Mary Ellen Klee has been involved with Esalen Institute since 1965 and has served on the board of trustees since the mid-80s. Her particular interests have been with the Citizen Diplomacy work of Esalen's Center for Theory & Research. An acupuncturist since 1978 with a practice in Classical Five-Element Acupuncture in Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades, CA, here she shares about her early experiences at Esalen and in Big Sur.

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I came to Esalen for the first time in about 1965. I had numerous friends, including Joan Baez, who had lived at Esalen before. I was visiting her in Carmel Highlands with a boyfriend. I was like, “Where should we go now?” I don't think we got as far as Esalen that day because it was so foggy we couldn't see anything.

Also, Jim Fadiman, whose name is back up in headlines again these days because of his influence in pioneering microdosing — he was a friend of mine from college, really one of my best friends. It's because of him, really, that I got there, because he first mentioned psychedelics to me when he got back from Europe in 1961.

I was still in Cambridge. He was a year ahead of me at Harvard, and we were walking down the street and he put his arm around me, which was something he had never done. He was just so much more open emotionally and affectionately than he ever had been. We used to write poetry together and do all that kind of stuff, but he was hands-off.

Anyway, he told me that Richard Alpert, who had been his tutor at Harvard, had come to see him in Paris and had turned him on to psilocybin. And I was like, well, that's interesting. Then in the summer of 62, I went out to Menlo Park where he was working at the International Foundation for Advanced Study. They were legally giving psychedelic trips to people, and I was a candidate, much to my parents' dismay. They were freaked out.

I remember my father saying to Jim, “You know, she's free and twenty-one years old. She can do what she wants. But if anything happens to her, I'll see you behind bars.”

Anyway, they would do some preliminary work with some kind of gas that they gave you to get you kind of used to [the psychedelic experience]. Well, I didn't get used to it. I didn't have any of the wonderful experiences that it was reported to give you.

I remember just being freaked out by what I saw and was experiencing. I was having dreams that I was turning into a cauliflower, you know, because my parents were afraid I was going to become a vegetable. So after three or four of these experiences, they finally said, “We don't think you're ready.” And I was really relieved. So I went back to New York.

The previous summer I had gotten into a heap of trouble. A relationship was breaking up, my back went out, and I ended up in the hospital in traction for three weeks. I was having a breakdown and, when somebody finally said to me, “You know, you've lost the will to live.” I went, oh, is that what's happening?

So I called Jim Fadiman, and he turned me on to a shrink who was working in New York. He said, “Do you want to have a psychedelic experience?” And I said, “No, I just want to talk to somebody who I think is gonna understand me.” Finally, I said, “Yeah, I'll give it a try.”

I had three experiences with him, all very challenging. Then in the spring of ’65 after a trip with my mother and step-father to the Far East, I felt like, boy, I’m a mess again. And I called this therapist from Hawaii and I said, “Can I come see you? I want another psychedelic experience.”

He said, “On one condition.”

I said, “What's that?”

He said, “That you go down to this place called Big Sur Hot Springs for the weekend after.” I had heard about this place, and so I was like, yeah, fine. And so I did. So that was my fourth trip. I was a slow learner. 

The idea of “oh, let's take acid and have a good time” was just completely foreign. Finally, the eighth time I tried it, it was psilocybin, and I was alone at my boyfriend's house up in Menlo Park. I went outside, and it was nighttime. I saw the stars, and I was just blasted open. When I told all these people who I'd been tripping with, who had just seen me crying for eight hours, over and over again, word went up and down the coast: Mary Ellen had a good trip!

The first time MEK came down the hill.

That first time I came down the hill at Esalen, I was half blind: I had a feeling that I had a spike in my eye. I drove down the coast in the fog with one hand covering my eye. I had the other hand on the steering wheel. It was so painful. The first person I remember meeting was this Chinese fellow Gia-Fu Feng.

He was doing the books on the abacus, and when he saw me, he did something to my eye, and all of a sudden, my eye was okay. That was impressive. And then at some point that afternoon, a bunch of people went out to the point overlooking the Big House and started drumming. And I started dancing from a place that, as a ballet dancer, I had not been trained to dance from. It had nothing to do with prescribed steps or what I looked like. It had to do with what I was feeling inside. And that was mind-blowing to me. But not being able to imagine that I was adventuresome or brave enough to live in mountains by the sea, I went back to New York for six months, after which I returned for what was supposed to be a two-week vacation.

I just had these really deep essential experiences when I was there. I mean, it was a scene. There were people living under their cars and in their cars. The oval was a dirt parking lot with just old jalopies in it. In those days, we would have group sessions. A psychiatrist friend of ours would lead psychedelic sessions. I was known for sitting in the corner and just sobbing my heart out while looking at pictures of my family.

I got a motel room. Then, all of a sudden, a room opened up off of the kitchen, and they said, “Oh, why don't you stay here?” All the people I'd met six months before were still there. They’d say, “How long are you staying?”

I'd say, “Well, two weeks.” And the whole room would just bust out laughing. It took me ten days to get the joke, which was that I wasn't leaving. It was apparent to them before it was to me, but it was something that I knew too. You just know in Big Sur whether somebody fits in or not. And when they don’t, something weird happens. Big Sur spits them out.

I stayed in Big Sur for six years. At that time, the north side of the property belonged to Michael Murphy and his brother, Dennis, but it was still incorporated. Many of the people who worked at Esalen lived over there.

I lived in a trailer where the gatehouse is — a six by twelve-foot trailer with no bathroom for a year and a half. The first work I did at Esalen was waitressing. We had waitresses in those days. And then I became Michael Murphy’s secretary because I knew how to do shorthand. I had taken a course. I also helped redecorate cabins. I mean, in those days, jobs were just given to whoever came down the road. Whatever was open, it was like, “Okay, why don't you do this?” Eventually I started learning massage and made it on to the massage crew.

Eventually, I found a place in Big Sur. It was a house with a bathroom and a kitchen. After one and a half years, what is now the Jade House at Esalen, which belonged to Dennis Murphy, Michael’s brother, became available for rent. A friend of mine came in and we did all sorts of things to it that made it adorable. I was just really happy to have a house, and it became sort of a gathering place, which was wonderful. We had a little round table and a little wood stove in this little kitchen, and we would all just hover around it and listen to music with these great big headphones. We would pass the headphones around to the new Beatles album or the new Dylan album or Jefferson Airplane. We were smoking dope and eating. I mean, it was just wonderful.

None of us had phones. We didn't have TV. Yet we always met each other where we were supposed to, whether we planned it or not. I am convinced that because we didn't have all that interference, our capacities — call it the human potential — that are now dumbed down were just really accessible. You just were in the right place at the right time, most of the time.

There was a sense that I had come home — not only to the land but to people who were like me. Even though we were totally different. We were all different, and so it worked. We had all sort of been outcasts wherever we were, so there wasn't that judgment.

I fell in love with the land. I was a city girl: I grew up in Manhattan on 90th Street between Park and Madison Avenues on the 10th floor of one of those buildings in a 10-room apartment. So the fact that I suddenly was in love with this rugged land was so startling to me. There were many of those “I could die now” moments. Not necessarily at Esalen, but in Big Sur. I remember driving up the highway one day and just getting that I was part of a cosmic dance. It was just wonderful.