Friday, Sept. 12, 2003 - 2:01 a.m.

Neck-Deep in Raw Newage

Naka-Ima, part 2 of 2

And Nonviolent Communication was my snorkel. Really. It allowed me to express myself clearly and honestly, without having to struggle with the words. And it gave me something useful to do with others, enabling me to empathize with their distress. Having that set of skills, I could interact as a peer with the teachers and assistants. Naka-Ima was supposed to be about dropping our masks and pretensions and getting real. Though the language of Nonviolent Communication can be stilted, it’s still the realest way I know to be. If I hadn’t been fluent in “a language of the heart” I would have been totally confused, helpless, and utterly dependent on the teachers and assistants to interpret what was going on inside of me. I shudder to think how disempowering this weekend must have been for the students without a similar background.

The day after we arrived, the weather shifted from hot, dry, sunny summer, to cold, rainy northwest winter to mirror the dark November of my soul.

I was really distressed by the spontaneous violent impulses that kept arising in me throughout the weekend. I had not felt that way since I was in high school. Back then, I was a Columbine massacre waiting to happen. Then again, I was not. I’ve always had superior impulse control. I guess a side benefit of being as disconnected as I am is that my thoughts are pretty disconnected from my actions. I’ve never harmed anyone physically, and I can’t imagine I ever will. But in my mind this weekend, I was a total mass murderer psycho killer. I even spied an unguarded double-headed axe lying by a pile of firewood. Ample opportunity to re-enact The Shining, but not tempting in the slightest. That’s not where I’m headed.

In November 2000, I went to a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation course. On around the 8th or 9th day, I started seeing weird images with my eyes closed. The meditation teacher warned us about these. He said if you see anything, just ignore it and return your attention to your breath. These images arise as you eradicate sankaras, which are knots of attachment in the mind/body complex. Sankaras are the source of neurosis. You eradicate sankaras through observing feelings in different parts of your body with perfect equanimity, retraining your self to dispassionately observe your feelings rather than cling to the pleasant feelings and recoil from the unpleasant ones. So I started seeing zombies and fields full of skeletons after several days of meditating. I dutifully tried to ignore them. I guess these visions were some kind of anguish and despair leaving my body. The one I remember most was of a screaming gorilla with huge fangs. I knew that must be the dissipation of the rage I had deep beneath my surface. Since then, I never felt the rage again. Until I showed up at Naka-Ima.

My rage must come from feelings of alienation. I decided to focus the rest of my time there on overcoming my alienation.

Day 3, Sunday

Sunday started with a brief lecture about being “at cause”. It means surrendering to the moment, and then once fully surrendered, being proactive.

The group started singing a doleful song with the words, “we are opening to the luminous love light of The One.” What was weird was that most of the people there already knew the words. From where? I thought the use of the phrase, “The One” was a marvelous triumph of public relations. Not only is it more ecumenical than saying “God”, it’s irrefutable. An atheist can disbelieve in God, but how can you claim to reject a notion as vague as The One? I did not sing along, and just sat there with my eyes closed, seething. “Fuck y’all. And fuck your cult bullshit,” was the thought going through my head, along with images of me shoving the people around me, and cutting their throats. Yeah, throat slashing seemed to be my visualization exercise that morning.

The teachers asked me in front of everybody to share what I was feeling. As if. Some things are better left unsaid. “Not in the group,” I replied.

I jotted down that I was needing acceptance, harmony, ease, and contribution to life.

Another short lecture on the difference of living “from damage” (passive, whiny, reactive) versus living “from vision” (proactive). Vision means an inner knowing that something else is possible. Proactive vision is more powerful than reactivity.

During the break, Larry, one of the teachers came up to me and asked me how I was doing, and what had been going on for me such that I wasn’t willing to participate. I told him that I was feeling enraged and I wasn’t comfortable sharing that because I wanted the group to accept me, and I didn’t want to disrupt the harmony of the group, and I wanted to contribute to the well being of the others by not perturbing them with the freaky-ass shit in my brain. I was worried that others wouldn’t feel safe around me.

Larry asked me just what it was I thought other people couldn’t handle. I said, “for instance, right now, I’m thinking about killing you.”

“Tell me more,” prodded Larry.

“Well, I’m imagining sticking a long knife into your head through your eye socket, and then breaking your neck,” I confessed.

Larry asked, “do you think there’s a chance you might act on these feelings?”

“No chance at all,” I replied confidently.

Larry said, “you’d be surprised what people are able to hear when you’re completely honest. Telling it all gets through to people’s hearts. How do you feel now?”

“I feel immense gratitude. My need to be heard and accepted has been met.” I was really impressed by Larry. He just listened to me with total compassion and didn’t wince once.

We were split into twos and took turns answering the questions, “what do you value?” and “what’s important to you?” I liked that exercise.

Then 4 people went on stage one at a time to say what they were feeling in the present moment, just like yesterday.

We danced The Wave again after lunch. Once more, I thought it was rather pointless, but I was grateful for a chance to get my blood moving, get some oxygen in my system, and for the respite from contrived interactions with people. The Wave is nothing more than the idea of playing one flowing-sounding song, followed by one staccato song, then one chaotic song, two totally dorky songs, and finally a song that reminds one of stillness. And Gabrielle Roth has the nerve to charge money for this, and make like she invented something profound. It’s supposed to be all spiritual or some such shit. Whatever. It’s just dancing.

During the dance, one guy picked up a bronze statuette of Ganesh. Another guy came over and picked up the marble statuette of Shiva, and made it talk in a high-piched voice to Ganesh. My heart was warmed to see this irreverent sacrilege. I accused them of playing Barbies. “We’re not playing Barbies,” one protested. “These are action figures.”

Then there was an exercise in which every student took a turn on stage while everyone else told that person what they thought of them. My instant reaction was, “that’s not NVC!” Marshall Rosenberg says that you should never hear what someone thinks of you. Instead, hear the feelings and needs underlying that person’s comments. I decided that’s just what I would do when it was my turn on stage. I couldn’t imagine any useful information could be gleaned from virtual strangers telling you what kind of person they think you are.

Anarchy Man was told, “you’re like a Jehovah’s Witness with a fart pillow.”

When it was my turn I got:

“You have a beautiful mind.”

“I think deep down inside, you secretly like people.”

“I’m guessing you have a whole Dungeons and Dragons universe inside of you.”

“You want to change the world, but you lack faith in humanity.”

“You have a lot of tension in your spine, neck and shoulders.”

Some of those comments seemed more apt than others. Maybe this exercise was slightly less than useless.

Then we formed into falsely-called “triads” again. In addition to just talking, many students began loudly wailing and primal screaming. How does one do that? It’s like the teachers pronounce it time to let it all out, and some people just perform on cue. In some groups the screaming/crying person had other people’s hands on them, sometimes forming webs of group members with their hands on one another. Several times I saw an assistant moving her hand over a student as the student wept loudly. I was tempted to write this off as New Age hooey, but I remembered how Prior Tenant did that to me once, passing her hand over my torso without touching it, and how that caused all this emotional pain to rise to the surface. I had to concede that there might be something to it, though I have no idea how it works.

A man in an adjacent room was pounding something while screaming in such mortal agony, it sounded like someone being nailed to a cross.

When it was my turn, I told my group that I wanted to resolve my feelings of alienation. The only trouble was, I wasn’t really feeling anything at the time, aside from a general sense of contentment. We talked around it some more, but still nothing. Why couldn’t I be like the others? I was ready to primal scream with the best of them. I was completely prepared to embarrass myself and I was at peace with the notion of abandoning every shred of self-respect. But I can’t seem to cry on cue. At the end, I was finally feeling something, but it was just frustration and disappointment at wasting the time.

The assistant who had interviewed me on the first night was on hand to assist me when it was my turn, but I sent him away because I wasn’t comfortable with him. Later I regretted it, because if he had stayed and creeped me out like before, at least I would have been feeling something worth talking about.

Before dinner, everyone formed a circle holding hands around the table with the food. Holding hands in a circle used to be my number one pet peeve, because it feels so insincere when it’s people I may not know, like, or trust. In recent years, it’s bugged me less, and I’ve joined in occasionally, especially with people I know, like and trust, though it still feels contrived to me. I had tried to join this circle the night before, but someone started thanking the Great Spirit, and someone else got the group singing “Amazing Grace”. I didn’t feel like singing that, nor worshiping no goddamned Great Pumpkin, but I was already locking hands on either side. To get away, I would have had to break the circle. So I just stood there silently with my eyes closed, wincing. After that I assiduously avoided these circles, and put my fingers in my ears while humming to avoid hearing their creepy songs.

Then we had dinner, followed by a lively impromptu drum circle in the dining hall.

Day 4, Monday, the final day

Monday was supposed to be about taking the benefits we’d gotten in Naka-Ima and applying them to our everyday lives. I didn’t know how to begin to participate in this because I hadn’t felt I had gotten any benefits out of Naka-Ima. I kept hoping I would get some grand epiphany at the last minute.

I was a lot less angry on this last day (though the thought of smashing the Hindu statues appealed to me. And even the Buddha statue for good measure.) I still felt profoundly shaken up. All the pain was on the surface, making me sensitive and irritable, like a severe emotional sunburn.

We were split into groups of two students each to take turns asking one another what we do in our lives that is in accordance with our values and the kind of person we want to be, and what we do that gets in the way of that. Then assistants came over to help us think up concrete, achievable near-term commitments we could make to help ourselves along our paths of personal growth. Again, I was at a loss. I had tried meditating a lot, but the results were so unpredictable, and I often found it so frustrating, fruitless, and time-consuming, that I’m not confident it would be an effective strategy for now. Yoga subtly but reliably gives me a slightly better attitude, but with Anarchy Man crashing on my floor these days, I’d have to either wait until the afternoon when he wakes up, and then be unselfconscious enough to do it in front of him. It takes up a bunch of time too. I could read my list of affirmations. I get a lot of instant benefit out of that. But I’d probably do that anyway. Is it important enough to bother committing to? I hemmed and hawed, and 3 assistants threw assistants threw out suggestions to me until I ended up committing to taking a walk to the post office every day. What a lame-ass commitment. But I thought it was better than none, since I had to commit to something.

We were brought back together in a large circle again to declare our commitments to the group. When it was my turn, I said mine. I felt like shit as I said it. I didn’t believe that taking those walks was necessarily the best use of my time, and I was thinking I could always renege if I changed my mind. When I realized that planning to renege is no commitment at all, I was disgusted with myself and needing integrity. I asked for a chance to speak again.

“When I made that commitment, I was lying,” I confessed to the group. “I just wanted to be go along with the group, and I felt pressured. I thought I had to come up with something, but my heart wasn’t in it. So all I’m willing to commit to is to think about what might be in my best interest to commit to.” The group was stunned and hesitated for a moment, and then affirmed what I said by shouting “ho!” while pulling their arms back rapidly.

They weren’t calling me a prostitute. They said this practice came from a Native American tradition. I pondered the politics of cultural appropriation. I don’t buy into the idea that when an outsider copies some aspect of another culture’s tradition, it somehow harms or reduces the originator. But when I thought of how European-descended peoples killed off the Indians, took their land, then built New Age retreat centers on that land, and now think it’s cute to say “ho” while they dance on the graves of indigenous martyrs, I felt really gross inside because it wasn’t meeting my need for integrity.

The students were then told to form a circle holding hands. The assistants formed an outer circle, fencing us in. The teachers told us that we were about to have a ceremony to affirm our commitments. We were to be each given a smooth rock as a symbol of our commitment, plus there was going to be a wonderful surprise.

“What the hell am I doing here?” I thought to myself. “I just undid my commitment. I have nothing to affirm. I totally do not belong in this circle. I took the hands of the people on either side of me, and brought those hands together and joined them. I ducked out of the circle.

I tried to find a place in the back of the room to sit down and observe these events as an outsider. Before I could get settled, the group started singing one of those hideous Pagan songs. In an instant, I was so out of there.

I don’t know what it is about Pagan chant/songs that cause such visceral revulsion in me. Is it the religious aspect I don’t like? I doubt it, since I visited Yogaville for a day once and gleefully joined in Hindu chants (“hare Krishna, hare Rama,” etc.) which I totally did not believe in, but it was so happy and upbeat that I had fun. Maybe it’s the depressing minor key. But most of the rock songs I love are in a minor key. Maybe it’s the droning repetition of them that connotes to me a mindless acceptance of fate, an attitude which I think conflicts strongly with my needs for critical discernment and bold inspiration. In any case, Pagan songs reliably give me a severe case heebee-geebees, and I can’t stand hearing them.

The song had but two lines: “I am remembering, I am remembering who I am”. So who you are is what the group says you are? They repeated these two lines for over 20 minutes through the ceremony. I’m sorry, but that’s gotta be seriously hypnotic. It was hypnotic, yet none of the students gave their informed consent to be in such an environment beforehand. I couldn’t bear the irony of all these people formally committing themselves to live their lives “at choice” while thoughtlessly going along with the herd, and doing what was expected of them in a ceremony that was foisted upon them by others.

I spied the surprise coming towards the door as I bolted out of it. It was 3 of the assistants, a man with green and blue spirals painted on his face wearing nothing but a bunch of sticks and leaves around his pelvis, with to women in green dresses in tow who were carrying baskets full of foliage and rocks. Egads, some serious Pagan shit. I so made the right choice to get out of there when I did.

Wanting to get as far away as possible as quickly as possible, I didn’t even bother donning my shoes; I walked all the way down to the parking lot in my socks. Even from that far away I could still hear the maddening chant. I plugged my ears and tried singing to drown out the sound. I paced back and forth singing “Live and Let Die” by Paul McArtney. It made me feel a little better, but I guess I’ve moved past the hate in “Live and Let Die”, so it was less then fulfilling.

After a few minutes, I was surprised to see Anarchy Man join me in the parking lot. I asked him what he was doing there. “It was a bunch of collectivist bullshit,” he explained. “They were chanting, ‘I am remembering who I am,’ and I remembered that who I am wouldn’t take part in a ritual like that.”

[Editor's note: I later heard from Woman of Altitude and one other eyewitness, that only one student kissed the Goddess Guy, and this was a joking thing because they were friends. It had nothing to do with the expectations of the ritual, and no one else kissed the Goddess Guy. Anarchy Man maintains he saw multiple kisses, but I say that two eyewitnesses beats one, so I want to retract my description of mandatory kissing. I'm leaving it in the post however, so that you all can see what I was thinking at the time and I like the way I use sexual assault as a metaphor for voting.]

Anarchy Man, who had remained in the room a few minutes longer than I, related that the ritual involved taking turns going up to the man wearing the leaves, who was continually referred to as “a goddess”. Men and women students alike were then kissed on the lips by the goddess-man. A sensuous open-mouthed kiss. And the so-called goddess dude was a tall, slightly balding, very heterosexual looking guy. No one even bothered to dress him up in anything resembling drag. Hey, even just a coconut shell bra would have contributed something to the illusion, and would have gone well with his leafy briefs. Anyway, back to the kiss. Only after you get kissed are you given the rock that’s supposed to signify an affirmation of your commitment. So if you want to graduate from Naka-Ima, you have to accept the kiss.

How many of the students actually wanted that man to kiss them? A few, maybe. How many of them didn’t want to intrinsically, but were wanting to stretch their boundaries by trying it, as a personal growth exercise? A few more, perhaps. I’m guessing that still leaves a majority who just went along with it because of peer pressure. With the loud, incessant chanting, there was no opportunity to discuss personal preferences or boundaries. No way to do anything different without interrupting the process.

It’s hard for me not to think of that ritual in terms of sexual assault. How would a rape survivor feel about being expected to kiss a strange man on the lips? What about how the group operated with an implicit assumption that this was not in conflict with anyone’s sexual boundaries? Did male students who were uncomfortable go ahead and kiss the guy anyway for fear of being labeled homophobic? Again, I’m furious to think that these students may not have received the consideration they may have wanted. What I hate most is how the ritual was structured so that students appeared to do this kissing voluntarily. I’m reminded of one time I was listening to the radio talk show about sex, Love Line. A teenage girl called in and told how she regularly felates her grandfather. Even though she totally loathes doing it, she protested to the show’s hosts that it’s her own fault, because she voluntarily walks across the house and goes up to his room when he calls for her. Yes, she has the autonomy to not do it, but somehow she’s been made to believe she has no choice, and then after her obedience is totally compulsive, she’s made to believe that she’s making a free choice after all. The solution is for her to realize that the belief system she’s operating in is not her own, and that she really does have autonomy and needs to act on it for a change and cease participating in her own abuse.

This, in turn, reminded me of voting. The electoral system is set up for you. You are told that this is how we exercise our freedom. You buy into it. You go into a booth and flip some levers. Whether the candidate you chose wins or not, you have just made another kind of vote, a vote to legitimize the whole system, a system in which politicians are given the privilege of ruling you, and backing up their laws with the deadly force wielded by police. You exercised your freedom by perpetuating the very mechanism that deprives you of freedom.

While they gave a lot of lip service to individual choice, choice was never worked into their program. You either got with their program, or…the only other option seemed to be to leave altogether. There must have been other possibilities, creative ways to participate on one's own terms, but that would have required considerable bravery to interrupt the proceedings and make requests. So individual autonomy was respected, but in no way encouraged.

Anarchy Man wanted to leave. So did I, but I wanted to get my notebook and shoes from the classroom, and I didn’t want to go in there until the ritual was over. So we waited in the smoker’s shelter because there were some chairs there. I looked with dread at the goddess man and his silent female escorts walking toward us with slow, deliberate, ritualistic steps. The goddess man stood before us, holding aloft a rock in each hand. He took a deep breath and began speaking like a witch doctor, “these rocks embody the life force of your commitments. I offer them to you…”

“Hey,” I interrupted, “Ethan, your name’s Ethan, right?”

I got no response from the goddess man.

I continued, looking him dead in the eyes, “I’m feeling really frustrated right now because I want to connect with you in a real way. Would you be willing to talk to me in a normal way?”

Goddess man went on as before, “I lay these rocks at your feet. May the energy…”

“Dude,” I interrupted, my voice choking, “it’s nothing personal, but I just can’t stay here if you’re going to keep talking to me like that.” I walked away rapidly, extremely upset and holding back tears.

Goddess man continued talking some ritualistic mumbo-jumbo at my back as I retreated. In a moment of total emotional freak-out, I spun around and flipped him the middle finger, screaming, “FUCK YOU!!!”

By then the chanting had ceased, so I ducked back into the classroom to retrieve my notebook and shoes. Larry, the Naka-Ima teacher, came out to ask me how I was doing. I told him how the chanting scared me, how I regretted flipping off Ethan, and how I was feeling angry and frustrated because I was needing consideration. Larry took it all in with perfect compassion, and asked for more details about how things could have been different to meet my needs. I thanked him for listening, and told him I was feeling so grateful because my need to be heard, and my needs for consideration, acceptance, and empathy had all been met.

Larry said, “you know, we like to think of Naka-Ima as a ritual, but in our brochure, we make it sound like a workshop.” He said that now he can see how their lack of clarity caused my misunderstanding.

Ethan came over, still in goddess gear. I told him, tears coming down my face, “I’m so sorry for giving you the finger. I really want to respect you.”

Ethan replied, “I don’t feel hurt at all. I just want you to know that what I did back there came from my heart. I see this great life energy in you, and I wanted to honor it. And I respect how you maintained your boundaries. I want you to honor that truth inside of you.”

Wow, I felt totally heard once again. I felt fine giving him a big hug to make up.

Naka-Ima reminded Anarchy Man of the Simpsons episode where Marge went to an anger management class, and the instructor announced the day’s schedule: “First we break you down, then we build you up, then we break you down, then lunch, then we build you up, and we break you down again, and then if there’s any time left, we build you up again.”

This may not have been intentional, but by never announcing what was scheduled until right before each exercise, this gave considerable power to the teachers and assistants, while keeping the students in the subjugated role of passively accepting what they were told to do, while in a permanent state of confusion.

The following is my most vital paragraph:

This experience has caused Anarchy Man and I to ponder the nature of authority and cultural conditioning. Naka-Ima exhibits cult-like tendencies not because Naka-Ima is different from the healthy rest of the world, but rather because the organizers and participants are just habitually reproducing the cult-like relationships intrinsic to our culture at large. The teachers, after explicitly stating that they’re fallible, and don’t know everything, and are still learning themselves, proceeded to act like experts. Their expertise was unquestioningly accepted by the people playing the role of students. It’s how we were all raised, to either take orders or give them. Naka-Ima is therefore probably less like a cult than any nuclear family chosen at random.

Anarchy Man and I decided to split right away. Naka Ima was virtually over and all we’d miss was the request for donations and the goodbyes. After what we’d been through, neither of us felt like rejoining the group in the classroom.

We drove fast back to Eugene and ate some beef at Taco Bell. Anarchy Man remarked, “dude, you flipped off a Pagan god.”

“Goddess,” I corrected.

I felt very emotionally shaken and hurting inside, even though I had made up with Ethan. Talking about what went down with Anarchy Man and another friend afterwards changed my perspective considerably. While I was there, I realized that I had been judging everything in relation to what the group had been doing, and what seemed to be expected of me. Now I had the insight, “why should I presume they’re the center of all meaning? I should be the one deciding what’s right for me!” I was ashamed that I had let the Naka-Ima people define things for me to the extent I had. That night we attended our Nonviolent Communication practice group, a group where I feel empowered, where I know the rules, and I know what’s going to happen next. I got some good empathy and felt like I was starting to heal from the trauma.

The good news is that I just got an email from one of the Naka-Ima organizers saying that they plan to change that ceremony for future Naka-Imas.

I don’t want to completely write off the content of Naka-Ima. Most of the concepts presented there I had encountered other places before, and a lot of it I had already incorporated into my lifestyle. I’m still not perfectly accepting of the present moment, still not completely unattached, still not completely “at cause”, but I had been working on those very things before Naka-Ima, and will continue to do so afterwards. I can see how something like Naka-Ima, an isolated weekend retreat where people try to connect in an authentic manner with one another and heal their emotional wounds, could be immensely beneficial to a lot of people. I started to imagine what Naka-Ima would look like without the crypto-authoritarianism, an event that actively encouraged the free choice of individuals at every moment, and that included optional exercises to specifically strengthen people’s ability to maintain independent thought and voluntary cooperation in the face of authority and peer pressure. Its focus would be on autonomous self-re-creation in free association with others of your own choosing, on your own terms.

I hope that the people we left behind at Naka-Ima don’t think that the reason Anarchy Man and I left early is simply because we are self-identified anarchists, that anarchists compulsively rebel against all structure real and imagined, that we were just mindlessly acting out unresolved conflicts from our childhood, that we just have some kind of psycho-spiritual pathology. Anarchy Man enjoyed the weekend more than I did, and I, for one, am frequently willing to follow laws I agree with, and participate in group activities I feel like participating in. The difference is, perhaps, that as anarchists we’ve devoted a little more thought to personal autonomy, and we’re conscious that every individual, actively or passively, is making decisions every waking moment. We know we’re free to decide to go along with what others are doing, or to go our own way if the group does not suit us.

What did I get out of all of this? The only thing they taught that I didn’t know before was to take a deep breath every time I feel stressed. I don’t know if it actually helps, but it gives me something to do, and just having something to do helps a little. I also learned that I’m still carrying around this emotional pain from long ago, and that to my chagrin, I must not have resolved it like I had thought. And I learned that I can use Nonviolent Communication effectively even when I’m extremely upset. It was definitely a learning experience, but think I learned despite Naka-Ima, not because of it.

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