‘I’ve spent a lot of years talking,’ says wellness writer Dani Shapiro. ‘I’ve talked in comfortable offices equipped with white-noise machines and decorated with hardy leafy plants so glossy they didn’t look real. I’ve talked on the Upper West Side, on the Upper East Side, and in downtown Manhattan. I’ve talked in an office by a waterfall in Connecticut, where a smelly old Lab snoozed by my feet. I’ve talked and talked to a Woody Allen–worthy cast of shrinks…Dissecting and understanding my history was, for decades, as natural to me as breathing. It has been necessary. Invaluable. Until it stopped working.’ Then, Shapiro found hope in the most unlikely of avenues: complementary wellness.
‘I hadn’t been looking for a healer,’ Shapiro recalls. ‘My tolerance for anything otherworldly is pretty low. And I was okay, wasn’t I? I was happily married, reasonably successful. But I was hungry for something I couldn’t name. Something mysterious that I hadn’t managed to touch during all those years of therapy, but that I could feel was there. Intangible, it was the shift I felt in the rare times I managed to meditate long enough, or when listening to a powerful piece of music. I had come to think of these as moments of grace, a feeling of being part of a greater whole. Virginia Woolf called this the pattern behind the cotton wool of daily existence. In a handful of instances, I’d been suffused with a peaceful and unmistakable sense of connectedness—but to what? I could draw lines and arrows, parallels, diagramming the various ways I had been formed by my history. I had such a handle on it, thanks to a lot of good therapy, that I could have written a memoir. But still, that hunger walked alongside me.’
Shapiro continues, ‘I found myself drawn back to Tamar’s healing room because of the way an hour with her made me feel. My feet, grounded. My mind, ironed smooth. My self, if I may tweak an Emily Dickinson poem, behind myself, revealed. At the end of a session, I’d move through my days, at least for a while, with a powerful sense—it felt ancient and unshakable—of being part of a vast tapestry. Fear, anxiety, guilt, pettiness, and that endless, endless mental chatter—gone. I felt like one of those three-dimensional anatomical models being filled in, rendered solid and whole by the most ethereal of practices.’
‘I’ve come to see Tamar for the fifth, sixth, seventh time,’ Shapiro enthuses. ‘There has been talk of energy fields. Of fairies. Of spirit animals. Of past lives. Words and phrases that I have learned not to overanalyse, because I crave what’s happening here. I am awash with something that feels like knowledge—not the kind that rests on a flimsy parabola of thoughts and suppositions, but rather, a deeper knowing. Yes, as Tamar moves crystals in the air above me; as I feel—actually feel—the energy moving into dark, deadened places. Yes, as she suggests an image, a visualisation to help me when I speak in front of large crowds. Yes, to the Chinese herbs that will strengthen my spleen. Yes, yes, to a wise old owl. In yoga philosophy, there is a Sanskrit word, samskara, which loosely translates as “scar tissue.” They are stubborn, the stories we carry in our bodies. One by one, I felt these stories becoming lighter. Letting go.’
Shapiro admits, ‘It’s hard to make sense of this healing business. In fact, sense doesn’t really enter into it. I have, in the past couple of years, found other guides into the world beyond consciousness. Because once you’ve had this kind of experience, you can’t help but want more. You hear about a great psychic, a talented astrologer, a tarot-card reader who is uncannily accurate, and your ears perk up…Who can resist the lure of trying to peek into the future? It’s enormously seductive, this sense that past, present, and future are all unspooling at once; that time, rather than being a continuum, is a vast field, the pattern behind the cotton wool, accessible only if one is exquisitely tuned in.’
Comments are closed.