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Gardener's Delight: Michael Stusser, founder of Osmosis Enzyme Bath Spa (Freestone, CA), shares how his love of gardening and a Zen experience inspired the start of his business.

By: Linda T. Nelson

American Spa - November 1, 2004

I created osmosis after decades of gardening and an extended stay in Japan in 1980. The centerpiece of Osmosis is our signature cedar enzyme bath, a warm mixture of light, fragrant cedar fibers, rice bran, and more than 600 active enzymes blended with warm water in a roomy redwood bathtub. The unique combination ferments and heats naturally, generating soothing cedar-scented steam that heals body and soul. More often than not, 20 minutes in the bath induces a profound state of relaxation unlike any other heat treatment. The blissful experience explains why nearly 80 percent of our guests return to the tiny hamlet of Freestone, CA, year after year from around the globe.

Into the Soil
The story of Osmosis begins in the late 1960s on a California college campus. I was 19 years old and studying philosophy at the University of California in Santa Cruz. One day an eccentric-looking older man named Alan Chadwick showed up. He gave a talk in the college library about gardening and about how wonderful it would be to celebrate the beauty of the new Santa Cruz campus by planting flowers and trees to overcome the institutional imposition on the landscape.

My philosophy professor and roommate both took the idea to heart and invited Chadwick to stay and help get the gardens going. I started helping them out, and Chadwick became a great mentor to me at that time in my life. Gradually, more and more people began working in the garden. A woman who owned four acres of land in the Santa Cruz mountains was so inspired by an article in Sunset magazine about what Chadwick was doing that she offered to donate her land. That property is now Camp Joy, an incredible community that has inspired many people, including a group of college professors. These professors eventually created another community, this one in Sonoma County, called the Farallones Institute. They had some of their early meetings at Camp Joy, and I was invited to join its board. I eventually became the gardener for the Farallones Institute.

Now known as the Occidental Center for Arts and Ecology, the gardens became my passion over the next five years. I was focused on the formula "healthy soil equals healthy plants equals healthy people." I devoted a lot of energy to soil building and also gave a lot of attention to composting. I was very much into the earth with my head down looking at soil, seedlings, and plants. Gradually, though, I started to lift my eyes up to the horizon. I began to see the spiritual implications of landscape gardening and how that form of artistry had a potential to affect people's souls. Also, by that time I had been studying Tibetan and Zen meditation for many years. Through my Zen studies, I gained appreciation for Japanese aesthetics and the legacy of Buddhism.

A Solitary Experience
When an opportunity arose to visit Japan, I jumped on it. Once there, I was deeply moved by the Japanese gardens. Though it was December, I remember walking through one particular garden: There was no foliage on the trees, it was very cold, and no one else was around. An unmistakable conveyance was taking place between the gardener who had created this garden 800 years ago and the experience I was having. This garden was saying to me, "meditation, equanimity." But there were no words; there was no religious dogma. I got something from this garden I was desperately missing from American culture -- a kind of equanimity, a sense of space outside of linear time.

Soon thereafter, on an auspicious New Year's Day, I happened to meet a landscape gardener in a Japanese temple and was invited to become his student. For the next six months, I worked hard in Japanese gardens with a fourth-generation landscape gardening family and visited other gardens. Eventually, I became more involved in Zen training, to the point that I left gardening behind and joined a Buddhist monastery. While living in the monastery, I developed a debilitating case of sciatica. Unable to continue my sitting meditation practice, I left the temple to consult a series of healers. None could help. Finally, I was advised to visit a place where I would be immersed in hot sawdust. The idea didn't seem appealing, but I had exhausted all other possibilities. I climbed into the 140-degree enzyme bath and was buried so deep I couldn't move. Suddenly, the pain ceased, and I had a profound mystical experience. During the series of treatments, the sciatica vanished. For a long time thereafter, I had a secret unfulfilled wish that I never confessed to anyone, and that was to crawl right into a compost pile. During the first enzyme treatment, a vision flashed before my mind's eye: that it was my calling to build an enzyme bath -- a healing human compost pile -- and to make a Japanese garden, to put these things together.

The creation of Osmosis was inspired by all these experiences. I want to expose people to something beautiful and calming, different from their usual experience yet familiar. And this happens every day at Osmosis. People walk into the tea garden, they sit down, and they say, "Wow, this is what I'd like to have in my backyard." But what they're really saying is, "This feeling of equanimity is what I want to have in my life." They identify with it, without anybody having to tell them what it is or how to achieve it. And the feeling allows people to know that this is part of their own inner yearning, part of their spiritual aspiration. You know, there are two kinds of osmosis going on here. There's the osmosis in the enzyme bath, which is a physical phenomenon. And there's also a cultural osmosis -- and that is centered in the garden.

I feel like I'm still gardening -- and still applying all the principles of gardening -- in the creation of Osmosis by cultivating the soil, planting seeds of imagination, and nurturing them with all of the elements they need. I find that the principles of gardening apply in every realm of managing a thriving spa, whether it's human resource management, developing a facility, or marketing. The gardener is the intermediary between heaven and earth. You honor the forces from above and below and enhance the transmission back and forth. It takes gratitude.

Michael Stusser founded Osmosis nearly 20 years ago with the goal of offering a profoundly relaxing Japanese-inspired sanctuary featuring a tranquil tea garden, an array of healing spa treatments, and plein-air pagodas for massages along the banks of Northern California's Salmon Creek.