California | Monterey Bay | Ottawa | Canada | massage

What attracted you to Monterey Bay?
I'd been going to different hot springs all over California. I'm from Ottawa, Canada, originally, so anything that's Pacific Ocean-oriented was amazing to me. California as a state is just my fantasy state. It's warm and it's dry and it's on the ocean. I really love it. And I love that what California is made fun of for is also one of its greatest charms, which is an openness to the esoteric and an openness to metaphysical understandings. Northern California, in particular. I just consider that part of the state - if I'm to generalize - really open-minded. And that's a really great quality, in my opinion.

What was your first visit to the Monterey Bay area like?

The first visit was a trip with some friends to Esalen, in Big Sur. It's a very famous kind of communal place with natural hot springs. They're world-famous for the Esalen massage - it's really intense. The hot springs area is clothing-optional, kind of old-school. They are open to having people come in just for room and board, but typically people go there to do workshops, for everything from health to eating disorders. It's very wellness-based. It's incredible to see the locale itself - the land is all right on the cliffs. It's gorgeous. Esalen has a meditation room. You can take hikes. Huxley is the main big room; I did a Five Rhythms Dance Workshop there. There are different yurts - you know, tents - where they do yoga, and there's an art barn where they have paint and stuff you can make. They have gardens everywhere and grow much of the food that they cook. You walk down this hill and all of the baths are literally right on the cliffs. There's a big house where you can rent rooms if you want to bring a whole gang of people. It's about a 60-minute drive from Monterey, and it's where I go when I need to get away from the height of intensity of the pop-culture world that I'm in, that I love - but sometimes I need to get away.