Floating on my back, my Watsu practitioner holds me up and moves me gently through the water, making sure my head stays above the surface so that I do not get water up my nose. Watsu, or water shiatsu, is a kind of therapy performed in water, but I have been going to Watsu sessions at the Beit Zayit pool to celebrate special occasions, like my birthdays, to enter into a dream state, to sink to the depths of my subconscious and to emerge anew.
The pool is an infinity pool at the moshav Beit Zayit near Jerusalem. It is inside a beautifully designed wood structure, with a large picture window that overlooks the green hills, with a seasonal reservoir in the valley, that fills up with water during the winter rains, but drains by the end of the summer.
**
2008.
Watsu
- in an infinity pool overlooking the Beit Zayit reservoir
I lie here in water, bathed in light, swayed
like seaweed,
swung out in an arch, then
hauled back
to my watsu teacher’s breast
and for a moment I become a baby once more
(the one who almost died at birth)
while I am filled with relief, oh what a relief,
at not having to stand guard
in order to stay alive
With no feet on the ground, I dissolve
like that photo with my head blurred.
A winged bird,
a skin diver, I hover
in outer space, as my smile ripples out to the reservoir
in the valley below
Then my teacher stops all movement
and I become a rock, my lungs are hard,
my chest is sinking, and I hear my mother cry she’s tired
of being blind, of staying alive
too long
If only I could hold her in my arms
and let her dive
beneath the surface with me
to sleep, at last,
in this sweet, wet silence
***
yes, I took my camera into the pool to take this shot...
May 10, 2018
Returning to the same pool to celebrate my 71st birthday, I chose to do “water dance” – a dance that takes you underwater, sometimes just under the surface, then turning you upside down, letting you touch the bottom of the pool - with a clip on your nose, to make sure you don’t get water up your nostrils. You start out as in the regular Watsu, on your back, with slow movements, until the practitioner feels you are ready for the dive.
I am a swimmer, at home in the water, but have never done any scuba diving, even if I grew up on an island in the coral-rich Caribbean. Perhaps this is what is it like, to be in a world of total silence, to experience a sense of space that extends into infinity. Even if I kept my eyes closed, and there were no corals in this pool, I would see the colors of the sun penetrating into the water, in many sparkling hues of reds and oranges. If not a scuba diver, then I was a fish myself, a manta-ray with spread out wings, at times a speeding shark.
Was it an examination of complete surrender? Of finding out what it is like when you almost reach the point of drowning, and then breach the surface again, taking a first breath, like a newborn?
It was the first time I had a male practitioner. Now, contrary to my experience in the poem above, I did not have a sense of being mothered like a baby, of letting go of the heavy burden of responsibility for my own life.
Still, here was a man holding me underwater, moving me around according to his will – and I gave him my complete trust. I trusted that he would read the signs when I needed to come up for air. I was totally in his hands – a situation that could have been frightening – a woman being held underwater by a man.
I did not panic when I felt the need to breathe before he brought me back up again, a couple of times I let him know with a gesture, almost all the time he could sense it. Later he tells me that it is a human reflex of the midriff to feel we are out of air, and that we have another two or three minutes of air left after that reflex, and you can be trained to expand your ability to free dive. Who knows, maybe one day I will take such a course.
I thought of the time when I was still a student in the Boston area and attended a workshop at MIT led by the dancer Ann Halprin and her husband, the architect Lawrence Halprin. We were split into two groups, according to gender – and each group was asked to create an environment for the other. The women created a soft, caring, womblike place for the men. The men, on the other hand, stood in two parallel rows, with their arms stretched out, clasping each other’s hands, bouncing us women across this row, from one end to another.
Many of the women – it was the late sixties, the beginning of feminist consciousness – were upset about being thrown about, roughly manipulated by the men, that the men should create a space that so typically showed their power and control. But I was flying, going off into the air like a trapeze artist, letting go completely. It was the men who were working for me, I felt– I was the one who was using their efforts for my own exhilaration, for my freedom from gravity.
And here too, in the water dance, it was the practitioner, who happened to be a man, who was working to create this incredible sense of renewal for me, to celebrate my 71st birthday.
****
after the Watsu session, you are invited to enjoy an open air hot tub overlooking the beautiful landscape
September 22, 2018
Another session, now to celebrate my friend Doreen’s 81st birthday.
Watsu brings up all sorts of feelings and thoughts from the depths of my consciousness. This time they were thoughts of death, more so than birth – and not my mother’s as in my poem, but my own. It was a very peaceful, sweet death - just dissolving into the waters, spreading out into the universe. A slow dimming of the lights, into total serenity.
A death without anxiety. I understood there is nothing to fear, if you don’t fight it, if you can wholeheartedly accept it and just let go. This is what Watsu is all about – letting go. Like going to sleep. Like going under in swimming before you come up again for air. Little deaths. The French la petite mort refers to “the sensation of orgasm as likened to death." (Oxford English Dictionary)
It is the reaction of fighting back - an instinctual reaction of survival - that causes such anxiety. The big question is, when do know you reached the point when fighting back is useless, when there is no hope of being saved?
I admire my father for letting go. With cancer, at 79, he refused treatment, not wanting to become dependent on doctors and medications, and in the end, to die in hospital. He said he had lived a full life, there was no reason to extend it artificially. It is a lesson in acceptance that I learned from him.
**
January 8, 2020
This time I had my Watsu session in early January, rather than on my birthday in May – perhaps to usher in the New Year.
And this time, it was not around sunset, with the magnificent colors through the picture window that overlooks the Beit Zayit reservoir below - but on a cold, and heavily rainy night. After coming in from the bitter cold outside, the heated water in the pool warmed us up, my friend Loraine and me. The water was even much warmer than the air above the pool, in the semi-dark enclosed space in which the pool is located.
Again, I asked for “water-dance”, which takes you below the surface. Yael, my Watsu practitioner, told me how she would signal me when to take a deep breath and close my mouth – to get ready to take the dive.
Coming down from the cold darkness of the air above the water, I suddenly was in a world that was warm, and bright. Most of the lighting in the room came from the sides of the pool, which gave the water a blue effect when you are looking down at it, but when you are under water, the entire world is lit up. It was like turning life upside down, that the deep, the water, was warm and light, when the world above was cold and dark.
To have the world upside down meant that that I felt more at home in the light and warmth that was below the surface of the water. The Beatles sang: I like to be, under the sea, in an octopus’s garden, in the shade. The shade of an octopus’s garden, a comforting place, away from the harsh sun, that of course, would not penetrate to the depths of the sea – only in this psychedelic reality.
In Hebrew, the water surface is called pnai ha mayim, the face of the water, the surface tension that can hold up a water-bug suspended between the air above the depths of the water. Calling it a face, gives it a material presence, makes it substantial. I felt it physically, like a thin film, a membrane, that you must cut through to go under.
In the Watsu pool, I went down, across the membrane, intentionally, willingly. But is the going under like a fall, into the abyss? No, because I am held up by Yael, I do not sink completely. Perhaps more like bungee jumping, where you are attached to a cord – an umbilical cord? – and bounce back. Like in bungee jumping, you choose to fall – knowing you will come up again. And so, you can experience the world upside down, another order of the real that is bright, warm, and, perhaps calling you, like an octopus’s garden.
The same surface tension that creates that membrane, is also what rounds the water droplets in my son, the artist Itamar Mendes-Flohr’s installation that opened around the same time at Mamuta Art and Media Center that January – where he used hydro-phobic materials on his surfaces, to let droplets form, instead of letting the dripping water turn into a flow, little droplets, that, with the force of gravity, follow the floor’s inclinations, and run erratically, like escaping little animals.
from Itamar’s exhibit “that we have forgotten the rain” - at Mamuta Art and Media Center, photo: Itamar Mendes-Flohr
Itamar’s exhibit was inspired by the rain-cisterns of the Hansen House, where the exhibit was held - a former Leper hospital compound where Itamar wandered as a child when the structure was abandoned before it was turned into a vibrant art center where he has been active for several years. As we lived nearby, he would often sneak into the building and explore its dark spaces, something I did not know until he spoke about it in the context of this exhibit. It is amazing that his fascination with cisterns was born independently of my own. The cistern of my childhood memories on the island of Curaçao, the “house of water”, plays a central role in my book, House without Doors (1 ), whose very title alludes to it.
With my love for those underground bodies of water, Itamar has promised to take me down, on a summer’s day and dip in those dark, cool waters of the old cisterns. It was Itamar who had told me about a hidden water-cave in the Jerusalem hills, where he would go to be alone, or mark his birthdays. He drew me a map, but it took me many hikes through those hills, till I finally found it, and went down the steps hewn in the rock.
I let myself sink in the cool waters of this domed subterranean spring. Suddenly, I sensed an orange quiver and was overcome with wonder to spot a tiny goldfish swimming beside me in those dark waters, lit only by the sun filtering through entrance opening. Upon telling my son that I finally found his secret hide-out and marveling at the goldfish I found there, I can’t believe it when he tells me it was he who brought that fish to the spring. Only later, he adds a more utilitarian motive - that spring-lovers like to buy goldfish to plant in the springs, in order to preserve the purity those waters, as the fish feed on water insects.
On a hike in the Galilee, which happens to be on my birthday in May, I let my body down through the trapdoor of a huge underground reservoir engineered by the British to capture rainwater on a paved mountain side, near Tarshiha, in the Galilee – descend on a trembling ladder, and plunge into the dark waters of the underground. I am alone, none of the other hikers has followed me. Struggling to drown my fears of hungry creatures lurking beneath my feet, I swim through the soundless rooms in this house of water, its rows of pillars holding up a horizontal sky, with light flickering through the cracks like stars my outstretched arms can almost touch, as I sink into hazy recollections. A lifetime later, I am born, out of the dark subterranean pool into the sunlight – just as I turn sixty.
Perhaps the night in the Watsu pool has something of being in those underground spaces filled with water - the sparsely lit space that holds the pool would be a cave, a cistern, while the picture window is black and steamed up, with the rain falling outside, so that too encloses me. And the water, warm, secure as I am held up by Yael - a microcosm of the subconscious, that you can enter, and sink into forgotten images, of life in the womb, of birth, of death.
***
My book, House without Doors – was published in Hebrew translation in Tel Aviv, in 2012 by Sifriyat Iton 77. See: http://housewithoutdoors.blogspot.co.il/
website of the Watsu pool in Beit Zayit, near Jerusalem:
https://www.good-water.net/?page_id=106
