Whatever you do, just give me a body.
In hindsight, maybe it was a mistake to put the music on.
I wanted to feel present enough to tune into whatever the float tank god was asking me to tune into, but after twenty minutes, I was still asking myself if I was doing it right.
I figured switching on the meditation playlist would help me switch off my distracted overanalyzing.
I made my way toward any wall I could find and traced it with my hand until I found the light switch. After awkwardly pulling my body out of the heavy, salty water, I plugged in my phone, hit play, and returned to the tank.
I switched off the light, and limb my limb, lowered my body back down into the salty tub.
Now I could relax, I thought.
It was striking to notice how long it took my senses to succumb to the level of sensory deprivation the float tank demanded. With each breath in, I was confident I couldn’t possibly relax any more, but with each breath out, I descended into new and unfamiliar depths of stillness, blissfully surrendering every last bit of my desire to hold on to the water and its promise to not let me sink.
Where am I still holding on?
Where am I still afraid to let go?
But then there was the music. The sound of string instruments somewhere far in the distance, beyond the earplugs, the salt, and the water.
The speaker was located inside the tub, under the water, but still, the music sounded so unattainable. Not quiet, just unreachable. Close by distance, but far in dimensionality.
Like a baby hearing music from inside the womb.
What must it have been like to sense an entirely separate realm of existence just beyond the thin veil of our mother’s flesh?
Ah yes, this place. I’ve been here before.
It was an overcast, blustery day in March. The crows arrived all at once, cawing and circling for hours outside the window.
The mushrooms didn’t taste as bad as I’d remembered. Earth. Metal. Must. I ate them quickly, intimidated but resolute.
The room was totally dark, but even still I pressed the eye mask tightly to my eyes with both hands, and pulled the blankets up around my neck.
Show me what I need to see from the inside out.
At first, things proceeded chronologically.
I was in a white hospital room with a group of masked strangers hovering above me. Gloves, blankets, and surgical tools. Fluorescent spotlights that cut into my squinted eyes as sharp as the knives that had cut into my mother’s lower abdomen.
As they yanked me out, two weeks late and stubborn as hell, I held on as tightly as I could.
Please don’t take me away from here. I don’t belong anywhere else… can’t you tell?
Back in bed, I started laughing.
“I’m covered in fur and have long, claws painted with nail polish!” I exclaimed from the inside of my heroic dose. “It all makes sense! I didn’t want to be born because I was too fabulous!”
Fabulous, yes. But also a total freak.
My pleading and fighting to stay in the womb didn’t seem to register with the masked strangers. They ignored my desperation, and continued to tear me away from where I’d come from.
How do they expect me to exist here?
Before the words came, I could still remember that place they took me from. There was a long, winding river surrounded by dense vegetation, and boats that traveled gently along the surface of the water. Everything was a deep shade of purple or forest green. The air was humid and smelled of mint and palo santo.
It was quiet. Vast, and comforting.
But in this new place, everything felt harsh, and unfamiliar. It was so loud and piercing that all I could do was cry and cry.
My parents fought, desperate and unhappy, and I couldn’t understand why any of us had to be stuck in this horrible place.
I kept trying to tell them I came from a somewhere so much better, and that we could all go there together. “Please let me show you” I exclaimed through desperate wailing that lasted late into the night.
What’s it like to not have the words to communicate something so important?
More begging and pleading to no avail, just like at the hospital.
No one here is listening. No one here understands me.
Gradually, as the words arrived, I slowly started to forget. I always felt like something was missing, but I couldn’t quite remember what it was. I would spend hours locked in my room, humming to myself, drawing shapes into the carpet, intuitively but unconsciously trying to alter my consciousness so that I could find my way back.
Back where? I don’t know. Anywhere but here.
A lingering, unnamed emptiness. A dull ache.
Eventually, almost three decades later, desperation brought about a memory whispered through darkness. The hint of something familiar, glimmering in the salt water that ran down my cheeks while I lay on the wooden floor in a fetal position.
Ah yes, this place. I’ve been here before.
“Welcome back,” said a voice.
There’s this familiar story I tell…
It’s a story that takes on new shapes, and evolves over time, so sometimes it’s hard to recognize, but it always seems to say the same thing.
It’s a story about being an orphan, and being stripped away from home. It’s a story of alienation, loneliness, and of the insatiable hunger to belong to a place I can never seem to find.
It’s a story that needed to come to the surface so I could confront its sharp edges, and embrace its harsh truths. An anonymous story craving a name and an identity.
“You can’t tell new stories until you acknowledge the old ones,” I say into a microphone in an empty room.
This is me talking to myself too, you know.
Back in the float tank, I couldn’t feel my body at all. This was the point, I was pretty sure.
Yes! I’m finally doing it right.
The music continued to play in the distance as I recounted my mycelial memory of being ripped from the womb. The fluorescent lights, the masked strangers, and the magical green and purple world that I came from and longed to go back to.
There I was again, in the womb, but this time, something felt different.
This time, a voice in my head screamed “Let me out!” and I felt the insatiable urge to move my body.
As the music reached a crescendo, I wanted to get closer so that I could hear it without distortion. I wanted to feel the notes move through me, penetrate me, and wash all over me. I started to move my body through the dense water. A slow, but deliberate dance. My body felt heavy and cumbersome, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t stop.
Shit. I’m definitely doing it wrong.
I wanted to move. Needed to move, but I was trapped. Like one of those dreams where you run and run and run, but still end up in the same place you started.
Let me out!
This was strange, and unfamiliar. The last time I was here I didn’t want to leave, but now I did, and desperately so.
Please, whatever you do, just give me a body so that I can feel what it’s like to exist out there.
Aha! A psychological trap door.
The story is presented with an alternate translation.
Maybe I belonged to the outside world after all?
I hadn’t yet made the connection when we booked the tickets to Greece.
Greece. The place where stories exist not only in words, but also in stone. The place where myth is embodied tangibly in the form of temples, statues, and holy land. The place where I could stand on the same earth from which the gods and goddesses hailed.
I went to Athens to dance, and to move my body alongside others who also were there to learn, grow, and communicate without words.
Just bodies with other bodies. Leading, following, holding, lifting, pushing, pulling, inviting, and being invited.
How do our bodies tell stories when the words aren’t there?
This, as it turned out, was also a place where myth was embodied tangibly.
“It was so great dancing with you,” she said with a big grin. “You felt so grounded and strong!”
Grounded and strong?
A far cry from the counselor’s reflection over the phone six years ago when she recommended that I visualize placing myself in a box because I seemed (and was) so manic and ungrounded.
How can we tell when a story’s been rewritten?
“The temples dedicated to Asclepius, the god of healing, were always built near a theater,” the tour guide explained as we stood under the Parthenon, sweating under the oppressive, mid-August sun.
According to the ancient Greeks, if you wanted to heal your body, you also had to heal your soul, your spirit and your mind.
Healing looked like dancing and singing.
Healing looked like joy, pleasure, art, meaning, and love.
Healing happened communally.
Healing was holistic.
Of course.
Soma.
Somatics.
I’m not just here to dance.
I’m here to feel the roots of new stories take hold in the soil beneath me.
I’m here to learn that I deserve to belong in a body that belongs in the world.
I’m here feel what it’s like for my own mythology to be embodied and enshrined alongside the shrines of Athena, Zeus, and Poseidon.
“Dance is the corporeal image of a given process, or of becoming, or of the passage of time. Every dance is a pantomime of metamorphoses.”
J.E. Cirlot
My body was telling a new story.
A story my mind hadn’t quite picked up on.
Grounded and strong.
Grounded and strong.
Grounded and strong.
Back in the empty room with a microphone, I ramble on about the hypocrisy of modern spirituality and its obsession with “ascension”.
How can we possibly be here now if we’re so busy running away?
And ascend to where? Retreat from what? Can we really attain “5D consciousness” before we’ve mastered the first four?
We can’t escape our bodies if we want to heal.
We can’t belong in a tangible world without flesh.
I start to wonder if my stories of alienation are just another way of escaping, and if my perpetual lack of belonging is just another way of opting out.
How can I help to save the world if I don’t even feel that I belong here?
As the music in the float tank started to fade farther away into the distance, the lights slowly came back on.
Ninety minutes. Time’s up.
Before getting out of the tub, I took one more deep breath, closed my eyes, and started to consider how I would narrate this experience without sounding like I was making excuses for my inability to do it properly.
My first time in a float tank and all I wanted to do was move my body.
Clearly, this was a failure.
Or, maybe, like all stories, this one also had an alternate translation.
I’d like to do this again, I thought, now that I know what it’s like.
Maybe next time I’ll be still like I’m supposed to.
Maybe next time I won’t tempt myself by turning on the music.
Or, maybe not.
Either way, whether I dance or dissolve, or move or choose not to, I can’t do any of it without a body.