eventeen 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. Despite her ugly words, the work had made me feel better, more open, more alive. I don’t think this was my imagination. Other people noticed that I was different too. I remember asking a friend if she could describe the change, and she said, ‘Yes. It seems like there’s more of you on board.’ It felt that way to me too. And so, when Linda told me that Pneuma could help almost anyone with almost anything, that it had radically changed her life and the lives of others, I believed her. More exactly, my body believed her. I decided that she was only human, that I didn’t really know what her strange words had meant to her nor why she’d said them. I also decided that I could guard against her negative traits, put them in brackets, while remaining open to the good she could do. Because I still wanted to bust out of the internal constriction I’d become aware of. Or, as I came to say half jokingly, to turn into someone else.

I don’t think I was – am – alone in this desire, not to become someone else literally, but to arrive at some better, less painful version of oneself – or as people say now your ‘best self’ – quickly, without years of frustrating expensive therapy that rarely (certainly in my case) helps much. In the early nineties certain optimistic psychiatrists promoted the idea that a then-new category of antidepressants could make you ‘better than well’. Does anyone remember the handwringing about how Prozac might make us artificially happy all the time, thus depriving us of our soulful humanity? Insert laughing emoji face here! But no matter: now there are psychedelic therapists and coaches who claim that one strong dose (or three or four) of psilocybin or ketamine or MDMA can physically rewire your brain so that old patterns are broken and you can bust out into best-selfness. People want it and they want it now!

But what does your ‘best self’ even mean? I was once asked to define that on a questionnaire, and the more I thought of it, the more ridiculous the question seemed. In spite of my joke about turning into someone else, what I really wanted was to be myself in a way that didn’t hurt quite so much or so often – I didn’t care about an objective ‘best self’. I am guessing that most people in pain feel the same way. At some point in my descent down the vortex, I saw a talk therapist who told me that she didn’t think I’d ever really become myself, that my ‘self’ had been formed entirely in reaction to bad things that had happened to me long ago. This irritated me immensely. It seemed unduly ominous; it also seemed like something you could say about almost anyone. Still, if her words did not exactly ring with truth they creepily hummed; they reinforced the suspicion that my life had been marred by unseen reactive patterns, most especially in relation to others.

During this time, I had a dream of a demonic plant on an impossibly long stalk that darted around my workspace like a snake, striking at everything, as if searching for something to attack or eat. It looked severely malformed: instead of blooming outwards, the flower was turned in on itself, forming a knot (perhaps a subliminal echo of what Linda had said about me, that I was ‘a Chinese knot’). I was afraid of it, but also I wanted to help it, and I couldn’t make it hold still.

And so when Linda suggested I come to her home on the West Coast to do a three-day intensive course with her I decided to use my frequent flyer miles to do so. She seemed pleased to have me and had prepared a guest room right next to her treatment area. She started working on me the first night I arrived, three hours in two ninety-minute increments that made me sleep very soundly. The next day we went for a long walk and had pastries; we spoke to each other quite intimately, almost as old friends would. And she worked on me all day . . .

This was more Pneuma than I had previously experienced, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. It was not comfortable to be so passive for so many hours and the emotions coming up in me were less deep than aggravating. Linda again reprimanded me for talking too much and for thinking too much. ‘I have a brain that’s just like yours,’ she said sternly, ‘so I know what I’m talking about.’ Between sessions, we did talk. About my mother. About her mother. About being a mother. About the guy who had molested me when I was five. About the female gym teacher who had sexually harassed Linda, to the point of calling on the phone in an unsuccessfully disguised voice to say that she wanted Linda to piss on her. In between sessions I would go for long walks and have increasingly dazed, angry feelings. I remember calling a friend and saying, ‘For this to be worth it, she’d better start pulling some rabbits out of hats pretty damn soon.’

And the next day, she did. During Pneuma my body would sometimes involuntarily shudder or twitch; Linda explained these small movements as ‘energy release’ – which is what they felt like. But that day was different. The movements were stronger, like intense contractions – particularly in my lower abdomen – and they lasted longer. They came at quicker intervals. They came with vivid feelings, awful feelings that alternated with a strange disassociation. During one of these dissociative moments, I felt a strong hot tingling move over the surface of my entire body. It happened a couple of times. In the first instance, my body seized up and released in spasms. The second time my mouth began to twitch, exposing my teeth in a sort of weird snarl. I felt myself grimace and then I spoke, in a much deeper, slower voice than is my norm. I looked at Linda and I – or the voice – said, ‘You fucking cunt. I’d like to tear your face off.’ She responded by smiling benevolently and, I would say, even proudly. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Let it come.’ I said some other stuff along the same lines. And then I felt my face change again into an expression of real sadness. I felt like I was going to cry. Instead I reached out and touched Linda’s cheek.

And then it was over. My body relaxed and the terrible feelings melted away. Linda continued to work on me and, as she did, a feeling of extraordinary bliss spread through me. I also became very hungry. I went to a restaurant nearby and had one of the most enjoyable meals I’ve ever had. It was a beautiful day and my senses seemed heightened, including my sense of taste. I felt great goodwill toward everyone around me, and I must’ve been transmitting that feeling because everyone I looked at smiled at me with real warmth. Tentatively, I wondered if everything was going to be different now.

When I returned home the wonderful feeling stayed for quite a while. I have never been the kind of person who smiles at strangers easily; for much of my life I have had a habit of wariness. After the visit with Linda, that changed: I found myself sincerely smiling at people I passed on the street; I found it easier to talk to people in general. I felt great; I also felt an Alice-in-Wonderland sense of disproportion, as if my life were now too small for me, or the world too large. The yearning for openness that had led me to Pneuma was unabated; it translated into a little too much openness, in terms of vulnerability and in what most people might call socially inappropriate sharing. I was very quick with my emotions, whether they were angry or affectionate. Some of it was nice – an odd, childlike kind of nice. I remember doing an interview for a college paper in which the person asked what I would do if I had only twenty-four hours to live: ‘I would tell everybody I love them,’ I said. ‘I would have sex with as many people as possible.’ I still remember the incredulous expression on the student journalist’s face.

During this time two people, one a friend and one a new acquaintance, told me that I seemed like ‘a fourteen-year-old girl’. Both of them meant it in a positive or at least neutral way. But it is not a great idea for a woman in her fifties to be walking around like a fourteen-year-old girl. Especially not a woman with a complicated public persona. This all happened during a period when I was professionally very active, doing readings from a new book, talks and teaching engagements. I became acutely aware that, if I was formed by a subtle internal pattern, I was also formed by an external, social one. This external pattern was more visible but almost as mysterious. Like the inner pattern it was me and not-me; like just about everyone with a social identity, I had created it but half consciously. Unlike everyone, my creation had undergone rather more conscious input from journalists, critics and publicists. And now it had a life of its own. And, when I was out in the world, that is what most people saw. Sometimes it was – and is – convenient; a persona can function as a kind of armor. It can also function as a steel trap. In my post-Pneuma state, the contrast between this complicated public image and what I felt was happening inside me was confusing and even painful. And then there was something else, something deeper that I associated with the weird voice that had come from me during the final session. I didn’t know what it was, but it was there too, incongruously mixed with what I’m calling the fourteen-year-old girl.

I tried to talk to Linda about all of this, mostly via email. But she didn’t seem to have any vocabulary for it. Sometimes she didn’t reply to me at all, and other times she said I should just trust my body to process the feelings. She did have something interesting and mysterious to say about the weird voice; she said she thought it was something external that I’d ‘allowed in’ at some point in my early life because I had thought it would protect me. I don’t think she meant anything supernatural. I think she meant a kind of disturbed adult aggression that I’d internalized, or tried to. She said that even before she heard it, she could see it in my eyes. I found this a little scary; I didn’t know if she really was seeing something or projecting it.

I also talked to Donna (the woman who had introduced me to Linda) about what I was experiencing, including my mixed feelings about some of the things Linda had said. Donna allowed that Linda was ‘a character’, but she basically agreed with her that the work of Pneuma couldn’t really be discussed at length, that it was innately non-verbal. She didn’t seem surprised by the voice that had burst from me; she’d done Pneuma in group settings and said she’d seen all kinds of things happen.

Icontinued to go about my life which was quite vivid at the time. I was still working and traveling a lot, still experiencing outsized emotions, which were at times a creative boon and other times were painful and chaotic. My experience with Pneuma had confused me but it also roused my curiosity; I still believed it had done something for me. It was the only therapy I’d ever experienced that seemed equal to the intensity of my own feelings; it spoke the intimate language (or at least a language) of my body. This combination of intimacy and intensity was irresistibly compelling to me; I wonder in retrospect if my taste for it made me more responsive to Pneuma than most.

And so, about a year later, when I went to the West Coast for a book event, I made a couple of appointments to see Linda. That is when things got . . . vortexian. I wish I could remember it better but vortexes are kind of a blur. I remember that the weird voice reemerged and that it had some nasty things to say. I remember Linda saying, ‘We need to break down your defenses.’ I remember a particularly dramatic moment when my body was shuddering and I said that I had to go to the bathroom. She said, ‘That’s okay honey, you can piss all over the table if you need to.’ I thought ‘gym teacher’ and controlled my bladder as I split myself in two, trying to receive the therapy and protect myself from the therapist at the same time.

Something else happened during that trip, an event that got wedged between my appointments with Linda. I ran into someone with whom I’d had an ephemeral emotional entanglement more than ten years earlier. I felt overjoyed to heal the harm that the misunderstanding had caused. When I told Linda about it, she encouraged me to reestablish a relationship, because she intuited, based on how my body felt when I spoke of him, that he was someone who really ‘got me’ – which, probably needless to say, turned out to be ludicrously untrue.

Months later, I emailed her to ask her why she had said this. I asked what had made her so certain of her opinion. She didn’t answer. I emailed her again, and once again got no answer. I am embarrassed to say how terrible I felt about this; the combination of what had felt like profound care on the one hand and thoughtless, capricious unkindness on the other was devastating and in some primitive way familiar. I was bewildered that someone could be so gifted while at the same time so irresponsible and inconsiderate on such a fundamental level.

On reflection, I realized that it made a very banal kind of sense. It is precisely those who have exceptional gifts that are most likely to fall prey to the kind of egotism that makes them impervious to other people’s feelings. This is even more true of those who have naturally dominant personalities, as did Linda. It is most true for those who excel in areas of esoteric, subjective expertise – doctors, artists, writers, healers. This character flaw is really unpleasant when you are on the receiving end of it. But it is also very human. In the end, I could not consider Linda to be a wicked person; I believed that she sincerely wanted to help people, including me. But I did not want to see her again.

It was hard to give up on something that had given me such hope, hope that I still felt. I was still suffused with longing and vulnerability; I had recurring dreams that I was lost in a humongous airport, late for my flight or unable to find the gate or unable to even remember where I was going – and at least once, on the wrong flight. I would wake with a palpitant feeling in my chest, as if something there was actively, blindly searching for something without knowing what it was. On one such awakening, I felt like there was a malign presence in the room with me. I was alone and felt genuinely disturbed; it was as if the awful voice was now coming at me from the outside.

I decided to give traditional therapy another try. I saw four psychotherapists, each of whom, like Linda, said strange unhelpful things minus her erratic warmth and powerful touch; they were less efficacious and less interesting than Pneuma but every bit as kooky. And of course I was the kookiest of all, desperately flailing around trying to get help for increasing pain that I felt I ought to be able to bear on my own, or at least to understand. I would have been embarrassed by my absurd susceptibility to any and every kind of purported healing had I not been so beyond embarrassment. I would be embarrassed now – except that the absurdity of my susceptibility seems, in retrospect, not merely matched but sometimes actually surpassed by the absurd nature of what the therapists offered.

The first one I saw came highly recommended, charged $300 for forty-five minutes, and was plainly a bright, urbane guy. During my first or second session with him I told him I had recently considered suicide. I made clear that I didn’t want to do it, but that I was starting to involuntarily daydream about it. He asked, ‘Are you a vengeful person? Is revenge important to you?’ I wondered why he had changed the subject, but I gave the question some thought. I said that I was capable of vengefulness and sometimes experienced schadenfreude, but that those feelings weren’t a big driver for me. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because,’ he informed me, ‘suicide is always about revenge.’ He said that he based his opinion on his experience of the sufferings of those left behind – which seemed inappropriate given that, while he didn’t know anyone I might have left behind, I was right there in front of him, suffering.

I lost confidence in the second one – also $300 for forty-five minutes – when she told me, without my asking for her opinion on the subject, that she thought my career as a writer was being impaired by my manner of speech, that if only I spoke differently my income and prestige would increase. I asked her why she thought this. Had she gotten this impression from people in my professional world? No, she hadn’t – it was just her ‘sense’. She also thought I might be low-grade bipolar or just ‘spectrum-y’ and prescribed gabapentin. She asked me to call and tell her how it had worked, but when I left a message that it hadn’t affected me at all, she didn’t call me back.

The third one I saw was at least cheaper – $250 for forty-five minutes. But he decided that he couldn’t work with me after I told him during a phone call that I’d woken up feeling like there was a malign presence in the room. He first expressed annoyance that I’d called on the weekend and then said he wasn’t qualified to help me and that I needed medication. I asked him to recommend someone, and he told me that he didn’t know anyone, but there were a lot of clinics I could go to.

A friend to whom I told these stories said, ‘What do you expect? They’re business people. You’d be better off cutting a picture of some kind-looking human out of a magazine, taping it to your wall and talking to it for an hour.’

I considered this! Instead, I tried yet another therapist (also $250 a shot) who told me that she thought I had PTSD (which was her specialty). She said that she could see a pattern in my body comparable to other people with the condition, and that this pattern could rouse aggression in others. She said that she could see terror in the back of my eyes; she thought others could too, and, as a result, felt uncomfortable around me without knowing why. This was a dismaying thing to hear, but at least it made some sense to me, and she seemed very intelligent. But after maybe ten weeks, I had to move way upstate, to the Finger Lakes area, for a teaching job and was no longer willing (or able) to pay a $1,000 dollars per month to talk on the phone for forty-five minutes one day a week. I asked if the therapist had a sliding scale; she did not.

I was at that point no longer willing to think much about self-improvement at all; I had too much to occupy me. I’d run out of money; I had a huge tax bill; my marriage had (temporarily) split up; most of my stuff was in storage; I was alone in an unfamiliar place and my family was in crisis. The stability that had helped make a place for new and chaotic emotions had been completely upended!

But I was nonetheless okay. The new job was good; I liked the students and faculty, and I got a lot of writing done. The malign presence had stopped visiting me. But I still felt a lot of pain and loneliness. I remember once talking to Donna about these feelings and she had said something that stuck with me, that ‘you have to grab on to good bits, even if they’re really tiny’. It’s the kind of advice that I hate, but, seeing the sense of it, I did my best.

After the job was over (it was a year-long guest chair position) I decided to move to New York City. This meant having a roommate and I was very lucky to find an optimal situation: large apartment, great location, unexpectedly deep new friendship. My debts were mostly paid off and I was excited to live full-time in the varied, fast-moving dynamic of the city. Perhaps most important, the hormone storm that had raged through me for the previous six years was finally subsiding. I felt a degree of equilibrium and optimism that I hadn’t felt for a while, and my work was flexing.

Still, I wondered about my experience of Pneuma; the intensity of it seemed in retrospect something inexplicable, like a sudden opening in the sky with an outpouring of visions. I remembered the dreams about going somewhere and becoming lost. I remembered the weird voice, and Linda’s blend of nurture and cruelty that felt so harshly true to the rest of life. I remembered how vital I had felt, how I had smiled at strangers. These memories made me long for something besides ‘tiny bits’; I missed the feeling of almost reckless openness, the apprehension of a deep place where innocence – the fourteen-year-old girl – might reconcile with darkness.

I looked and discovered that Pneuma had a website which listed practitioners. They were almost all in California. I had just been offered a job in southern California. There was a practitioner named Sylvia who worked out of her home in a verdant working-class neighborhood (passion flowers, roses, orange orchards, hummingbirds) that was a ten-minute drive from my faculty house.

If Pneuma with Linda might be compared to The Haunting of Hill House, with Sylvia it was more like Candy Land. Sylvia, also in her sixties, was a retired first-grade teacher with a strong inclination toward sentimental mysticism. The room in which we worked was filled with religious imagery and knickknacks – Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and New Age – the walls were covered with uplifting sayings and exhortations about love. (Sylvia had briefly attended Divinity School.) Her house, which she shared with her husband of many years, was always fanatically decorated according to the holiday seasons, which were, during my semester there, Valentine’s Day, St Patrick’s and Easter. Between sessions we would talk about whatever was on our minds; she shared with me the story of her escape from a fundamentalist family in eastern Pennsylvania and her belief that she was part of an ‘intergalactic council’.

Wide-bodied, soft and sweet-natured, Sylvia could not have been more different from Linda as a personality. As a practitioner, I did not consider her to be as strong. But when she worked on me, the same things happened: my body would first deeply relax and I would become dreamily aware of some kind of pattern within it; sometimes I would drift so deep into this awareness that it was a kind of trance; other times my body would involuntarily twitch, shudder and even convulse. Sometimes the weird voice would speak in a generally hideous way. Sylvia had no problem with it; once she surprised me by growling back at it – she had a surprisingly guttural snarl. On another occasion she invited it to leave me and come into her which struck me as a bad idea. I needn’t have worried. ‘I’m not interested in you,’ said the voice. ‘I want it.’ It being me.

Was this frightening? It was. But it was a kind of fright I had gotten used to. As had previously happened, I felt great when I got off the table. And, as had previously happened, there was a rebound effect. Again, I felt the bewildering and sometimes painful contrast between the deep, private experience of Pneuma and my outward relationship with the world. It seems worth mentioning too that during this time I was assailed by violent sexual dreams that were too horrible to relate. Even with no bad dreams, I often woke with the familiar sensation of openness in my heart area combined with the feeling of searching for something.

Sylvia encouraged me to keep believing that I would find what I needed; she talked a lot about love (of all varieties), claiming that it was ‘the only real thing’. She also talked a lot about outer-space people called Pleiadians, with whom she served on the ‘intergalactic council’. This sort of talk was difficult for me to respect; as I had questioned Linda’s essential decency, I now questioned Sylvia’s thinking to the point that it became hard for me to be receptive to her touch. Eventually, I concluded that she was weird but wise, essentially a very kind woman who happened to have some sort of power in her hands. Because even as I closed off to her in my mind, my body still responded, sometimes dramatically, to her touch; it was impossible to deny.

But where had this power come from, how had she gotten it? I looked again at the Pneuma website; it relied heavily on the concept of an ‘energetic biofield’ which it claimed may be manipulated to great effect – but the language was so hackneyed and vague that I found it ridiculous. (The concept is, however, acknowledged and even treated with a degree of respect by the National Library of Medicine which cites several studies that appear to support its efficacy.) The website was created by a guy I’ll call Jonathan who claimed to have invented Pneuma after discovering his unusual ability to heal people almost by accident. Linda had already warned me about him; she had said that Jonathan was a sexually abusive, power-hungry guru-type from whom she and several other women had split years earlier. But Sylvia didn’t describe him this way. According to her, Jonathan was immensely gifted but very troubled (as opposed to abusive); she hadn’t seen him for years but still sent him a Christmas card every year – he in turn sent her his photographs of wild animals.

At this point the Pneuma phenomenon was seeming increasingly discordant. On the one hand, everything about it said ridiculous-cult-org-preying-upon-the-vulnerable-and-dumb. I appreciate that the reader might now be saying aloud: ‘You just thought of that?’ I actually thought of it earlier. But Pneuma seemed too small and too disorganized to be a cult of any kind. There were at the time maybe a dozen practitioners in the US (there were more in Europe, where it seemed more popular), and they weren’t doing much to advertise themselves, i.e. to prey upon anyone. You didn’t have to become a member or to have any particular beliefs. No one had asked me to contribute money to any cause. No one had tried to have sex with me. There was no discernable bad motive, just standard human fucked-up-ness. What I had experienced with both Linda and Sylvia had been disturbing and powerful and, I still believed, at least potentially beneficial.

Maybe a year after I’d first worked with Sylvia I went to Portland, Oregon, for several weeks in order to do research on a project. My destination just happened to be located where Jonathan lived and worked. He was around eighty and semi-retired, but he seemed delighted that I wanted to see him. I wanted to work with him because I hoped to finally figure out what this therapy was. Even more, I hoped to stop being in pain, to stop waking up in the middle of the night searching for something; I hoped to get rid of the weird voice once and for all.

Jonathan lived in a small house in a middle-class neighborhood in a state of old-guy-alone disarray; dirty dishes on the counter, struggling plants, layer of dust. He was visibly sad. I seem to recall that early on, maybe during our first meeting, he told me how lonely he was, that his children didn’t visit him often. I remember thinking that he wasn’t a good advertisement for his method – also that, plainly, he wasn’t interested in advertising anything, at least not in the usual way.

But once I got into the session with him – in a small upstairs room, with windows on every side – he proved himself, just as Linda and Sylvia had done. In fact, he was stronger. He said he was recovering from an operation and wouldn’t be able to work longer than an hour at a time – but during that hour, I immediately went into a trance state in which I seemed to be remembering things that had happened between me and my siblings when we were toddlers. My body went nuts: the voice emerged and furiously shouted at Jonathan: ‘You’re dead! You’re dead! You think you’re alive but you’re dead!’

‘I’m Ned?’ asked Jonathan.

‘Yes! And you’re dead!’

After the session, I asked Jonathan how he knew that name. It was the name of the man who had molested me and I had not mentioned it. Jonathan replied that he hadn’t said the name, that he had just repeated my words back to me, saying, ‘I’m dead?’ The moment seemed uncanny to me.

Jonathan was very different from Linda or Sylvia, but session time with him was similar in that it was a matter-of-fact blend of the uncanny and the mundane, a time where the weird voice wasn’t even weird. Over two or three weekends he worked on me for four hours a day, in one-hour increments, with half-hour breaks during which I would go out for a walk or eat something with him. During these breaks Jonathan talked to me about the women in his life who had, it seemed, hurt and disappointed him a great deal, from his mother and kindergarten teacher to his wife. He struck me as one of the most unhappy people I’d met – but he was convinced that this method, which he had somehow come up with (a process he could not explain to me any more than Linda could), was able to cure people of everything from trauma to depression to severe menstrual cramps.

The last time I had a session with Jonathan he told me he thought that I was done, that my problems had been solved. I didn’t believe this, but I didn’t debate it with him. There had been a fascinating depth to the entire Pneuma experience which I felt – and still feel – had helped me to become less constricted by old ways of being. At the same time, I suspected it had also done me some damage, or perhaps just led me into a few strange places.

Right before I left Oregon, Jonathan emailed to say that he wanted to take me to lunch. Almost as soon as we sat down, he brought up the then-current pedophilia charges against Jared Fogle, a former spokesperson for the Subway sandwich chain. Jonathan expressed sympathy for Fogle, who is now in prison for child pornography and sexual exploitation of a minor. He looked me in the eyes and said, ‘What exactly is child sex abuse anyway?’ I answered pragmatically, with the legal definition. But I was shocked, too shocked to respond appropriately. Even now I’m not sure what ‘appropriate’ would’ve been. Get up and leave? Throw a fit? Hit him? All of the above? While I sat there Jonathan carried on, agreeing that sex with children was wrong, but arguing that sometimes young girls could be seductive; he gave me several examples of his own experience with supposedly perverse pre-teens. The conversation was like a more extreme – more stupefying – version of Linda’s announcing to me that I would’ve been a terrible mother, and unlike in her case, I could not ‘bracket it’.

I never saw Jonathan again. I saw Sylvia the next time I taught in southern California. (I asked her if she could refrain from talking about outer-space people and she graciously agreed.) I no longer believed that she was going to do anything more than give me emotional support, but she was very good at that. I had never considered her as strong as Linda or Jonathan; it occurred to me then that perhaps I had confused force with strength. Something more occurs to me now: the weird voice, while it had spoken in Sylvia’s presence, never spoke aggressively to her. But it had called Linda a ‘fucking cunt’. It had told Jonathan that he was ‘dead’; it had linked him with ‘Ned’. Perhaps that voice is something I should get to know better. Perhaps it was the best thing to emerge from Pneuma, even if no one understood it, even if I still don’t.

For that alone, even if I can’t exactly advocate for Pneuma, I’m glad that I did it. The experience in retrospect seems both real and chimerical, suffused with some kind of sub-personal force that Jonathan and the others had tapped into without really knowing what it was. That ignorance (mine as much as theirs) combined with the mysterious whatever they touched on, the sincere will to help combined with real human failings – a seeming disregard for harm – all of that truly did let something loose without definition or judgment. I still think of it with a question mark. And with respect.