Toni's Inner-Outer Development Leading to a Tank Experience

At Decker Canyon, the isolation tanks had been installed only a few months, when I took this journey.

Walking to the isolation building that day, I was preoccupied with the business of setting up a new corporation of which I was going to be president. I was not sure I wanted to play such a role; I knew my pattern of seriously taking responsibility toward projects of this nature. My midyears seem to be much more adaptable to less precise relationships. Being president of a corporation seemed to be a little more precise role than I wished to play. I much prefer the “sloppy fit" and the freedom that I believe it gives me to redefine boundaries that otherwise might be too clearly confining.

My education had this looser pattern and continues that way. Formal courses have led to informal creative relations in new fields. For example, my interest in art as a young girl led me to formal experience as a student. I studied at the Art Center in Los Angeles for about a year; I then decided to study with a drawing teacher I much admired named Jeppson at Chouinard Institute. From there I went to Otis Art Institute for another few years. After a showing of my drawings, I found myself wondering "What now, bigger and better shows?" I found the art scene fun: it led to my discovery of my inner realities. The more I examined and learned of my inner realities, the more the bridge from art to what was called "therapy" appealed to me. That was the accepted religion in the circles I was influenced by at that time. In 1961, I started my own therapy with a psychoanalyst Dr. Carroll Carlson. At that time the National Institute of Mental Health authorized him (and several other psychiatrists) to use LSD-25 in clinical research in practice.

After about a year of psychoanalytic work with me, Dr. Carlson proposed that he guide me in a therapeutic session with LSD-25. I will not recount yet another "first" LSD experience, except to say that mine was classically universal. During this session and in the analysis afterward, I realized that I had probed this area as deeply as I had planned. I ended the therapy.

I decided to express my art, in a new form: it became transformed into a means of helping other people to experience larger domains of feeling. I became a cotherapist with Dr. Carlson's groups. These experiences gave me a new tolerance of other people's patterns of living, thinking, emoting and timing.

I was fascinated with group work, with the individuals in the many groups that Dr. Carlson was treating. It was an exciting time: he was willing to experiment with the new techniques— of which there were many at that time: Psychodrama, Encounter, etcetera. Also some already established techniques, such as Gestalt therapy. We started going to Esalen Institute in Big Sur to examine some of these new approaches to therapy. My creativity was expressed well through therapy, which offered more dimensions in new domains. My "actress," "director" and "stage designer" came out of my deeper self as new felt roles for me. My experiences of being a therapist have been deeply learning, teaching ones for me.

These more or less formal experiences led to further, informal ones. I became involved with a marvelously creative group of young people (one of whom was my daughter, Nina), called the "Company Theatre" of Los Angeles. For two very intense years,

I tie-dyed, painted, designed and sewed costumes for them and various other interested people. My house was a developing "village" of young creative people.

About this time John came into my life (see The Center of the Cyclone). We started giving workshops with groups. The new course of activities with John became a natural outcome of the previous flow of training-learning and lifestyle. Our new home became the new center of my inner-outer realities.

Now back to walking to the isolation building getting ready to again put myself in this box of water in the silent darkness. I want you to know that it wasn't exactly a short walk from the house to the tank building for me. All of my previous experience (including previous LSD experience) was dynamically-dramati-cally with me and evoked feelings I had known during those experiences. In addition, that day I had a head cold; I wondered if I was wise in going into the tank.

While I was taking my pretanking shower, all of the above background thoughts passed through me. I finished, put on my robe, walked to the isolation building. I opened the door, looked at the dark green tank container and disrobed. I opened the lid of the container, climbed over the side and closed the lid after me. I lay down and floated.

The supportive water engulfed and caressed me.

The loud silence approached.

The dancing white lights in the blackness played on my observer's three-dimensional visual display screen. I watched my thoughts go by. Ah—this time a new stranger came toward me.

Is this one friend or foe? . . .

And then, bang, panic. I shook in terror.

My congested nose precipitated me with amazing speed into a claustrophobic panic space: I couldn't catch my breath; I felt I was suffocating; I felt I might die suddenly.

The inner events piled up too rapidly. Before I realized it, I was already launched into the midst of my basic survival programs.

I might add that my Self-metaprogrammer was scrambling along with the lowly programmed systems, hopelessly identified with saving my life: they all came up with a unanimous democratic decision of "OUT fast!”

I scrambled from floating to a crouching position in the shallow water. I uncoiled my crouching body; my hands and the top of my head hit the lid; it opened so rapidly that the hinge broke. There was a resounding crash in the silent dark tank room.

My heart was pounding as loud as a jackhammer. I stood for a long minute or two trying to figure out what had happened. (“Can I really be so dumb as not to realize I can change my breathing and breathe through my mouth ?")

Let me try to describe for you, something I call panicsville instantaneous claustrophobia, a body-shaking terror. First there were some faint memories of a childhood experience with ether anesthesia: the trauma of the ether mask over my face; someone holding me down on the operating table. Total coercion for unknown purposes; truly formidable for the young me.

Standing there alone, I realized that the ether experience had vividly imprinted itself in a blocklike form somewhere deep in my memory. This form was very busily being fed survival energy that was not available to my conscious Self-metaprogrammer, as John would say. This insight came in a second, along with a movie-framelike series of split-second eternities.

My birth experience was vividly recalled: the squeezing transit, the suffocation, the gasp of the first breath.

A deeper experience from the LSD-25 session was also invoked: I was a primordial simple biological organism imbedded in swamp mud. I knew that I had been inching along in the primordial ooze. I passed rapidly from worm to amphibian to reptile. I developed scales, finally, to help push me into the air to dry in the sun. The first conscious breath on land went through my form.

All of these past inner realities passed through me in a few seconds; “Time is surely absurd“ I thought, dripping and shivering there in the tank room.

The terror abated. I became calm.

I found myself so fascinated with these discoveries in my inner reality that I got back into the tank. This time I would allow myself to breathe through my mouth if necessary.

Again the familiar patterns of floating, darkness and silence.

This time "the stranger" approached from a similar direction. I was able to do a Tai Chi-like mental movement and allow him to pass. My new perspective and review allowed me to see the stranger as a friend: I was able to greet him/her and allow him/her to leave without my previous feelings of panic or fear.

My tank experience that day was exhilarating. It makes me again conscious of the limitation of words: direct experience translated into words is, after all, a simulation of that experience.

John:

"We have very few reports of such experiences. Our subjects are not in therapy, are self-selected and noncoerced. Under other more pressured circumstances more such episodes might be seen."

Chapter Twelve