Children and the Holotropic World

by Kari Kovik

I am relatively new to the Dreamshadow community, but it feels like home, on this side of a year of training workshops. I came in with a background in early childhood music education, looking to deepen my natural inclination as a psychonaut, and to possibly carve out a second career for myself in my second half of life. Somehow, here I have been noticed and honored more for my work with children than I ever expected, so it is a happy surprise that I am being asked to contribute as someone who might bridge these worlds. I don’t consider myself an expert in either (that would be foolish!) but I am happy to ponder the questions with you of what children have to teach us about holotropic states. I never thought of children this way before, but looking back, I see I have often been blessed with experiences I have shared in their presence that qualify. Why? I haven’t tried to explain it, and I won’t try here but I will try to describe the magic and wonder of that state to open up the conversation of what this says about us as human beings. Or maybe just Beings.

As a child, I remember the moment I shared with a male friend of the family, my father’s best friend, Mr. Scott. He was a loving and playful man, and I was very fond of him. I could feel his heart-centered way of being. I think he must have offered me a kind of emotional connection that was not accessible in my father, and I knew it.

In my memory, I am about 5 years old and in my backyard, probably with other children, as it was a favorite neighborhood place to play. My dad had built us a treehouse in a sunken end of the yard with a platform and a rope swing. We would climb up four steps going nowhere but up and jump off of the top one and swing across the yard to drop off at the top of the adjacent hill.

In my memory, Mr. Scott is walking down the hill to where I am standing, coming over for a visit. A visit with me! I see him and run full force in his direction. He catches me and scoops me up with one graceful motion and I am lifted to the sky, looking down at him. I feel a golden light connecting us, the beams of his arms and my body suspended in joy. I fall back into his arms and hug him and say, “I wish you were my daddy.” Sadly, our joyful state takes a cautious U-turn here. His strained voice whispers, “Well, don’t tell your daddy that, OK?” Our play changes after that day to pretend karate fighting, he always approaching me with playful hand chops meant to create a safe distance from that dangerous subject. My father should not know that my heart belonged to another man. I didn’t care that the physicality of the play changed. Mr. Scott was always my buddy, and his heart was always open, so I still loved him, and I knew he loved me.

Later, in my adult years, when I taught a class of eight three-year-olds in a Durham, North Carolina daycare, I had the same experience with a little girl. I was close with all of those children, so I can’t explain why I felt that same moment of golden connection one day when I tossed Carlyn up and caught her. Was it her laughter? Her joy? It is palpable, that connection. I felt it with my daughter Maggie, tumbling and tickling together on the floor, when her joy and mine merged into one, as my voice’s laughter was surrounded by and sat inside of the clear bell of hers. So this is what Joni Mitchell was feeling in that song Cactus Tree.

She has brought them to her senses
They have laughed inside her laughter

It’s a real thing.

Maybe I was born this way, with a special sensitivity to heart connection, especially with children. It’s probably exactly because I craved it so much as a child, and still do. The next-door neighbor’s baby was irresistibly attractive to me when I was seven or eight. He lit up every time he saw me, and the connection we shared was so understood by us both. He was too young to talk but I knew the language we shared: “I see who you are. And by the way, you are beautiful!” One day his mother said, “It’s those shiny balls on the hair ties you wear, Kari. That’s what it is!” She was delighted to figure out why I alone got this reaction of delighted attention from her son. I went home and told my mother that we had “figured it out.” To her great credit my mother said, “No, it is NOT your hair ties, Kari. It’s you he’s smiling at.” I knew that, inside. It was pivotal that my mom for affirmed that reality.

Connection is so little understood in our society, isn’t it still? And our language is not adequate for communicating how deeply we affect each other, and sometimes how mysteriously. We don’t seem to know how to ask for it, or how to purposefully create it outside of some therapeutic settings, at least in my experience. Is emotional connection always spiritual connection? I don’t know.

The most outstanding experience I have had of what I can only guess was a shared holotropic state with children is one which I once shared with Lenny and Elizabeth, which prompted Lenny to ask me to write it down. It happened in the summer of 1987, when I was 23, in a Durham City Parks and Recreation Summer Camp I was helping to hold for mostly inner-city children. I was one year out of college and was struggling to find meaningful work. I had a B.S. in psychology from Duke, but it turned out there was a little in the field I could do with that degree. I had tried to work as a “psych tech” in stress clinics and psychiatric hospital wings, but the field felt inhumane and yes, emotionally and spiritually disconnected. Why was it such a foreign concept to treat people like people instead of a set of symptoms to be fixed with pills? By contrast, the camp position as a “music specialist” in an outdoor summer camp seemed like a refreshing change to bring me closer to people and to our real natures. It was my first job with children, and with music.

I went into the job with my own deep wound this particular summer, recovering from my pain at having gotten pregnant the previous fall “out of wedlock”, with all the shame and rejection that term implies. I was also suffering from the shock of losing that baby at 16 weeks of pregnancy due to unknown causes. The father had been Black (at least one of the possible fathers) and my family had suddenly revealed itself to be less than the perfectly liberal and accepting springboard my mother‘s previous supportiveness had led me to believe. The experience of abandonment on so many levels left me hurt and confused and at the beginning of a painful and lonely journey of individuation I did not see coming.

The summer camp children knew nothing of this. We just shared one hot day after another outside, in one park or another, week after week. I played Ella Jenkins songs from a record I had checked out from the local library and pirated onto a cassette tape, and they clapped along as I taught them the layered rhythms the best I could. I wished I had had more to offer them, but there were a few songs that we really liked, and we did them over and over. The kids rotated through different “stations” in the park each day, and mine was one among other “specialist”-led activities meant to keep these kids busy and our time structured just a little bit. The high-humidity days were unbearable, but surprisingly, if we kept in the shade, most days had enough breeze to almost enjoy ourselves.

On this one day, the children were having free time, probably after lunch, and I stumbled across them in a thicket of bushes. It was open in the middle and big enough for them to circle up in. There were maybe eight or 10 children, mostly 5th or 6th graders as I recall, and maybe some younger. They were passing a balloon around like a hot potato, and it was filled with water. “Miss Kari, come play with us!” They cheered me in. “Everybody pass it around! It’s Miss Kari’s baby!” What were they talking about? My baby? I guessed that all kids pretend that squishy wet balloons are babies, and that their camp counselors are their moms. I stepped into the circle as they delighted in the game of tossing the balloon from person to person in my name. It was only a moment before one child inevitably grabbed it a little too hard, or the rubber stretched a little too thin, and POP! the balloon burst, just like an amniotic sack when the water breaks, and SPLASH! the liquid spilled all over the child and the adjacent ones.

The shock and horror on their faces as they realized what had happened was genuine. They held still the bits of rubber skin on their hands for a moment, and we all stood silent for a beat. Then one said, “Let’s have a funeral! We have to bury Miss Kari’s baby!” This, I cannot believe. I stand as stunned as they had just been, watching as they take the water that is left on the balloon and place it on their faces, drawing streams of play tears down from their eyes with their brown and black fingers and pink fingernails. They pretend-wail and cry as they dig a hole in the dirt and place the rubber remnants inside and cover them with more dirt. They sing and dance and mourn as I watch dumbfounded, realizing, they are giving me the only funeral my baby will ever have. I am washed with their care, their intuitive contact with the deep wound in me, and their healing capacities as young shaman and priests, counselors, and community members to me alone. My spiritual tribe materialized out of nothing. How? How? They probably ran on to other play from that moment. They probably never knew how deeply and profoundly they touched my wounded psyche that day, how they offered connection and solace on the deepest, deepest level.

Are children in a different state from adults? Do they live in a holotropic world? I don’t know. I only know that their openness to the world of imagination and emotion must have something to do with the magic they carry. Does it stop with childhood? I doubt it. What are the conditions that make it possible? I can’t say. I am guessing it has something to do with wholehearted perception, lack of judgment, spontaneity, and play. The willingness to enter into an imaginative space wherein there is no difference between us and whatever we create together doesn’t really matter, but might also, at times, and maybe by accident, be Divine.