There are many reasons to visit the Ojai Valley — the hiking, the vistas, the sweet-smelling orange groves. But for the last 100 years, this small mountain town an hour east of Santa Barbara has also been drawing spiritual seekers to its beautiful environs for meditation, inspiration and the dream of building a new, more peaceful civilization.
Ojai’s modern spiritual roots can be traced back to 1922, when the philosopher and teacher Krishnamurti and his brother Nitya arrived in the rural mountain town with the hope that its warm, dry climate would soothe Nitya’s tuberculosis. The brothers enjoyed their time in the peaceful, scenic valley so much they decided to keep a permanent residence there and Krishnamurti continued to speak and teach in Ojai until his death in 1986 at the age of 90.
Krishnamurti was already a well-known spiritual teacher when he arrived in Ojai and his presence drew early 20th century seekers to the valley to hear attend his lectures. The area’s reputation as a spiritual center received a further boost in 1924 when the Theosophical community Krotona, which was dedicated to “the spiritual awakening of the human family,” left its original home in Hollywood and moved to Ojai as well.
When Annie Besant, the president of the Theosophical Society, an international organization dedicated to the study of the world’s wisdom traditions, visited Ojai in 1927, she wrote that it would one day become the “cradle of the New Civilization of America.” She promptly raised funds to buy 520 acres in upper Ojai, known today as Happy Valley, where she could establish a school that would educate future members of this new society.
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Over the following decades other spiritual pioneers were drawn to the town. In 1946 Agnes Baron, a devotee of the Indian spiritual leader Meher Baba, founded Meher Mount in his honor on a 170-acre property off Sulphur Mountain Road. One year later, Beatrice Wood, a free-spirited ceramicist and member of the NYC Dada movement, moved down the street from Krishnamurti. In 1968, Florence Gerrigue, the 80-year-old co-founder of the School for Esoteric Studies in New York City, created a mini-oasis called Meditation Mount, where she hoped to sow the seeds of a new, enlightened and compassionate world through creative meditation.
Spend a few days in Ojai and you’ll soon understand why spiritual seekers have been long been drawn to this small town. The landscape is rugged and wild, but there’s also a softness to the area thanks in part to the many oak trees that shade the valley and the famous pink light that reflects off the mountains at sunset. Residents speak of the valley as a nest or a chalice protected by the mountain ranges and say it emits a feminine energy. “The longer I live here, the more held I’ve felt,” one local told me.
Annie Besant thought it could take 700 years for Ojai to birth the new civilization she saw in her vision, but that shouldn’t stop you from visiting now and perhaps sowing your own seeds of spirituality and connection to the divine.
Here are six places where you can ground, meditate and experience Ojai’s rich spiritual history for yourself.
