Back in the Day with Josef London

“I love conflict. It's where the truth is.” Josef London, Esalen’s current safety manager and beloved longtime resident, tells us about his three-plus decades (and counting) on campus, including an epic love story that began on his very first day: “I'm a very lucky man. I just saw her, and I fell in love with her immediately.”

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I’ve been here for 33 years. I arrived at Esalen in November 1991 from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I come from a very dysfunctional family — I needed a gigantic amount of healing. My parents came to Brazil from Belarus and Poland in 1928. At that time, Polish families were having wedding celebrations and one of the ways to celebrate was to kill Jews during that celebration. Some of my relatives were shot point blank.

They had five options: America, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and Brazil. On each side of the family, I have five uncles and one aunt, so many of them decided to go to Brazil. Some of them ended up in Argentina thinking they were in Brazil, and some of them arrived in Brazil thinking they were in Argentina. 

As an adult, I worked for a small jewelry company that had thirty percent of the jewelry business in the world. After that, I became a consultant for small businesses, but I began taking courses: astrology, astronomy, meditation, shiatsu. I was looking for something. I wanted to heal myself. 

One day, on a Saturday afternoon in 1986, a friend of mine in Ipanema said, “Josef, there's only one place for you in the world. It's called Esalen, and it’s in Big Sur, California.” She showed me some catalogs — I’d never heard of it. “Go there to be a work scholar for one month,” she said. “If it doesn't work, you can always come back to Brazil.

I said, “You know, I'm going to make a leap of faith.” I divorced my ex-wife after 20 years of marriage. I sold everything I had. I called Esalen. They said, “You can come February 10th, 1991.” I packed two suitcases and traveled straight from Rio to Esalen. The day I arrived, the very day I arrived, I met my new wife, Montgomery. 

I'm a very lucky man. I just saw her, and I fell in love with her immediately. She was a wildcat — a gorgeous, spectacular, sensational, fantastic, feisty woman. I am attracted to powerful, strong women. My feeling is Montgomery helped to design that concept.

She was dating somebody, so I left it alone. Then she said, “I'm breaking up with them, and I'll be away for six months. I don't want to see anybody.” I marked my financial agenda: March ’91 to September ‘91. I said to Montgomery, “I want to have dinner with you.”

She said, “Why do you want to have dinner with me?” I convinced her to have two, three dinners. After the third dinner, she said, “Are we dating? Okay. If you want to date me, there are three things you need to know about me.”

“So what are they?” I responded. 

“One, I don't do family. I don't want to meet those people. I want to meet you.” And she said, “The other thing is, I see you love kids. I'm not going to have a kid.” 

I said, “Okay, fine.” 

“Do you still want to be with me?” she asked.

“Yes. What's number three?”

“Number three is our relationship will have to be process-oriented. If we need help, we're going to get somebody to mediate our challenges.”

“Awesome,” I said. “Yes, would you please? Let's do that.”

We sat with a person every week for an hour and a half. Then, maybe two months down the line, they said, you guys are moving too fast. I don't have the skills that you’re needing right now. So somebody gave us a referral to a therapist in Monterey. We saw him every single week for nine and a half years.

For another two and a half years, we saw him every other week. For a year and a half, we saw him every month. Every time there was trouble after those 14 years, there was someone to talk with.

I just love conflict, because that's where the truth is. You know, not everybody's on board with that, but that's what I like. I took maybe seventy-five workshops at Esalen. Maybe forty of them were related to Gestalt. I felt like this: I have the opportunity to be in a place that is safe and healthy for me to be who I am. And I'm going to play that edge.

I ran marathons for 30 years, you know. It's a practice. Gestalt demands a practice. It demands a discipline. Now, if I'm here in the place where I can be who I am, and I can talk to somebody who can accept me the way I am, I am going to use that.

Will Schutz [famed Esalen encounter group leader] came to be a visiting teacher for three months. He had this very famous book Joy, and he was here kind of thinking of rewriting a little bit of that. This is ’97, ’98. He was very connected to Montgomery; she loved him. She went to him and said, “Could you do a session with us?”

He said, “Of course I'll do it.” So Will Schutz offered us a private session as a facilitator, as a mediator of our thing. Such an honor. We had the session booked for mid-afternoon. And at lunchtime, he came to me. 

He said, “Come here.”

“What?” I said. 

“I just wanted to tell you: I can't stand you.” He said, “I don't like you. I'm going to do this session because I love Montgomery.”

I said, “Well, I read your book. And thank you so much for letting me know where you're coming from.”

So then we're in the session. He didn’t have a watch, but fifty-four minutes down the line, you know, I was about to say something very important. He stood up and said, “What's for dinner?”

That was the end of the session.

So I stood up.  

Will Schutz came to me, and he said, “I'm learning to like you.”