Inner journey: one skeptic's spirit quest led her to go beyond her rational self to rediscover a childhood lesson in faith - Inspirations

Natural Health, March, 2004 by Lois B. Morris

It was a total lunar eclipse, the highlight of last November's calendar, falling on my last night at the New Age Health Spa. As I stripped off my clothes and dashed into the sweat lodge on the first truly freezing night of the season, the near-full moon was an eerie, ghostly shadow.

Celestial phenomena aside, why was I putting myself at risk of frostbite and who knows what else? It was an eclipse of a different sort that led me to my icy sprint, one that was obvious only to me.

It occurred when I was on assignment in the Middle East, not the safest place but certainly one of the most exciting. I was there working with the love of my life, whom I had met five years before.

On the surface, everything was in place. Love and work are the two things that a human being has to be free to pursue, at least according to Sigmund Freud. And my experience with Freudian-derived psychotherapy had opened opportunities for these basic goals to flourish in my life. So why was I so sure, facing forward, that something big was still missing? Perhaps it was my most recent birthday--there was a zero in it--but a shadow had fallen over my life, and I needed to find out why.

skeptical optimism

I signed up for the weekend at New Age only because my rational explorations seemed to have reached their limit. Though I love spas, I've steered clear of their self-discovery programs. Going by names such as Spirit Quest or, in this case, Inner Journey, many of them incorporate a range of psychotherapeutic and healing techniques that strike me as unscientific.

Some programs, inspired by the traditional Native American vision quest, combine a journey of sorts with deprivation of food, water or shelter to induce an altered state of consciousness and an "intense desire to discover," explains John Suler, Ph.D., a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., who has written on the topic. Vision quests help produce important insights--and I felt almost desperate for one by the time I drove through the gates of the spa, 125 miles and a huge breath of fresh air away from New York City. As for deprivation, I knew the next three days would be free of caffeine and alcohol--hardly life-threatening, but not without a withdrawal effect on stressed-out urbanites.

At dusk, when herds of deer materialized from the woods in these 280 acres of rolling Catskill Mountains, I felt almost certain that here I would embark on the next stage of my life journey. Still, I had to struggle to suspend my disbelief.

For the introductory gathering, we got little drums to bang on. I caught the glance of the woman sitting next to me, a corporate lawyer, and both of us rolled our oh-so-sophisticated Manhattan eyes. Drums? Jheri Allen, a bio-energetic healer who co-designed the weekend, began to talk about chakras. Energy centers in the body? Yeah? Show me one on an X-ray!

But I managed to hush my inner doubter when Joyce Velma Grant, a music professor turned music therapist, told us to pound to the rhythm of our own heartbeat. Soon, within the spa's magnificent wooden yoga and meditation center, sitting on a heated floor beside a golden Buddha and a sparkling fountain, we were all beating to the same mesmerizing rhythm. I felt connected, to what I didn't even try to name, since I knew that being lexical would put me back in the rational mode I was trying to set aside.

nature's lessons

Nature was the unifying concept, according to Dan Vorisek, New Age's director of outdoor programs. "Everyone gains differently from experience," he said, which is why he and Allen had designed the weekend to include a number of different components emphasizing "nature as the commonality of all living things."

I felt on more familiar ground early the next morning, when I stumbled half-asleep into a dream group led by a psychotherapist. But it was later that morning that I spontaneously attempted something very new to me, and it became the turning point of the entire weekend.

On a 90-minute, mostly silent Forest Spirit Walk that Vorisek led, I shut down the usual chatter inside my head and tried to take in just the sights and sounds of the forest and the feel of the wind. It was almost as if I'd donned a hearing aid, for a rich, previously unperceived world began to appear. At one point we paired off and took turns closing our eyes and pretending to be blind. My partner led me around and directed me to reach forward or downward and touch what was around me. Though I live part-time in the country and have spent a lot of time in the woods, I can say that I have never been so aware of the subtle, detailed sensations that went through me when I stroked the bark of a white pine or caressed a mound of moss on the forest floor.

From there, everything seemed to gain relevance. After experiencing more drumming, some chanting, the sweat lodge, a spiritual workshop, and a healing stone massage that was meant to clear my chakras (and may well have, for I felt a superb clarity), I began to open up to a thought that had sneaked into my mind some weeks before.