Kindred Spirits - Essays in Race, Politics, and Psychology 1960-2000
Sample Chapter

Opening The Heart

Life in the Heart comes when consciousness is centered in feeling.
-- Hazrat Inayat Khan

I came to Spring Hill because Connie said I had to. I wasn’t really up for it. I hadn’t been up for much that year. I was miserable. I had started to see Amanda in May. She had left me in August. For two months I had been ecstatic, inspired. When she left, the bottom fell out. My bottom. I had never been so low for so long. All that I had learned from therapy just kept me afloat. I stayed alive – no small accomplishment – and even did some good work. But inside! Inside! Much of the time I felt like a fraud, like the psychiatrist in Alan Wheelis’ novel The Seeker, "an expert guide to the maze of living, myself lost."1

I had been waiting for my Amanda for some time. I had been divorced for ten years. During that time there had been many women in my life. I did not like being alone. I enjoyed variety but yearned for stability. Marriage and family seemed like my path.

None of the women were quite right. I struggled to make relationships work. I feared I suffered from terminal ambivalence. I didn’t know what exactly was wrong. The women usually knew: My standards were too high. I was still scarred by divorce. I was just like all men. I almost agreed with their diagnosis: allergic to commitment. Yet, I remained ultimately unconvinced.

With Amanda it was all different. I felt what I had been longing to feel. I loved her without reservation. I knew it was to be forever. I had not had that feeling before. She fit some blueprint I had been carrying around. I thought of her as "a very Rogerian person" – empathic, soft, feelingful, vulnerable, innocent. She was beautiful on the outside and soulful on the inside. A purity of spirit shone through her pale blue eyes. I felt committed. I had no doubts.

The feelings seemed mutual. On our third date she asked, "Will you still love me when I’m sixty-five?" The next day she said, "I’d love to have a little Friedman in my belly." Her son and my daughter got along like brother and sister. We would be a perfect family.

In retrospect, there were hints of trouble in paradise. She had once agreed to marry a man she had known for a week. She broke the engagement the following week. Her favorite song was "Don’t Fence Me In." And early in August she had a dream in which I was suffocating her with a pillow.

After the dream I volunteered not to see her for a weekend. That was my idea of backing off. I loved her so totally I couldn’t imagine an unhappy ending.

Thus, the abrupt conclusion to what she later referred to in a letter as "our brief, intense, and crudely ended affair" took all the breath out of me. On a Tuesday in August she gave me a statue of Obekenobi from "Star Wars" with the message, "May the force be with you." I didn’t realize that it was her way of saying goodbye.

One weekend apart hadn’t been enough. She wanted to call "time out." She wasn’t sure of her feelings. She couldn’t talk about it. She needed her space. All bets were off. She never said goodbye. I never saw her again.

Her leaving threw me into disbelief, dismay, rage, and, finally, despair. My descent was gradual. I tried other women, vacations, therapists, writing. Nothing worked. I could not bounce back.

I thought that my one chance in life for love was lost. I would never meet another Amanda. I would never settle for less. I cursed my cruel fate. I fell into a life routine that seldom varied: I awakened each morning with obsessively self-torturing thoughts. I ate breakfast alone at the local coffee shop and dinner alone at the Chinese restaurant on the corner. I took a nap in the afternoon. I watched sports on cable TV. I had no initiative, no oomph. I felt too anxious to try new things. My body ached a lot. I watched Kojak reruns five nights a week. I thought often and inconclusively about what was the matter with me. I reviewed my entire life with hopeless regret. I seemed to be living within a Kris Kristofferson lyric:

Yesterday is dead and gone
And tomorrow’s out of sight
It’s so sad to be alone
Help me make it through the night.

With better and worse days this had been going on for eight months when Connie told me to go to the Opening the Heart workshop at Spring Hill. Her description of it didn’t exactly turn me on: "It’s something like an operation," was all she would say. I gritted my teeth and held onto the chair. There was something in her voice that wouldn’t be resisted. She was one of the true friends who’d helped see me through so far. I decided to start my three week August vacation at Spring Hill.

I needed a miracle.

******

Spring Hill is a psychospiritual community whose home base is on a hilltop in Ashby, Massachusetts. The Opening the Heart workshop was created by Robert Gass, a cofounder of Spring Hill. It is a unique blend of meditation and catharsis, music and quiet, work on body, mind, feelings and spirit. It is a weekend experience which combines intense release of feelings with an infusion of spiritual energy.

I drove out to Spring Hill from Cambridge with another friend of Connie’s. A rainbow graced the sky as we turned off Route 119 and climbed three miles of winding country roads to the top of the hill. It was August 19, 1981.

At the top stood the wood building which was to be home for the weekend. It is called ‘the barn.’ I thought of the Shakers when I first saw it – all the simple and stark wood.

Approaching, the barn has the feel of some kind of rustic lodge. Entering on the basement level, the lodge association is reinforced by the coats, shoes, and luggage lined up along the walls. Going up one flight, and after taking off my shoes, the same association continues as I come to a kitchen and dining area: large stoves, deep sinks, yellow pine benches and tables. Flowers in vases grace each of the tables. The cleanliness is impressive.

The best is yet to come. Going up one more flight of stairs, the associations change. I am in the workshop room itself. My immediate impressions: spacious, lush, simple, warm. The walls, posts and ceiling are rough-hewn pine gracefully curved and artfully designed. A thick maroon carpet makes me want to sink to the floor. The high ceiling of the A-frame features Casablanca-like rotating fans. The room is large. It is really like two rooms. A main area extends from the mantle and chimney all the way to the far wall and from the windows to the posts. On the other side of the posts there is a not as large supplemental area. On the mantle of the large stone fireplace at the front of the room stand two simple white candles, a stick of Muktananda brand incense, a shell with cedar and sage, a simple vase of flowers. One lonely looking fern hangs from the ceiling to the left of the mantle near the piano. Small photos of Jesus, Meher Baba, and Mother Teresa stand in a window in the supplemental area of the room. A stack of mattresses, an elaborate disk-jockey sound area, pillows and meditation benches – these catch my eye. There is a sleeping loft above. The room – the barn – is grainy, spic and span, inviting, soothing, a work of art, a cathedral.

******

It is Friday night. The workshop is beginning. Thirty-six of us are sitting around the edges of the main area of the room. The staff is on cushions and meditation benches in front of the fireplace. I am nervously apprehensive and preoccupied as the singing begins:

Listen, listen, listen
To my heart song.
Listen, listen, listen
To my heart song.
I will never forget you.
I will never forsake you.
I will never forget you.
I will never forsake you.
Listen, listen, listen
To my heart song.

Each of us, I sense, is with his/her own private associations, richly endowing the simple works with personal meanings not yet shared. I am with Amanda and I am sad.

The songs, Robert Gass is telling us with his boyish charm, are scientifically designed for non-singers, those who were admonished in second grade to mouth the words. He laughs at his own comforting humor. So do we. The songs contain, he assures us, usually three notes and six words, obsessively repeated. And, indeed, these songs will prove to have the quality of an obsession for me: Repetitious words of inspiration and hope driving out of my mind repetitious words of despair.

It’s in every one of us
To be wise.
Find your heart.
Open up both your eyes.
We can all know everything
Without ever knowing why.
It’s in every one of us,
You and I.

Robert explains that the staff (he, Judith, Robert Alter, Jane, Leslie, David and Emily) have collected our watches to help us really be here: to loosen us from the time framework which usually constrains us. He speaks naturally, with a soothing humor and nonchalant grace, which is good because he says some shocking things. He tells us the workshop is rigorous. There won’t be much sleep, some of the things that go on will look weird, some are weird (nervous laughter), and, horror of horrors, the weekend will be conducted in silence except when one is working in the workshop room. We will eat, take breaks, and go to bed in silence.

I curse Connie. She didn’t tell me! For nearly a year I have been oppressed by the incredible noise in the silence, the internal chatter that has threatened my existence. I have lost, in Molly Scott’s words, "the silence beneath thinking." I have not been able to get freed "from the confines of my mind." And, knowing this, Connie has sent me into what I am sure will be hell. I dread the weekend.

After the singing, the work begins with the Spring Hill version of the hot seat. We have sent in ahead, among other things, an autobiographical statement, from which the staff has designed for each of us a two minute task. One by one, as our name is called, we sit in the red chair in front of the whole group, now arranged in a semicircle right in front of us. A staff member reads us our individually designed task and, however we do it, we are met with resounding applause when we are done.

In my statement I had said, "I don’t see any future for myself." My task is to close my eyes and slowly visualize my life for the next ten years, year by year and then open my eyes and share with the group. I actually do only two years. I see myself standing in front of a group. I see myself holding a baby. My baby. I cry a couple of quiet tears. I get a huge round of applause. I feel some slight trembling in my body, mostly from being in front of the large group. I sit down.

Bioenergetic exercises follow. I’d never done much bioenergetics. Nor do I want to now. I want to talk. I want to get into my problems. I feel annoyed as we are led through some stretching and jumping, some pushing a partner while yelling "get out of my way," some "get off my back," and then some "no" and "yes" tantrums on the floor.

I do not really get into the vigorous exercises. I mostly worry about my body’s frailty, its aches, pains, and incipient disintegration. I am afraid I am falling apart.

At the end of the exercise period we are told to gently roll over, form groups of six, and sit up.

See me
Feel me
Touch me
Heal me.

The experience of a laying-on-of-hands is not easy to describe. In turn each of us lies down in the center of the small group. The others sit around us and lay their hands on us. There are seven circles. Robert and Emily play guitar and sing, moving from circle to circle, troubadours of healing. The members of the circle lay hands on and sing to the brother or sister being healed.

I am a bubble
Make me the sea.
I am a bubble
Make me the sea.
Make me the sea, Lord
Make me the sea.
I am a bubble
Make me the sea.

I am lying in the middle of a circle. I lie there and feel hands on me. My body starts to twitch. At first the trembling is slight. I feel the warmth of hands on my forehead, my chest, my stomach. Then I hear Robert’s voice. It is singing right above me. His voice is singing directly to me. The trembling increases. There are no words, no thoughts. Something is moving in my body. It is neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It is not willed. It just is. Some energy is coming from him to me.

Something is happening.

I feel energized. At the end of my turn I return to the group and proceed to sing to each of the others.

After the experience, we are sent to bed. I am in the loft. I am not tired. I have no thoughts. I have no chatter in my mind. I do not sleep most of the night. I lay on a mat. Seven others sleep nearby. I am in what I will come to know as my Spring Hill state: I lay there calm, content, alert. I have been freed, for the night, from the confines of my mind. I am in the silence beneath thinking.

I do not sleep. I go downstairs. There are jars with mint, hibiscus, camomile, and red clover tea leaves. Another fellow, Tom, whom I will see three more times at Spring Hill, sits morosely sipping tea. I pour myself a cup. The sky is dark, the room is still, the world is far away. We sip the tea and keep the silence.

******

I awaken to Saturday morning’s version of my obsessive ruminations: "My neck hurts, I’ve injured myself, maybe it’s serious, my body won’t survive this weekend, this will do no good, what do I have to go home to anyway, I’ll never ever meet anyone again…" (Repeat the chorus six times…)

This morning our main work is in the lines. We have meditated, walked, and eaten. Now we pick a partner. We sit across from each other, eighteen pairs. One of us is the witness, one the sharer. We take turns in each role. The witness says, "Tell me what you feel inside." The sharer responds with whatever comes up. The witness says nothing, maintains eye-contact, keeps beaming the sharer good energy. Staff glide in and out, offering unobtrusive but firm assistance. Call on them for help.

I choose her as my first witness because she looks Nordic, ethereal, vulnerable and beautiful – like Amanda.

-- Tell me what you feel inside.

-- I feel sad (sigh)…I miss her…I want her…I feel futile…I feel hopeless…I feel like my life is over…I feel weak, weighted down…

I am repeating obsessive thoughts I’ve said to myself over and over. After two minutes of this, I sense I’m going nowhere new. I focus and hear inside: "You’re stuck; ask for help." I raise my hand and Leslie comes over. I tell her where I am. She turns to my Amanda:

-- Move a little further back… (Leslie gets behind me and puts her arms around my stomach restraining me so I cannot move forward.) Okay, Neil, now reach for her. Try to get to her. Reach for her, Neil, reach and call --

-- (tentatively) Mandy.

-- More! Louder!

-- (Louder) Mandy!

-- Louder. She isn’t coming, Neil.

-- (Still Louder) Mandy!

-- Again!

-- Mandy!!

-- Reach for her, Neil; reach and call.

-- Mandy !!!

It is a plaint, a wail, a shriek, a plea, a scream. I lurch forward and Leslie’s strong arms hold me back.

-- Don’t stop, Neil; don’t give up. There she is. You really want her. Don’t let her get away. GO FOR IT!

Leslie holds me around the chest. I struggle towards my Amanda. At first I’m playing at it. Leslie isn’t. She is strong and she is for real. I surge forward calling for my Amanda. Now the tears start to flow for real. They are no longer little droplets. Now they are a cloudburst. Leslie is my cloudsplitter. There are suddenly no words, beyond words, just hurt, pain, anger, primitive. Leslie asks me to make sounds. Once I would have called my noises inhuman; now I would call them too, too human.

-- Mandy! Mandy! Mandy!! Mandy!!!!!

The gong rings. My turn is over. After thirty seconds of silence, I become the witness. It is my partner’s turn to scream at me as I become the unfeeling husband who dumped her.

As she begins her work, I’m amused at the cosmic irony. We are meant for each other. We have both been left. Leslie has her talk to me as if I am her husband. Soon she is beating up a pillow and cursing me. As Leslie helps guide her into her anger, I can feel myself getting ready to do the same with mine. Her work is a rehearsal for mine. My witnessing is a prelude to my experiencing.

Soon it is my turn again:

-- Tell me how you feel inside.

-- I feel angry. (I am talking to Amanda). Why did you go?…Why did you leave me?…Tell me why…You shouldn’t have, damn you. Why did you never say goodbye?

I am reaching out with my hands as I talk. David kneels at my right shoulder. He asks what my hands want to do.

-- I’m not sure whether I want to caress her or choke her.

-- (David moves between me and my witness. He offers me his wrist.) Try both out…Alternate…See which connects.

I stroke his wrist lovingly a few times. Then I squeeze it menacingly.

-- That feels more like it.

-- Go with it. Look her right in the eyes while you do it.

I glare at my witness and choke David’s wrist.

-- Die! Die! Die! Die!

-- Say it all, Neil. Say the worst words.

-- Bitch! Fuck! You fuck! Fuck you!!!

I am strangling his wrist with all my strength. I am cursing all the while, loud and strong. Suddenly I am crying that cry again, those special tears that come from God knows where. The round ends with me in a ball on the floor, my witness and David comforting me.

Throughout the morning I move between beating pillows, choking wrists, throwing myself at a stack of mattresses, berating women partners, crying, and wrestling. I can’t say it is great fun. The staff is constantly encouraging, compassionate, lovingly skillful and responsive to my needs. As the afternoon goes on, I feel lighter. The only way out is through. There is a lot to get through.

And I am not alone. We are all in this together. We are individual variations of universal experience. So much anger! So much pain! We have all been leavers. We have all been left. We are no more and no less than a cross-section of humanity. Our sole distinction seems to be that we are letting out what is chronically held in. The room is sometimes bedlam: Screaming, moaning, crying, pounding, laughing, shouting, shaking surround me. It helps to have it going on all around. It lessens the shame. I have never seen anything like it.

I dedicate myself to emotional honesty.

Round three beings with a new partner asking me:

-- Tell me how you feel inside.

-- I feel despairing…I feel my utter despair coming up…I’m afraid of it… I want some help…(I’m holding my head and staring at the carpet.) Ask Leslie to come over. (My witness signals and Leslie comes over.)

-- What’s happening?

-- I feel the despair coming up and I want to let it and I’m scared of it. I’m scared it will kill me. It says I’ll never love again –

-- (Leslie lays one comforting hand on my shoulder and the other on my chest, where I’ve indicated it is coming up.) Okay, Neil, let it come up. Tune into it. What do you feel?

-- (I close my eyes and tune in to my feelings. My words come slowly.) It’s in my chest…It’s on my chest…It isn’t moving…It’s sitting there…It’s holding me down…

-- Neil, lay down on the floor. (To my witness) Let’s get on his chest. Let’s hold him down.

I am on the carpet. My witness and Leslie are on top of me. For less than a split second my mind thinks: How ludicrous. Then I am into it.

-- Okay, Neil, we’re your despair. We’re holding you down. What do you want to do?

I am lying there with three hundred pounds leaning on my chest. I am uncomfortable. I decide to get it off me. So I push up my with my chest…And nothing happens! They – it – is really on me. It won’t leave of its own accord! It is no pushover. Simply telling it to go isn’t enough…It is my depression. Goddamn…Come on guys, move…Hey, please? Nothing…Still there…

I summon up some strength I didn’t know I’d been keeping in reserve. Up to this point I’ve been polite. Now, I use my elbows. I start, stop, rest, pretend I’m done, sneakily start again, try to catch them off guard. The three of us are in mortal struggle.

Suddenly, a picture comes to me. I see it: A man and a woman are holding me down. I am four years old. I have cut my eye with a screwdriver. My father and mother are holding me down to put drops in my eye – searing, burning, sight-saving drops. Remembering the burning pain, remembering Amanda, I scream – and then I push violently, and they are off me. I am free. I sink to the floor crying my eyes out.

-- Tell me how you feel inside.

It is two rounds later. I am remembering loving a woman who didn’t love me back. A mini-depression had followed the end of the relationship. I feel angry. I put her in front of me.

-- I’m pissed…I was open to you. I really loved you…I blame you. It was your closedness, your fear, that drove me away.

I feel stuck. I feel a familiar self-righteous, blaming, hardness inside. I’m fault-finding. I’ve sensed before that there is something under this feeling but have never been able to get to it. I call Robert Alter over. He kneels beside me. He asks me to continue.

-- I blame you…I loved you up to a point…Up to a point –

-- Neil, you say you loved her "up to a point." (Robert’s hand lays in comforting Spring Hill style on my shoulder.) That ‘point’ must have been waiting inside you for her to activate it. (He presses on my solar plexus. I experience a shock, a recognition, a ‘yes’ inside me as he speaks.) That point has been in you for years…(He speaks slowly, gently, forcefully, steadily. Waves of tears well us inside me.) What is that point? Speak from it.

-- (Through the tears) There are no words. Just images of my parents.

-- Talk to them. Say whatever words are there.

-- I don’t know where these words are coming from. They just popped in –

-- Say them.

-- I don’t know if I can.

-- Say them!

-- Help me!…Help me!

-- How? How? Tell them how they can help you.

-- I don’t know…That doesn’t seem right…I feel small…(I’m trying too hard to find the words. Suddenly--) Help me – Be there for me! (More tears, deeper tears) Be there for me! Be there for me!

In the calm after the tears, I get the crucial import of someone’s being there for me. This woman’s not being there had triggered a deeper, older response. Behind the blame, lay the hurt. The memory of my eye operation comes up. My mother had left me in the hospital. She said she was going to get a drink of water. She didn’t come back until after the operation. She hadn’t been able to tell me she was leaving. She had never said goodbye.

I get the fleeting sense that all this may go back still further. The quality of my tears is ancient.

I am quiet. I see a kaleidoscope of women leaving me. Amanda, the last, looks something like a picture of my mother when she was young. I feel calm. I hear the words of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden: "It is as big, then, as abandonment and the going away of all love."2

******

It is late afternoon. Eight rounds of the lines are over. We have done some more bioenergetics. We are lying on the floor exhausted. We are listening to the favorite records and tapes people have brought with them. We have been implored: "Open yourself to the music. Breathe it in."

The theme from "Ordinary People", the Pachelbel Canon, comes on. I have been resting. I choose to open myself to the music. The move is about the death of a child and the grief of a survivor. I allow myself to imagine my daughter, Kyra. I am vague about details but of this am sure: She is dead. She has left me. It isn’t an exercise. It isn’t imaginary, I imagine. I am in a wide open state. I am a six lane highway of feelings. They flow through me. I have slept little, had no chit-chat, been immersed in a sea of emotion. Now my child is dead. I cry; I cry. A staff member cuddles me. I cry; I cry.

I mourn my Kyra.
I mourn my Amanda.
I mourn my father.
I mourn my little Neil.
I cry; I cry.

******

Saturday night ends with a four-hour blindfold session. During it I make contact with a woman who interests me, and she leaves me! Honest. I’m not making this up. Maybe it is my karma.

I react to her leaving by becoming terrified. I am alone and I have no eyes. The room suddenly seems humongous. People’s noises scare me. I am afraid I’ll be physically hurt. I am four years old again with a patch over my eye. Fear, terror. I go into hiding. I find a corner and sit in it for hours listening to the music. I imagine that all the others have paired off and are making good use of the cloak of anonymity.

Sunday morning I awaken still shaken by the night’s fear. I don’t connect it – I just connected it as I wrote this – with the woman’s leaving me. Everything happens at Spring Hill as it has to happen. I had experienced the whole theme in microcosm again: I give up myself to the other. I make her my eyes and when she goes I am lost.

This morning I know the consequences: My mind chatters a new chorus of worrisome thoughts. "What will I do when I leave? What will I do in San Francisco? If I feel like this I’ll be miserable at AHP…I’ll always feel like this…I was right. The vacation won’t change anything…What else can I do?…What should I try? It’s such a long ride home…I’m scared…I’ll get sick out West…I’m spending too much money…And besides…"

The morning circle doesn’t look exuberant. We are pooped. Emily starts the singing:

A-le-lu-ya
A-le-lu-ya
A-le-lu-ya
A-le-lu-u-ya

She sits cross-legged, arms extended, palms up. She looks reverent. The chant changes the energy. Tears begin to stream down her face.

I am in a black church in Birmingham, Alabama. Rev. Poole, a student of mine, has asked me to attend his church with him. My father is dying. I go to church every Sunday for three months. The black church prays for my father. The choir sings, Hallelujah.

All my losses are congealing.

Tears stream down my face.

A-le-lu-ya

Through my tears I hear that Robert has begun, "Listen, Listen."

I will never forget you.

No, Amanda. I never will. You almost killed me.

I feel a supportive hand on my shoulder.

I will never forget you.

But you forsook me, without skipping a beat.

Why can’t I let go of the past?

Tears, tears, tears. The Eskimos have all those words for different kinds of snow. I do not have enough words for the different kinds of tears I shed this weekend. Right now they are hard tears, gut-wrenching tears, no-longer-fun tears.

Tears of sorrow.

Judith sends me a coo with her eyes. Robert looks toward me mournfully. Is all this being orchestrated for me? Are we all thinking this together?

Robert starts "The Rose."

Some say love
It is a river
That drowns the tender reed.
Some say love
It is a razor
That leaves the soul to bleed.
Some say love
It is a hunger
An endless, aching need.
I say love
It is a flower
And we, it’s only seed.

I am the reed; I am drowning.

I am the razor; I am bleeding.

I am the hunger, the endless, aching need.

Can I be the flower? Can I be the seed?

******

"This morning you will have the opportunity to give and receive feedback with three-quarters of the people in the workshop." Emily is speaking. We have eaten another bountiful and nourishing Spring Hill breakfast. We have walked or joined Judith for movement or Robert Alter for frisbee. Now we are standing in four lines of ten people each. Two lines face each other. For about a minute and a half each of us with our backs to the windows will give feedback to the person in front of us. Then the receiver moves on to the next person and so on through the line. After the line is done, we reverse roles: givers become receivers, receivers become givers. I will give and receive feedback with twenty-four people in the next few hours.

The feedback session gives us an opportunity to hear how we have been experienced during the weekend. Up to this point we have existed mainly as witnesses and surrogates for each other. The workshop is primarily intrapersonal. ‘Reality’ is mainly our projections. The workshop provides a hiatus in conventional sociability. The rule of silence takes away a usual distraction and hiding place. The feedback session now provides a highly structured interpersonal reality-test. Any one person’s feedback may well be autistic projection. But hearing similar things from twenty people makes these things difficult to ignore.

The feedback I receive in consistent. I am seen as kind, gentle, vulnerable, open, hurt, attractive. It is only as I hear this last description applied to me that I see that there are twenty-seven female and nine male participants in the workshop. I’ve been so inside myself that I have not noticed that, yes, I am a most desirable man.

The consistently positive feedback shocks me into the inescapable recognition that the self-image I’ve been carrying around is wildly and dangerously out of whack with the reality others are seeing. I’m seeing myself through very demoralized lenses. I make a mental note to revise my view of myself: I am attractive and desirable.

I receive two unforgettable pieces of feedback. Robert says, "You are hungry and you are not sure that you will be fed."3 Leslie says, "Your problems cannot be solved by psychology alone."

I love receiving the feedback. Equally important is what happens when I give feedback.

By this time Spring Hill has become a total environment for me. I am suffused with Spring Hill energy. We all are. We look different – softer. Robert has spoken about his vision of all humanity as one organism. Looking around the room, I feel related to everyone. We have been sharing in an experience at once intensely personal and universally human. By going into our most private lives, we have come out most connected with each other.

I enter a certain state of consciousness as I give feedback. I stand opposite the person. I wait. I let images come to me. I hear song lyrics in my head. I know that, however bizarre, the images or lyrics have to do with this being in front of me. It is like I have a direct line to some deep part of the person. Like there is a beam of light connecting us that I’m tapping into. I don’t experience myself as doing anything. Something is being channeled through me. I’ve having a psychic hit. I sense there is wisdom in what I say to the person though I don’t always grasp the wisdom. I’m communing with the person. I don’t censor. It comes out of my mouth just as it comes to me. I say what I see or hear inside me. I’m ‘on beam.’

All year I’ve been feeling closed, shut down, staticy inside. My receiver has been jammed by the party line of committee voices chattering away inside. I have had to work to really be with people. Now, something has opened up, something has quieted down, something has unfrozen, something has happened. I can hear my true inner voice. My internal imagery is moving again. I am deeply present and still.

I stand in front of a twenty year-old who has been working on issues of masculinity. I tell him:

I see a Chinese coolie-boy, a drawer of water. He is a servant, worn down with his burden, frail and lowly…Now I see him going to a gym for muscle-building. He’s lifting weights…Now I see the Russian heavyweight weight-lifting champion on stage. The coolie-boy stands next to him. They are taking a bow together. They are two parts of you… (His eyes well up with tears.)

I see them sitting in chairs facing each other. Your mother stands behind one chair; your father the other. Each pulls in the opposite direction. The coolie and the weightlifter reach for each other, for integration. Your parents are pulling you apart. Each is cheering for a different version of you. Back and forth, back and forth, toward integration, toward segregation, the see-saw goes on.

The gong rings. He embraces me and moves on.

I stand in front of a black-bearded minister with piercingly serious dark eyes. My only contact with him has been to overhear him putting the workshop leaders down.

I see Christ. He is moaning: "No one appreciates me." He is sulking in a corner…Oh, now I see another Christ, one who is at the center of attention…You are the moping Christ envying the one you call the anti-Christ…I see you chopping wood and cursing him… "Why does he get all the credit?"…Your competitiveness comes from your insecurity, your own self-loathing…Use your envy as a spur…Work on yourself, your own life. Stop sulking and projecting.

His eyes are softer as the bell rings.

******

It is sometime Sunday afternoon. We are in the homestretch. The healing circle is a chance for a final discharge. It is a last chance to do whatever work still needs to be done. It consists of six participants, a leader, and a mattress. Each of us will have twelve to fifteen minutes in the center to get the group’s total loving attention. Robert Alter is reminding us, "The tears are not the pain; the tears are the release of the pain. We are going to a liberation party."

When it is my turn I’m initially played out and not really into it. What more could there be? I lie down on the mattress. I say I want to be lifted high over everyone’s head and carried around the room; then I’ll see what else I want.

I am lifted and carried. I’m dizzy and nauseous, more scared I’ll be dropped than excited to be high. I’m untrusting.

When I’m laid down, the thought comes to me: The workshop is over in a few hours. Before it started, I worried it would never end. Now I’m worried that it will. I dread going home. Nothing will have changed in my real life. This will have been an island of peace in a sea of worry.

Emily is leading the healing circle.

-- What are you feeling, Neil?

-- Despair…My old friend…Despair about despair…

-- How do you experience it?

-- It is holding me down.

-- Where, Neil, where does it hold you down?

-- All over.

Okay, says Emily to the circle, let’s hold him down.

Six people hold me down. One sits on my chest. Two hold my legs, two hold my arms. Another seems to swarm around me. Emily is cheerleading us on: "Come on, Neil, get up."

They are holding me down. I am struggling to get up.

They are really holding me down. I am really struggling to get up. "Get off me! Getoff me!" I kick, scratch, and struggle.

I throw myself into the struggle wholeheartedly. All my energies are mobilized. I’m thrashing around. I’m beyond my usual limits. I’m entirely into this. There is no self-consciousness, no observer

Suddenly I get a whiff of ether.

Like in an operation.

I am stunned. I am dumbfounded.

I throw them all off and indicate something has happened.

I had an unmistakable whiff of ether. There is no ether in the room.

I tell Emily and the group about my eye operation (my "I" operation). The ether seems related to it.

I stumble from the circle with wonder. Something has happened. Another reality has intruded. I have no explanation for my experience, nor the need for one. I am in shock. The experience has been extraordinary. It has been beyond extraordinary.

I give my attention to my fellow sufferers.

******

The workshop ends around seven Sunday night. There is a final Sufi dance and a sharing circle. I don’t recall much detail of what is shared. Everyone has something remarkably positive to say about the workshop. It all feels real. I do hear one woman say, without bravado, that before the weekend she was sure she would sooner or later have to kill herself. She no longer feels that way. She has hope.

She says this matter of factly. We accept it matter of factly. There is no shame.

I tune in and out. My mind takes me to Coki Beach in St. Thomas. I’m snorkeling. I’m meditating on the water. I’m following a blue-green parrot fish with a yellow spot on its tail. I watch it as it swims in and out of the coral.

I surface to tell the group that I’ve been visiting my favorite place in the world, a place that feeds my soul, Coki Beach in St. Thomas, and that I now have another favorite place, a place that does likewise – Spring Hill.

******

"We live two lives… The life we learn with and the life we live after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness."
-- Bernard Malamud, The Natural

Spring Hill changed my life. It ended my depression. It got me moving again. It was a conversion experience – from sickness to health.

How can we understand it? Andras Angyal’s theory helps.

As we have seen, Angyal argues that life is an ambiguous gestalt in which a neurotic pattern and a healthy pattern vie for dominance in the life of each person. The neurotic system gains the upper hand when life events reproduce the primal traumas of infancy and childhood. One is then plunged back into the state of anxiety and diffidence, mistrust and hostility, which is basic to the neurotic pattern.

Amanda’s unexpected and unexplained departure had thrown me back – once again – into my neurotic pattern. How to break the hold of such a pattern?

Angyal writes that a strongly dominant neurotic pattern "will not yield to detached thinking, generalizations and explanations: only experiences of shattering power can effectively combat it. The neurotic structure melts in the face of an intense and pervasive emotional experience."

Such is the experience Spring Hill provided. The operation was a success.

Continuing my vacation I took my daughter Kyra on a trip to San Francisco. I went from there to the Association for Humanistic Psychology National Conference in Los Angeles. On the morning before the last day of the conference I awakened immediately alert. There were no worrisome thoughts circling in my mind. It was if a needle that had been long stuck in one groove of a record had been lifted out and had moved on. I looked forward to the day. I couldn’t remember when that had happened. I said out loud, "It’s over," and it was.

I had a horizon again.

I began a new relationship.

Like a deluge which follows a drought, my life started moving on at breakneck speed, as if making up for lost time. I was in a new cycle.

On leaving Spring Hill I had jotted down in my journal a table of contents for a book I’d been thinking about doing off and on for seven years. The whole project suddenly fell into place. In my next trip to St. Thomas, I wrote fifty pages of the book in one week. In two months of concentrated work the book was done. I self-published the book, Experiential Therapy and Focusing, in May, 1982.

Similarly, I had been thinking for three years of leaving New York. But I couldn’t get the energy up to do it. The whole move felt too weighty. I had accumulated too much furniture. I didn’t believe I could start over.

Kyra wanted me to move up to Cambridge, Massachusetts so she could spend her senior year of high school with me. In the year after Spring Hill I laid the groundwork for moving. What before had seemed impossible now seemed merely difficult and challenging. I no longer needed the safety of my routines. On July 3, 1982 I moved to Cambridge.

Spring Hill had come along at the right time for me. It gave me the push that completed a lot of work I had done on myself. It released blocked energy. With its help, I reclaimed something that I had lost. I met life again day to day with zest, bounce, persistence, and hope. I understood again Robert Gass’ lyric: "All people are my family/the whole earth is my home." A mode of consciousness that had been AWOL had returned. It was the mode I had touched in the feedback line. I could hear my inner voice. I was open again. I was back.

Work had fallen into place. How about love?

I knew I had found a good place for me, and so I revisited Spring Hill three times during the year for tune-ups. On July 4, 1982, the day after moving to Cambridge, I went to the annual celebration that Spring Hill holds. I went with the woman I had been with much of the year. Another woman caught my eye. It was as if she had walked out of that blueprint I had been carrying around. She fit.

She was standing in the food line talking with the woman I came with. It turns out they had taken the Heart Workshop together that April. They had done only one exercise together: pushing against each other, going for what each wanted, screaming, "Get out of my way!" The woman I was feeling drawn to had won the exercise. I listen to this and am stunned, as I know what is happening inside me.

Her name was Laury. She lived in Cambridge. The next day when I walked into a natural foods store she was standing there. She told me later that she had dreamt about me the night before.

I left her a message on her answering machine the next day: "This is your not-so-secret admirer. If you like intrigue as much as I do, be at home Wednesday night at nine."

She was.

Spring Hill magic.

Within a month we were together. It was easy between us. There was no struggle, no ambivalence, no working it out. I had no doubts. We glided into each other’s lives with a mutual sense of ripeness. There was roadwork being done between our two apartments in August. By September it was done. The obstacles were gone.

I had moved to Cambridge to start a new family. Kyra was living with me now. She and Laury took to each other as if they had known each other at least once before. I had the feeling of a circle closing, a gestalt being completed.

On June 19, 1983 Laury and I were married at Spring Hill in the workshop room. One period of my life had ended; another had begun.

Spring Hill – Opening the Heart – was the way from the one to the other.4

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