Embodied reorganization courtesy of Philip Shepherd

On attending a Radical Wholeness Retreat

Philip’s Radical Wholeness retreat, ostensibly drawing on the title of his book of the same name, took place at an enormous home in the hills above Carlsbad, California. I live in the state, so I am somewhat inured to the excesses of California New Age spirituality, but suffice it to say I have not seen this many museum-grade crystals aggregated into a single location since visiting an award-winning rock shop in Sausalito a couple of years ago with my daughter.

I stayed in a room in the house that belongs to the 16-year-old son of the owner, who was in Europe with his father. My room connected to a large closet that had the cat’s food and litter box in it, and a bathroom that I was sharing with her 21-year-old son. The first night that we met them, she explained to me that their cat had a little bit of an unusual habit when it ate. She explained that it would meow incessantly in order to be fed. Once it was fed - 2/3 of a cup of food to be exact - it enjoyed being pet vigorously while it ate. At other times, it preferred not to be touched. I didn’t think much about this instruction until the first time it happened. I can’t now remember whether it was four in the morning and I had just gotten up, or whether it was 8:30 at night, and I was getting ready to go to bed. The meowing started. The cat entangled itself through my legs. So I uncapped the food, poured out 2/3 of a cup of food onto the cat’s mat, and stood back. We both looked at the food. The cat’s face was totally blank. It appeared completely disinterested. Look, I said to it rather sternly. You’re the one who wanted to eat. And then I remembered what the owner had said. I moved toward the cat to stroke its back, and literally the moment my fingers touched its fur, it raced forward in a frenzy, jammed its face into the middle of the pile of food, and began gobbling it up like we were in a race. This alarmed me enough that I stopped petting it. Like a wind-up toy that reaches the end of its chain, the cat slowed piteously, looked up at me, and seemed to completely forget what it was doing. It walked away from the food, went over to the litter box, rolled around on its back in a pile of pebbles, and stood appraising me. I reached out to pet it again, and the same thing happened as before. An electric shock went through the animal. It leapt forward and attacked the food. Again I paused, and again the cat immediately stopped eating. OK, I said, narrowing my eyes, who is doing what to whom?

It seems both strange, and a little bit embarrassing that I can’t remember more concretely what we did during the retreat. All the more so, because I was paying very close attention. There were about twenty of us assembled in a circle, and on the first day Philip told a story with which I am quite familiar, because I related a similar one in the book Ground. He told a part of the deep story of how we have become acculturated to live in our heads. How this indoctrination has taken place through our schooling. But how it is, in fact, a much more ancient and ancestral affair. He tracked it back about 7 million years to the origin of bipedalism. He explained to us that the kind of thinking that the Greeks were doing was synonymous with being in the deep belly, and explained to us that by that point in history, three thousand years ago, we had already lifted our thinking up off the pelvic floor.

Sitting there, in the presence of a master teacher of embodiment, and listening to the place his own words originated in his body, and the place that they resonated in mine, I found myself in contact with a depth of embodiment into the pelvic floor that was novel and unfamiliar to me. Since I’ve spent the last thirty years learning to bring attention deeper and deeper into the body, the process of this was not alien. But the target of awareness, its location, the notion that it was possible to organize our intelligence from the base of the bowl of the pelvis, was something that hadn’t really occurred to me before encountering his work. At a certain point on the first day I became somewhat alarmed to realize that I couldn’t seem to speak without stopping the cycling of my breath. I began to notice that certain modes of discursive thought that were very familiar to me also involved stopping my breathing. I experienced this a little bit like looking at your reflection in the mirror, and being shown that you actually have two heads. Which is to say that it was entirely surprising to me, and I didn’t like it very much at all.

Why couldn’t I think and breathe at the same time? Why couldn’t I speak and breathe at the same time? The training continued, but I lay down on the floor, trying to figure out how on earth to organize my breathing and talking into unison. There are certain kinds of embodied habits that we develop that we simply do not realize we have. Rarely in two days have I encountered such a series of re-orientations to the way that I was living in my body.

On the second day it became obvious that I didn’t know how to stand up without pausing my breath. That in fact the habitual way I was doing this was causing me to over-effort. Phillip moved with both an economy of motion, and a continuous dynamic sense of grounding. The amount of concentration required to try to move the needle on the processes he was bringing into my conscious awareness astonished me. I found myself profoundly fatigued by the whole endeavor.

By Sunday night, I was ready to be alone, and I left the room and the cat and checked into a hotel on the beach. It was well appointed, smelled wonderful, and had herbal tea waiting for me. Truly a sanctuary, I didn’t realize that I would not sleep at all for the next two nights I spent there. I didn’t particularly relish the home in Carslbad, but I slept like a baby there. Now I had escaped. The retreat was over. I was no longer enmeshed with a co-dependent cat whose survival I had accidentally become responsible for. I was in the second part of a precious week on my own, away from my family, on a sabbatical it taken me seven years to earn, and I finally had a few nights to myself where no one else was asking anything of me at even a subtle level.

I was staying at the lovely Inn at Moonlight Beach in Leucadia, California. An epic location. A healing sanctuary. Nearly perfect in its attention to detail. And I was not sleeping at all. It wasn’t because I wasn’t tired. On arrival, the first night, I lay on the perfect mattress, in the aromatherapy-suffused air, and discovered that my body was simply engaged in some interoceptive process I didn’t understand, and that would not turn off. At a certain point I stopped fighting it.

Moments from the last seven years rose into awareness. I began to sense a veil of grief around my heart. I got in slowly in touch with the level of cynicism that had crept into me due to all of the challenges I had faced at work. Most of the night I spent attending to this inward landscape. It hadn’t occurred to me to bring sleep aids of any kind. I just lay there, letting consciousness trace the interior of my body, returning my attention again and again to the pelvic floor. Like some kind of strange pseudo-mechanical engine, my awareness transited from one part of the body to a seemingly unconnected other part, following strands of logic or nervous system arousal or feeling tone that were nearly invisible, yet like threads of spider silk holding some distributed form of awareness together.

I pulled myself out of bed the next morning. I drove to a coffee shop. Drank a cappuccino, went to get Philip to take him to the airport. Once I dropped him off, I visited a resort in LaCosta where I played a high intensity tennis match against one of their professionals. By mid afternoon I needed to lay down. I went back to the hotel. I was too tired to get dinner. I snacked on plantain chips, and Peruvian corn that had been provided as a snack in the hallway. I closed my eyes around 6:30 PM, just as it was getting dark. And again, for the second night, I did not sleep. The same restless internal perambulation of awareness took place throughout the night.

I had an important meeting the following day in Irvine. It was the second reason I had come to Southern California on this trip. I was exploring initiating a new consulting project with a new client. I had to have my wits about me. I lay there, simply letting this thing happen. It was obviously not under my control and I kept making myself relax, choosing not to freak out.

I dragged myself out of bed the following morning, checked out of the Inn, and drove to Irvine. My meeting was at one in the afternoon, and I was able to stay focused and present for the three hours required to successfully complete it. As soon as it was over, I drove to Whole Foods, bought melatonin, GABA, electrolytes, and trace minerals, went straight to a hotel, and began pounding water and melatonin. I would drink 16 ounces of water with electrolytes, take a melatonin and a GABA, and lay down to rest. It was just getting dark. I did this three or four times between 6 and 9 PM.

Somewhere around 9 o’clock in the evening, deeply sleep deprived, stoned on melatonin, and still working with my self meditatively, something in my consciousness backed out of my head. It reminded me of watching our cat try to get its head out of a yogurt jar that it had stuffed its face into trying to lick out the very bottom of the container. Most cats are fiends for dairy: we used to give him the 16 ounce yogurt containers when they were basically empty, and he would finish them off. Often, with his head jammed all the way down, and he got stuck. There was a particular strange way that he would try to jerk himself backwards out of the container, and this is what happened in my conscious awareness. It was like I was trying to take off my head: had to find just the right angle to jerk myself free of it. Finally–as though I had slipped a knot– this happened, and I felt myself slide down the inside of my back all the way into the pelvic floor. From that location, it was as if I was looking up the immense vertical span of the spine towards the head, but my eyes and attention were anchored to the bottom of the pelvic floor. That’s the last thing I remember. I was finally asleep.