Joy

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Chuck hadn’t called the sheriff with the answer he wanted. He hadn’t called him at all. We heard his cruiser in the drive. The sound of the big engine was familiar to us by now. Chuck put his shoes on and waited for Mr. Bolger to come and get him, then the two of them walked up to the house. While he was gone I kept going to the window and looking out. I had a bad feeling through and through. When Chuck came back I was sitting on my bed in a kind of trance. He looked at me without any sign of recognition and closed the door gently behind him. Then he jumped on the floor and started pounding it with his fists like a brat having a tantrum, except that instead of crying he was laughing. After he’d done this a while he got up and staggered from wall to wall. His face was red. He grabbed me by the shoulders and danced me across the room. “Wolfman!” he shouted. “Wolfman!” “Yo, Chuckles.” “I love you, Wolfman! I fucking love you!” I said “Terrific,” but I was watching him. “Listen, Wolfman. Listen.” He leaned into my face. “There’s gonna be a wedding, Wolfman. The old wedding bells are gonna chime. What do you think of that?” “I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think?” “What do I think? I think it’s fucking great, Wolfman, what do you fucking think I think?” He went into the closet and got his Canadian Club. “Let’s drink to the bride,” he said. He took a drink and handed me the bottle. “Now drink to the lucky groom,” he said. “Go on, drink up.” He grabbed the bottle back and said, “What are you gonna call Tina after the wedding, Wolfman?” I didn’t know what to say. “What are you gonna call her?” I told him I didn’t know. “How about Mrs. Huff?” he said. “How about Mrs. Gerald Lucius Huff?” When he saw how I looked at him, he held up his right hand and said, “Gospel, Wolfman. I shit you not.” “Huff? Huff’s marrying Tina?” Chuck started to answer but suddenly bent over, coughing and snorting. Canadian Club ran out of his nose. I pounded him on the back. I heard myself cawing harshly. Something was breaking loose in me, some hysterical heartless tide of joy. I could hardly breathe. My face twitched. I was shaking with relief and joy and cruel pleasure, for the truth was I didn’t like Huff and felt no pity for Tina. To me she was just The Flood and now I saw Huff trapped in its grip, paddling feebly on its broad heaving surface, pummeled and smothered, going under and bobbing up again somewhere else with his hairy arms churning and his pompadour agleam. Pearl felt abandoned after my mother left, and I was sorry for her. I let her eat lunch with me sometimes.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  He surprised us both by saying, “I’m alive.” By learning that he could begin to feel, Adam became, in that moment, like the child, proud with the wondrous creation of his kite. That was the beginning of a gradual, rhythmical learning for Adam. Now, he could begin to feel his body-self without opening too widely the dark door of violence and horror in his soul. He was able to open up just enough to feel—to feel without being annihilated, without being swallowed up by the black hole of his horrific past or lost in the deep shadow of his immense grief and guilt about Paulo. Somehow, in this body-mindfulness, he was finding that there was a middle ground. He had uncovered a place between being completely overwhelmed and flooded, on one hand, and shut down into a deadening depression on the other. Adam later wrote to me that his experience of a tender, yet durable, middle ground allowed him to experience a new sense of hopefulness. From this place, he was able to feel compassion for himself as the orphaned Holocaust child. “It was also the beginning,” he said, “of my being able to mourn for my beloved son and to find joyful pleasure with my family.” Discussion Points I reflected on our session and on what might have brought Adam out of his immobilizing depression and into the stream of life. He was able to identify with the slum child’s exuberance—an exuberance that transcended the child’s deprived fate. Adam was able to feel, in his own body, the innocence, excitement and joy of a child flying a kite improvised from scraps of scavenged trash. In a similar way, Adam collected scraps from the trash heap of his devastating and dehumanizing past. This time, instead of collapsing under its weight, he marshaled a creative solution. By standing up (kinesthetically contradicting his habitual collapse) and physically grounding his pain, he mobilized his life force and joined with the transcendent flight of the kite. He could feel himself being drawn upward by the soaring image, and toward the possibility of authentic freedom and spontaneous play. Metaphorically, he reacquainted himself with the allegory of his namesake. Adam connected with the innocence of the biblical Adam—before the bitter fruit of terrible knowledge had singed his tongue with the bitter taste of man’s cruel and evil inhumanity. This formerly broken man now had touched into the grounded embodiment and resilient self-compassion enough to begin grieving and thus initiate a movement back into life. I did not want to expose (and most certainly flood) him with the shock of seeing his son hanging in the bathroom.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  N. and Z. were standing at the table, not dancing anymore, with full glasses in front of them, and as I joined them Z. refilled my glass, too. He was smiling, there wasn’t any sign of what had happened as we knocked glasses, holding each other’s eyes to say Nazdrave, I looked for some special message from him but there was none. While we were drinking, the music abruptly tapered and cut off, leaving a kind of roaring in its wake. And then over the speakers a man’s voice, loud and deep, theatrical, said Dami i gospoda, ladies and gentlemen, and in a burst of quick syllables I couldn’t quite follow announced Andrea, the singer we had come to see. With a single beat on a drum the lights snapped out, and with another drumbeat a stage I hadn’t noticed was suddenly bathed in white light. It was against the opposite wall, on the other side of the bar, though we could see just fine, it wasn’t as large a space as I had thought. A roar went up when the music started, the intro of Andrea’s most popular song, “Haide opa,” and another when a door in the wall opened and she stepped out onto the stage, followed by four other women. They wore skimpy two-piece outfits that exposed their midriffs, the four dancers almost identical, Andrea set off by what looked like a fur vest, plush and white, hanging open around her breasts, and by her hair, which wasn’t gathered back like the others’ but teased into a blond mane. It was a small stage, they could hardly move, they lifted their arms and spun, sometimes bending their knees deeply, everything exaggeratedly sexual. We had moved from our spots around the table and were standing in front of it, Z. in the middle, dancing so that we knocked into each other, our shoulders and hips, and then Z. put his arms around our shoulders and drew us tight, hugging us. When I looked over he was smiling, watching Andrea, smiling more when he turned his head and looked at me, and I smiled back, happy, pressing against him, reaching around him to squeeze N.’s shoulder, and he smiled at me too.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I was eager for it, even, I planned to enjoy myself, to dance and drink, to relax in the company of these boys I genuinely liked, to be their friend for an evening and not their teacher. The evening had started a few hours before, at a restaurant where I had promised to meet a group of students to say goodbye. They were already there when I arrived, ten or twelve of them seated at tables they had pushed together. When they saw me several of them stood up, their chairs scraping on the uneven patio, and they called out my name, or not my name really but my family name, I mean my father’s name; soon I wouldn’t be that name anymore, I thought, feeling suddenly the relief of it. Of course it was what they called me, though they weren’t students anymore, or not my students; they had graduated a year earlier and were back in Sofia after their first year abroad, in America or England or Amsterdam, they had scattered as all my students here scatter, none of them had stayed behind. There was already wine on the table, three bottles opened to breathe, a cheap Bulgarian white for the late June evening, even as I took my seat I could taste the twinge of it. But it was a pleasure to hold it up to the light, and more than a pleasure to hear them say my name again, my father’s name, and then Z. said To new beginnings, and we drank. It was terrible wine but it didn’t matter, I was as happy in that moment as I had ever been. There were more toasts over dinner, as the waiters carried out dishes that my students had missed while they were away, salads and grilled meats and ceramic pots of vegetables and cheese. They toasted one another, their year away, their stories of London and New York. I had a fucking miserable year, N. said when his turn came, I mean I knew it would be awful but it was fucking miserable. I told you, Z. said, I knew you weren’t cut out to be a lawyer, and the girl next to him said That’s true, and everyone at the table loudly agreed, making N. raise his hands in surrender. Hey, he said, I wasn’t the one who wanted it, but even Gospodinut —and here he waved one of his hands toward me—couldn’t convince my mother it was a terrible idea. It was true that I had tried, at the beginning of N.’s senior year, when his mother came in for her quarterly conference. She never missed these meetings, even though it meant a two-hour drive from her home in Plovdiv, losing half a day of work. She was a serious woman, invariably dressed in a pants suit, dark navy or gray, her black hair cut in a severe line just above her shoulders.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  We toasted on the street, too, after a fashion, lifting the carton to one another before we drank. This had been our plan, to leave the others after dinner and drink together, just the three of us, a prelude to more drinking at the club. We passed the carton as we walked the narrow streets, but the second or third time it made the circuit I handed it directly to Z. Hey, he said, trying to give it back to me, you can’t skip your turn. But I didn’t take it. I need to slow down, I said, I can’t drink as much as you. I was already feeling it, the wine from earlier and the vodka we were drinking too quickly now, I could feel the edges of myself softening, a kind of tingling, like a limb waking up. It was dangerous to drink so much; I didn’t have a sense of who I would be if I got really drunk, I had never let myself go like that, as men around me did in my childhood, it was another way I had always been unlike them. Gospodine, Z. said, his voice heavy with disappointment, come on now, and he shook the carton, still holding it out to me, don’t let us down. All right, I said, relenting. And then, in a broad, cartoonish Slavic accent, another classroom trick, I said Tonight I make exception, and drank deeply. Bravo, Z. said, that’s the way, and N. said again This is so epic, and then, this is the best night of my life, which made all three of us laugh.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Most subjects feeling joy reported feeling “ready for action.” This readiness was accompanied with energy and the abundant sense of purpose and optimism that they would be able to achieve their goals. Understanding the contradictory basis of the negative emotions, and their structural contrast to the positive ones, is revealing in the quest for wholeness. All of the negative emotions studied were comprised of two conflicting impulses, one propelling action and the other inhibiting (i.e., thwarting) that action. In addition, when a subject was “locked” into joy by hypnotic suggestion, a contrasting mood (e.g., depression, anger or sadness) could not be produced unless the (joy) posture was first released. The opposite was also true; when sadness or depression was suggested, it was not possible to feel joy unless that postural set was first changed. The facial, respiratory and postural responses that supported positive affects are opposite to those seen in depression. There is a poignancy to this truth that was revealed years ago in a simple exchange between Charlie Brown and Lucy (from Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts). While walking together, Charlie, slumped and shuffling, is bemoaning his depression. Lucy suggests that he might try standing up straight, to which Charlie replies, “But then I wouldn’t have a depression to complain about” as he continues on his way resigned, slouched and downtrodden. And what are we to do if we don’t have an ever-vigilant Lucy to elucidate the ever-perplexing obvious? However, as correct as Lucy was in a metaphoric sense, mood changing is not a matter of simply willing postural change (like a proud military stance). Indeed, altering one’s psychological disposition is a much more complex and subtle process that fundamentally involves, instead, the spontaneous and subconscious changing of postural states through body awareness. The extensive work of psychologist Paul Ekman 159 supports the role of facial posture in the generation of emotional states. Ekman trained numbers of subjects to contract only the specific muscles that were observed during the expression of a particular emotion. Remarkably, when subjects were able to accomplish this task (without being told what emotion they were simulating), they often experienced those feelings, including appropriate autonomic arousal states. In a quirky experiment, Fritz Strack of the University of Würzburg, Germany, had two groups of people judge how funny they found some cartoons. In the first group, the subjects were instructed to hold a pencil between their teeth without it touching their lips. This procedure forced them to smile (try it yourself). The second group was asked to hold the pencil with their lips, but this time not using their teeth. This forced a frown. The results reinforced Ekman’s work, revealing that people experience the emotion associated with their expressions. In Strack’s work those with even a forced smile felt happier and found the cartoons funnier than did those who were forced to frown.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 3: The separated soul receives nothing directly from corporeal places in the same way as bodies which are maintained by their respective places: yet these same souls, through knowing themselves to be appointed to such places, gather joy or sorrow therefrom; and thus their place conduces to their punishment or reward. Whether souls are conveyed to heaven or hell immediately after death?Objection 1: It would seem that no souls are conveyed to heaven or hell immediately after death. For a gloss on Ps. 36:10, “Yet a little while and the wicked shall not be,” says that “the saints are delivered at the end of life; yet after this life they will not yet be where the saints will be when it is said to them: Come ye blessed of My Father.” Now those saints will be in heaven. Therefore after this life the saints do not go immediately up to heaven. Objection 2: Further, Augustine says (Enchiridion cix) that “the time which lies between man’s death and the final resurrection holds the souls in secret receptacles according as each one is worthy of rest or of suffering.” Now these secret abodes cannot denote heaven and hell, since also after the final resurrection the souls will be there together with their bodies: so that he would have no reason to distinguish between the time before and the time after the resurrection. Therefore they will be neither in hell nor in heaven until the day of judgment. Objection 3: Further, the glory of the soul is greater than that of bodies. Now the glory of the body is awarded to all at the same time, so that each one may have the greater joy in the common rejoicing of all, as appears from a gloss on Heb. 11:40, “God providing some better thing for us—that the common joy may make each one rejoice the more.” Much more, therefore, ought the glory of souls to be deferred until the end, so as to be awarded to all at the same time. Objection 4: Further, punishment and reward, being pronounced by the sentence of the judge, should not precede the judgment. Now hell fire and the joys of heaven will be awarded to all by the sentence of Christ judging them, namely at the last judgment, according to Mat. 25. Therefore no one will go up to heaven or down to hell before the day of judgment. On the contrary, It is written (2 Cor. 5:1): “If our earthly house of this habitation be dissolved, that we have . . . a house not made with hands, but reserved in heaven [*Vulg.: ‘eternal in heaven’; cf. 1 Pet. 1:4].” Therefore, after the body’s dissolution, the soul has an abode, which had been reserved for it in heaven.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  We knelt to arrange them, and when we finished R. sat back on his heels. Isn’t she beautiful, he said, taking my hand in his, but he answered the question himself, she is, isn’t she, I think she’s beautiful. WE WENT TO BOLOGNA because it was the cheapest place we could fly: there were tickets for forty euros, a price I could afford. We packed a single carry-on each, anything else would have meant a fee, and rode in a cab to the airport’s old terminal, which the budget airlines used. It was my first time leaving the country. During breaks, when the other American teachers left for places near or far—Istanbul, Tangier, St. Petersburg—I stayed behind; I didn’t want to travel, I said, I wanted to be settled in a single place. I studied Bulgarian, I read, I wandered the streets downtown. But I did want to travel with R., to leave Sofia, where even when his friends were gone there was a pressure of secrecy, where it was too dangerous to hold hands in the streets, to kiss in public, however chastely, where everywhere we had to keep a casual distance; I wanted to be with him in a place where we could be freer with each other, a place in the West. It was my gift to him, a getaway, a bit of romance. We arrived at the airport early enough to be first in line for the unassigned seats, and sat in the front row, where there was extra room for our legs. Even so my knees almost touched those of the single attendant who sat facing us, strapped into her foldout seat. She spoke English with an accent I couldn’t place, not Bulgarian but something Eastern European, and she smiled slightly, kindly I thought, when the plane started down the runway, thrusting us all back, and R. moved his hand to cover mine where it lay on my knee. WE BOOKED THE CHEAPEST HOTEL , too, a chain a good way from the city center, with a bus stop outside for getting to town. We arrived too late for any exploring, we’d have to wait until morning to see the city. It was hard not to feel depressed by our room, which had the corporate airlessness of such places, comfort sterilized of any human touch. It was on the second floor, overlooking the parking lot. It’s not exactly a dream of Italy, I said, meaning it as an apology, but R. laughed, he drew the curtain across the glass and pulled me to the bed. Who cares about the view, he said, the bed is nice, that’s all that matters, you should care about the bed, and then we were both laughing, one on top of the other. The hotel’s one luxury was the breakfast we found the next morning, a buffet of eggs and sliced meats, yogurt and fruit, a table overloaded with cakes and tarts.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  I was freer to observe in the tradition of the ethologists. From this vantage point, and without a premeditated list of symptoms, I was able to monitor my clients’ bodily reactions and self-reports as I participated in their transformative process of healing. The highly charged physiological reactions described in the earlier chapters, including shaking and trembling (when experienced as a safe discharge) together with dramatic spontaneous changes in temperature, heart rate and respiration, helped to restore their equilibrium. These reactions also promoted a relaxed readiness, an aptitude similar to that cultivated in Zen and in the martial arts such as aikido. In sorting through these types of involuntary, energetic and deeply moving experiences, I realized that my clients’ reactions manifested what was right and normal—rather than what was wrong and pathological. In other words, they exhibited innate self-regulating and self-healing processes. And as the animals went on about their daily business after such discharge reactions, so too did my clients reengage into life with renewed passion, appreciation and acceptance. At the same time, they frequently touched into a variety of experiences that I learned to appreciate as spiritual encounters such as Nancy’s feelings of aliveness, warmth, joy and wholeness. In moving toward an understanding of this intrinsic relationship between trauma (“raw, latent survival energy”) and spirituality, I was excited to come across a formative article by Roland Fischer published in the prestigious journal Science . A surprising and unexpected tenet emerged: that spiritual experience is welded with our most primitive animal instincts . Transcendental States Roland Fischer’s article, titled “A Cartography of the Ecstatic and Meditative States,” 166 described a schema for showing the association of various parasympathetic and sympathetic (autonomic-instinctual) activities with mystical and meditative experiences. While the details of his work are well beyond the scope of this short chapter, suffice it to say, I suspected that his view of the psychophysiological underpinning of various mystical states paralleled the range of “transpersonal” experiences that my clients were encountering as they unwound and released their traumas. Trauma represents a profound compression of “survival” energy, energy that has not been able to complete its meaningful course of action. When in the therapeutic session, this energy is gradually released or titrated ( Step 4 in Chapter 5 ) and then redirected from its symptomatic detour onto its natural course, one observes (in a softer and less frightening form) the kinds of reactions I observed with Nancy. At the same time, the numinous qualities of these experiences gracefully, automatically and consistently became integrated into the personality structure. The ability to access the rhythmic release of this bound energy makes all the difference as to whether it will destroy or vitalize us.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  RABANUS. And this glad tiding is given not to you alone for the secret comfort of your own hearts, but ye must extend it to all who love Him; Go quickly, and tell his disciples. CHRYSOLOGUS. (Serm. 77.) As much as to say, Woman, now thou art healed, return to the man, and persuade him! to faith, whom thou didst once persuade to treachery. Carry to man the proof of the Resurrection, to whom thou didst once carry counsel of destruction. CHRYSOSTOM. And, behold, he shall go before you, that is, to save you from danger, lest fear should prevail over faith. JEROME. Mystically; He shall go before you into Galilee, that is, into the wallowing stye1 of the Gentiles, where before was wandering and stumbling, and the foot had no firm and steady resting-place. BEDE. (Hom. ubi sup.) The Lord is rightly seen by His disciples in Galilee, forasmuch as He had already passed from death to life, from corruption to incorruption; for such is the interpretation of Galilee, ‘Transmigration.’ Happy women! who merited to announce to the world the triumph of the Resurrection! More happy souls, who in the day of judgment, when the reprobate are smitten with terror, shall have merited to enter the joy of the blessed resurrection! 28:8–108. And they departed quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great joy; and did run to bring his disciples word. 9. And as they went to tell his disciples, behold, Jesus met them, saying, All hail. And they came and held him by the feet, and worshipped him. 10. Then said Jesus unto them, Be not afraid: go tell my brethren that they go into Galilee, and there shall they see me. HILARY. The women having been comforted by the Angel, are straightway met by the Lord, that when they should proclaim His resurrection to the disciples, they should speak rather from Christ’s own mouth than from an Angel’s. AUGUSTINE. (de Cons. Ev. iii. 23.) They departed forth of the tomb, that is, from that spot of the garden which was before the tomb hewn in the rock. JEROME. A twofold feeling possessed the minds of the women, fear and joy; fear, at the greatness of the miracle; joy, in their desire of Him that was risen; but both added speed to their women’s steps, as it follows, And did run to bring his disciples word. They went to the Apostles, that through them might be spread abroad the seed of the faith. They who thus desired, and who thus ran, merited to have their rising Lord come to meet them; whence it follows, And, behold, Jesus met them, saying, All hail. RABANUS. Hereby He shewed that He will meet with His help all those who begin the ways of virtue, and enable them to attain to everlasting salvation. JEROME. The women ought first to hear this Hail, that the curse of the woman Eve may be removed in these women.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  She adds, “But I don’t need to do that anymore.” Miriam takes a full easy breath and says with a broad joyful grin, “That breath took me and tickled me and laughed me.” She laughs freely, looks around the room, then slowly at my face. She puts her hands to her face—first, to cover it in embarrassment, but then gently holds and strokes it shyly. Tears roll down her cheeks . “I feel finished … for now, I mean,” she says. “I know there’s other stuff, but I just want to sit in your yard by the river for a few minutes, then take a walk … Thanks … See you next week. ” Bonnie: A Forgotten Moment The mind has forgotten but the body has not—thankfully. —Sigmund Freud Bonnie is not an aggressive person, but she is by no means a pushover, either. Most of her peers and friends see her as well adjusted, even-handed and assertive. It was therefore surprising to her colleagues, and to herself, when for no apparent reason she became increasingly submissive and unpredictably explosive. At the point when her behavior threatened her relations with her colleagues, she became concerned. During my Berkeley training class in 1974, Bonnie raised her hand when I requested a volunteer for a demonstration session. This was to be a demonstration that would start solely with symptoms or behavior issues rather than with any recall of a compelling event. I will frequently work without a historical link in order to prevent the client from bypassing bottom-up processing and prematurely jumping to an abstract, interpretational level. Neither I nor Bonnie’s classmates knew her “story” when she elected to work with me on her symptoms in front of the group. Bonnie herself did not make the connection between her behavioral changes and an event that had transpired a year and a half earlier and that, as far as she was concerned, was irrelevant. I asked Bonnie to recall a recent encounter with a colleague that illustrated her sudden shift in behavior, and then we both noted her bodily reactions. Bonnie described feeling a sinking sensation in her belly. I noticed that her shoulders were hunched over and brought that to her attention. When asked to describe how she felt in that position, she replied, “It makes me hate myself.” Bonnie was taken aback by this sudden outburst of self-loathing. Rather than analyzing why she felt that way, I guided Bonnie back to the sensations in her body. ‡ After a pause she reported that her “heart and mind were racing a million miles an hour.” She then became disturbed by what she described as a “sweaty, smelly, hot sensation” on her back, which left her feeling nauseated.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  In a lifetime of working with traumatized individuals, I have been struck by the intrinsic and wedded relationship between trauma and spirituality. From my earliest experiences with clients suffering from a daunting array of crippling symptoms, I have been privileged to witness profound and authentic transformations. Seemingly out of nowhere, as with Nancy from Chapter 2, who was “held in warm tingling waves,” such unexpected “side effects” appeared as these individuals mastered the monstrous trauma symptoms that had haunted them—emotionally, physically and psychologically. These surprises included ecstatic joy, exquisite clarity, effortless focus and an all-embracing sense of oneness. In addition, many of my clients described deep and abiding experiences of compassion, peace and wholeness. In fact, it was not unusual after that profound internal shift of feeling the “goodness of self,” perhaps for the first time, to refer to their therapeutic work as “a holy experience.” While these individuals realized the classic goals of enduring personality and behavioral changes, these transcendent side effects were simply too potent and robust to overlook. I have been compelled to follow these exciting and elusive enigmas with wonder and curiosity for many decades. Because the formal diagnosis of trauma, as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III, was still over a decade away when my newfound odyssey was in its infancy, I didn’t have a formulated set of pathological criteria to unduly distract me. I was freer to observe in the tradition of the ethologists. From this vantage point, and without a premeditated list of symptoms, I was able to monitor my clients’ bodily reactions and self-reports as I participated in their transformative process of healing. The highly charged physiological reactions described in the earlier chapters, including shaking and trembling (when experienced as a safe discharge) together with dramatic spontaneous changes in temperature, heart rate and respiration, helped to restore their equilibrium. These reactions also promoted a relaxed readiness, an aptitude similar to that cultivated in Zen and in the martial arts such as aikido. In sorting through these types of involuntary, energetic and deeply moving experiences, I realized that my clients’ reactions manifested what was right and normal—rather than what was wrong and pathological. In other words, they exhibited innate self-regulating and self-healing processes. And as the animals went on about their daily business after such discharge reactions, so too did my clients reengage into life with renewed passion, appreciation and acceptance. At the same time, they frequently touched into a variety of experiences that I learned to appreciate as spiritual encounters such as Nancy’s feelings of aliveness, warmth, joy and wholeness. In moving toward an understanding of this intrinsic relationship between trauma (“raw, latent survival energy”) and spirituality, I was excited to come across a formative article by Roland Fischer published in the prestigious journal Science. A surprising and unexpected tenet emerged: that spiritual experience is welded with our most primitive animal instincts.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  During this process, which lasted almost two hours, and which was punctuated with cycles of soft trembling and gentle sweating, she gradually developed the capacity to tolerate her sensations until they came to their natural completion. I believe evidence exists supporting the idea that this fulfilled and successful action “switched” certain critical brain circuits, allowing her to experience the possibility of meaningful, effective action rather than helpless anxiety. 99 In this way her immobilizing anxiety transformed into a “flowing wave of warm energy.” The vast “life or death” energy of survival had metamorphosed, through cycles of trembling discharge, into feelings of aliveness and goodness. After directly experiencing this relief as a sensation in her body (a sensation that directly contradicted her paralyzing terror) Sharon regained a sense of aliveness and the felt reality that she had, indeed, survived and that her life had a future with expanding possibilities. She no longer felt trapped in the horror of the event; it began to recede to the past where it belonged. And it was now possible to travel on the subway to hear her favorite music at Lincoln Center. A new and different meaning for her life arose out of a new and different experience at the instinctual bodily level. This was the story Sharon’s body told. It is reminiscent of Antonio Damasio’s prose: We use our minds not to discover facts but to hide them. One of the things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean, the ins and outs of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day. 100 Epilogue Our feelings and our bodies are like water flowing into water. We learn to swim within the energies of the [body] senses. —Tarthang Tulku To review, human beings have been designed over millennia, through natural selection and social evolution, to live with and to move through extreme events and loss, and to process feelings of helplessness and terror without becoming stuck or traumatized. When we experience difficult and particularly horrible sensations and feelings, our tendency, however, is to recoil and avoid them. Mentally, we split off or “dissociate” from these feelings. Physically, our bodies tighten and brace against them. Our minds go into overdrive trying to explain and make sense of these alien and “bad” sensations. So, we are driven to vigilantly attempt to locate their ominous source in the outside world. We believe that if we feel the sensations, they will overwhelm us forever.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  In a quirky experiment, Fritz Strack of the University of Würzburg, Germany, had two groups of people judge how funny they found some cartoons. In the first group, the subjects were instructed to hold a pencil between their teeth without it touching their lips. This procedure forced them to smile (try it yourself). The second group was asked to hold the pencil with their lips, but this time not using their teeth. This forced a frown. The results reinforced Ekman’s work, revealing that people experience the emotion associated with their expressions. In Strack’s work those with even a forced smile felt happier and found the cartoons funnier than did those who were forced to frown. To get even weirder, Richard Wiseman160 posted a series of jokes on a humor website. The basic template of the joke was that there are two cows in a field. One cow says, “Moo,” and the other cow responds, “I was going to say that.” When this joke was modified with different animals, by far the funniest was two ducks sitting in a pond. One of the ducks says, “Quack,” and the other duck responds, “I was going to say that.” It was indeed the “k” sound heard in “quack” and “duck” that was experienced as especially funny. Once again it may have been the facial feedback (as the pencil experiment) that made the people feel particular mirth. Nikolaas Tinbergen, in his Nobel acceptance speech titled “Ethology and Stress Disease,”161 described and extolled the beneficial effects of a method of postural reeducation called the Alexander method. Both he and his family, in undergoing Alexander’s treatment process, had experienced dramatic improvement in sleep, blood pressure, cheerfulness, alertness and resilience to general stress. Other prominent scientists and educators had also written of the benefit of this treatment. These included John Dewey, Aldous Huxley and scientists like G. E. Coghill, Raymond Dart, and even the great doyen of physiology and earlier Nobel Prize recipient, Sir Charles Sherrington. While admiration from such prominent individuals is provocative, it hardly constitutes rigorous scientific proof. On the other hand, it is unlikely that men of such intellectual rigor had all been duped. F. M. Alexander and Nina Bull had each recognized the intimate role of bodily tension patterns in behavior. Alexander, an Australian-born Shakespearean actor, had made his discovery quite accidentally. One day, while performing Hamlet, he lost his voice. He sought help from the finest doctors in Australia. Getting no relief, and desperate, he pursued assistance from the most influential physicians in England. Without a cure, and given that acting was his only profession, Alexander returned home in great despair.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Every so often, I meet couples who get it, who maintain a sense of playfulness with each other, in and out of the bedroom. They are physically and sensually alive—two people whose desire for one another hasn’t been left to languish. Even in our culture of immediate gratification, they’re able to see seduction as an end in itself. Johanna continues to bewitch her boyfriend of ten years by setting up rendezvous in motels in a nearby suburb. Darnell and his lover pretend not to know each other when they go to a party. Eric describes making love to his wife in the alley of their apartment building when they come home late at night, a furtive pleasure they indulge in before checking on the kids. Every year, Ivan and Rachel go away for a long weekend of consensual adultery with other swingers. “Instead of having secrets from each other, we have secrets from the world.” Jessica has rescued her husband from many lonesome stretches on the road by teasing him on the CB radio. Every morning, Leo tells his wife how lucky he is to be married to her, and he still means it after more than fifty years. For all these couples, playfulness is central to their relationship, and eroticism extends beyond the sexual act. Their lovemaking can be ceremonious or sudden, soulful or utilitarian, vanilla or transgressive, warm or hot. The point is that sex is pleasurable and inviting, not dutiful. They revere the erotic, yet they delight in its irreverence. They like sex, they especially like it with each other, and they take the time to nurture an erotic space. Like all couples, they go through periods when desire is dormant—when they are estranged from each other, or simply immersed in their own projects and in their own lives—but they don’t panic, terrified that something is fundamentally wrong with them. They know that erotic intensity waxes and wanes, that desire suffers periodic eclipses and intermittent disappearances. But given sufficient attention, they can bring the frisson back. For them, love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of their romance, it’s the beginning. They know that they have years in which to deepen their connection, to experiment, to regress, and even to fail. They see their relationship as something alive and ongoing, not a fait accompli. It’s a story that they are writing together, one with many chapters, and neither partner knows how it will end. There’s always a place they haven’t gone yet, always something about the other still to be discovered.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  For some of us, this is when romance starts to work its way back into the fabric of our lives. We remember that sex is fun; it makes us feel good, and it makes us feel closer. As my friend Clara said, “It’s easy to forget that before we were parents, we were lovers. Sex reaffirms that for us. It reminds me that I chose Meyer because I love him; I’d choose him again today. For me, that’s romantic.” But while some couples gravitate toward one another again, others slowly wander off on a path of mutual estrangement. Reclaiming erotic intimacy is not always easy. The case is often made that American parents today, regardless of class, are overworked and overwhelmed. As a consequence, we virtually schedule sex out of our lives, keeping it on permanent standby while we attend to more pressing matters. Family life can feel like ongoing triage: what needs my immediate attention, and what can I put off until later? We constantly sort conflicting demands into their appropriate hierarchical slots: The Crucial, The Important, The Dreamed of, The Ought-to, The Negligible, The Irrelevant, The Whatever, The Trifling, The “Maybe Someday,” The “Not in this lifetime.” Sex often remains firmly at the bottom of the to-do list, never relinquishing its last-place status to other, more mundane tasks. But why does our erotic connection with our partner wind up so demoted? Does it really matter if the dishes aren’t done, or is there something more beneath our mysterious willingness to forgo sex? Perhaps there is something specific about our modern American culture that reinforces the erotic muting of moms and dads. Or perhaps eroticism in the context of family is simply too difficult for anyone to embrace. Parenthood, Inc. Safety and stability take on a whole new meaning when children enter the picture. Read any parenting book about infants and toddlers and what you’ll find over and over is an emphasis on routine, predictability, and regularity. For children to feel confident enough to go out into the world and explore on their own, they need a secure base. Parenthood demands that we become steady, dependable, and responsible. We plant ourselves firmly on the ground so that our kids may learn to fly. Even before a child arrives, we review our life insurance policies, buy a car with air bags, and move into the best (i.e., safest) neighborhood we can afford. We cut down on our drinking, finally quit smoking, and begin to keep something in the refrigerator besides a six-pack and condiments.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I looked down at the page and then up again, confused; I don’t see it, I said, what did I miss? He leaned across the table, reaching his arms toward the page so that his upper body rested on the lacquered wood, a peculiarly teenage gesture, I thought, I remembered making it but hadn’t made it for years, and he pressed his finger to the margin of the page. Here, he said, pointing to a line where the single word She appeared, I made it here and it happens several times, the pronouns are all wrong, and even in his half-prone posture I could see that his whole body was tense. Ah, I said, looking up at him from the page, I see, and then he leaned quickly back, as if released by something, and as though after his revelation he wanted to reassert some space between us. I leaned back too, and pushed the pages across to him again; it was clear that they had served their purpose. Those poems we read in class, he said then, I had never seen anything like them, I didn’t know anything like them existed. He was talking about Frank O’Hara, I understood, whose poems had shocked most of my students, as I intended them to. I had never read anything before, he went on, I mean a story or a poem, that seemed like it was about me, that I could have written it. He didn’t look at me as he said this, looking instead at his hands, both of which were on the table in front of him and in one of which a cigarette had shrunk almost to its nub between two fingers. I felt two things as he spoke, first my usual dismay when talking to gay men here, who were more excluded than I had been, growing up in the American south, where at least I had found books that, even if they were always tragic, offered a certain beauty as compensation. But in addition to dismay I felt satisfaction or pride at having provided (as I thought of it) some degree of solace, and maybe this was the bigger part of what I felt. I had gathered him up, I thought, and this sparked a sense of warmth that started in the central pit of me and then radiated out.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  This left much of the bridge free, and protesters had set up a little carnival there, coloring with chalk on the pavement, painting flags on children’s cheeks. At the far end of the bridge a man with a tuba played a jaunty bass line as another man, in a T-shirt and jeans and an NYC baseball cap, chanted or sang; I couldn’t quite catch the words, but whatever they were they made the people gathered around him laugh and cheer. I paused to watch them, leaning against the rail of the bridge (the Perlovska passed a couple of meters below, a muddy stream), when I felt a hand tentative on my shoulder. I startled a little, I had been lost in my thoughts, and M. smiled at me apologetically when I turned. But I was happy to see her, I surprised myself by greeting her with a hug, though I almost never hugged my students; I could see that she was surprised too, surprised and pleased, she was smiling when I pulled away. She was a senior, a short, lovely girl with auburn hair that hung in curls around her cheeks, a serious student, though she didn’t care much for literature; her heart was in science, she said, in the laboratory, in arcane things I couldn’t begin to understand and that she would study next year in Berlin. Gospodine , she said to me now, isn’t this amazing, and she made a gesture that took in everything, the marchers, the tuba, the gray of the bridge, the slow trudge of the Perlovksa, it’s so good that you’re here. The crowd of protesters flowing past the end of the bridge had thinned, and as we approached them to join the march again M. pointed down the stretch of Tsar Osvoboditel we had walked up, where now three figures with push brooms were gathering litter into large plastic bags, which they piled at each corner for pickup. Can you believe it, she said, they’re making sure the city doesn’t have anything to complain about, have you ever seen the streets so clean? It’s so inspiring, what they’re doing, she said. We joined the march again, which was quieter here in the back; most of the shouting was ahead of us, the drums at the front of the crowd were a distant sound. The tuba on the bridge blurted a few last notes, then stopped.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  WE FOUND THE TREE by chance one late afternoon. We were in a part of town I’d never seen before, on the other side of the city center, looking for a German supermarket, a chain that was popular in Western Europe but that had only the single store in Sofia. It was less a store than a warehouse, really, there weren’t shelves but huge bins people pawed through, everything mixed together, a dozen kinds of chocolate bars in one bin, toothpaste and shaving cream in another. The chain had its own brand of food, and R. was craving something from his life in Lisbon, a frozen lasagna, and when we found it in an oversized freezer case he clutched it to his chest with happiness. It was a long walk from the store to the metro, longer because the sidewalks were caked with ice. R. scolded me as we walked, telling me to take my hands out of my pockets, to keep them free in case I slipped, as for whatever reason I did often enough; if it had been night he would have passed his arm through mine to keep me upright. R. saw the trees first, in the window of a little shop that was full of Christmas decorations. Even from outside you could see how cheap they were, all metal wire and plastic bristles, but R. insisted that we needed one, and ornaments, a box of lights; I want to have a real Christmas, he said. It was maybe three feet tall, it hardly weighed anything but it was cumbersome, I held it in both arms like a child as we walked. I felt a little ridiculous sitting with it on the train but R. seemed proud, he kept one arm around it to hold it steady on the seat between us. When we got home, he wanted to trim the tree right away, and he opened the box of tinsel to find that it was far too large, we hadn’t been paying attention, it was meant for a much bigger tree. He laughed as he wrapped it again and again around the branches; she was swaddled now, he said, it would keep her warm. Her, I repeated back to him, inquisitive, mocking him a little, and this gave him an idea: she needed a name, he said, and he decided to call her Madeleine, I don’t have any idea where it came from but he loved to say it. He liked to give things names, I think it was a way of laying claim to them, and he called out to her every time he passed, almost singing it, Madeleine, Madeleine. He saved the box of ornaments for Christmas Eve, little glass balls we hung from hooks on the branches, tucked among the tinsel. We knelt to arrange them, and when we finished R. sat back on his heels.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  And then, as the statue burned—it was huge, it would take a long time to burn—there was another sound, a salute of drums and a burst of guitars, and then the far corner of the square lit up with floodlights, and there was a new shout from the crowd as it shifted toward the platform where the band had begun to play, four skinny boys bent over their instruments. There was a keyboard as well as the guitars and drums, it was an American sound, I thought, which contrasted with the stone buildings around us, with the pagan fire. R. and I didn’t move as the crowd thinned further; we wouldn’t stay, it was cold and the band wasn’t very good, we would watch the fire a little longer and then go back to the hotel. R. pulled away from me suddenly and reached into his coat pocket, taking from it the packet of raisins he had bought earlier with the wine. I almost forgot, he said, it’s almost too late. He handed me his bottle and took off one of his mittens so he could open the packet. Give me your hand, he said, so I put the bottles on the ground and held it out to him, taking my glove off as he asked, and he counted out twelve raisins, placing them in my palm in a single line from my wrist to the tip of my third finger, then counting another twelve for himself. It was the Portuguese tradition, he had told me, a raisin for each month of the year that had passed, a wish for each month of the year to come. He looked at me and smiled, Skups, he said, feliz ano , and we kissed again. He ate his all at once, tossing them in his mouth and putting his mitten back on before he leaned down for his bottle and turned to watch the fire. But I didn’t watch the fire, I kept my eyes on him, though it was cold and I wanted to be back in the hotel with him, in the warmth of our bed. I took my time, I put the raisins in my mouth one by one, thinking a wish for each, though all my wishes were the same wish.