RECOGNIZING STRANGERS

By Kate Mabus

Among the list of things Los Angeles is famous for, the dragon tree is not high up there, but it looms intractably in my mind. While visiting this past October for a screening of Life & Breath at the Awareness Film Festival, I was struck by how corporeal the dragon tree looks. Their trunks are so sturdy as to look swollen, the limbs metastasizing into a dense umbrella of sky-reaching fingers. These aren’t really trees at all, but flowering plants that grow in bundles of vascular tissue, rather than the concentric rings that we rely on to decipher the age and history of other trees. Maybe this unruly indecipherability is what makes the dragon tree seem so anthropomorphic. Or perhaps what I was recognizing was an insistence on expansion.

At the arrivals curb of the Los Angeles Airport, I look for a man in a baseball hat and grey hoodie. At his shoulder, I tilt my head forward for a glimpse at his face, as if I might instinctively recognize this person I have never met before. As if he had any reason to recognize me. Better to ask, Are you–? Kyle is a mental health counselor who has been studying holotropic breathwork with Lenny and Elizabeth Gibson for over a decade. We are both here at their invitation, and I can’t help but see him as a more advanced version of myself. I only started practicing holotropic breathwork a year ago, but I have pursued it with an urgency somewhat similar to that of trying to recall a fading dream. For me, breathwork is about making the familiar feel less far away.

Once Kyle and I have covered our basic biographical information, I realize that it could be quite a while before Mustapha, the documentary’s director, makes it through the asphalt snarl that is LAX to pick us up. So I sit down on my suitcase, stabilizing myself on its rough-worn wheels. Small talk, like other activities that stretch the mind, typically starts getting good around the point of physical discomfort. Soon, Kyle tells me about how a near-death experience he had as a teenager led him to study transpersonal psychology and the therapeutic potential of psychedelics.

The writer Hanif Abdurraqib posits that near-death experiences occur not as the clichéd flash of life and all its memories, but as “the future parading itself in front of” our impending demise. That is why a brush with death often motivates people to transform their lives. Abdurraqib’s realization occurred during a bout of airplane turbulence. Holding onto his seatbelt, he remembers how the great Otis Redding died in a plane crash that he might have survived had a malfunctioning seatbelt not trapped him inside the sinking vessel. “No one ever talks about that part,” Abdurraqib writes, “How that which protects us can also be our undoing.”

I wasn’t thinking about this on my flight, because I don’t prefer panic attacks, but now it’s all I want to talk about with Kyle. What should we make of the fact that even the most promising therapeutic tools can inflict unexpected harm? The year before, the FDA rejected MDMA as a treatment for PTSD, despite evidence backing its efficacy, due to claims of bias and misconduct in the clinical trials. It’s devastating to think that people seeking help could have been hurt in the process. Even so, I find it difficult to accept that this would foreclose others from receiving the therapy. Is the potential for harm reason enough to prune the power to heal? The right to grow? It strikes me how exceptional it was that, just around 300 miles North of here, Stan Grof created holotropic breathwork out of the vacuum of LSD research following the 1970s crackdown.

Mustapha arrives in a silver minivan with Lenny, Elizabeth, and their son Thad in tow. Living in New York City, I rarely get picked up from the airport anymore, but I always long for this creature comfort. Packed like sardines, we set off into the interstitial labyrinth that surrounds LAX. On the way to the hotel, we make a pit stop to pick up flyers for the film and a lobby card that Mustapha had made for the screening. The image is a woman wearing a deep blue eye mask, her head in the clouds, as if weightlessly levitating above a cumulus cushion. Her profile is, well, breathtaking, her sharp nose and pursed lips rising over the sky like mountains. Is that a model? Elizabeth chuckles. Mustapha insists that the image is from the film, with the obvious exception of the clouds, which Michelangelo might have painted. Elizabeth is still skeptical, as am I. Real life is never so lovely.

Ahead of this trip, I have steeled myself against any Shangri-La. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to be charmed by my present circumstances. Upon check-in at the hotel, the concierge offers us champagne. Mustapha asks for her name, which I will come to learn he does with everyone, no matter how fleeting their interaction. As logistics get sorted and room keys distributed, I catch up with Lenny. Anyone acquainted knows he can stretch a few minutes into a complete lesson on psychology, mathematics, or mythology. Having only known Lenny for a month, I already feel attached to him as a mentor. He holds his head at an angle, a consequence of overcoming throat cancer, creating the ever-present effect that he is gazing at you encouragingly or, on occasion, conspiratorially. As I break off for my room, I wonder whether this is true familiarity or simply the impression of it. I hope I won’t by the end of the trip.

On the other side of the bed is a balcony that overlooks the beach. I imagine how idyllic it would be to finish my champagne in the sea breeze. Sliding the door open, I hold fast to my glass, knowing that the quickest way to lose a nice thing is carelessness. Under my grip, the glass gives way slightly. Plastic, just like everything else in this town, I think in an Old Hollywood croon. I may have been fooled, but I’m still up. The sun is about to set over the Pacific Ocean. I decide I’ll watch from the beach, which is just across the road, on the other side of a narrow park. However, once I reach the end of the grassy stretch, I realize that not only is there a 30-foot drop separating the footpath from the sand, but a four-lane highway and about a quarter mile of parking lot. Now I feel betrayed. A mirage might have been better.

I try to focus on the bright orange pinpoint before it slips into the sea, but the mountains of Malibu are far more remarkable. Beyond them is the Esalen Institute, where Lenny and Elizabeth studied with Stan while he was developing holotropic breathwork. When I think about breathwork and the act of documenting it, through film or writing, time tends to collapse. It has been decades since Stan invented the technique, yet the Gibsons seem to be shepherding a movement still in its nascent stage. Even so, I regard holotropic breathwork as something ancient and inalienable, forecasting a future where it serves the same function as meditation or even dreaming. By the time I turn my gaze back to the beach, the blip of a sunset has already vanished into haze.

We regroup for dinner with one of Mustapha’s longtime friends, David. Except for Lenny and Elizabeth, whom I came to know and cherish during a week-long training in Pennsylvania earlier that month, I am still getting acquainted with everyone. I start to notice that, in addition to addressing everyone by name, Mustapha has the quite personable habit of introducing himself with a handshake. It’s a diplomatic way of carrying oneself and, in the context of this city, could easily be mistaken for the trademark of a celebrity. In fact, the restaurant’s host asks as much, certain that he recognizes Mustapha. This will become a motif of our trip. On Saturday night, we go to a classic Italian spot, which is to say a restaurant of entirely American invention with doughy pizzas and huge portions of spaghetti marinara. Our waitress swears we’ve been there before. She is a sweetheart, so it’s easy to suspect this is her way of making all customers feel at home. However, the more she insists, the more uncanny the situation becomes.

After dinner, we walk to the Illusion Magic Lounge to watch some of the other films featured at the Awareness Festival, which celebrates stories of human experience that defy convention and inspire interconnectedness. The venue is typically used for magic shows, and it shows. The walls are coppery green and lined with old-fashioned lithographs in gilt frames. The Harry Houdini posters may be true antiques, but even I, a magic dilettante, know that David Blaine is anachronistic to the aesthetic they’re going for. The chairs are tufted velvet and the chandeliers crystal. The overall effect is carnivalesque.

Three films are showing in this screening: a short drama about a Marine struggling to square his identity as a Muslim-American with his actions in the War on Terror, a documentary about trauma doctors in Ethiopia teaming up with an American doctor to combat the epidemic of deadly injuries, and another documentary about recovering the legacy of the Kalamazoo Gals who crafted some of today’s finest vintage guitars during World War II. Lenny finds something in each film that relates to him personally, which his son teases him about. To see yourself in everything, for me, carries the risk of hubris. The fear being that I might misjudge reality. But what might I be missing? What magic am I denying myself?

While the lines Lenny drew between each film and his own life were faint, they were not altogether invisible, at the very least because he had traced them. In transpersonal psychology, this tendency is called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences. Many psychologists, including Stan, think about synchronicities not as a phenomenon but as a way of seeing, a mechanism for sense-making. It is a skill that can be honed or shocked into the system, not unlike in near-death experiences, for the sake of rendering our lives more numinous.

The next day, I retrace the route I carved along Abbott Kinney the day before. I feel deracinated in Los Angeles, and walking helps me establish myself in new spaces. For long stretches, I only share the sidewalk with food delivery robots. I run into more than a few Cocos, and some others with similarly chic names like Esther, Padma, and Otto. They remind me a bit of my neighborhood in Brooklyn with its penchant for naming restaurants after old ladies: Miriam, Gertrude, Margot. Really, I’m just forcing something to feel familiar.

It seems as if there is a dragon tree on every corner I turn, their branches spilling over fences and yards like mitosis run rampant. I remember something Elizabeth said during training, about imagining the trauma a cell experiences when dividing. Might our bodies hold on to some memory of that? That could be one explanation for how apprehensive these trees make me. Although, I take it more as a thought experiment to open up the idea that we store much more than we’re even aware of. Stan believed these influences, otherwise known as condensed experience systems, could date back generations before we were born. In other words, they go beyond what mainstream psychiatry can solve, as the dragon tree defies dendrochronology.

At breakfast the morning before the screening, my last day in the city of angels (and dragons), we spend a long time talking about faith healers. Lenny grew up in an evangelical household, and Mustapha had been a Pentecostal preacher as a boy, another vocation one could mistake for the signs of celebrity. Eventually, he left religion to pursue a PhD in ethnography before finding his way to film, trading talking at people for listening to them. David, who has joined us again, went to born-again tent revivals as a boy. He remembers each of the church ladies his mother was friends with by their full Christian names, resembling those of delivery robots and brunch spots. His come-away-from-Jesus moment happened around age nine.

It all started with a breath-holding competition among his youth group. David, determined to win, had secretly been breathing through his nose. Once the other kids dropped out, he kept going, testing to see whether the pastor who was judging the competition would call him out. After an implausible amount of time, he grew tired of his own scheme and let out a fake gasp. This was not faith on the pastor’s part, but the forcing of David’s hand. In another moment of spiritual untethering, David tried to get out of a revival meeting by feigning illness. A curious boy, he wanted to inspect the heavy metal stakes that fastened the tent. Instead of excusing him, the church ladies enveloped young David. They put their hands over him and raised them to the heavens, wailing with concern for he was sick, not physically, but spiritually.

An association flashes to my mind: there is a scene in Life & Breath where someone raises their palms to the sky. Was there not? I look to Mustapha for confirmation, and he nods. I can’t remember who it was in the shot, so I make a mental note to look out for it at the screening. I first watched the film while training in Pennsylvania. The Gibsons had already introduced themselves and their work, but I had no clue the full scope of what they had established. Some of the friends I met through training are in the film, but most of the people I didn’t recognize. Set at their home in Vermont, where they have hosted breathwork training for decades, I saw how much wider this network extended. I couldn’t help but think of my second time at the screening as a way to measure whether I was still a stranger to this world.

Of course, it’s when you realize that the world is much wider than you thought that it keeps on growing. People from every period of the Gibsons’ lives are at the screening. Elizabeth embraces a friend she hasn’t seen since they were new mothers together. Now their sons are grown men, and Thad is standing with another friend’s mother, a geochemistry professor who studies the earth sciences but is intrigued by this mystical science of the mind. Mustapha introduces me to a woman who is impeccably dressed in a bright beret and satin skirt. Valia had checked us into the hotel several days ago. She and Mustapha ran into each other at a coffee shop earlier, where he invited her to the screening once again. She tells me that had the run-in not happened, she wouldn’t have come, not thinking it a serious offer. Now that’s a synchronicity I could believe in.

In the film’s opening sequence, photographs shutter past from the Gibsons’ lives, their home in Vermont, and the many mandalas created there. It is a distillation of their legacy, but for me it also feels like a glimpse of possibility: a place to visit, a community to join. It is both the flash of life and the future parading before your eyes. I see friends from training who I had met on the other side of grief, processing the sickness of their loved ones in a time before I knew them. A shot of the deck where, I now knew, the idea for this film had come about. And, finally, the scene I had been waiting for, confirmation of that vague image I had of raised hands. Except now I recognized something new, a familiar face. It was Mustapha who held his hands to the heavens.

Mustapha had not intended to put himself in the film. However, he tells me that there was a moment while filming a session, when everything was still, and light was peaking through the room, that he started to cry with the camera on his knees. It was then that his cinematographer suggested Mustapha let him take over filming so he could participate. His sharing this reminded me of a profound experience I had while sitting for a breather in Pennsylvania in a pocket of sunlight. About two-thirds of the way through the session, the breather put out their hand in a reaching motion. I couldn’t figure out if they needed water, or a tissue, or simply space. I began to panic at my inability to interpret their needs and predict their next moves, so I shrank out of their way. It wasn’t until Elizabeth gently prompted me that I realized they were reaching for me, for a hand to hold. I grasped theirs instantly, scrunched into an awkward position right in the sunspot. In the light, I began to weep for this instinct to fear connection. I hoped that I would never forget this moment. The film, far and away from proving familiarity, served as the cherished reminder I needed.

After the screening, friends and festival attendees are eager to speak with Lenny and Elizabeth. Meanwhile, I float around the magic lounge looking for an open hand. Eventually, I find Valia, who is also solo. She had brought a friend, but he was so overwhelmed by the film that he had to leave halfway through. Valia explains that he recently lost his mother, as she had a few years before. Perhaps his wound was too raw for the film’s discussions of grief. She, on the other hand, felt inspired for the first time since her loss. Mark my words, she tells me, I won’t be able to sleep tonight. We exchange numbers and promise to be in touch, but I doubt we will.

I catch up with the geochemistry professor, who is ready to try holotropic breathwork after watching. She tells me that the first time she met the Gibsons, she was skeptical about the practice but was so inspired by the couple’s insights that she immediately read everything she could on Stan Grof. Another audience member asks me if the Gibsons ever teach on the West Coast. There is clearly something about Elizabeth and Lenny that magnetizes people to them. Indeed, they are a study in contrasts — she congenial, he eccentric — like watching interlocking gears. However, to only focus on their verve is to miss the fantastic machine they are propelling, the generations of practitioners and teachers they are fostering to carry on holotropic breathwork.

On my last night in Los Angeles, headed back to my life of ordinary trees and well-trodden routes, I finally feel the vastness of this collective not as unruly or unreachable, but as a reassurance of the many branches and open hands to hold onto when stuck, hurt, or astray. When I arrive back at the hotel with only a few hours until I need to leave for the airport, I receive a text from Valia. She is still awake, as promised, wishing me a safe flight.