When the Impossible Happens (42 page)

Flora also started experimenting with heterosexual relations and eventually got married. However, her sexual reorientation clearly was temporary and superficial; she was able to engage in sexual intercourse with her husband, but found it painful and unpleasant. The marriage ended three months later, and Flora returned to lesbian relationships, this time, however, with much less guilt. Her condition was so improved that she could be released from the hospital and started working as a Baltimore taxi driver. Although in the following years she had her ups and downs, she did not need hospitalization and did not have to return to the psychiatric hospital that could have become her permanent home.

I have never in my fifty-some years of practicing psychiatry seen a more dramatic, lasting improvement than the one I witnessed in Flora’s case. I cannot help but see a great irony and even a touch of cosmic humor in the fact that, after years of studying and practicing medicine and psychiatry, the most dramatic therapeutic result I have ever encountered in my life was not achieved by officially accepted respectable psychiatric treatment. It was the result of a process that resembled more a medieval exorcism or an intervention of a witchdoctor than a respectable rational therapeutic procedure based on discoveries of modern science.

EMBODYING THE DAPHNE ARCHETYPE: The Story of Martha

The rich spectrum of transpersonal phenomena includes experiences of identification with other life forms, including plants and botanical processes associated with them. On occasion, such experiences show deep connection with various emotional and psychosomatic problems. In those instances, full emergence of such experiences from the unconscious into consciousness is a necessary prerequisite for healing. This can be illustrated by the case history of Martha, a 32-year-old client of mine, who was accepted into the experimental program of LSD psychotherapy after many months of unsuccessful treatment by various psychopharmacological substances and other conventional methods.

Martha’s psychiatric diagnosis included terms like “bizarre hypochondria cal complaints” and “borderline psychosis with vague distortions of the body image.” The most striking of her complaints involved very strange sensations in her legs and body that she had great difficulty describing. She said about it: “Something is just terribly wrong about how my body feels.” These symptoms began after what she described as “repeated sexual harassment” by one of her co-workers, a handsome young man. Martha was very attractive herself and had many suitors, but felt strong resistance to the idea of a committed relationship and marriage. She attributed her sexual problems to her childhood history of repeated abuse by her older cousin.

Several of Martha’s initial LSD sessions had a relatively normal course; they focused on her traumatic childhood experiences and on various aspects of her birth. In one of her later sessions, the content of her experiences suddenly dramatically changed. She felt an abrupt increase of the strange sensations in her legs that eventually reached such intensity that they seemed absolutely unbearable. Martha decided to have her session terminated and asked me for an injection of Thorazine, something we tried to avoid in psychedelic therapy at any cost.

Administration of tranquilizers in the middle of a “bad trip”—unfortunately, a common practice among mainstream professionals—tends to freeze the experience in a difficult stage. It prevents positive resolution of the underlying problem and makes successful completion of the session impossible.

Talking to Martha, I was able to find out why she did not want to continue. “This is absolutely crazy,” she said. “I think that if I continue, I will turn into a tree.” I assured her that she would not turn into a tree, regardless of how believable and convincing her concerns that this would happen. The worst that could happen to her was that she would
experience
herself as a tree. I told her that experiences of identifying in a very convincing way with various aspects of nature were very common in psychedelic sessions and did not pose any danger. After a while, Martha calmed down and agreed to continue with her LSD session.

As she closed her eyes and turned her attention inside, the bizarre sensations in her body and her legs continued to intensify, but this time she was able to endure them. As she allowed them to fully develop, she realized that what she had considered weird feelings and distortions of her human body image were perfectly normal and very authentic experiences of being a tree. She stood up, stretching her arms toward the sky, and maintained that position for a long time. She had an ecstatic expression on her face, and it was obvious that she had actually started to enjoy the session.

Martha sensed that her fingers were now extended and had become branches with rich foliage. She had a powerful vision of the sun and was receiving its light, experiencing on a cellular level the mysterious process of photosynthesis—the basis and secret of life on our planet. Her body became the trunk of the tree; she experienced the cellular activity in the cambium and felt the flow of the sap through the system of veins traversing the sapwood. Her feet and toes were growing and branching until they became the convolution of roots penetrating deep into the earth. Martha was now able to sense the exchange of water and minerals in the tiny feeder roots and root hairs of the tree. She was amazed by the authenticity of the insights concerning the anatomy and physiology of trees that she was receiving through this experience.

However, her insights were not limited to the botanical aspects of this experience; they had a profoundly numinous quality and distinct mythological and spiritual dimensions. What at first appeared to be just the astronomical sun, the source of physical energy supporting all life on our planet, became also the Cosmic Sun, the source of creative power and Logos in the universe. Similarly, the soil in which the tree grew became Gaia, a fantastic mythological figure of Mother Earth. The tree itself assumed a mythological meaning and became the Tree of Life. The experience that was at first difficult and frightening thus became ecstatic and mystical.

Later in the session came another experience that revealed the deep archetypal meaning of Martha’s symptoms. She identified with Daphne, a young, beautiful nymph, daughter of the river god Peneus. According to Greek mythology, Daphne dedicated herself to Artemis and, like the goddess, refused to marry. She was pursued by many admirers, but rejected every lover, including the god Apollo. When the god pursued her, Daphne prayed to the Earth and to her father to rescue her, whereupon she was transformed into a laurel tree. This insight made a lot of sense in view of Martha’s resistance to marriage and of the fact that her symptoms had started after unwanted advances from her very attractive co-worker. Martha emerged from the session without the disturbing distortions of her body image and open to the idea of getting married and starting a family.

HEALING DEPRESSION BY A SEPHARDIC PRAYER: The Story of Gladys

Although reading Sigmund Freud’s Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis and my enthusiasm about it was what inspired me to study psychiatry, my excitement about Freud’s theories and his method of therapy has been seriously undermined by my later clinical experience. While I continue to admire Freud as a great pioneer of depth psychology, I believe that most of his theoretical concepts have not withstood the test of time and require substantial revisions. I have even stronger reservations about his therapeutic strategy.

During my psychiatric practice, I have seen many patients who, after years of psychoanalysis, were able to give lectures about their emotional and psychosomatic symptoms and their connection with various postnatal biographical issues, such as oral cannibalism, toilet training, primal scenes, or Oedipal and Electra complexes. However, their intellectual discoveries did not pro duce equally impressive clinical results. My experience with therapeutic use of holotropic states was exactly the opposite. After powerful psychedelic experiences and sessions of Holotropic Breathwork, we have often seen dramatic therapeutic changes, but had no idea why and how they came about.

A salient example of this kind is the story of Gladys, a young woman who participated in one of our five-day workshops at Esalen. As she told the group at the beginning of the workshop, she had suffered for about four years from serious attacks of depression accompanied with intense anxiety. These episodes started daily early in the morning and lasted as a rule several hours. During this time, she had to struggle to accomplish the most elementary tasks—to take a shower, brush her teeth, and get dressed. From a traditional point of view, these features characterized her depression as
endogenous
(literally “generated from within”) rather than
reactive
(caused by external life circumstances).

In our five-day Holotropic Breathwork workshops, participants typically had two sessions each in the role of breathers and functioned as “sitters” in two sessions of their peers. In her first session of holotropic breathing, Gladys had a powerful experience in which she encountered various traumatic experiences from her childhood and infancy. She also relived several sequences of her biological birth. She had very good feelings about the session, although it did not bring her any noticeable relief from her morning depression.

The second session she had, two days later, took her deeper into her unconscious and consisted almost entirely of the reliving of her birth. It resulted in an extraordinary activation of physical energy, which is an important step in the work on depression, a condition characterized by major blockage of emotional and physical energy. However, in spite of intense bodywork in the termination period, she did not reach a satisfactory resolution. This is a situation that is quite exceptional when systematic effort is used to facilitate the integration of the session.

The next morning, her depression came as usual, but was considerably more pronounced. It also took a different form than it had before. Instead of the usual inhibition, lack of initiative, and apathy, Gladys was agitated. We had originally planned for the morning session an open forum, a group discussion during which participants could ask any questions about their process, the method of Holotropic Breathwork, or theory. However, seeing the condition Gladys was in, we decided to change our program and do experiential work with her without delay.

We asked her to lie down in the middle of the group, do some deep breathing, surrender to the flow of the music we were playing, and accept any experience that might emerge under these circumstances. For about fifty minutes, Gladys experienced violent tremors, choked and coughed, made loud noises, and seemed to fight some invisible enemies. Retrospectively, she reported that this part of her experience involved the reliving of her difficult birth, but this time more deeply than before.

Later in the session, her screams became more articulate and started resembling words in an unknown language. We encouraged her to let the sounds come out in whatever form they took, without censoring them or judging them, even if they made no sense to her. Gradually, her movements became extremely stylized and emphatic and her words clearly recognizable. However, what was coming out was in a language that we did not understand or recognize. At one point, she sat up and began chanting a haunting repetitive sequence that sounded like some kind of prayer. This went on for quite some time.

The impact of this event on the group was extremely strong. Without understanding the words or knowing what Gladys was experiencing internally, most participants felt deeply moved and started to cry. Some assumed a meditative posture and joined their hands as if in prayer. When Gladys completed her chant, she quieted down and resumed a horizontal position on her back. She moved into a state of bliss and ecstatic rapture in which she stayed for more than an hour, entirely motionless. Later, when giving a retrospective account of her experience, she described that she had felt an irresistible urge to do what she did. She did not understand what had happened and indicated that she had absolutely no idea what language she was using in her chant.

Carlos, an Argentinian psychoanalyst from Buenos Aires, who participated in the group, recognized that Gladys had chanted in perfect Sephardic language, which he happened to know. This language, also called Ladino, is a Judeo-Spaniolic hybrid that is a combination of medieval Spanish and Hebrew. By strange coincidence, Carlos, who was Jewish, had studied the Sephardic language for many years as his personal hobby. Gladys was not Jewish and did not know any Hebrew or Spanish. She had never heard about Ladino and did not know that it existed and what it was. Carlos translated for us the words of Gladys’s repetitive chant, which had had such a powerful effect on the group. The literal translation was: “I am suffering, and I will always suffer. I am crying, and I will always cry. I am praying, and I will always pray.”

During this dramatic finale of her experience in the group, when she chanted the Sephardic prayer, Gladys broke through the depression and her condition stabilized in a psychologically comfortable place. Since the Esalen group, we have seen Gladys on two different occasions and found out that her depression has not returned. It was one of the most powerful healings I have observed during my entire psychiatric career. Yet, this episode and the profound influence it had on Gladys have remained a mystery for her, as well as for us, until this very day.

THE STORMY SEARCH FOR THE SELF: The Story of Karen

It seems to have been my destiny or karma in this lifetime to get involved in controversial projects and activities. That is certainly true for my lifetime passionate interest in psychedelics and non-ordinary states of consciousness in general. Years of research in this area have convinced me that current beliefs of mainstream psychiatrists concerning the nature of the human psyche and consciousness are deeply erroneous and require a radical revision. I also came to the conclusion that many of the findings from consciousness research seriously challenge the materialistic worldview of Western science, particularly in regard to the relationship between consciousness and matter.