Built, Felt, Lived: Healing Within North American

Built, Felt, Lived: Healing within North American Spaces of Retreat Zoë M. Brown Advisor: Sienna R. Craig Department of Anthropology Dartmouth College 2020 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………3 Introduction. Telling the Story…………………………………………………………………4 Background and Methods…………………………………………………………………6 Navigating Healing………………………………………………………………………12 Embodied Healing………………………………………………………………………15 The “Harming Potential”: Notes on Cultural Appropriation, Indigeneity, and Identity……16 Chapter One. Becoming Lost: The Pilgrimage of Place……………………………………...18 “Breathing In” a Place: The Felt Sense……………………………………………………23 The Labor of Retreat: Staff and Employee Communities…………………………………26 “Like Coming Home”……………………………………………………………………29 Chapter Two. Narratives of Sacred Space: Mythmaking, Storytelling, and Culture………...31 The Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans, an Ashram, and the Tales In Between: History and Myth at Kripalu…………………………………………………………………………...43 The “Right” Place: Coastal Positionalities (and Predilections) ……………………………49 Chapter Three. The Container: Generating a Holistic Landscape…………………………55 On Holism……………………………………………………………………………….55 The Container in Practice: Work-Scholars and Gestalt at Esalen…………………………57 “A Garden of Eden”: The Cultivation of Retreat as Permission to Heal…………………62 Holding the Form: Containing (And Cordoning Off) Healing……………………………64 Constructing Separate Worlds: The Retreat Versus “Real Life” ………………………….66 Immersion: Healing Within the Glow of the Container…………………………………70 Integration: Sustaining the Healing Outside the Container………………………………75 Chapter Four. Healing by Connection: Deep Vulnerability…………………………………78 The Permeability of Illness and Healing………………………………………………….78 Organized Vulnerability: Creating Space for Healing……………………………………81 Esalen Massage: Cross-Cultural Connections to “Shamanic” Healing………………….…84 Validating the Dis-eased Experience: Seeing as Healing…………………………...………86 Ephemeral but Deep: Naming the Silent Things…………………………………………90 Social Healing: I’m Not Okay, You’re Not Okay…………………………………………93 Chapter Five. Healing for Whom? ……………………………………………………………95 Country Clubs of Wellness………………………………………………………………95 What Constitutes a “Safe” Space? Who Can Feel Safe? ………………………………….97 “Whose Body Is To Be Enlightened?” …………………………………………………103 Waking Up: The Work of Authentic Inclusivity and Accessibility………………………109 Conclusion. Continuing to Listen……………………………………………………………115 The Glossary. A Vocabulary of Healing…………………………………………………………118 Major Participants………………………………………………………………………………120 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………121 3 Acknowledgments I owe my thanks to a great number of people who guided and generously supported me through this work. I am grateful to Mr. Lawrence Goodman and the Claire Garber Goodman Fund for the Anthropological Study of Human Culture for generously funding my research and making this project possible. I owe the opportunity to pursue this work to the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health and the Esalen Institute, both of which kindly welcomed my research in their spaces of retreat. To my thesis advisor Sienna Craig, who guided my thinking, analysis, and understanding of this project, and patiently edited my drafts while encouraging me to develop my own voice. Her thoughtful words and own ethnographic work initially drew me towards studying anthropology as I sat in the audience of a lecture she delivered during my freshman orientation at Dartmouth. It is not an overstatement to say that without her, this thesis (and likely my passion for anthropology) would not have flourished in the way they did. To Jeff Sharlet, whose course reminded me of my deep love for writing (and reading) during my second year at Dartmouth. As evidenced by the many quotes that frame the following chapters, it is this dance between the arts and the sciences—and the balance between wondering and knowing— that have enabled me to make sense of the wonderfully tangled practice of ethnography. To my friends, who have championed me always, and listened as I developed and wrote this thesis—and then listened more. I’d like to thank Nate Gallagher and Grace Sherrill for their senses of humor, care, and empathy. This thesis would not be what it is without the loyalty and unwavering support of Emily Morin, Sophie Neuhaus, and Madeline Donahue, who are my greatest teachers in the healing power of connection and community. To my family, my enduring source of love and encouragement. To my mom, who was the first to empower me to tell my own story and taught me the magic and life-affirming importance of hearing others’. And finally, to my participants. I am endlessly thankful for their time, openness and vulnerability, and emotional efforts in sharing their stories. While fieldwork can be an isolating and lonely endeavor, I was continuously amazed by the communities at Kripalu and Esalen and the warmth with which they welcomed me into their worlds. It is a privilege to have these meaningful conversations and relationships—which will stay with me long after this project is complete— comprise the core of this work. 4 Introduction Telling the Story We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or to be blind. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then become a storyteller. — Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby Positionality begins before the ethnographic work: it begins with the seeds that grow into guiding questions. The questions that have informed this project stem from my own lived experience of seeking healing, and they continue to drive many of my pursuits, academic and otherwise. This positionality shaped the engagement and dedication with which I approached this project. I worked to remain reflexive, considering where my identity could trouble the line between informed inquiry and analysis versus an investigation shadowed by bias. I’ve spent much of my life telling (and re-telling) my own story. At eight years old, I thought I was going to die. A routine check-up tumbled into a diagnosis and three-day hospital stay. For the first few hours, the doctors around me spoke of my body, named my illness, and gave directions to my parents. But it took my asking before I knew if I would live through the weekend. The term “Juvenile Diabetes” meant nothing to me but sickness, the frightening unknown. After the first twenty-four hours in the hospital, I realized that although I would live, my life would not be what it was. I learned that my condition was chronic—by which I mean interminable. My doctors made ill- timed and upsetting jokes in well-meaning attempts to make me smile, gave me a binder of instructions invented by the American Diabetes Association, and assured me I could live a “normal” life. They left little room for individual response, let alone experimentation with treatment, and gave no warning of the litany of challenges and frustrations I would face by following their rules meticulously. With my diagnosis came the sudden sensation that my body was not my body. In the hospital and at each endocrinologist appointment thereafter—which were scheduled every three months and entailed thorough blood work and tests that would reveal less-than-perfect control over my glucose levels and body—the doctors emphasized that I was to consult with them before 5 beginning any “alternative” forms of treatment. The numbers on my charts and tests took center stage at each check-up. I was disembodied. With time, I began an ongoing dialogue with myself, in which I could sense subtle changes in my own health, identify their source, and search for possible cures. I found a vibrant online community of individuals with Type 1 Diabetes who updated message boards with clues to the answers I sought. My doctors did not facilitate or encourage this dialogue. At first, I craved some hidden cure, but my expectations and hopes shifted with each passing three months, when a doctor would review (and gently reprimand) the results of my lab work. These appointments left me ashamed of my body—which I always failed to control with the proper precision, regardless of my efforts. Still, the litany of tests and questions and forms did not address or give any credence to the bulk of my illness experience. Why was the medicine that kept me alive concurrently making me lethargic, altering my emotional state, and causing interminable weight gain? And if I was following the careful carb counting protocols and food pyramid in the official “how-to” manual, why was my blood glucose impossible to predict? Where was the guidebook for navigating a new social identity as a person with an invisible chronic illness, one that underscored each moment of my days and nights? My story led me to forms of health care deemed “alternative” by biomedicine. I found profound healing in a community of other patients; practitioners of Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, herbalism, and natural medicine who functioned as allies instead of opponents; and yoga teachers, for many years merely voices on video tapes and in books I found at the local library, who empowered me with a new understanding of my body and this illness. The spine of my story has been bound by personal and academic pages in equal parts. In high school, I conducted autoimmune research on diabetes, determined to exert my analytical mind to make sense of

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