SEBASTOPOL, CA — Circa 1978, long before yoga studios lined every city block, conscious living became a lifestyle category, and cacao ceremonies were calendar events, there was a feeling in the air in Northern California that something was evolving in our culture’s soul.

The 1960s had cracked something open. Woodstock had proven that half a million people could gather in a field and choose music, mud, and each other over the machinery of a world that no longer made sense. Alan Watts was on the radio, his voice rolling through Bay Area living rooms like incense, translating Zen for a generation hungry for meaning. Down the coast at Big Sur, the Esalen Institute had become a gathering ground for the century’s most radical thinkers. There,  Abraham Maslow, Joseph Campbell, Fritz Perls, quietly assembled the intellectual bones of what we now call the Human Potential Movement.

By the late 1970s, all of that energy was looking for somewhere to land that wasn’t a lecture hall, a protest, or a crash pad. It was looking for a home. And in 1978, a young student at Sonoma State University was endowed with a head full of ideas and a penchant for culture and community building.

Harmony Festival As A Sign of the Times

What Debra Giusti created on the grounds of the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa began as something sweetly modest: a college fundraising event held on the Sonoma State campus. When the university declined to host it a second year, she didn’t let it die. She renamed it the Health & Harmony Festival and moved it to the Santa Rosa Fairgrounds, where it would last for decades. She was 21 years old.

What followed was 33 years of one of the most influential gatherings in the history of conscious culture on the West Coast.

• “The festival was born from the passionate core values of the ‘60s movement. From the youth came a cry, a protest, and a celebration. There needed to be a grounded evolution in our culture.”
  — Debra Giusti

The Health & Harmony Festival was unlike anything the region had seen: a single gathering that wove together live music, natural foods, holistic healing, ecological activism, spiritual teachings, and New Earth community building, all in one festive location. At a time when these ideas were still countercultural, Debra Giusti was building the template.

It was fully seeded by Debra and her passionate, culturally creative community. Over three decades, it grew into the largest event of its kind in Northern California and was voted Best Festival in Sonoma County for 13 consecutive years. 

Harmony welcomed more than 33,000 attendees annually at its peak, 700+ vendors and exhibitors, and world-class performers including Bob Weir, Michael Franti & Spearhead, Damian Marley, and The Flaming Lips. It featured a Health Expo, Healing Sanctuary, Eco Village, Goddess Grove, visionary keynote speakers, and the legendary Techno Tribal Community Dance. 

Debra also ensured the community had the opportunity to learn from thought leaders over Harmony’s 33 years. Political leaders, activists, spiritual teachers and even comedians who were splashing the world with new vibrations were among them, such as evolutionary biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton, “the mushroom guy” Paul Stamets, authors Dan Millman, John & Ocean Robbins, and David Wilcock, ET researcher Dr. Steven Greer, musician and teacher James Twyman, comedian Swami Beyondananda, actors Mariel Hemingway and Mike Farrell, spiritual teachers Caroline Casey and Bobby Williams, and politicians Marianne Williamson and Ralph Nader.

The elements Debra and team wove together in Sonoma County, yoga domes, sound healings, visionary talks, healing arts, conscious vendors, and ecstatic dance, became the DNA of an entire genre. Transformational festivals, conscious conferences, wellness retreats, yoga immersions, spiritual expos: these are now a global movement, tracing a direct lineage to what this young woman started on a California fairground nearly five decades ago, parallel to other pioneers also surfing the waves of the times.

What a Pioneer Does Next

The Harmony Festival concluded in 2011. And then Debra Giusti did something that perhaps only someone who had spent 33 years building something for others could do: she became a student, attendee, and champion of the world she had helped create.

She began participating in transformational events: festivals, conferences, retreats, expos, yoga immersions, and sacred gatherings of every description. She built and deepened relationships with producers, teachers, and luminaries. She watched the landscape she had seeded bloom into something vast and beautiful. Over time, she realized that new seekers might find this world overwhelming to navigate.

Debra also kept building and crafting pathways for the movement, and has never once stopped. In 2020, she co-founded Saturday Night Alive for the Global Peace Tribe, a virtual variety show that reached 50,000 international viewers per episode during the pandemic. She grew Wishing Well Promotions into a platform reaching 150,000+ subscribers, one of the most aligned and engaged audiences in the conscious living space. And through all of it, she was taking careful note of which events were authentic, which producers were doing the real work, and which gatherings had the power to genuinely change people’s lives.

That discernment, accumulated over nearly five decades at the intersection of community, consciousness, and culture, is now her gift to all of us.

The Transformational Events Guide: A Compass for the Conscious Event Goer

Today, the Transformational Events Guide and its newly launched Top 10 Transformational Events Magazine, published three times a year and available free at WishingWellPortal.com, represent a coalescing of Debra’s discoveries, experiences, and creations.

The guide covers the full spectrum of what the transformational events world has to offer: Festivals, Conferences, Retreats, Expos & Fairs, Gatherings, Yoga Immersions, both in-person across North America, internationally, and online. Debra has personally vetted and even attended a large portion of these events. Many of the producers are people she has known for years, some for decades.

“After attending and producing transformational events for decades, I’ve seen how the right gathering at the right time can completely change someone’s life. The Transformational Events Guide exists to point people toward the events that are truly authentic and deeply catalytic.” — Debra Giusti

Issue #2 of the Top 10 Magazine, now available at Top10Magazine.org,  features hand-selected events across seven categories: Music & Artistic Expression; Personal Growth & Development; Health, Wellness & Healing; Higher Consciousness & Spirituality; Disclosure & UFO Research; Indigenous Wisdom & Teachings; and Deep Community Connection. 

The mission is twofold: for seekers, it removes the noise and lets the signal surface so it’s clear which gatherings in the current season are most likely to catalyze real transformation. For producers and organizers, her promotional offerings provide direct access to 150,000+ subscribers actively seeking exactly their type of event. It is, as Debra frames it, an act of service: both to the community she has spent nearly 50 years building, and to the movement she helped bring into the world.

Subscribers receive exclusive access to discounted tickets, 25–75% off, on many featured events. Debra is also the author of Activate Your Soul Tribe, available as a free gift to the community at WishingWellPortal.com and on Amazon.com.

The energy that crackled through those late 1970s California nights, the hunger for meaning, the sense that something new was being born,  never really went away. It just grew up. It became a movement, then a culture, and finally a global community of millions of seekers, healers, teachers, and dreamers gathering under shared skies in places across the country and around the world, and online. Debra was there at the beginning and never stopped celebrating, creating, and imagining the expansion of the community and the movement.  Now, with the quiet authority of someone who has given five decades to something she truly believes in, she is holding up a lantern so that seasoned event-goers and those just finding this world have a trustworthy guide they can surely rely on.