Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  To be relaxed is the optimum state, I will find. Not happy, not joyful, not bouncing off the walls – what we are really aiming for is to be relaxed. But to get to relaxed is not relaxing. In order to remove our masks, first the mask has to be identified. Man, this is the worst. Members of the group stand up in front of us and we have to say what we think of them. I only have first impressions of these people, in an artificially intense, intimate and stressful space. So one by one the strangers around me stand up, nervous and afraid, and I and the others volunteer assessments such as ‘you have sad eyes’ or ‘you have low self-esteem’ or some other statement informed by the thinnest of thin slicing. Really, what do I know of these people – or anyone? And what do they know of me?

  I wait almost until the end. Then it is my turn to stand up.

  My level of discomfort during this exercise is so deep, I can barely take in what people are saying. One guy tells me I have trouble making eye contact. I immediately get self-conscious and self-correct by staring at him, before getting uncomfortable and looking away. Why have I not been told this before? Does that mean I’ve been going around all my life not looking at people in the eye?

  One woman says I have a problem ‘committing to commitment’. Yeah, that’s probably true. I always like to keep my options open. Another says, ‘You’re afraid to spend time with yourself.’ I nod, while thinking, That’s not true – I’m a writer, I spend huge slabs of time alone. Right? Right? Some of the ‘feedback’ is old news. Yes, I live life with my head, not my heart. And, yes, I am my own worst critic. But the mask I’m wearing is slipping down.

  It’s only day one and already I’m feeling big emotions – mostly fear and vulnerability. But that is what the process promised: they would take us down from our heads to our hearts, and the best way of doing this is to think less and feel more.

  It’s late now, and I feel drained. Alima asks us to close our eyes. Oh, what now? But her words are reassuring, almost like a mother’s to a frightened child: ‘You are meant to be here and there is no other place you need to be right now. You’ve paid your money, got on a plane, got here. And now you are here. Let it all unfold as it will.’

  It’s the verbal equivalent of having your forehead stroked.

  As we leave the hall with our buddies (mine loops his arm through mine, like we are schoolchildren), I notice many people walking back to their cabins in tears.

  *

  In trying to dodge unpleasant feeling we often numb ourselves or distract ourselves. We don’t even know we are doing it. There’s no social media or smart phones or booze around this week. Without distractions, the feelings will have their week in the sun.

  During the week I get a lot of insights around this. Unconsciously I blunt my feelings through drinking, distractions such as the internet or television or social media. I dull them through prescription drugs that promise to take away sadness and anxiety. We don’t even realise it, but so much of the time we walk around numb. It’s just as Deepak and others have said.

  Our minds work hard to label our experiences and feelings as good, bad, fun, boring, etc. – so a lot of what we experience is filtered through a judgemental lens. What I have been taught from Matt and Aruna, and now here, is to let the feelings run through me without putting a name on them, without labelling them as good or bad or whatever. The feelings will eventually run their course and be replaced by other feelings. There’s no point getting too attached to them. The trick is just to loosen the reins a bit and, as the Tame Impala song goes, just let it happen.

  To move into a state where feelings have primacy over thinking, the Path of Love has a number of elements that are quite physical – sensual even (not to be confused with sexual). Touch plays a big part, as distinct from most traditional therapy set-ups, which are very much hands off.

  On the first day I wake early (my bed is very soft, maybe too soft), even before someone walks around outside playing chimes from 5.30am. We’re to start the day with an hour-long meditation called Dynamic. My roommate and I are not meant to talk outside the sessions but in the drowsy pre-dawn we compare notes. She is cool – a doctor and mother of five who has been here before.

  ‘What is Dynamic?’ I ask. We have not been told what is going to happen. (Samved later tells me why people aren’t told what happens before they go in – they are liable to get scared and not do the program in the first place.)

  She shudders. ‘Dynamic is awful.’

  We walk down to the hall and I stand at the back while the drum and bass music gets progressively louder. Someone speaks into a microphone like a DJ at a rave.

  Because I’m not properly prepared for it, when people start doing primal screaming, I freak the fuck out. I’m not used to people making loud sounds. Screaming is something I’ve reserved for when someone is actually murdering me. No wonder this retreat is miles from anywhere.

  There are people doing ‘grrrrrr’ sounds (popular with men), or shrieking like they have lost a child (women), or moaning like they have been kicked in the balls or womb. It is too loud and too intense and I don’t like it. For a while I curl up in a ball and put my hands over my ears and wait for it to pass. I try to join in but all I can muster is a couple of low-level moans, like I am suffering bad period pain. Nothing is coming to the surface. I look around and notice a couple of other women curled up and holding their ears. My roommate looks as if she has gone ‘vacant’: there in body but sort of mentally checked out. I vow to find the scream-resisters later and talk about how we could get out of Dynamic. The next bit of this Sufi-style meditation involves jumping up and down for fifteen minutes. It’s meant to awaken the sex drive. Jumping like this hurts my boobs, though. I also feel self-conscious even though no one is looking at me. I should have packed a sports bra.

  When I ask one of the facilitators later why we start the day with such vigorous – and unusual – physical activity, he tells me that it helps dislodge feelings that have been suppressed or buried in the body. Already, before breakfast, my Fitbit shows I’ve done more than 12,000 steps.

  After an hour, when the meditation is over, the bush has that lovely early-morning glow, where even the harshest landscapes are bathed in a forgiving light. It has rained overnight. Dew sits heavy on the leaves, poised – ready to drop.

  *

  In the group sessions today I make a real effort to make eye contact with people. But it is a really sad and gruelling day. People stand up and talk about what is going on for them and it is wrenching. For the sake of their privacy I’ll not say anything more about the others.

  I stand up, clear my throat and talk about boys.

  One of the facilitators, a big, masculine dude, stands up with a punching bag and kickboxing pads and tells me to hit him. As instructed, I run up to him in front of the group and give him a kick in the balls area, very hard, and scream, ‘Fuck you!’ I do this several times and feel better but also physically exhausted.

  In the afternoon we dance for hours. It’s like a rave but without drugs or alcohol. We are encouraged to dance with our eyes closed. I keep opening mine and peering around at what everyone is doing until one of the helpers spots me and comes around with a blindfold. Then I’m dancing in the dark.

  At certain points of the dance, people scream and cry and yell – just like they do in the morning, but it’s less contained now. They are really letting it rip. My writer’s mind is leaping out of my head; I’m imagining all the stories and things that happened to these people to make them howl with such pain and rage. The facilitator comes over to me with the punching bag again and tells me to ‘let it out’, which I do, and I begin to howl too. I would find the next day that I have actually screamed so hard, my voice is going.

  *

  On day three I sleep in and miss Dynamic – which, as you can imagine, is devastating. My ‘buddy’ is meant to report me missing, but thankfully he doesn’t. I feel slow and drowsy. The process is taking it out of me. It’s all that jumping and dancing and listening an
d emoting and processing. An article about the Path of Love in the UK Sunday Times talks about how much people eat – which I understand now. Meals – meant to be eaten in silence – are a process of refuelling. We’re shovelling it down. The Sunday Times article also says a week at this retreat is the equivalent of going to therapy weekly for two years.

  In the hall I hear the sound of screaming. My roommate joins me on the balcony in the morning sun. She snacks on some gluten-free crackers and tells me that the staff are doing their own process when we have our breaks.

  The interesting principle at work is release and containment. You release whatever emotions need an outlet – old hurts, betrayals, ugly feelings – but you are doing it in a safe place, where you can spill out and rage and cry and there is no one judging you – in fact, they’re encouraging you. I’ve never seen so many people in tears. Even when we are sitting quietly before sessions there is the sound of people sobbing around me. But I realise many participants feel relieved that they are in a place where they can just totally let go and let the tears flow. After all, if you walk down the street wailing and crying and screaming and beating things up with a rubber bat (we do that too), you would likely be committed.

  Here, people come and hold you when you are crying. They stroke your feet and your hair. Sometimes you find yourself, when a slow song comes on, dancing in someone’s arms. It is a helper. You are blindfolded and can’t tell which one, and even if you could, it wouldn’t really matter. Your head is on someone’s chest and there is an eerie old Peter Gabriel song playing and the heart beating in their chest fills your eardrum, the temperature of your skin and their skin running hot.

  By the end of the week, I get to recognise where people are in the room not by the sound of their voice, but by the sound of their weeping.

  *

  Despite all the sound and fury, at this stage I still feel like I’m not going too deep. I’m yet to cry. Even though I shouldn’t, I feel vaguely competitive with all the criers. They are really going for it, getting bang for their buck. And me? Is there nothing to feel sad about, or am I highly repressed? I begin to get stressed that my sorrow is so deep that it is at a place I can’t access. Or that there is no sorrow, which means I am an unfeeling monster.

  Through waking up the body, the process is supposed to quiet the mutinous mind. We are kept so busy with activities and sensations and stimuli that the mind has no chance to analyse anything we do. My mind, however, conducts its mutiny late at night. In the narrow single bed, with hot February winds blowing up the hill through the ghost gums and nothing but a noisy plastic fan for relief, my mind won’t slow. It runs so fast, as if fast-forwarding through a tape, and plays a bizarre loop of Joe Hockey talking about the 2014 Federal Budget, over and over. Why? Who knows? But a surge of feelings, electrical in its currents and power, has short-circuited my thoughts, producing loops and jump cuts and nonsensical montages like a bad art installation, like a waking dream. It is only my exhausted and sore body that, night after night, manages to drag me to sleep.

  *

  After Dynamic on the third day Samved tells us it’s Shame and Shadow Day, and my heart sinks. One of Carl Jung’s major archetypes was the Shadow Self. There’s the Persona, or mask, and alongside that is the Shadow, comprising repressed ideas, instincts, impulses, weaknesses, desires, perversions and embarrassing fears. The Shadow can be a source of creative energy, but it’s mainly tied up with shame. The aim of today, Samved tells us, is not to purge the Shadow Self, but to bring it out into the light and somehow integrate it with the rest of our being. A sort of cold, whole-body shiver moves over me, like a sudden storm.

  I’m not the only one who feels this way – the whole atmosphere in the room changes; atoms and air rearrange around this new charge.

  This will be heavy. And so it proves to be.

  When we file into the hall, Nirvana’s ‘Come as You Are’ is blasting and I feel physically ill. I try to think what I can bring to the group that I’ve never told anyone, the thing I have gone to the greatest lengths to conceal. I have no shame.

  Then I give it some thought. I have so much shame. The challenge will be picking what story of shame to share. So much, so much, so much, so much shame.

  I try to imagine what shame others in the group will bring and brace myself. I also feel a pre-emptory compassion for my fellow group members and the things they’re going to share today.

  Shame and Shadow Day turns out to be very hard and cathartic, and once I get through it, I feel lighter and free – as if I’ve made some dangerous crossing (at night, headlamps bright then dim, carrying all my bags through a rising and dark river and the knotted and sharp foothills of a mountain – and on and on, walking carefully in the dark, looking at my feet, until it is safe and I can place the bags down. I have crossed, and I can continue my journey but it is lighter now, and I am unencumbered).

  Later it is back to hitting the guy with the boxing pads. And then in the afternoon, in the special disco, I am hitting and hitting and hitting, long after everyone has stopped and is lying on their individual mattresses on the ground, heaving, sobbing, sighing and spent. My eye mask is slipping off and my dress is soaked with sweat. This is a workout for my inner life, and the energy I am producing has the force of a geyser. It is coming from a well somewhere within and the process has finally unleashed it – and it feels like it will never stop. I keep hitting and hitting and hitting.

  *

  On the evening of the third day there’s a full moon and the bush is still and hot. It’s meant to be a scorcher tomorrow, a total fire ban. The music – party music like Rihanna and Katy Perry – is blasting and we’re all dancing together and swapping partners with a kind of abandon and swagger and swing. I’m dancing with men and women – people I’ve never met and people I know and people whose secrets I’ve heard (and they have heard mine). With these people, even though it’s only been three days, I feel so warm and close, and kind too. I let them get into my space, all up close, our noses touching in a dance. It’s joyous. I want to break eye contact at two seconds in but I try not to. Why is it so hard? It feels too intimate, like I am being too intrusive by staring. Breaking eye contact feels like giving the other person privacy. But maybe I’m the one who wants privacy.

  These people hold up a mirror, and I pull back and shiver.

  *

  The next day I cry, and I’m relieved. It’s triggered by seeing two people from my group hugging in the middle of the hall as we do some prayer/gratitude exercise. Initially I’m really cynical about the exercise and have to be talked into doing it, but then I see them embracing in the middle of the hall and it is this, for some reason, that touches me deeply, for I see suffering and love in both of them, and in them I see the suffering and love of everyone. And I also see something primitive and primal and Christ-like that I have pushed away, because I am an atheist, but this image of man and woman, like mother and son – his chest, her head, the interchange of them – connects with some old story that resides deep in me, and some feeling bursts like an explosion from my chest. And I know that if the only aim of the week is to drop down into a feeling state, then I’ve achieved it.

  This is serenity – I really think this is it. It’s come not from silence, but from noise, from diving deep and getting dirty. This feeling of serenity seems vastly different from the other times. It’s not the blank, clear feeling I get from meditation. It feels fuller, like it could gush out of me. Yet I also feel more vulnerable, tentative and raw. My skin is thinner. I walk around feeling like every nerve is exposed, but in a good way.

  When I return home, I slow things right down, and spend a lot of time outside. I can’t be around certain people any more – people who are cynical or mean. I get up for the sunrise and take it all in with an almost tearful gratitude. I notice dust motes and watch them fall.

  The feeling lasts for a long time, weeks and weeks. What a strange spell this is. It’s continual ecstasy rolling at my feet. It’s unlike
anything I’ve experienced – but in it, there is no wanting (only wanting this feeling to stay forever). I don’t need anything – everything I need I already have. The divine is within me and all others, I know that now. Everything is whole, everything is good, everything is as it should be. Serenity Now.

  In the West we’ve moved at speed from a religious to a secular, atheist society. The liberation from old religions – especially for women – is immense, but with liberation comes some loss. There are consequences to this abrupt shedding of our spiritual skins. We’ve lost an important figment of the collective. Worshipping as a community is one less thing that we do together, one less thing that binds us. We’ve also lost the spirituality that used to be woven into how we lived. I still remember a time when no shops were open on Sunday, there was fish on Fridays and regular churchgoing, and religious holidays and saints days observed. That was my childhood. Now all that’s gone – where I live, anyway. That other age has evaporated, unmourned – did it even happen?

  How are we doing God-type experiences in a secular world? What is our source of serenity, the peace that the world cannot give? Where do we turn and what do we do if we want to go inwards? It’s no coincidence that the rise of mindfulness meditation has emerged as organised religion has receded.

  Modern life has very few gaps in it for us to practise the kind of intentional introspection and seek the serenity once found in traditional religion. Now spirituality is untethered from religion and is a commodity like any other product. To find it you need time, privilege and capital. Pay $2000 to go on retreat, and meaning, spirituality and community will be sold to you. You’ll feel great for a week, connected, cleansed and whole (elated, even), but it’s about as practical and as healthy as losing weight in the Biggest Loser house; there’s little possibility or means of integrating what you’ve learnt into your daily life.