One New Year’s Eve a friend and I decide to skip the parties and take part in a midnight yoga class. We’re in a room packed mat to mat with people with the same idea, clad in multicoloured Lycra. The lights are dim, and for an hour and a half we contort ourselves, gently, into a variety of poses. It’s a cold night in San Francisco, but inside, even without any heat, the air temperature warms up amid so many bodies in motion.
As our muscles shake through a long, painful stretch, one of our yoga instructors reminds us that our minds are wonderful at getting work done and sorting out problems, but when we can’t shut them off, they can become our prisons. By tuning into the feelings of our bodies, including embracing this pain, we can live in the present moment, outside of those racing thoughts.
She encourages us to let ourselves feel it as we sink further into the stretch. It’s the New Age version of exactly what science tells us – that we are susceptible to the constant disruption that come from outside of us, and returning to our sense of touch can ground us within our physical realities and emotions.
As midnight approaches, she asks us all to come close to the centre of the room and place our hands on the backs of someone else until we’re linked together in the shape of an imperfect mandala. We chant “Oooooooom” over and over, for half an hour, taking long breaths in between. The room gets even more humid, with so many sweating bodies pressed close to each other.
The vibration of our larynxes is creating what feels like an orb of energy around us, like it’s shaking each air particle. When finally we stop and have a moment of silence, the vibration ceases and calm is restored, like a collective sigh that I can sense deep within me. I turn to my friend on our way out and ask her, “Did you feel that?” She nods. I feel restored and ready for a new year, but almost immediately upon leaving, I’m not sure how to think about our celebration.
In one light, it’s a night of beautiful symbolism and group ritual. What we’ve done here goes beyond fad. Exertion is the simplest, least-conceptual way of short-circuiting our ruminating brains. And group exercise is a way to tap into feelings of unity with each other, especially in a culture where religious practices have fallen out of favour.
By moving our bodies in unison, we feel like we’re creating a shared energy in the room. Meditation, physical discipline, and fasting have long been a part of our world’s religions, and wellness has adopted them for similar reasons.
But through another lens I’m the caricature of a millennial. I’ve paid eighty dollars and much more than that in yoga gear for this privilege of appropriating an ancient spiritual practice. There’s a well-worn argument here about colonisation and oppression. But there’s also something to be said about how the way we use yoga reinforces old racial beliefs about touch.
The truth is that we don’t need to look at some older, purer culture outside of our own to become more in tune with our bodies. There are ancient Western practices that we could also embrace. But by looking elsewhere we continue to hold a superior position as a vision-centered culture while claiming that other, more primitive people are more acquainted with the lowest of senses.
While we say we venerate cultures that celebrate the body, it is telling that we turn to them in an effort to shut our minds – our most precious tools – off. This is just a continuation of racial biases we’ve seen in previous iterations, and it’s as true of yoga as it is of spas that advertise Chinese gua sha, a vigorous scrubdown of the skin to increase circulation, or sauna treatments that mimic Native American sweating lodges. Our feelings about touch are just as conflicted as they’ve always been.
Who is allowed these sensory indulgences is also based on deep prejudices. Social expectations tell us that only some people are allowed to concern themselves with their own comfort; some are expected to live the life of the mind and others are meant to endure more roughness in life. The world continues to feel different to us depending on our gender, race, and social standing.
White women are the most likely to benefit from the litany of tactile commodities available to us. Meanwhile, men are rewarded for toughening themselves. People from marginalised groups might get the feeling that these tactile services are not for them. We use commerce in the same way we’ve always used interpersonal touch to maintain a stratified society.
“Social identities remain but as one is turned into a consumer, they are increasingly shaped and conditioned by patterns of consumption. We identify our real selves by the choices we make from the images, fashions, and lifestyles available in the market, and these in turn become the vehicles by which we perceive others and they us,” writes Joseph E Davis, University of Virginia sociologist in his essay “The Commodification of the Self.”
A friend tells me that I should try out the most outrageous spa treatment they’ve heard of – a flotation tank – where I can lose all my senses, and I immediately know I have to do it. A few weeks later, I’m receiving instructions before heading in. The owner of the facility asks me what brought me here. Book research, I say, but I also want to know what it’s like to be free of my senses.
He tells me about his own life-changing experience, during which he experienced what he termed as “ego death.” Without any sensation, he was able to escape his body, finally understanding what it was like to be only a soul. Ever since, he’s been less afraid of his own mortality. “In the West, we’re so afraid of death,” he says. “We don’t live with it the way Eastern cultures do.” I tell him he’d be surprised that much of the Eastern world isn’t too thrilled about death either.
Soon I’m in a dark room, lying at the surface of a tub of body temperature water filled with Epsom salts, which is supposed to give me the impression that I’m suspended in air. I’ve been told that I’m supposed to lose my connection to my body completely. But the opposite happens; I’m hyperaware of it.
I can still feel the wetness on my skin and how the sound of my breath is magnified by the water. I am so attuned to these small details that they occupy all my thoughts. I change my focus and think instead about what I can’t sense. I can’t tell whether I’m tensing my neck or letting go completely, whether it is my muscles or the salt water that is holding me up. I’m ruminating.
I try again. I let myself simply be. After soaking for a little longer, I can’t tell where my fingertips end and the water begins. I’m being supported effortlessly, so I feel light and unburdened. Unoccupied with every faint sound and feeling, a new set of thoughts become louder to me.
I start to solve all the problems that I’ve been piling up for weeks and months – how to redo that paragraph I’ve been working on, how long I’m going to stick around in New York, what I hope to do with the next decade of my life. Without any knowledge of the passing of time or the feelings of my body, my mind races, and I can’t believe when it’s time for me to wrap up. I imagine this is what advanced meditators feel, that sensation of levitating out of one’s skin and watching oneself from up above.
Once my time’s up and I’m back outside, it doesn’t take long – minutes, maybe – to feel anxiety creeping up on me again. My phone buzzes, and I remember that the day has flown by, and I haven’t gotten anything done. I make a mental list of everything I have left to do. I wonder whether the float tank was worth it. Was it meant to be enjoyed in the moment, or did I expect to carry its effects for weeks after?
This is the flaw of our perpetuation of the belief that the senses are completely distinct from each other and that we need special services to experience them. When we relegate our enjoyment of the tactile to a corner of our lives, we have to leave it behind when we’re done. The crucial question is whether there’s an alternative to all of these complicated practices, which is to spend time moving and making physical things and embracing embodied forms of human interaction.
Excerpted with permission from How To Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch, Sushma Subramanian, HarperCollins India.
