A few months back, I lay in my bed around 3 in the morning, watching the shadows of the branches crawling across the ceiling. The craggy shapes were fronted by moonlight and filtered through wide-slatted faux wood blinds. And, I felt myself falling up into the sky. I’d been wildly stressed out for months prior to this “burnout,” and was fighting existential dilemmas daily, so this felt like a relief: to get to leave.
That night my experience was so visceral, I was sure I’d die if I gave into it. It was like my bones were evaporating into little particles and drifting upward, out the walls and ceiling into space. I was certain at that moment my heart would give out, or I’d have an aneurysm or something, and my body would sh!t the bed, leaving a mortified mess for my husband to clean up in the morning. And, I couldn’t shake the experience just by waking up, and I was wide awake.
So, like any anxious, middle-class, normal-wanna bee woman would, and with what felt like sheer force of will, I plunged my awareness back down into my unique 5 foot 2 inch teeming hold of matter. Over my chest, I yanked a weighted blanket, and vowed to take more calcium and do more weight-lifting come morning. I went back to sleep proud that I had consciously chosen life in this body, even though life had been feeling so hard.

I remembered I have kids who need me, and a whole bunch of stuff left to experience that requires a body. Without consciously choosing to be pressed into form by gravity, I’d miss out on traveling around this place, seeing, hearing, and smelling new stuff, and yeah, feeling all of this body’s pleasures and pains before it disintegrates into a pile of dirt or stardust.
Psychedelia Free Zone: Wanna Drift Away?
I probably should have counted myself lucky. A one-time wanna bee hippie, I could have simply enjoyed a free and sober trip around the cosmos that night. Since I know that folks seek these kinds of “one with everything” experiences through religion and ritual with great abandon, maybe I should have gone with the flow? But instead, I asserted my will to get back down to earth, literally.

After all, I had worked hard to have exactly the life I had now. I’d be damned if I’d give it up by ‘letting go.’ F*ck that!
Later I realized, that Gravity and its felt counterpart Pressure, go hand in hand in physical embodiment AND psychological health. My remedy was putting myself ‘down’ into my form, with a conscious re-commitment to the pressures of this life, and this kind of life’s actual gravity, both practically and metaphorically. And, it worked. I’m still here seeing and deciding things about my experience in my body, and outside it1.
What I can also hope is that I have something good to bring “down” for whenever others feel like they aren’t really here either. To help them feel the positives of pressure.
Letting Go | Removing Pressure
In so many spiritual traditions, they talk about ‘letting go’ and ‘letting God’2 But what does it really mean to let go? How would you actually know you’d done it? I now think of letting go as disengaging the triggers of emotional stress from the body’s reflexes. Or maybe it is the act of distancing oneself from our embodied experience as human beings. So, letting go is an option, but it’s missing something too. Right now, I’m choosing that ‘something.’ It’s not easy.
For the record, I think we all experience the tension between spirit vs. matter daily. It’s common to turn to spiritual longing, and have a desire to relieve stress and pressures. When we are anxious out (I was before I had the experience above), we often wish to escape– it’s only natural.
Yet all the best stories, songs, and art – and our dreams – come from traversing both realms. Creative people, healers, and priests often serve as conduits and bring the mysterious gifts of spirit down into form. It’s like taking the ethereal and infusing it into mass: whether making a meal, a hand cream or writing a book, these worldly items represent the act of moving between worlds. Without bringing our best “down” into this world (IE, the land of gravity), we miss something, and others miss something too: the fullness of us.
A little more on healing and wholeness for Doc Stars and Rock Stars
We need to know our vantage point in the moment if we are to serve in a role between realms of awareness. For instance, when we talk about ourselves using language like, “I have xyz problem because of abc,” we are psychologically objectifying ourselves. That is, the vantage point of awareness that says, “I have a problem,” is not actually having the problem. This is the aspect of self that can fall into the sky, or choose to be here, now.
Healers understand their vantage point ties together both realms: the spiritual one, and the weighty one of the world. The place from which we diagnose, describe what ails us, is always outside of the problem. And from that vantage point, can come unlimited healing and freedom.
I admire spiritual notables, and artistic cosmonauts like David Bowie3, people who see and show us in form the workings of this relationship between spirit and matter. This is part of the path of the artist, and those who create beauty and movement give us something that helps enjoy the place we have in the universe, as little points of mass on a swiftly twirling planet, full of weight and wonder, creativity and relief.
Thank you for reading. I have other writings on Substack too. I’d love your support & conversation on that platform if you care to share.
- Sometime I’ll have to write about how you can have shifts of consciousness by playing with prepositions. ↩︎
- Thought experiments are my favorite, ever since I heard that’s how Einstein came to his special theory of relativity. If you ask yourself a good enough question and stay with it, amazing experiences and awarenesses can come about. E=mc2 being especially pertinent to this piece in terms of potential energy as it relates to mass, and mass being closely associated with gravitational pull . ↩︎
- Bowie seemed to truly orbit around up there and brought down representations of himself as a studied confections of rock star and abstract art. ↩︎