THREE

A Session Day

Readers of an early draft of this book asked me to take them inside a typical session day to show what actually happens there. The following narrative is my attempt to do so. It is the backstory to session 9 and thus overlaps the previous chapter slightly. I’ve woven pieces from session 10 into the narrative to present a more rounded account. This is what a session day looks like.

I closed the door behind me as I climbed the stairs to my study on the third floor. Passing the overflowing bookcase on the landing, ducking my head where the ceiling drops low, I turned the corner into my haven, a long cream-colored room with low ceilings slanting down to four-foot drop walls on its two long sides. The mattress and cushions from our living room sleeper sofa filled the center of the room. Through the large skylight on the left, I saw the tops of the trees softly lit by the early morning sun.

I looked at my watch. I had taken it ten minutes ago and only had time for one more check before closing everything out. A green blanket lay folded near one corner of the mattress, a large aluminum bowl and towel at another. Carol had already placed her seat and notepad beside the cassette deck, along with her snack for later. The food looked good. As always, I had skipped breakfast and was hungry, but the last thing I needed in my stomach now was food.

The tapes for the day were stacked beside the deck. Last night I had chosen the music and made a detailed chart of the options for each phase of the session, noting how long each piece lasted and its level of intensity on a scale of 1 to 5. Earlier this morning, I had positioned the tapes to begin their music immediately when played, so that detail was taken care of. The last thing you want during a tape change is to be left hanging in excruciating silence for thirty seconds while a tape runs its lead. Headphones, eyeshades, washcloth—everything was here.

Carol sometimes thinks I sweat these details too much. She may be right. I’m never in great shape on these mornings. Our sharp words in the bedroom ran through my head. Stupid tensions over nothing had almost caused us to cancel the session. At least now we understood the pattern. Just stress before getting started. I hate these last hours.

I plugged in the headphones and straightened the wires, wondering what the day would bring. Would the pain be worse than last time? Where would it strike, and what would it ask of me? There was the ecstatic side, of course, the visions and the teachings, but at the beginning of a session it’s always the pain I remember most.

I had already meditated, asking for guidance and renewing my commitments. Now I put some lotion on my face and hands, a small thank-you to my body for what I would soon be putting it through. Part of my ritual to help set a positive mood, like always wearing my favorite old clothes. Little things that had come to matter. I wondered if other people had their own private rituals of self-support.

I lay down and fussed with the eyeshades and earphones until both were snug and comfortable, then turned on the cassette deck. Willie Nelson’s voice flooded my head. I often start with Willie these days. His voice has the wisdom of hard knocks softened by kindness and humor. It eases the early waves, helps me stay centered as the energy builds. Fifteen minutes into the tape, I caught myself wondering what Willie would think if he knew where he was singing today. “Café Psychedelic. Minds shattered while you wait.” I laughed. That’s a trippy thing to say. It’s beginning. Where is she? Carol should be here by now.

I calmed myself by turning back to the music, trusting that my support line would be in place before I fell apart completely. A few minutes later, I heard the door open and Carol’s steps on the stairs. She sat down beside me and gave my shoulder a small squeeze.

“Sorry I took so long,” she said. “I had to tell Stephanie about Jason’s medicine. How are you doing?”

“I’m good,” I said, turning my sightless face toward her. “It’s just starting. A little more time and then we’ll escalate. Everything all right downstairs?”

“Everything’s fine. She’s taken Jason to her house. Go ahead. And good luck.” A moment later, she squeezed my shoulder again. Everything from this morning was forgiven. I touched her hand and then turned back to the music. Little Jason’s earache. How far away that precious world seemed to me already. It was starting.

My teeth ached and I was feeling sick. There was no way to get comfortable any longer. I felt like I had the flu, except that the symptoms kept shifting around my body. First my stomach hurt, then my shoulders, then legs, now neck and head. I hate this phase. I had dumped 600 mcg of LSD into my system, and my body was straining under the acceleration. So much energy for it to adjust to so fast. Maybe someone will invent time-release LSD someday. That would help. Poor body. I stretched my arms and legs and arched my back, trying to ease the nausea. No relief. Damn, my teeth hurt.

“Time to go,” I said out loud. “Let’s get this show on the road.” After a brief pause, Willie’s voice disappeared and “Ride of the Valkyries” took its place. Great, I thought, as my mind began to fragment into the swirling flow. This ought to be fun.

That was my last “rational” thought. There was no holding on any longer. Sanity as I had known it would not return for eight hours. Now everything was dissolving into chaos. Now there was only anguish without logic.

After changing the music, Carol watched him draw further away from her and the world they had built together. She sat for him, but she didn’t really like the sessions. She hated the suffering. She hated seeing him all curled up like this, whimpering while God knows what was being done to him. She never knew what he was absorbed in while she sat with his body. So severe and unpredictable.

Why does he do it? she asked herself. Why can’t he be satisfied with the slower methods? He’s too impatient, that’s why! she answered. Does he really know what these sessions are doing to him? Are they really as safe as he insists? How could it be safe to experience this much pain in one day? Sometimes when he tries to tell me what he’s been through, he stops midsentence, unable to say more.

He was curled up in a tight ball, his arms folded across his chest, hands turned in at sharp angles. His fingers dangled awkwardly, trembling, uncoordinated. Judging from his body, he was in some kind of fetal space. She noted it in her log. He kept shifting his position as if trying to avoid something, but all his efforts seemed to fail. He would withdraw physically and then collapse into stillness, making sounds of whimpering, of being overwhelmed.

He hyperventilated for brief periods, blowing thick fluid from his nose and throat, never seeming to notice when she wiped it away. Then the convulsions began.

She hated the convulsions. Without warning, his body would suddenly jolt, snapping him around, bouncing him across the mattress. She got up and dragged him back to the center, surrounding him with cushions so he wouldn’t hurt himself if one of the big ones threw him farther than usual. Between spasms, he was breathing fast, like he had run a hundred yard dash. Whining, whispering something. She bent in close but couldn’t catch the words.

The seizures lasted over an hour. Small respites shattered again and again. She had read the books and knew the theory. Perinatal seizures, the body discharging deep tensions, waves of stress leaving his system. Maybe so, she thought, but it was so foreign to her nature, she could not understand why anyone would submit to it.

Suddenly, his body began to writhe more rhythmically, and he drew himself up on his hands and knees. She jumped and grabbed the bowl, shoving it under his head just in time to catch his vomit. He heaved as if throwing up more than the clear liquid that came out of him. He finished, and she wiped his face as he fell back on the mattress.

Don’t let him start talking; get the headphones and eyeshades back on him, and send him back inside. Crumpled on the bed, he passively accepted her caretaking, marginally conscious of her moving around him. As she got the headphones back over his ears, he grabbed them, pressing them hard against his head, as if trying to extract more power from them.

Inside, I was locked in a life-and-death struggle, caught in a private hell sculpted with nightmarish precision. I was being forced to become the opposite of what I was, trapped inside lives that were not my own and unable to experience life in any other way.

I was being stripped of my maleness and trapped in the lives of women who were uneducated and poor. I became countless women of all shapes and sizes, races and classes. Women of color at the laundromat with no prospects. Women in poverty trained by television in the art of living. I was completely absorbed with life lived at its most superficial level. The intellectual barrenness was excruciating, and the loss of my sexual identity was terrifying, with layers of metaphysical and existential anguish folded into it. I fought what was happening with all my strength, but the more I pulled away from it, the tighter it gripped me.

I began to scream at it, trying to make it stop. Long plaintive cries. “Nooooo! Nooooo!”

Carol jumped up and closed the windows.

What in blazes is going on? she thought. If he keeps this up, someone’s going to call the police.

She grabbed a pillow and covered his head slightly, just enough to muffle his shouts but not enough to interfere with his breathing.

“Please stop,” she whispered, knowing he couldn’t hear her. “Please stop.”

Inside, I couldn’t make it stop, so I kept screaming at it. I was showing it all the pain it was causing me, begging it to stop, but it wouldn’t stop. Why wouldn’t it stop? It could see my anguish; it could see exactly what it was doing to me, but it wouldn’t stop. Pain from earlier periods of my life laced what was happening. Being teased at school, my dad’s early death. I had always kept silent in the face of these injuries. Now I was screaming my rejection of them all.

I pulled the headphones off and sat up. “Got to stop!” I gasped. “Just for a minute. I’ll go back. Got to catch my breath.”

“No,” Carol said firmly, following our established agreement. “You’ve got to go back inside now and see what is happening.” She put the eyeshades and headphones back on me. I tried to object, but I could not mount much of a defense. She was right, of course.

Back inside, the women pounced on me immediately. The more I rejected them, the more tightly they grabbed me. Wave after wave of female experience engulfed me. At times I experienced parts of my personality emerge in the flow but now in a feminine form. It was excruciating to feel pieces of my life that were so familiar but stripped of their maleness.

Mixed into the flow were painful snippets of life so universal I could not help but open to them. I became a young girl at a party on Saturday night, all dressed up but knowing no one would ask me to dance. In another scenario, I became a twelve-year-old African American girl in her after-school world, dying alone in a hospital bed, unable to contact my best friend. No one knew I was dying. They would learn only after I was dead, when it was too late. I wept at that girl’s fear and sorrow. “So many ways to die,” I said out loud. “You don’t have to go far to find them.” Carol wrote it down and noted that my voice had taken on feminine tones.

After hours of struggle, I was at a standoff with the women who had taken over my life. I had not given in to them, but they were wearing me down. The sheer number of female experiences I was having was slowly making me feel more comfortable feeling as a woman feels, but I was still resisting the final surrender. I didn’t know how this was ever going to resolve itself.

In the middle of this impasse, Carol accidently put on the wrong tape, one of those little synchronistic miracles that sometimes happen in a session. Suddenly, Louis Armstrong’s gravelly voice was in my head singing, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Nobody knows my sorrow.” The jolt of his deep voice putting the perfect words to my distress broke my resistance. “I give up,” I laughed. “You can’t beat the girls of the neighborhood. All you can do is join them.” With that I let go and allowed myself to become fully a woman.

From here I was taken for a long stay in the world of women under the arm of the Great Mother, sampling a wide range of female experiences and knowing them more intimately than I ever dreamed possible. No aspect of women’s lives was closed to me. I conceived in passion, walked heavy with child, and suckled my newborn. I prayed at dawn and laughed with my sisters at our husbands. It lasted hours. I was fully woman. I was beautiful.

Late in the afternoon, I took off my headphones and eyeshades, coming slowly back to shared reality. I saw Carol watching me from across the room. I had never seen her as I saw her now. Tears filled my eyes as I experienced her womanliness anew. How little I had truly understood her before. So much to make up for.

“Is everything alright?” she asked, seeing my tears.

“Yes, everything’s fine,” I assured her. “It’s the overflow.”

“Would you like something to eat?”

“What time is it?”

“Four-thirty. It’s been eight and a half hours.”

“Yes, that would be nice,” I said, scratching my head with both hands.

She got up and walked to the stairs, stopping at the top. “I’m going to call Stephanie and check on Jason. Any messages?”

“Tell her I love you all.”

She looked at me quizzically, knowing she was not supposed to understand. “I look forward to finding out what that means,” she said and disappeared down the stairs.

It was always a shock to come back and realize that no one knew where I had been all day. The sessions were so powerful, how could they be so private? And how will I ever be able to describe to her what happened? To anyone? When I write up the sessions, I can never convey their full intensity and realism. The experiences are so concentrated, so multilayered. And they cut to the bone.

She returned thirty minutes later with a small plate of grapes, cashews, dried pineapple, and carob-covered raisins. Good primal hand food. Well, okay, the carob-covered raisins weren’t very primal, and the pineapple? Who knows, but eating with your fingers always feels natural after a session.

After the light snack, Carol left to collect our son, and I went downstairs to wash off the sweat of the day. I was wobbly, holding on to the walls for balance, operational if I went slowly, but just barely. The effects of the LSD had faded, but I moved in a field saturated by the day’s events.

The hot shower was wonderful. Reconnecting with my body, I noticed that my posture had changed, just like before. I stood a bit differently, more aligned, more balanced over my feet. My chest a little more open, shoulders lower. I knew this postural realignment would not last. Over the next week, it would slowly fade as old muscle habits reasserted themselves, but they never reclaimed everything. Slowly, my body was being restructured. Standing under the running water, I looked at my future. How good it felt to be this open to the world.

In our bedroom, objects weren’t just objects anymore but clues overflowing with significance. Everything I saw told a story of where we had gotten it and when, who had given it to whom, how much we had enjoyed it since or not. Everything represented something within one of us or both of us, some need, some vacation whimsy. The story of each object flowed to me against the backdrop of the day, revealing details I had not seen before.

Once or twice, memories from the session washed through me, causing me to pause and steady myself. Time to get back upstairs before the window closed completely. Dressed in fresh clothes, I made my way back up to the study. The room was a mess. Pillows and blankets tossed about, cassette boxes everywhere. How friendly it looked. It was always like this after a session. It only took a few minutes to put things back in their places.

Soon I was lying down, looking out the skylight, remembering the details of the day, trying to reconstruct the exact sequence of events. Later Carol and I would go over her notes and share impressions from the day, but only lightly. My verbal functions are never fully back online for twenty-four hours, and I had much to sort out. I would spend most of the night connecting the dots, falling asleep shortly before dawn. By then I would have a rough outline of the day fixed in my mind. Another piece of the mosaic. Another step deeper into my soul.