When there is too much going on, more than you can bear, you may choose to assume that nothing in particular is happening, that your life is going round and round like a turntable. Then one day you are aware that what you took to be a turntable, smooth, flat, and even, was in fact a whirlpool, a vortex.

– Saul Bellow, Something to Remember Me By

Seventeen years ago, there was too much going on. If I lay out what was going on, it will sound absurd to call it ‘too much’. It seemed absurd to me even at the time. The turntable: at age fifty-two I was happily married, I had a tenure-track teaching position, I had just published the most critically acclaimed book of my career to that point, and I was healthy and strong, really at a peak of mental and physical strength. I also felt like I was beginning to feel connected to two communities, one literary and the other more local and neighborly; this was a first for me. I had never before experienced such stability and connectedness in my entire life. The vortex: I was boiling with a kind of visceral confidence that was completely new to me and which at times felt mildly unhinged.

The confidence that came with being healthy, strong and stable had the effect of opening me up to a deeper, more emotionally complex experience of life that was often wonderful, but that occasionally took the form of irrational terror or pain so great that it caused me to wake at night, holding my hands over my heart in an attempt to comfort myself. As the turntable steadily droned by day, at night I felt the disconcerting, maddening pull of the vortex – and then the night feelings began to show up during the day too.

All of this was accentuated, I am sure, by the hormonal firestorm called perimenopause; it had just begun its raucous burn, sometimes making me feel like I was being playfully tossed back and forth by a pair of fiery fists, then repeatedly bounced off the nearest wall. The volatility was an intensity I could use creatively but sometimes . . . it was just a little more than I could bear. I increasingly felt I’d spent decades locked and loaded in a baroquely guarded survival mode and now I could lower my defenses and bust out – except that I didn’t know how to make it happen.

In the middle of this I adopted a cat, a feral kitten that I brought home after a months-long trip to Italy. He was a wonderful little creature, one of those animals that wakens in you something new and tender, and makes you appreciate the noun ‘familiar’: a spirit often embodied in an animal and held to attend and serve or guard a person. Then I lost him. It happened three months after we got back. For nearly a year I was grief-stricken to the point of dysfunction; I couldn’t do anything but cry and look for my cat. (I wrote thousands of words trying to make sense of my extreme reaction in an essay, ‘Lost Cat’, published in these pages.) The loss coincided with and amplified other forms of grief, for my family and for what I feared was the impending loss of two children my husband and I had been fostering for years. It was as if my grief for the kitten was a chink in my standard protections, a gateway to so many other emotions that I had been keeping myself from and which now began to trickle, and then to pour across the threshold. These were the night feelings; this was the vortex.

There was a lot more to this terrible period but, in the context of this story, all you need to know is that my life had begun to seem wrong to me. Not broken exactly or meaningless. More like misguided or undeveloped. My heart hurt. It hurt so much that I had become desperate. This did not feel like ‘depression’ to me. I didn’t feel numb or hopeless. I felt strongly alive and was actively searching for what I still believed in: love and my version of goodness. I’m sure that sometimes my demeanor or behavior did not appear that of a person looking for love and goodness, that outwardly I might’ve seemed angry or just weird. Truthfully, I sometimes was those things. This would give me a great deal in common with thousands if not millions of bewildered and unraveled people who are not entirely sure why they hurt quite so much and whose hurt reads to others as anger or weirdness.

It was in this state that I came across a type of physical therapy I am going to call Pneuma. I had at this point experienced many such therapies, most of which (chiropractic, Alexander Technique, massage) don’t purport to offer anything more than greater physical ease, pain relief and structural alignment – which, in the right hands, can actually be quite significant. I had also experienced ‘body work’, specifically reiki and craniosacral, that (sometimes, depending on the practitioner) claim to offer something more mysterious: spiritual attunement, psychic integration, and emotional release beyond the scope of traditional talk therapies. Having experienced talk therapy, I felt that in terms of emotional well-being I’d gotten more out of body work, particularly craniosacral. It is hard to explain the efficacy of these techniques, but at their best, meaning with a gifted practitioner, they are remarkable in their direct effect on the emotions via the nervous system, and in conveying compassion through touch. They are also a lot less expensive (at the time, craniosacral ran typically $150 for ninety minutes versus talk therapy at $250–$300 for forty-five minutes), and don’t require a weekly commitment. So I was receptive to Pneuma.

The first Pneuma practitioner I met – I’ll call her Linda – came highly recommended by a friend, a woman named Donna who had recently lost both her daughters to a rare and terrible disease that they were born with, and had lived through with a kind of wild courage until finally succumbing, slowly and painfully. Donna said that Pneuma was one of the few things that had helped and strengthened her during her anguish. Linda, who was based in northern California, was visiting upstate New York, and doing Pneuma sessions out of Donna’s home in a town very near me.

During this time, I was in residence at an artist colony about an hour away from my home. I made a special trip back for three sessions over a period of five days. I was having a stressful time at the colony which, though it was a great opportunity, was a bit of a hothouse environment. I generally love spending time at such retreats but, perhaps because of my instability going in, this time was different. The group dynamic was neurotic, gossipy and, to me, seductive; I’m sorry to say that I was party to all of it. It was very cliquish, very much about people being rejected and humiliated – and yet there was a kind of rough-play quality that made it absurdly funny. I got drawn into the playfulness, especially in relation to a guy I nicknamed Old Blabber Mouth; together we could be so goofy about all of it that I could make light of the real bitchiness involved, even when it was directed at me.

My first session with Linda was not extraordinary. As with many such therapies it was deeply calming and grounding, that is, it made me very aware of my body. Linda herself was an intense bodily presence. She was in her early sixties, physically strong, stolid and adamant, like a human root vegetable with a dominant personality. Her voice was vaguely scolding and warm at the same time. Her hands were muscular and intelligent, her touch powerfully communicative and directional.

She had me lie on a table, but in a kind of odd contraption of cloth and wood – something like a cradle or hammock – that raised me slightly off the table, allowing her to place her formidable hands on my front and back simultaneously, say, on my chest and the corresponding place on my upper back. She didn’t rub or massage me; her hands were firm and still, holding various parts of my body between them for long, taffy-stretched moments. She might hold my chest and back for several minutes and then move to my belly and mid-back, and then my hips. I don’t know if there was any set time or order to these choices. I only know that as she worked, I felt as if I were unwinding until I went into a kind of trance state from which, on that first day, I emerged feeling refreshed.

The second time it became something more. That something is hard to describe, especially after the passage of so much time. It involved a very subtle awareness that my body was holding a complex pattern that lived in my tissues and musculature, something woven into me, something deeply a part of me and yet alive and independent of me, at least as I usually consider myself. (‘You’re a hard one,’ Linda remarked, ‘like a Chinese knot.’) I didn’t have this awareness the whole time I was being worked on – most of the time I was just zoning out. It was something I felt in flashes that were not in any way thought-based. If I could compare these flashes to anything, it would be the apprehension one sometimes has in dreams, where an incomprehensible puzzle is suddenly exposed and you are suffused with miraculous understanding – which you forget the next instant. This might sound unpleasant but it wasn’t. It was strangely enlivening. It was like discovering that your house has another floor, without being sure you knew what was in it.

The sessions were intriguing, and stronger than reiki or craniosacral therapies, both of which use a far lighter touch (reiki practitioners often don’t really touch you at all). Still I did not immediately perceive it as very different from these other types of body work. When I returned to the colony, however, a small but striking incident made me realize how much the treatment had affected me: I walked into the common area and Old Blabber Mouth regaled me with the latest dirt. I don’t remember exactly what it was, something someone had said, how someone else, perhaps a person he expected me to dislike, had been put down. A week earlier, this gossip infusion would’ve worked on me like an injection of allergen, causing layers of internal reaction, the psychic equivalent of scratching and rubbing that only makes things worse. This time it didn’t affect me that way. It hardly affected me at all. I was friendly to OBM and even replied to him. But the poison didn’t get into my system – and he knew it. I still remember the bewildered look on his face – something like a cat that had pounced at a mouse which suddenly . . . wasn’t there. I left the conversation politely but quickly; we were no longer on the same wavelength.

A small thing, but to me, remarkable. Because the change in response had happened on a completely natural, unwilled level, a bodily level. It was the kind of change that people spend years of therapy to achieve. It didn’t entirely stick; when I got back into the social mode of the colony, I was drawn into the drama once more. But not as deeply. It didn’t get inside me the way it had. It did not cause me the same pain.

I saw Linda once more before she returned to the West Coast. When she was in New York later that year, I saw her another few times. I can’t remember much about the physical parts of these experiences; it was more of the same, but deeper, as if each session reinforced the previous one. However, I remember the talking aspect. Talking wasn’t supposed to be a big part of Pneuma; Linda actively discouraged talking or interpretation. But given all the change I was feeling in my body, Pneuma-induced and otherwise, it was impossible for me to be completely silent, nor did total silence seem desirable to me. I don’t remember exactly what I said, just that I spoke frankly about my emotions, especially regarding loss. I also talked about images that popped into my head during the treatment. Linda was sympathetic with the former, but impatient with the latter. She said that I was too much in my mind; she said, ‘You need to cut your head off.’ She said this emphatically; she said it as if it were a wonderful suggestion. On another occasion she said it was a good thing I’d never had children because I would’ve been a ‘terrible mother’. I opened my eyes and said, ‘Wow, that’s really hurtful.’ And she said, in a tone of apparent surprise, ‘Really? That hurts you?’ I may’ve replied, ‘I think that would hurt almost anyone.’ But I’m not sure.

I have no idea what prompted her statement about my potential terribleness as a mother. I do remember feeling in that moment that something was really off about this woman, that she was either very unaware or actively hostile or both. And yet I did not get off (or out of) the cloth-cradle thing and leave. Instead, I stayed interested in working with her.

This is embarrassing to reveal and hard to explain – though perhaps it shouldn’t be. People will tolerate a lot in relationships that they feel are beneficial in some way. And I did feel there was a lot of potential benefit in working with Linda.