Does your spirit need cleansing? Scarlet Sage in San Francisco has a class for that.

“I see dead people,” Mary Grisley says with a disarming smile as she introduces herself to a sold-out tarot class at San Francisco’s Scarlet Sage Herb Co. Her tone is light, self-aware, but she’s not joking. Communing with the dead is just one extension of Grisley’s clairvoyant abilities.

It’s a chilly winter night and students stare up at her over steaming paper cups of cold-fighting herbal tea. As they introduce themselves, it’s revealed that several students also see dead people or know someone who does. Others identify themselves as “dreamers.” One says, simply, “The women in my family know s—,” which is met with scattered nods of understanding. Others receive messages through divination tools like tea leaves or coffee grounds. A hair stylist from Palo Alto says she reads messages through hair; clients now seek her out as much for a trim as for a reading. A woman explains she was always viewed as “the sensitive one” in her family and has started tarot studies as part of a “quest for validation.”

Then there are those, like me, who aren’t clairvoyant, just a little intuitive, and very curious. I was raised on the East Coast with traditional religion, a blind trust in Western medicine and a healthy dose of eye-rolling skepticism toward anything “woo woo.” Then I moved to San Francisco and a few years later had children. I began dabbling in alternative wellness during my first pregnancy — visiting an acupuncturist between OB visits, taking prenatal yoga, drinking special blends of herbal tea to aid birth, and learning to tune into the feelings that had always hummed along in the background of my gut. By the time my second child was born, I was seeing an intuitive counselor regularly.

My experience is not an unusual one, says Laura Ash, a clinical herbalist and owner of Scarlet Sage. A former employee, Ash bought the store in 2015. While best known for its world-class herbal apothecary, Scarlet Sage also sells homeopathic remedies, organic personal care, crystals, moon ritual products, spell books and more, offering what Ash describes as “a holistic view of health — spiritual and physical.”

Scarlet Sage opened a wellness space directly beneath the shop in July 2018 and has since ramped up its roster of educational and healing offerings. It now has the capacity to host two to four classes during the week, certifications and intensives on the weekend, and private sessions with healers specializing in everything from spirit cleanses to dream interpretations. Classes regularly sell out. When given access to both categories of products in an inclusive, nonjudgmental environment, it becomes a small leap from buying pregnancy tea to picking up a pack of tarot cards.

Dedication to self-betterment, both physically and spiritually, is what Ash believes drives all her clients. Oakland native Alice Chen discovered Scarlet Sage while battling Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an autoimmune disorder. In chronic pain and having exhausted Western medicine with no relief, Chen realized she needed to look elsewhere. Although initially reluctant about the efficacy of alternative practices, she began to explore her options and found a great resource and community in the Mission neighborhood shop.

“As I was going through this whole journey of healing myself holistically, Scarlet Sage was one of the only places that I could go to that didn’t see you as crazy, that accepted you and the different modalities, whatever they (may) be.”

Energy healing in various forms finally helped Chen — and started her on a path that involved treating her physical body as well as her spirit, which had been harmed by childhood trauma. She studied with a shaman, worked to break a generational cycle of family pain, and went on to become a shamanic reiki master herself. “I’m finally through this work and accepting myself for who I am and what is. I am able to create this new path for myself, and it is truly empowering.”

Alternative wellness has maintained a vibrant foothold in the Bay Area since the counterculture revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, when people began challenging religious dogma and commoditized western medicine. Michael Shaughnessy, a 40-year veteran teacher of traditional Christian ethics at St. Ignatius College Preparatory in San Francisco, says that during that time people “fled from the rest of the country to get to an ‘alternate’ place” — and that place was San Francisco.

Add these antiestablishment sentiments to an area already somewhat familiar with Eastern medicine because of the large Asian American population, and alternative wellness practices didn’t seem so foreign; the Bay Area was quick to embrace spirituality and wellness in its various forms. That spirit has been institutionalized, from the San Francisco Zen Center (established in 1962) to Sausalito’s Academy of Intuition Medicine (1984) to the Scarlet Sage, founded in 1995 by Lisa Kellman and Dino Lucas.

While many crowded the streets of San Francisco during the social revolution, others headed to the countryside to live in sustainable cooperatives. Ash describes the back-to-land movement as seminal to the American herbal medicine tradition Scarlet Sage was built on. Separated from sophisticated city hospitals, it became increasingly important for people to understand the medicinal qualities of the herbs around them. Rosemary Gladstar, dubbed the “godmother of American herbalism,” introduced Sonoma County to herbal medicine when she was an apothecary at the Guerneville Natural Foods Store in 1971 (it evolved into Rosemary’s Garden, still open in Sebastopol) and founded the School of Herbal Studies in Forestville in 1978.

If you come into Scarlet Sage with an ailment today — as the many locals who treat the shop like a walk-in clinic do — you have a good chance being referred to a Gladstar book or treatment she described. Despite the shop’s love of alternative treatments, the highly trained staffers have no qualms about referring customers to a traditional doctor when appropriate. This attitude underscores the essence of holistic wellness today: It’s not about rejecting one form of treatment over another so much as it is about exploring multiple modalities to find the best one or combination to achieve physical and spiritual well-being.

“The West Coast is less binary,” Shaughnessy says, summarizing this inclusivity phenomenon.“People who are still traditionally active in church are drawn to yoga practices and Buddhist practices, which other parts of the country deem as heretical.”

Likewise, traditional Western medical practitioners are seeking alternative training. Ash has a medical doctor enrolled in her herbalist certification course, and Grisley has taught medical professionals how to tap into their intuitive, receptive mind so they can better tune into patients’ ailments. “I strongly believe that the more people can get in touch with their intuition, the more we can be of service to our world no matter what we do for a living,” Grisley says.

Meanwhile, I sit on my living room floor with my kids, sipping tea and studying my new tarot deck, feeling like my world has expanded just that little bit more now that I’ve started honing my empathic abilities.