I suspect I’m not the average loner. For my entire life I have occupied an enclosed mental space that no one has managed to penetrate. I have grown “close” to people in the sense that we have been in each other’s proximity, but never close enough for those walls to come down. Ask people who know me and they will confirm that in a whole manner of ways. Is it just a coincidence, I wonder, that many of my most beloved friends live in different states, or that the meaningful romances in my life have been long-distance relationships?
Perhaps I’ve chosen loneliness because it is my language. I don’t want it to be, but it’s the only condition that feels familiar to me, and somehow safe. Of course I’d like to earn my rightful place on that grid, no matter how poorly plotted my location, because this feeling of placement that I’m searching for—well, that’s a basic human right. So I’m going to try to figure out how to fight my way in, even though I’ve been thoroughly trained to fear being a fully realized part of the outside world with every fiber of my being. I don’t yet know where I’ll end up—in fact I’m starting to realize that the process may be more complex and time-consuming than I’d suspected—but if there’s something I’m sure of, it’s that the process itself is worth it. Sometimes it’s only through pain that we feel alive; better to have that than no sensation at all.
I had gone six months without a full night’s sleep when I stopped into my favorite coffee shop one morning in March of 2013 to perk myself up with a soy latte before I picked Isaac up from school. It felt like I hadn’t slept in years; I had been struggling with middle-of-the-night insomnia. As I sat down to wait for my coffee, I recognized an acquaintance, Robert, a local naturopath.
“You look a bit under the weather,” he remarked.
“I haven’t been sleeping,” I said. “I really need to see someone about this.”
“You should meet my friend Ed,” he said, pointing to the white-bearded man sitting next to him. “Ed’s a renowned sleep specialist.”
What a crazy coincidence, I thought. I reached out to shake Ed’s hand. “Hi, I’m Deborah.”
After he introduced himself, I jumped right in. “Have you seen the article in the New Yorker this week about that woman who went to a sleep clinic?”
“I did.” Ed nodded his head sagely.
“I loved what she said about larks and owls,” I said, referring to the article’s differentiation between two genetic types of sleeping patterns: early sleepers and risers were larks, and late ones were owls. “I had never heard that before, but it totally makes sense. I’m such a lark.”
“That information has been around for a while. But the article really offered very little in the way of a solution to insomnia. Even the woman’s insomnia wasn’t cured by going to the clinic—it was just more finely diagnosed.”
“That’s the thing about doctors, isn’t it?” I laughed. “They’re really good at telling you what your problem is, but not so good at fixing it.”
“Very often that’s the case, yes.”
“Do you think you can help me?” I asked. “According to the article, I’m an MOTN, or middle-of-the-night, insomniac. I fall asleep somewhat easily but wake up on schedule a few hours later, and then I can’t fall asleep again until dawn.”
“That doesn’t work for you, having two sleep periods a night?” Ed asked.
The article had said it was normal, and I’d read the research: middle-of-the-night wakefulness had, until the industrial revolution, been accepted as a normal period in one’s daily routine.
“I have to get my son to school at 7:45, though. Then it becomes stressful, knowing I won’t get the sleep I need. I’m starting to be afraid of nighttime. I’ve always been a good sleeper too, before this year, so I can’t understand why it’s happening.”
Ed fumbled around in his tote bag. “I don’t seem to have any business cards at the moment, but here, take my personal one.” He handed me a card with his name and email address on it, and the word “Shaman” printed on the top right corner.
“Shaman?” I asked.
“Long story,” he said, smiling. “That’s who I am in my personal life.”
“Well, that’s who I want to see. Not the sleep doctor! Shamanize me!”
Ed bowed his head and smiled. “Why don’t you come by next week?”
We made a date for the next Tuesday.
“Just one thing,” he said. “Between now and then, keep an eye out. Any new animals cross your path, anything out of the ordinary at all, take note of it. You’ll tell me about it when we see each other.”
I agreed to keep an eye out for any strange encounters, but nothing special crossed my path in the following days. I did notice one thing as I was driving around a curve late one night: a strangely positioned waning crescent moon, looking like a prim smile in the black sky. I had never seen the underside of the moon lit up in that way. It seemed to me that crescents should be upright, not lying on their backs as if they were cradling something.
I arrived at Ed’s farmhouse on a cold day in late March. We had just experienced what would be our last snowstorm, and the land was blanketed in a fresh layer of white powder. Yet the birds seemed to know that despite the snow, it was spring after all, and they flitted from frozen tree branch to frozen tree branch, chirping merrily.
I parked in front of the barn turned garage and walked past the enormous pile of wood to the front door, where Ed greeted me. I left my yellow galoshes on the doormat and followed him in my socks to the sunroom at the back of the house, a light-filled space framed on three sides by floor-to-ceiling windows. What looked like a massage table draped in Navajo-themed fabrics was on the right. On the left was a chair and a table, on which sat a bowl of different colored crystals.
“Pick a stone,” Ed instructed me.
I selected a smooth black one, which looked to me like obsidian.
“Interesting choice,” he said.
“I have a dark side,” I joked. It was then I noticed the pretty but unassuming rose quartz I’d overlooked.
“Why don’t you sit there on the bed?” he said, motioning toward the massage table.
I did, shifting until I found a comfortable spot.
“Do you know why you haven’t been sleeping?”
“Stress, I guess. I have a lot of anxiety. I’m very neurotic—if you define ‘neurotic’ as having a fear of life.” I smiled sheepishly. “I’m afraid of everything. It’s embarrassing.”
“Blow it into the stone.”
“What?”
“Cup the stone in your hand and blow your anxiety into it, as hard as you can.”
I did it, feeling foolish. Snow had started to fall again, a thick curtain coming down around us.
“Now you can watch as I prepare a sacred space for us.”
He pulled a hooded brown cape over his head and turned to me wielding a wooden rattle and a bottle of vanilla-scented water. I listened to his chants, which he addressed to each wind, claiming their qualities and asking them to assist in the healing process.
“South Wind, great serpent, wrap your coils of light around us, teach us to shed the past the way you shed your skin, to walk softly on the earth, OH!” He paused, shook the rattle, blew over the top of the bottle to make a soft whistling sound, then swished some of the water in his mouth and blew it out into a furious, blooming spray. I was caught completely off guard and jerked backward away from the spit.
“West Wind, mother jaguar, protect our medicine space, teach us the way of peace, to live impeccably, show us the way beyond death, OH!” Again, Ed performed the same routine of rattle, whistle, spit. I tried to appear unperturbed. “North Wind, hummingbird, grandmothers and grandfathers, ancient ones, come and warm your hands by our fires, whisper to us, we honor you who have come before us, and you who will come after us, our children’s children, OH!” Rattle, whistle, spit.
“East Wind, great eagle,
come to us from the place of the rising sun, keep us under your wing, show us the mountains we only dare to dream of, teach us to fly wing to wing with the Great Spirit, OH!”
Ed crouched to tap the wide wooden floor planks with his rattle.
“Mother Earth! We’ve gathered for the healing of all your children, the Stone People, the Plant People, the four-legged, the two-legged, the creepy crawlers, the finned, the furred, and the winged ones. All our relations, OH!”
His chant was fast, practiced. The words sped up and blurred into one another at this point. I stopped concentrating and gazed off into the distance beyond him, out the window to the field covered in snow. A squirrel hopped nervously toward the wooded edge that cut off my vision.
It’s probably not real, I thought. All this show, what is it really going to accomplish? Why am I here? And a voice in my head responded: Who cares? Since when do you say no to the possibility of something just because it strikes you as strange? What happened to your adventurous spirit? Give it a chance!
Back in the room, Ed was looking up toward the ceiling now. “Father Sun, Grandmother Moon! Great Spirit, you who are known by a thousand names and you who are the unnamable One, thank you for bringing us together and allowing us to sing the song of life, OH!” The ceremony concluded with one last great spit in my direction, and Ed lifted his hands over his head as though clearing the air above us.
“Now you can lie down, and I’m going to explore your chakras, see where the energy is blocked.”
I eased cautiously onto the bed, resting my head on the small hard pillow that Ed had placed underneath. He dangled a string with a small weight at the end of it, making circular movements over my body as he worked his way up. He stopped at my solar plexus. Somehow I wasn’t surprised.
“Your two most blocked chakras are the root chakra and the heart chakra,” he said. “But the root is the most injured. So I will put the stone you chose right there.” He laid a folded cloth on my pelvis and put the stone in the middle. Then he moved behind me and placed his index fingers on what he called “certain pressure points” behind my head.
“Now I’m going to ask you to do some work. If at any point it gets to be too much and you need to stop, just let me know, okay? I don’t want to push you too far.”
“I’ll be fine,” I assured him, grinning. “I’m not known for backing away from a challenge.”
“Close your eyes.”
I did as I was told.
“I need you to go back to your earliest memory of the fear and anxiety you described to me before. As far back as you possibly can. Where did all this start for you?”
I searched the recesses of my mind. It seemed that my entire childhood was like a sack of memories in which a stain of worry and dread had spread, tingeing everything a deep crimson color, but somehow it was difficult to pick the memory that started it all.
Ed said, “Take as long as you want.”
“Ah!” I’d come up with something.
“Don’t tell me. Just think about it.”
I have lost something important. I lie about it because I am afraid of being punished for losing the object, but instead I am beaten for lying.
“Feel it,” Ed urged. “Go deep into the pain.”
The more I focused on the image of my childhood self cowering in a corner as the blows fell, the more my body seemed to fill with the physical sensation of that experience in the present. I began to tremble slightly. My breathing quickened. A tear fell out of each eye and rolled down into my hair.
“Good,” Ed murmured. “Good work.”
It struck me suddenly why this whole shamanic healing thing could actually work. I had recently learned about a psychotherapeutic technique called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), which was designed to help people struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. In a treatment session, a patient recalled traumatic memories while being distracted by visual and sensory stimulation. The stimulation causes the recall process to use different neurological pathways and connections, thereby sidestepping the usual associations of anxiety and dread that are attached to the memory. The psychologist who pioneered the treatment had discovered that when a traumatic or distressing experience occurs, it can overwhelm normal cognitive and neurological coping mechanisms. The memory and associated stimuli are inadequately processed and stored in an isolated memory network. The goal of EMDR therapy, therefore, is to re-process these distressing memories, reducing their lingering effects and allowing patients to develop more adaptive coping mechanisms.
What Ed was doing wasn’t too far off from an EMDR session. Distract the client with visually stimulating displays, apply pressure to sensory points, and there you have it—the forced recall of traumatic memories travel along alternate neurological routes.
And so, with this realization, I resolved to fully commit myself to the effort.
“Now, go back to the first time you felt angry,” Ed said.
“Angry?” I asked dubiously. “I’m not really a very angry person.”
“That just means you have to go deeper. Try to find the place where the anger is.”
I genuinely did try. I traced delicately over the map of my childhood memories, as if holding a pendulum of my own, waiting for it to find true north. Where, oh where, was the anger? Sadness there was plenty of. Loneliness, despair, and self-loathing I could find, but no anger.
Here was the little girl who wore hand-me-downs from the seventies, not because her family was poor, but because nobody cared enough to buy her new clothes. She watched as her cousins were lavished with cashmere sweaters, velvet hair ribbons, and lacy stockings, and so deduced that they were more worthy of love than she was. Here was the adolescent living in her grandparents’ empty nest, a house that resonated with the booming silence of deflated and abandoned dreams. She sat on sofas covered in plastic, watching the flickering candle commemorating her murdered relatives burn through the years, and wondered how to find happiness in a world that seemed to admonish against it so strongly.
This was a girl who was considered a black sheep in her family long before she broke any rules. A product of a destroyed marriage in a community that placed all value on the health of the family unit, she was the daughter of the mentally retarded man whose condition had caused all of his siblings difficulties in finding a match, and birthed by a woman who had dreams of education and a life that was unacceptable to the Hasidic world. She was doomed before she could even talk in her own defense.
Although the Hasidic community hates me for rejecting the way of life I was taught to hold sacred, in actuality I was rejected by those same people before I’d ever even entertained the slightest thought of rebellion. Rejection was my fate, to be an outcast was my destiny. What was asked of me, then, was acceptance of God’s will, the grace to live under the burdens I had been doomed to shoulder without complaint.
Until recently, I couldn’t remember much about my early childhood. Now, the occasional beating stands out: the time when I was standing on a chair and someone tipped it over just so I would fall; when a vacuum cleaner was thrown at me so hard that I developed enormous purple bruises. Abuse was common in the world I grew up in. Parents hit their children, teachers hit their students, and rabbis claimed that the Talmud made it right. You could count yourself lucky if you went through life and didn’t once suffer at the hands of a parent, spouse, sibling, or teacher. The Satmar Hasidic community in New York is a culture of violence, not necessarily because its members fetishize it, but because the group’s only inheritance is the violence of European anti-Semitism that culminated in the Second World War. Authority and discipline are seen as necessary, as much to preempt divine punishment as to self-flagellate for the sin of surviving a tragedy that wiped out most of our ancestors. I do not remember ever feeling victimized when a blow fell; rather, it was such an event that gave me a form of equality among my peers. Lik
e some grand initiation into the postwar Hasidic identity, suffering brought us closer to that first generation of survivors, and it compensated somehow for all those who had died horribly, and in whose stead we now existed.
It wasn’t until I hit the very last year of my childhood, when my seventeen-year-old self detected a small spark of something that seemed like it could be—wait, was it? Yes, there it was: a small, hard kernel of anger, wrapped tightly into a ball, packed into the very core of my inner self like some seed waiting to sprout and bear fruit.
“I found it,” I said triumphantly.
“Good, where is it?”
“I’m seventeen. I’m getting married.”
“There’s nothing earlier?” Ed asked searchingly.
“No, this is where it is.”
“Okay then. Breathe deep. Be in the anger. Experience the memory.”
I went back to that time, the days and weeks after my wedding.
Perhaps it was reasonable for my aunt Chaya to see an early, arranged marriage as the ultimate solution to the problem I presented. There were hardly any other options for a young girl. I remember it was discussed whether I should be allowed to travel abroad to a seminary for girls, considered a haven for those from a troubled background. But it was decided that the stigma would only make it more difficult to marry me off when I returned. I was very disappointed when my dreams of traveling abroad on my own were dashed.
I wonder now what prompted Chaya’s choice of husband for me. She knew me well enough to understand that a little bit of freedom and understanding from a spouse might have been enough to keep me in my place. But instead, she chose a man from one of the most fanatical families in our community, more extreme than any of our relatives. Was she trying to quell my obvious independence by trapping me in a repressive marriage? How ironic then, because I surely believe that was a major catalyst to my break from the community. Take everything people value away from them, and they have nothing left to lose—but give them some of what they want, and they may be too afraid to let go of the little that they have. In the end, I did not feel like I was losing much.
Exodus: A memoir Page 2