Voices of Esalen

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Whole Self Health: Bill Drummond on Youth Mental Health, AI, Diagnoses, and Healing Through the Body

June 19, 2026

In this episode, Sam Stern speaks with Bill Drummond, a clinical consultant psychologist based in Wellington, New Zealand, where he serves as Clinical Leader for Youth Mental Health Services across the region. Bill has spent more than a decade working with young people and families in public mental health settings, supporting adolescents facing trauma, anxiety, depression, family instability, identity confusion, and complex mental health challenges. His work spans acute care, community-based...

Steeped in Big Sur: Brita Ostrom on Early Esalen, Her New Memoir, and the Wild Work of Becoming

June 04, 2026

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. F...

Darnell Walker: The Life of a Death Doula and the Art of a Peaceful End

May 22, 2026

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 peop...