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Illustration by Nijah Smith
My mental health maintenance regimen is usually evidence-based, involving psychotherapy (lots), exercise (some), and meditation (okay, I’ll get there). But then came a five-year period I could synopsize as: death, death, divorce, pandemic, breast cancer, breakup-over-a-stretcher. My will-to-live switch remained turned on, but wiggled.
A local cancer clinic offered me free “coaching” sessions with a woman named Moira. But she wasn’t a psychotherapist – Moira practiced hypnotherapy, reiki and something called “soul calibration.” Broke and despondent, I said yes.
Through a Zoom rectangle, Moira appeared warm and amiable, huggable if I could dodge her pointy butterfly earrings. “Hello there, me dear,” she said with a Scottish lilt. I wondered what I was getting into. But her initial insights sounded reasonable if not clinical, akin to an aunty who watched lots of Oprah.
She sent me guided meditations to do daily. Post surgery and heartbreak I couldn’t do much more than tap on my phone anyway. I lay on the couch and followed along: “With each inhale, say to yourself: ‘I am worthy.’ With each exhale, repeat: ‘I am enough.’ Release what no longer serves you.”
With a hypnotically mothering tone, she directed me to imagine climbing a mountain to meet my spiritual guide or brushing my inner child’s hair or beaming love out my hands into my heart. For days I channelled and chi’d and visualized, well… sex, often I’d visualize sex. Then her soothing voice would suggest I instead fantasize about climbing a flowering tree.
When you’re told that you’re feeling relaxed, but you aren’t really, it’s easy to feel like a relaxation failure. But Moira urged me on. “It’s normal for the suggestions to feel unnatural at first. Fake it till you make it, me dearest!”
So I’ll affirm that the universe gifted me an opportunity to observe the daycare of my mind during a pre-nap meltdown. My inner child bawled. The teacher in charge drank in a corner, sneering: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dog gonnit, people like me.” (Curse you, Saturday Night Live.)
But I must admit, with time, it did start to feel like all this was reaching old wounds in dark corners of my psyche. It felt nice to visualize soaring to the stratosphere, even if I had to shush my analytical brain about a lack of oxygen. When Moira suggested I open layers of my green heart chakra, I pictured an artichoke. That artichoke somehow had the power to send healing juice to just where my body needed it: three traumas ago in my kneecaps; grief overload in my post-mastectomy chest; childhood traumas in my hoo-ha chakra (I think I’m supposed to call it my root chakra. Oh, well).
The thing is, that artichoke made it conceivable I wasn’t broken for life. And I needed to know this not only in my rational mind.
The latest science backs this up. Once I started feeling stronger, my couch reading shifted to The Body Keeps the Score, a popular book on post-traumatic stress. The author Bessel van der Kolk, MD, explains why talk therapy isn’t the best place to start with trauma. The emotional nervous system needs to be calmed first. To do that, peer-reviewed (albeit sometimes nascent) evidence supports a range of somatic – or body-based – practices. These include massage, neurofeedback, EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), and even theatre, yoga, drum circles, and – yes indeed – meditation.
So what Moira was doing wasn’t entirely woo-woo. If the human mind is a high-tech laptop plugged into a Commodore 64 on top of an abacus, the little monkeys who flick my abacus beads were panicked and hijacking the show, and they don’t speak English. But they do understand calming tones. I couldn’t process analytically. I couldn’t figure anything out in a cognitive-behavioural way. The neocortex was frozen. Pressing cancel did nothing. But the monkeys slowed their bead flicking upon hearing the soothing Scottish voice of this hippy with qualifications my neocortex still finds questionable. She hummed monkey melodies, offered treats and gently pulled their paws away from the beads. The monkeys trusted her enough to nap deep in a part of the wild jungle never visited by my highly credentialed shrink.
Still, other things Moira espoused I couldn’t swallow whole, like the notion that we “manifest” outcomes in life via the so-called “law of attraction.”
I can’t accept single-factor explanations for why I got cancer or why bad things happen to anybody. Outcomes are multifactorial. We are all walking formulas for risk and poor judges of which variables are controllable.
I still think much of what gets lumped under the big tent of holistic healing deserves skepticism. But people turn to it for a reason. And if there’s a gap in the mainstream psychological treatment of trauma, can we blame them?
Moira, too, was multifactorial. Even though our views diverge on some things, thanks to her, my monkeys remain calmer to this day.
She was a bit like a lover you know you’ll only be with a few times. Just savour the moment. Talking could ruin it.
Ann Cavlovic lives in Outaouais, Que.