MAY 12, 2008

(Warning: Extra-long blog!)

GIMME ANOTHER SPOONFUL OF THE UNDERSTANDING

Over 30 years ago, about 4 months prior to beginning the work that I am doing to this day, I traveled to Orcas Island (in Washington) to learn a form of bodywork called Polarity Energy Balancing. Much happened there besides bodywork... What follows is taken from an essay I wrote in the early 1980s; the changes I've made in it are mostly only cosmetic, so as to retain, as much as possible, the flavor and feel of that time.

The long wooden tables were arranged in an oval in the center of the room. Behind and on them sat about 40 men and women, some taking notes, some simply watching. Their ages ranged from 18 to almost 60. In the center of the oval stood a sturdy, very well-padded table, just over 6 feet long, specifically designed for the giving and receiving of deep, massage-like treatments called Polarity Energy Balancing sessions. The padding was primarily provided to minimize the possibility of injury when the recipients of sessions felt inclined or driven to kick or flail or pound with their fists, which often happened, given the painful, sometimes extremely painful, nature of most sessions.

I lay on the table, wearing only shorts. Around and around the table paced Stewart, a senior teacher of  Polarity Energy Balancing, explaining with more than a trace of arrogance what he was about to do. I waited, my eyes closed, as waves of fear rolled through me. Soon, very soon, I’d very likely be feeling pain, sharp pain, for Stewart was going to give me a session as a demonstration for the rest of the class. I had, out of characteristic chutzpah, volunteered to be his guinea pig. I didn’t trust him very much, but I did trust the impulse that had led me to thus volunteer — much like the impulse that had spurred me into coming here 5 weeks earlier for a 7-week residential training in Polarity Energy Balancing.

Stewart’s hands settled onto my feet with predatory firmness. The room was silent. I had already received at least 25 sessions (from both teachers and students) in the past month, and in most of them I had felt intense pain. Sometimes I’d been able to ride such pain into joy and a deep sense of ease and wholeness, but other times I had not been able to do much more than cope with the pain, somehow enduring and outlasting it. My favorite sessions were with practitioners who weren’t trying to make something preordained happen with me. But even then I had been probed and dug into harder than I thought was necessary. My protests, however I voiced, them were invariably dismissed as “resistance.”

As Stewart started to dig in, I recalled the theory behind the pain of the sessions. Where there was resistance, the teachers said, there was energy. I agreed. They also said that resistance caused pain; that is, the pain experienced by me when a teacher pressed deeply into my flesh was not caused by their touch, but by my resistance to their touch. Thus, if I didn’t resist, I’d feel no pain, but rather only an energetic flow of varying intensity. This of course made room for the bypassing of responsibility commonly seen not only in psychospiritual circles, but also in many a relationship in which the heat is typically brought primarily to one partner. Sometimes my muscles were bruised after a session; this was, not surprisingly, attributed to my “resistance.” A few sympathetic staff members told me that they knew how I felt, that they too had once felt as I now did, and that I would feel much better when I “surrendered.” Or joined the club.

I often saw students with black-and-blue heels, souvenirs of overly zealous sessions. And the theory behind injuries? It was very simple; If I was injured, it was because I needed to be injured. This, whatever its metaphysical implications, absolved the teachers from taking any responsibility for what happened in the sessions they gave.

A few weeks earlier, I had walked in on a session in which the recipient screamed and writhed as a teacher resolutely dug into her feet; her screams were tightening, rather than releasing, her. She asked him to stop. He replied that she was resisting, and pressed even harder. She struggled to get off the table. With unrelenting intensity, he pressed on, looking only at her feet. I told him he was hurting her. He ignored me, telling the woman he could see that she was hurting; with a knowing look, he asked her who in her life had hurt her, as though this would explain the pain she was now experiencing. This was too much — I stepped in more, saying that even if her old hurts from way back when were contributing to her current distress, something very different was also happening now: She had asked him to stop, at least 5 or 6 times. It was obvious she didn’t trust him. The session was over; she got up and left. I later found out that she had harshly judged herself for “chickening out.”

As much as I didn’t like the teachers’ habit of making a virtue out of leaning heavily into those areas of students’ bodies that were most tense or constricted (and as much as I didn’t like the arcane theorizing about life and the cultic mentality that pervaded the School), I still chose to stay. I argued, but not in a way that would have expelled me. In struggling against the School’s rules, of which the session-oriented ones were but a few, I was growing in unsuspected ways. More and more, I found myself relaxing into the very turbulence generated by the School’s many rules, without becoming enslaved to them, however outwardly compliant I might appear. In me was stirring a fledgling capacity to stay open in circumstances I found unpleasant or even abhorrent (although I did not at the time recognize the shadowside — undiscerning tolerance — of such openness). And such circumstances flourished at the Polarity Health Institute.

Stewart began probing into the soles of my feet, searching for sore spots. His knuckles seemed to be cutting highways in my feet. I kept uncharacteristically silent, doing my best to rise above the pain. I had a strong hunch that Stewart wanted to overpower me, to see me break, for I had a reputation of being very resistant. I wondered if he might be jealous of me; many students said that I gave better sessions than the teachers. Regardless, I knew that Stewart was out to get me. I felt as though I were on the edge of a dark wave that could at any moment toss me like a matchstick through the whitewater fury of its upcoming breaking. Fighting this would only waste my energy; my choice was not whether I’d ride the wave or not, but how I’d do so.

Now Stewart was working deeply into my neck and shoulders. I maintained my silence, knowing that he expected me to vocalize my pain. I was sure that my silence bothered him, and that it probably also increased his determination to break me. As the wave started to peak, I felt my willingness to cooperate with its flow, no matter where it took me. Stewart began pressing into my lower belly, digging deeper and deeper, his fingers held like a wedge; my navel burned and throbbed with so much sensation that I had to make sounds. I groaned and moaned, tightening my abdomen. Stewart asked me how I felt, and I replied that I felt intense pain where he was now pressing. Opening my eyes, I saw a faint smile wriggle across his face. He pounced. “And what is giving you pain in your life now?”

“Your touch,” I said. His smile disappeared. I knew he wanted me to say something else, something that would expose some neurotic behavioral pattern rooted in my past, something that he could use to turn this session into a pseudo-Gestalt encounter (between one “part” of me and another “part” of me opposed to the first), with him playing facilitator. But I wouldn’t let him trick me into making this possible, for I didn’t trust the dumbed-down facsimile of Gestalt therapy (termed “awareness” in Polarity Health Institute official-speak) that he and the other teachers practised. And I didn’t trust him, period.

At last, Stewart stopped working on my body, asking me to sit up and tell the class about a time when I had been humiliated. There was no turning back now. The wave broke, huge, soft, compelling. I was out of control. Without any hesitation, I spoke of how my father had on many occasions shamed me before my childhood buddies until I cried. To my amazement, I actually felt good sharing this. Now I no longer felt any desire to resist Stewart’s directives, no matter how off they seemed. The wave foamed all around me, churning wildly, its surface aglitter with shattered sun.

Openly grinning, Stewart asked me if I was willing to make a fool of myself. The room grew very still. Sure, I said. Whatever. Screaming and whooping, I sprinted around the room, hanging from bars, leaping over tables. The students laughed and cheered, clearly relieved for a break from the previous hour’s tension. Finally, I paused, panting and exhilarated, bereft of my usual defenses. But Stewart was not done. He told me to hop around the room like a bunny rabbit. I did, blushing furiously. “Now,” he said triumphantly, “go around the room and be seductive with the men.” Sweating with embarrassment, I did.

I disliked Stewart and distrusted him, yet still trusted the overall situation. Even as my feelings of humiliation grew, I felt oddly detached from the whole scene. Everyone, including me, seemed to be moving in slow-motion, as though everything was being choreographed underwater. An unfocused love pervaded me. The wave flattened into bubbled gossamer as it lightly and almost dryly touched the shore. I seemed to be standing on a vast shore, strangely settled into my core of being, even as the air around me seethed with shame and humiliation. Stewart wasn’t done yet, but what he did no longer mattered to me. In an odd way I was grateful to him for his part in taking me to my edge, however unwittingly or sloppily he acted.

And I also felt grateful — overgrateful in hindsight! — to the School for providing such opportunities, even though they weren’t provided for the purposes for which I used them. But I was not only grateful; I also hated the School. It was a minefield of rules and regulations, a rigidly structured community — a cult — that made a religion out of adhering to its “guidelines.” There were rules for just about everything, right down to the correct step-by-step procedure for decision-making by couples. It was very anal, antiseptically anal. I had stumbled into a place wallpapered with exhaustively argued explanations and metaphysical shoulds, a place jammed with esoteric props and unverifiable pronouncements, a place crammed with earnest, rosy-cheeked true believers with maddeningly predictable speech patterns. My challenge was to live in this place without becoming enslaved to it — as most of my friends there did — and without losing myself through playing rebellious adolescent to its strict parent.

One of the school’s rules was no sex, except with one’s legally married spouse. Another was no nudity. It’s only 7 weeks, I reminded myself as I considered these and other rules and the logic behind them, 7 weeks of playing by rules that were quite closely aligned with those to which my father subscribed during my youth, and from which I had thoroughly distanced myself for quite some time. So here I was, living in an authoritarian, heavily patriarchal institution that bristled with as just as much self-righteousness and prudery as my father had ever mustered. No wonder I had a charge with being there! But whereas my father had not explained his “laying down of the law,” the Polarity School used elaborate weavings of metaphysical, energetic, and astrological theory, along with est-like jargon, to justify its dictatorial rulings, which it called “guidelines.”

A very appealing safety and sense of belongingness, a familial coziness and security, constituted the big lure, hauling in most of the students well before their 7 weeks were up. I was both attracted to and repulsed by the homey aura of the School. Those who had submitted looked much happier than those who hadn’t, perhaps they no longer had the pesky task of deciding what to do with the areas of life — just about everything! — that the guidelines so thoroughly addressed. Most of their major decisions had already been made for them. All one had to do was commit for life (usually in front of the entire class) to the guidelines. But for most, if not all, such “commitment” had not naturally emerged  as an organic unfolding or grounding for their further maturation; instead, it had been adopted and imposed from the outside, as a self-serving device to alleviate their sense of insecurity or rootlessness.

I remained a stranger at the Polarity school, resisting its advances, even as I sometimes wistfully gazed at the swing of its hips. It promised me the sweet peace of psychological oblivion, the peace of not having to make major decisions (other than to keep aligning myself with the guidelines), the peace of being part of something apparently bigger than myself. It also promised me friends who followed the same path as me, along with an already-written “understanding” of whatever might happen to me. It promised me a home.

The Polarity School’s rigid adherence to its form gave it a dense, planted strength that was very, very appealing to those without a firm grounding of their own. It stood huge and steady, like the all-powerful daddy of my early childhood. Through its rigorously inculcated belief system, especially as applied and driven in during individual sessions and group therapy, the School undermined the ground of its students, so that, in their increasing sense of uprootedness, they would be unusually vulnerable to the fatherly solidity of the School. That is, the Polarity School had an unacknowledged investment in enlarging itself and its “family” through means that sabotaged the personal integrity of its students. Cultism 101.

For example, students were told in the first few days of the training not to engage in their usual practices, like yoga or running or writing or reading, so that they would be more available to the presentations of the School. This way, we were told, we’d get far more out of the training. True, but only partially true. What we weren’t told was that this way we would be far more vulnerable to exploitation by the School.

We were fed on schedule. Each morning, after an optional vomiting of one to two quarts of water (done in order to loosen up the diaphragm and vocal apparatus), and after an exercise class (in Polarity yoga), we each drank a cup of liver-flush, followed by one or two cups of mint-fenugreek tea. Liver-flush? It was a blenderized concoction of raw garlic (a couple of big cloves), olive oil, lemon and orange juice, plus a dash of cayenne pepper (and, if one wanted to be an extra good student, extra garlic to masticate and swallow as one drank one’s liver-flush). It was supposed to cleanse our digestive tract and detoxify our liver. Not surprisingly, the morning class was well punctuated with resonant garlic belches. The room reeked, but no one minded, for we all reeked. Lunch was sprouts of all sorts, steamed vegetables, and sometimes a grain. Dinner was fruit, soaked almonds, and sometimes leftover lunch. Our diet was hardline vegan, with very little protein. It was an easy diet for dropping weight quickly. Filling up on sprouts was no picnic

The little pleasure I derived from eating somewhat compensated for my complete lack of intimate physical contact with women. Not only was sex forbidden for those who were not married, but embracing was frowned upon, unless it was very brief. A-frame hugs were encouraged if two people really needed to hug. But sexual crossings of the party line were not much of a problem, as the diet quickly took the punch out of just about everybody’s libido. And any punch left was taken care of by rectal flushes.

A rectal flush was worse than it sounds. Picture a self-inflicted enema performed while precariously squatting over a large pail. Here’s the sequence: Relax your anal muscles, then squirt about one cup of water into your rectum with a finely nozzled hose. After a short wait, release the water into the pail; this was supposed to create a vacuum effect that sucked down fecal matter that might be clinging to your intestinal wall. A typical rectal flush was a matter of repeating this process about 20 times in a half hour or so. It was a grim business, but not without humor; seeing a friend squatting with quivering thighs over his pail, hose firmly in hand, searching the waters below — sometimes with a flashlight — for signs of the legendary matter that was supposed to have been plastered against his intestinal walls ever since he first started eating the wrong foods, rarely failed to make me laugh, and laugh hard — I was not opposed to tampering with the water pressure at such times.

The Polarity Health Institute was like a rectal flush in that it attempted to clean out waste material, to flush out its students’ psychological accumulations and accretions, to somehow undo their behavioral and attitudinal constipation. Unlike a rectal flush, however, the School was not content with a clean colon. As it made psychospiritual room in students through intense physical release and emotional discharge, it injected its own beliefs and propaganda, its own highly energized context and content into the students’ newly created spaciousness. The students of course didn’t have to allow this, but they were, in their largely unaccustomed openness, unusually susceptible to the School’s input.

One night late into the training, one of the students called home and spoke with his wife, finding out that she was sexually involved with a neighbor. He was outraged and very hurt. He and his wife belonged to a spiritual organization/cult (soon to be known as Rajneeshism) that tended to make a virtue out of casual, boundary-ignoring sex, so he prostrated himself before the notion that she should be free to do as she pleased, and that he had no right to tell her what to do, even if they were married — after all, she wasn’t his property, was she? However, he was also enmeshed in the puritanical sexual ethic of the Polarity School, so he shifted his position, staking himself out around the belief that she was wrong, and that he, as her husband, should put a stop to her behavior. (I recall one staff member literally sitting on top of the woman he was going to marry, so as to help her to get used to the authority he would have to, as a member of the School, assume over her once they were married.)

The student didn’t see that the point wasn’t just to confront his wife, but to really explore the conflicting emotions in which he was immersed, messy and disturbing as that might be. But the Polarity School made no space for him to move into and through what he was feeling, except insofar as it could be harnessed to the School’s ideology. After a day of fuming and fretting, he marched to the phone, brimming with self-righteousness, already knowing what he was going to say. He loudly overrode the “going with the flow” morality of Rajneeshism with an onslaught on Polarity School jargon, repeatedly yelling at his wife that she wasn’t being a “five-pointed star.” I’m sure she didn’t have a clue what he meant; he probably didn’t either. A “five-pointed star” was, as far as I could tell from the arcane literature about it, the pattern of bodily energetic connections that, according to Polarity theory, most fundamentally represented female energy.

He finally hung up, exasperated and trembling with unexpressed emotion. He’d shared his feelings only as amplifiers of “his” ideas about relationship and conjugal fidelity. He’d revealed little of his deeper vulnerability, at least in a manner that his wife could hear. And though he was desperately confused, he had spoken with certainty.

The teachers also spoke with certainty; their confidence was unwavering, at least in public. They frequently talked about the importance of giving “the understanding,” meaning the Polarity School’s doctrine, emphasizing the importance of giving it when recipients were unusually receptive. Doses of “the understanding” were usually administered right after the emotional and physical release of bodywork or group practices. Many students, after weeks of constantly having their “resistance” attacked and undermined, eagerly swallowed “the understanding, “ getting up in front of the entire class to vow, often with considerable emotion, their lifelong commitment to the School’s “guidelines.” I expressed my doubts and concerns less and less frequently, for I was tired of hearing about my “resistance,” and of invariably having my concerns about the School turned back into pseudo-Gestalt sessions directed at my childhood relationship with my father.

Sometimes, out of sheer exhaustion — and also because of being isolated on a small island for so long with so many others who had succumbed — I let in “the understanding.” When I did so, I felt much closer to the School, benevolently occupied and filled, as though by a foreign power. My submission at such times not only gave me a rest, but also produced in me the euphoria of belonging, of being under the wing of a very large, very firm, but kind parent. Or so it seemed. Before long, though, I’d once again pull away from what I was being fed, unable to stomach it.

“The understanding” was in the service of the Polarity Health Institute’s intention to expand its family, to gather converts. And so the ubiquitous elixir, copiously supplied, created favorable conditions for the assembly line production of devotees whose cheery mechanicalness was insidiously infectious. It was like watching a crappy show on television that you know you ought to turn off, but nevertheless keep watching, even as it gets under your skin. Thankfully, my indigestion of “the understanding” again and again reminded me that this wasn’t for me, even when I would envy the happiness I’d see on a friend’s face when he or she took a lifetime vow to follow the School’s guidelines.

And yet, when the training ended, I signed up for the advanced training, beginning in a couple of months. I had grown at the Polarity School and largely attributed this to the School, despite all that I disliked about it. I was not yet able to see that I had grown there largely in spite of the School. Also, I’d enjoyed learning the various Polarity bodywork techniques, and had been assured that the advanced training would include many techniques with which I was not familiar.

After the training, I felt peculiarly vulnerable — all 154 pounds of me — ill at ease with the trappings of my pre-Polarity lifestyle. I wobbled precariously around my edgy disorientation, feeling far more confused than I cared to admit. My former world no longer appealed to me, its rootlessness having been stripped of its gypsy glamor. And the Polarity School was no more attractive to me. I was not able to recognize what both worlds had in common: an unacknowledged commitment to operating in a parentally-dominated context. Whether I obeyed or disobeyed the rules made no real difference; whether I submitted or rebelled, I was simply dwelling in various stages of reactivity to parental injunctions. I had not grown up. The security of the submissive one and the freedom of the rebellious one were but traps, however cozy or liberating they seemed.

My two lifestyle possibilities seethed and fenced in me, each with its own ambassadors and artillery, each with its own hidden core of irresponsibility. Between the two I bounced, trying to tuck in my confusion. Solutions to my apparent problem blew through me like confetti. About a week after the training, I decided, halfheartedly, to take a treeplanting job. I didn’t know what else to do. So with six others, I moved into a motel near the treeplanting site. My pain amplified; I felt very lost, not realizing that I was in the chaotic midst of a massive turning point.

The following afternoon I walked into some woods a short distance from the motel. Soon I was weeping uncontrollably, surrounded by dense foliage, damp, cold, yet somehow welcoming. I continued walking, with unsuspected direction, until my crying ceased. I was now deep into the woods. For a few minutes I squatted, gazing at the fir needles densely carpeted between my feet. Then I looked up, at the bushes and ferns and leafless network of alder branches, gradually letting my gaze drift down. Less than 10 feet in front of me stood a hand-fashioned cross. In amazement I stared at it, noticing that it rose from a dirt mound sparsely coated with grass.

I had no doubt that the mound was a grave. I stood before it for a while, feeling oddly refreshed, both sobered and uplifted. Then, with a prayer of gratitude, I left the woods, feeling as though I’d stepped out of whatever it was in which I had entombed myself for the past week — and not just the past week, but the past month and more. It was raining. I sat on the shore of the lake near the motel. The sun was hidden behind puffy, inkstained clouds; but the rain, once fully released, would reveal the sun. I had been, I thought, like a cloud that wouldn’t let go of its rain; how stubbornly I had blocked my own light!

The next morning, foot-deep snow made treeplanting impossible. Everyone was upset about it except for me. We decided to leave until the snow was gone, possibly in a few days. Without premeditation, I told the others that I would not be returning. I simply knew that I had to be elsewhere. For three or four days I did nothing more than eat, sleep, and relax, without any pressure to do anything else. Then a friend called and told me about a Vipassana meditation course he had just attended; as soon as our call was done, I felt a wave of inspiration and joy, and registered for a 2-week Vipassana retreat in southern California. A day later, I was there, feeling very excited, having never done such a retreat before.

All but one of the fourteen days of the retreat were conducted in silence. The teachers spoke only to provide instructions, conduct brief interviews with participants, and give evening discourses. The instructions were basically suggestions to aid one’s meditative practice, not only during the formal sitting meditations, but also during times of eating and walking. Our task was to pay moment-to-moment attention to whatever was now happening, be it the rhythms of our breath, the tone of our thoughts, the feelings arising and passing in us, and so on. We were encouraged not to identify with what was arising, but simply to observe it. Pure awaring.

My world quickly expanded. After a few days there, I felt totally at home, even though there was no contact between any of the participants, not even eye-contact. So I settled in more and more deeply. I was left alone with my openness. Spontaneous insights began pouring through me. I was happy, happy to simply be. Thoughts and feelings kept arising, but I felt freer and freer, even as I maintained the discipline of simply being present with whatever was occurring

Halfway through the retreat I suddenly knew without the slightest doubt that I was not going to attend the Polarity School’s advanced training. At almost the same moment, I knew with the same unshakable certainty that I was going to start my own bodywork practice when I returned home (although I’d given bodywork sessions for years, I had never charged for them). I had a vividly compelling, clearly detailed vision of what to do when I returned: I saw myself starting a cooperative house, designing and printing a poster advertising my bodywork practice, and doing my work in the house. All this in one brilliant moment.

I began to understand the meaning of taking responsibility for myself. It wasn’t so much a tough or rigidly independent “I can take care of myself,” as it was a willingness to firmly yet lovingly parent myself, to use my current circumstances as an opportunity to become more intimate with who and what I really was. Such responsibility was not an act of mind, but of being.

The retreat was set in high-altitude desert. The nights were crisp, the days hot and bright. I especially enjoyed taking slow-motion walks through the desert, sometimes going barefoot. Joshua trees and alien uprisings of cactus stood like sentinels in the shimmering stillness. By my feet tiny yellow and purple flowers swayed on subtly trembling stems. Lizards darted between sandy shadows. Sudden hares bounded over the hills. Awareness bloomed in me like a flower in the desert.

It was the early Spring of 1978. To my surprise, I soon had more than enough clients to provide me with a liveable income. I was, from long practice, skilled at the hands-on aspect of bodywork, but not so skilled at dealing with the intensity of feeling that often surfaced during sessions. My skill in this area gradually deepened as I became more creative, more fluid, in my responses to my clients. The technician in me began serving the artist. In my work, I incorporated many techniques, including ones I had learned in Polarity School.

There was a tangible grace to my life. Every day I meditated for two or more hours. My life flowered. I, the inveterate traveler, the rootless one, the wanderer whose longest job had lasted 10 months, now had a career — and not just a career, but a vocation! I swelled with self-esteem and self-importance.

One day, perhaps three months after I’d begun my practice, I received a letter from a dear friend at the Polarity School (who was doing the advanced training), inviting me there for his wedding. After some hesitation, I decided to go, and to stay for a few days afterward, hopefully to pick up some techniques from the advanced training, which was almost over.

Shortly after the wedding, three men from the School approached me, looking very serious. In a tone dark with reprimand, they said that they had heard I was doing bodywork therapy without calling it Polarity Energy Balancing, and that I was living in a house with three women, one of whom I was involved with sexually. I replied that this was true, realizing that my just-married friend must have told them what I was doing. They steamed with righteousness — I, a graduate of their school, was having sex with a woman to whom I was not married, and was polluting Polarity work with other methods! They didn’t seem to know that the techniques of the Polarity Health Institute had been garnered from many places besides the teachings of the founder of Polarity Therapy. All they saw was that I had left the fold, and for that they were scolding me.

I stayed for 5 days, spending much of my time alone. “The understanding” peered at me from most faces. The atmosphere whispered forth the guidelines; the landscape bustled with converts. I was not surprised to hear that the School was planning to become a church. My differences with the School were, of course, still called “resistance.” The morning that I left, I had a confrontation with the acting head of the School. He let me know that I was not a desirable presence on their premises; I was apparently a bad influence on the students. My criticalness of the School, he stated, was not in the best interests of the School. After several minutes with him, I decided not to argue. Finally, he told me that I wasn’t ever to return to the School unless I was totally committed to their guidelines. So I left, feeling a mixture of sadness, anger, and relief. I could no more change the School than I could have changed my father during my early years.

Nevertheless, I still wanted a home, a haven, a place in which I could rest and replenish myself. But now I was further propelled into finding that place in the midst of whatever I was doing. Slowly but surely I was beginning to discover in myself what I had hoped to get from the Polarity School. A half year later I had the following dream:

I receive a letter from the Polarity School. In it are my grades. I have A’s in Polarity Therapy and Diagnosis, and D’s in everything else. Suddenly I am sitting before the entire staff of the School, tied to a chair. One of the teachers does cruel, crude bodywork on my face until I start crying. Two plastic sheets are draped over me.

I begin suffocating. In panic and rage, I tear the sheets off, to the irritation of the staff. They assign me to my quarters: An elaborately penciled diagram lets me know that I am to live in a basement room. I have plenty of space, but feel trapped. I leave, and wander until I am in the fenced-in pasture of the stallion I knew from my teenage years (on my parents’ horse-farm). The pasture is full of sleeping animals. One awakens and charges me, immediately changing into a young girl who is swinging a large Teddy bear at me. I run from the pasture, past the motionless figure of my father, toward unknown territory

Much of the dream seemed like a cartoon of my time at the Polarity School. In it, I felt “D”-graded, tied down, suffocated, rebellious. The diagram, or blueprint, was the “understanding” — submitting to it meant living in a basement, in semi-darkness. And I had felt as fenced-in at the School as I had as an adolescent. My wildness, my raw vitality, my true power, represented by the sleeping animals, was dormant, tightly and carefully contained — but not dormant for long.

The awakening of the animal signaled my awakening from the heady slumber of my adolescence, and from the tidy pasture of the School. The animal was much more substantial than the me of the dream, more authentic, closer to the ground. And this animal was no animal, but an aspect of myself that I had looked down upon in my adolescence, viewing it as no more than an “animal.” What I had done to myself then (call it domestication) I had allowed the Polarity School to do to me during my training there.

In the dream, the animal becomes a young girl, reflecting the presence, however young, of the feminine in me. Not until after the dream did I realize that the Teddy bear which she swung at me was a sign of kinship, of understanding for my desperately protected vulnerability, for I had forgotten that Teddy bears had been been my childhood allies and protectors, especially during my frequent nightmares. So I left the pasture, left the School, passing by my father, who was so much like the School.

As I worked with the dream, playing out the various parts, I eventually stood facing the father of my early childhood, no longer feeling “tied down.” And then a great sadness rose up in me, as I felt all my efforts to get love from those who wouldn’t or couldn’t give it to me, except under conditions that were all but intolerable for me. Gradually my grief became love, a soft deep love in which I felt the strength to stand my ground, not like a stone monument, but like a pliable young tree.

And so I said a full no to the Polarity Health Institute, a no to rigidly conditioned love, whether it came from the Polarity School, or from my parents, or from me, a no that lightened me, that made it possible for me to say an authentic, fully alive yes, a yes that was not weakened by my saying no.

I was grateful to the Polarity Health Institute for showing me in such dramatic fashion what I did not need. A vision of a much healthier family/organization began to take shape in me, centered by an intimacy that was sustained not by rules and shoulds, but rather by the ongoing choice of each member to share themselves and their inner workings in a way both deepened their individuality and strengthened the group.

I was, however, more idealistic than realistic here. Though I saw that a family or community could function not only as a noncultic haven, but also as a healing fire flaming through whatever tended to sabotage the integrity of its members and their relationships with each other, I didn’t fully recognize the depth of maturity needed to manifest this. And though I saw that a profound trust was needed between members to make all this happen, and that this trust had to spring from each individual’s trust in his or her own fundamental nature, I was not nearly as ready as I thought to make this a living reality, and in fact didn’t really get it for another 17 years. I was on my way, but had some major detours along the way, as described in my book Darkness Shining Wild. Let me finish with something I wrote from that time verbatim, maybe a year after my time in the Polarity cult:

“When we make awareness a priority, our urge to belong, to be part of something bigger than ourselves, becomes less and less exploitable by self-aggrandizing systems like the Polarity Health Institute, for we then experience ourselves as already belonging, as already part of something bigger than ourselves — we move more easily into resonance with the current of aliveness, the primal flow of being, that pervades us and our environment.

“In the midst of circumstances, however stormy, it is up to us to remember to open our eyes. Such seeing is often but a seed, hidden in our darkness, buried beneath the debris of our efforts to meet standards that do not serve our well-being. When we encounter this seed of awakening in ourselves, it is our responsibility to care for it. Through nourishing it, we allow it to take root in us, to become a seedling. Essentially, the seedling’s life is our life; in caring for it, we become less and less obsessed with satisfying the very parental expectations that we originally allowed to contract us into being other than ourselves.

“The heartfelt recognition that we already belong, that we are not essentially apart from the Mystery in which we arise, signals the beginning of our coming home, but only if we devote more energy and attention to that recognition than to our dramatization of our apparent isolation. Our homecoming is ours to take — the intuiting of its uncharted path is our challenge and responsibility, our sacred joy and need.”