When I finished he enthusiastically said, “There's someone you have to meet. Brugh—pronounced B-r-e-w—Joy. His real name,” Scott added, smiling. “Brugh was a successful internist in Beverly Hills. Then, when he came down with a severe pancreatic disease, his doctors wrote him off. Incredibly, through a process of meditation and self-healing, the disease disappeared. This inspired Brugh to give up his practice and begin conducting workshops on psychic and spiritual development. Why don't you do a retreat with him? It might really help you understand what happened with Christine.”
It was a big step even to consider attending one of Brugh's workshops. They were two weeks long, tucked away in the high desert, two hours' drive from L.A., and during that time I would be asked to cut off all communication with the outside world. If I attended, this would be the first time since opening my practice nine months before that I would leave my patients in the care of another psychiatrist.
Aside from such considerations, however, my reticence went deeper. After my premonition about Christine I didn't know where to go next. I wanted to open up and yet I was conflicted. My medical training had taken me so far away from the psychic that the idea of reexamining that part of my life felt dangerous. I was afraid to begin, wary that I might jeopardize everything I had worked so hard for. I held on for dear life to the identity I had carved out for myself: as a traditionally trained medical doctor. The arguments in my head wouldn't shut off. The difficulty was that for so long I had come to view my dilemma in all-or-nothing terms. Every scenario I constructed was the same: The psychic and medical worlds could never mix.
I was driving myself crazy. I had to do something. Finally, I followed Scott's advice. Three weeks after our conversation I called Brugh Joy's office in Lucerne Valley and scheduled a retreat in early September. This gave me a month to mull over my decision, and I changed my mind many times, but whenever I picked up the phone to cancel I stopped myself. Remembering Christine, I just couldn't let myself back out.
At seven o'clock the evening before the retreat, I decided to take an aerobics class and do my packing afterward. Leaving home a little bit later than I'd intended, I quickly parked my car on a side street, tossed my duffel bag over my shoulder, and rushed down the street toward the gym. The sun was nearly down, the horizon dimly lit with a pale pink glow. I flew past an alley not looking where I was going—and ran into a moving car. Going perhaps twenty-five or thirty miles an hour, an aging Oldsmobile driven by an elderly man hit me with such force that I was hurled up and back against the windshield twice, each time crashing with a horrible thud.
Suddenly I was transported to a tunnel identical to the one from the Tuna Canyon accident. Watching safely from inside, I saw my body bounce off the hood of the car and then slam against a brick wall alongside the alleyway. Two teenage boys sitting on their front porch witnessed the accident and rushed over to help me. I could have been an acrobat in a black leotard and tights, performing a death-defying stunt. After rebounding from the impact against the wall, I landed upright and on my feet, almost as if waiting for the audience to applaud and the judges to score my performance.
A crowd gathered around me. The driver, extremely feeble and confused, his vision not good, was shocked. He wanted very much to help me, as did the teenagers. But feeling all right, and perhaps foolishly independent—in this period of my life I found it hard to ask for help—I drove myself to the UCLA emergency room. Except for a painful whiplash, there were no broken bones or other injuries. Having been to the tunnel before, I recognized what had taken place, but it had never occurred to me that this might be a repeating pattern that would protect me a second time when my life was in jeopardy. I found this notion extraordinarily consoling, realizing that the tunnel was a great blessing. People were severely injured and killed in accidents every day. But both times I had been in grave danger, the tunnel had saved me. Now, thinking it over, taking stock of what had happened, I knew I would be all right. Against medical advice, I prepared for my trip. And in the morning, I threw the suitcases in the backseat of my car and headed for the Institute of Mental Physics in Joshua Tree.
The temperature was over 110 degrees when I arrived. Visible waves of heat rose from the asphalt driveway that led up to the entrance. The desert surrounding the conference center was a vast expanse of sand with pale green barrel cacti dotting the landscape. Brugh's personal secretary, a robust middle-aged woman, directed me down a winding stone path lined with blooming oleander bushes to my room. Hot and weary from the drive, I took a shower and settled in.
After dinner that evening, forty men and women of various ages gathered in a circle in a large conference room. Brugh himself was a lithe, pale, androgynous-looking man in his midforties. Trained at Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic, he was a member of Alpha Omega Alpha, the medical honor society. Wearing jeans and a pullover sweater, he appeared reserved but unflinchingly blunt and confident as he spoke in a calm, evenly articulated voice, outlining the rules. Stay off the phone. Stay on the grounds. No drugs or sex. No outside distractions. Brugh wanted us to remain focused on the present. The purpose of the conference was to shift us out of our ordinary, conditioned habits of viewing the world and to open to a different reality. With group dream-discussion, meditation, periods of silence, fasting, and other techniques, we could shift into a more intuitive state.
At six o'clock the next morning the group reconvened, with Brugh leading, and we were to discuss our dreams. To get up so early was appalling to me, but I set my alarm for 5:30 and showed up on time. Sitting cross-legged on a meditation pillow, I planned not to participate, but inevitably, that first morning Brugh started with me.
The only dream I could summon up was a recent one I chose because I could remember it, not because I thought it particularly significant. For some time I hadn't been dreaming much; it was a special occasion when I could remember one at all. In this dream, I was walking through a residential neighborhood on a bright and sunny day, an area much like where I grew up, with manicured lawns and large houses. Suddenly, I came upon a huge, dusty, empty lot in the middle of the block. I paused, hesitating to enter: The lot obviously didn't belong in that setting—it had a suggestion of menace. At the same time, though, it had a strange appeal and evoked a kind of longing. I kept staring from my safe distance, feeling something in its emptiness that I couldn't quite understand.
That was all. Short, few frills, no real plot. The dream had left me unsettled, however. Brugh responded with an extended discourse about what it meant. He seemed to be making too big a production, and the language he used sounded like it had been taken straight out of Gum 101, a mix of intellectualism, spiritual jargon, and a know-it-all attitude. “Dream states are far closer to our natural Beingness than even our most highly intensified external reality. The empty lot represents the great mystery of consciousness, your spiritual and psychic potential. You've created an artificial partition within yourself that keeps you from experiencing total awareness.”
Brugh went on to say that I had fixed ideas about many things. Unless I let go of my rigidity, he argued, it would get in the way of any spiritual progress I hoped for. By the time he finished, I was mortified. It was unnerving to have him be so direct with me in front of everyone, as if trying to confront me so that I would react. The more he spoke, the more irritated I became: Who gave him the right to pass judgment on me?
I ate lunch that day with Michael, a writer and director from Malibu who was to become a good friend. Michael, a towering six-foot-nine Harvard-educated M.D., had given up medicine to write novels, many of which were later made into feature films. He reminded me of a huge, magnificient bird with outstretched wings flying high above the earth. Cynical and smart, he wouldn't easily be won over by spiritual mumbo jumbo. Having traveled all over the world, Michael had met psychics of many different cultures. As Michael now saw it, Brugh had given me a reading, and his interpretation of my dream was based less on content than on his deeper impressions.
“Did it fit?” Michael asked.
I knew Brugh had me pegged, but still I wanted to deny his words: Although Christine's suicide attempt had left me intellectually prepared to explore my psychic life, an enormous part of me remained frightened. Sensing this, Brugh had used the dream to break through that fear, and I had responded by fighting back, tightening, protecting myself.
The evening session began with high-intensity sound, a technique for stimulating the psychic process by listening to loud music and paying attention to the images evoked. Brugh described it as a powerful tool that could bypass our minds and help us to open up. He told us to relax, have no expectations, and to remain receptive to whatever took place. All forty of us lay down on pillows, side by side with our heads pointed toward the center of the circle. Brugh dimmed the lights and then, at full blast, he played the sound track from
Chariots of Fire.
Instantly, I felt the vibration of the bass pulsing through the floor and into my body. I was terrified that my eardrums would explode, the noise was so deafening. The music assaulted me; I cringed and I fought it. But after ten agonizing minutes, something shifted. I forgot my discomfort, swept away by the beauty of what I was hearing. My mind became lit up by a fireworks display of mesmerizing images. Wild horses galloping through a lush, grassy meadow. A fierce electrical storm exploding over the ocean. The face of my grandfather when he was a young man. A troop of traveling mimes. All were disjointed pictures that flashed one after the other as the music built into crescendo after crescendo.
A floodgate had opened. I was being transported to a time when I was much younger. I was again able to see clearly, sometimes into the future. But I wasn't scared. The walls I had built around me were gone. Anything was possible. I felt courageous and free. I ached to recapture that innocence and freshness; I had lost so much. The sadness rushed through me, leaving me disoriented and drained.
When the music was done Brugh turned on the lights and I was jolted out of the session. The room was spinning so fast I felt nauseated. I struggled to gain my balance, overwhelmed by the lavish outpouring of images and memories from the past. It was a shock to my system to have them resurface so precipitously after being buried for so many years. I felt wobbly, as if someone had taken a plumber's snake to my unconscious and dislodged a gigantic plug. When we went around the circle and shared our responses, I could barely concentrate. Afterward, I returned to my room and went straight to bed.
I woke up the next morning in a fury. I didn't know why, but everything made me angry. The whiplash from my accident had worsened and the muscles in my neck had condensed into a stiff, knotted rock. I couldn't move my head in either direction. I wanted to go home, but something kept me from leaving. At breakfast, I decided to tell Brugh about my symptoms.
“How wonderful!” he said. “You're finally waking up.”
“Waking up?” I snapped. “I feel miserable.”
Brugh shot me a knowing look that made me seethe. He seemed so smug and sure of himself that I wanted to deck him.
Unfazed by my hostility, he continued. “The music was just a catalyst. It heightens your senses, opens you up quickly and makes you more aware. Last night you remembered something important about yourself and got frightened. Fighting it only creates tension. When you shut down, your body tightens and reacts with symptoms. The secret is to let go.…Trust your images instead of trying to censor them. Then tell me how you feel.”
“What does letting go have to do with it?” I pleaded. “I'm in enough pain. Why make it worse by purposely bringing up all that sadness?”
Brugh was soft-spoken but adamant. “The sadness is a key to your pain. You can't keep running from it forever.”
That was the last thing I wanted to hear. Preferring to believe that my problems were physical, I was outraged. What kind of doctor was Brugh, anyway? He didn't seem sympathetic at all. And I had no intention of reliving the images of the previous night. Maybe some other time, when I was in better shape. But not when I felt so awful. Exasperated, I got up from the table and left in a huff.
My dizziness and nausea continued to get worse. I was ready to give up. In the middle of the afternoon, tired of battling Brugh and myself, I collapsed in the desert beside a juniper bush and fell into a deep sleep. I slept there for hours, curled up on my orange beach towel. When I awoke in the twilight, something inside me had released. From that point on, my attitude changed.
Watching a half moon rise in the violet desert sky, I felt refreshed, unusually clear. I lay stretched out and tranquil, cushioned by the softness of the sand. I had reached a breaking point. Like a child who'd worn herself out after a tantrum, the fight in me was totally gone. I hadn't intended to let go. It happened in spite of myself. An unsuspected wisdom took hold, an organic impulse to bend and survive under pressure instead of getting blown apart. Whether an activation of a wiser aspect of myself or divine intervention, the result was that my resistance had melted. I was lifted over a chasm uncrossable by will alone. I'd gotten through medical school and residency on sheer will and perseverance. Whatever the obstacle, I'd just bear down, concentrate harder, and push through it. This style had worked a long time for me. But it hadn't succeeded here. I couldn't have forced myself to change. It was an act of grace, totally beyond my conscious intent.
I had never known the great relief that came from surrender. Thus far in my life, I'd always equated surrender with “giving in” or failing. But now I was bursting with energy, radiant. A thick, rigid band within me had dissolved, and my body felt unconstricted and agile. Within hours, my nausea disappeared and my neck muscles loosened. The tension drained from me; I was a different person, laughing and talking with the others, no longer pushing them away.