On Our Bookshelf: Steeped by Brita Ostrom

This month, our Esalen Book Club is savoring a singular story from a pioneering voice in Esalen® Massage and the human potential movement. In her new memoir, Brita reflects on a pivotal moment in Esalen history — when self-discovery, radical connection, and embodied awareness expanded the boundaries of what was possible: “We are wilder than we know, able to ford deep streams, get naked, and strong enough to lend a hand at the steep spots.”

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This memoir by a longtime Esalen practitioner, massage educator, and psychotherapist revisits a brief but consequential period in Esalen’s early life: the years 1967–68. In Steeped, Brita Ostrom traces her departure from a conventional path toward what she describes as “a lifestyle centered on self-discovery, alternative relationships, and body awareness in a remote wilderness setting,” a shift that brought her both with and without her husband to the cliffs of Big Sur. She has remained at Esalen for more than five decades, teaching a somatic practice grounded in attention, presence, and touch.

Within this story of transformation there is a refreshing skepticism of the moral clarity often associated with the era. Reflecting on her involvement in the anti-war movement, Brita recalls how calls for peace often led to an inability to listen. “If we couldn’t talk to each other,” she writes, “how could we talk to Russia?” The question unsettled her enough to prompt a change in direction. She set aside what she calls her “social worker persona,” oriented toward helping others, and turned inward, toward a terrain she sensed existed but for which she had no map.

That turn parallels the ethos emerging at Esalen itself, where experimentation often preceded explanation and personal transformation was treated as a form of cultural inquiry. Brita’s portrait of Esalen co-founder Dick Price is notably embodied: she marks the softening of his jaw, the loosening of his shoulders, as he worked to undo the effects of earlier psychiatric treatment and immersed himself in Gestalt practice. When Fritz Perls left the United States near the end of the decade, disillusioned with its politics, Price assumed a central role in shaping a more egalitarian, improvisational approach that would come to define Esalen’s culture.

Brita writes without mythologizing these years, attentive to their audacity and their limits. “Writing this book to the final ‘the end’ forced me to my knees in admiration for the canyon-wide leap taken by Esalen visionaries and their families,” she notes, even as she acknowledges the instability of memory and the temptation to keep revising the past.

Steeped is both a moving personal tale and a profound meditation on the costs of self-examination. Its quiet provocation is that cultural movements falter when inner work is treated as secondary or indulgent. That claim, rooted in the 1960s, remains uncomfortably relevant now, and should be a lesson for every era.

To mark her achievement, we’re celebrating the many decades of Brita’s story at the Institute with her 2020 interview and video with Esalen community elder and longtime friend, Ken Dychtwald. After that, check out Brita’s Back in the Day with more on her initial Esalen years, including her first impressions of this extraordinary land, all the “movers and shakers” she found, and that late ’60s counterculture vibe: “It was also super funky … it was both this lavishly gorgeous place and a place that I could tell was going to be a bit of a scene.”