body, we’re discussing the book "The Serpent’s Tale: Kuṇḍalinī, Yoga, and the History of an Experience," a sweeping and deeply researched tome by Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen, who trace Kundalini from its roots to its many reinterpretations in modern yoga and global spirituality, examining the forms by which Kundalini has been embodied across traditions and how this elusive force has been interpreted, practiced, and sometimes misunderstood across time.

Sravana Borkataky-Varma is a historian, educator, and social entrepreneur. She is a scholar of Hindu traditions at the University of Houston. Her scholarly work investigates Indian religions and delves into topics such as esoteric rituals, gender issues, and bodily concepts, especially in relation to Hindu Śākta Tantra traditions, often referred to as Goddess Tantra. She adopts a research methodology that blends social anthropology — examined from an outside perspective — with elements of reflexive autoethnography that reflect her personal experiences. She is a member of the Esalen board of trustees and a Center for the Study of World Religions fellow at Harvard Divinity School.

Anya Foxen is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and a Research Associate at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions. She is a historian of modern yoga whose work maps the intersections between South Asian traditions and Western esotericism.

They are interviewed by Esalen’s Simon Cox.