BY PAUL KAIHLA — I first heard of watsu when I went to Harbin Hot Springs with an ex because of its rep for having the best mineral baths north of San Francisco. We were surprised to discover that the place was actually a New Age hangout.

When my significant-other saw people in a pool doing what we later learned was watsu, she almost sounded like a socialite encountering lepers — “Ewww, who are those people?”

At first glance, it did look somewhat sideways: What seemed like a bunch of aging hippies in the nude, paired up and cradling each other as if they were attempting some kind of re-birthing exercise.

Perhaps it was our relationship that deserved the “Ewww,” not watsu. And the fallout from it led me through a path of serendipitous discovery that brought me back to Harbin to try this powerful and mysterious technique myself  in the hands of a trusted practitioner and new acquaintance, Inika Spence.

You can take watsu on two levels. You can simply enjoy it as a massage in water (the origin of the name is “water” stitched together with shiatsu, the Japanese pressure-point massage). But if you want to take it deeper, watsu is really about being inducted into a meditative trance.

The hypnotic rhythm and sensuality of water is what gives watsu its juice — way beyond traditional hypnotherapy, counting down with eyes closed on a psychologist’s couch. Watsu immediately demands a far higher threshold of surrender and intimacy. After all, you’re handing control of your body — stripped of clothing and social setting — over to a practitioner in a medium that can technically kill (drown) you.

Inika, one of those rare silent types who is channeling an enormous amount of spiritual power, formed a circle with me using our arms, and we held hands. She bobbed me gently, inviting me to feel my weight in the water. It felt more like a weightlessness. She cued me to breathe into the bob, and extend my breathing into my bones, to extend those bones with my breath. She again shifted my awareness with an inventive image: “When I breathe, I smile at my organs.”

She then floated me into her arms, and I barely sensed her wrapping flotation foam around my ankles.

At times she held me in a concentrated pose, pouring presence and energy into our shared space, and during other passages swooshed me around like so much peasant’s laundry in a river.

The experience triggered something archetypal —a feeling of plunging into the depths of one’s own being, kind of like that image in Lord of the Rings where the wizard Gandalf falls into a bottomless abyss in the Mines of Moria.

This is where watsu asks for a secondary threshold of surrender: once you’re in a deeply meditative state . . . allowing layers of thoughts, memories, images and lumps in your throat or stomach to well up and have a place in your reality. Allowing all of those things that have been buried beneath the mental noise of the office and city living to arise. Without judgment, without trying to get rid of them, without trying to make sense of them, or doing a single thing with them.

After dwelling in that place for who-knows-how-long, I suddenly felt this euphoric awakeness. “I” wasn’t aware of myself as a personality but simply a sphere of awakeness, as if there wasn’t even a person there at all.

The mind would slip back in, start talking to itself about a thought that had come up, or an incident or a clogged pain.

And then I felt Inika’s presence again, and it gave me a booster shot to surrender even deeper: ‘I’ll hand these things over to Being‘, I silently resolved. ‘I don’t need them, you have the power to dissolve them.’

I wasn’t aware of time passing or even that I was a body in a pool anymore by the time Inika propped me up against the side of the basin and pressed my feet down onto its floor to literally ground me. She disappeared, and I don’t know when I got out of the pool. But I do recollect sitting on a deck chair and experiencing the most profound moments of my life.

I was facing a hillside of small trees and wild shrubbery. It was spring, and the branches were still bare, save for some sprouts and dead leaves. “What playfulness consciousness exhibits in living things,” I realized, observing the flamboyant patterns the intelligence behind the plants had produced. “It has an extravagant sense of humor, and I’m now in on the joke.”

A sublime awareness enveloped me: the tree forms were consciousness presenting itself to me, and I was another aspect of consciousness looking back on itself. That hillside, this place, only existed for the very moment that these two fonts of consciousness interfaced. The second my consciousness withdrew from here, the forms would no longer exist.

In a Heisenberg-like trick, it was my consciousness that had given the objects in my field of vision form and “reality” for that brief period. As soon as thoughts like this tried to reconstruct the experience, which arose out of a knowing that lay precisely beyond the act of thinking, the portal was closed.

On the opening page of Love in the Time of Cholera, Nobel-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez set down one of literary fiction’s most arresting images of death: He writes that a character who commits suicide “had escaped the torments of memory.”

The flip-side is that when the person who dies is one of our own, their death — however it happens — logs a new memory of torment for we who remain living. Peter Levine, a biophysicist who became a renowned psychologist and author, goes further. Any death, divorce, or loss is not just a physiological trauma but a physiological trauma to your nervous system.

“Because traumatic events often involve encounters with death, they evoke extraordinary responses,” writes Levine. “The very structure of trauma, including hyper-arousal, dissociation. and freezing, is based on the evolution of predator/prey survival behaviors. The symptoms of trauma are the result of a highly-activated, incomplete biological response to threat, frozen in time. By enabling this frozen response to thaw, then complete, trauma can be healed.”

Levine founded an exciting new branch of mind-body therapy called Somatic Experiencing which promotes that thawing process by combining elements of medical hypnosis, gestalt therapy and healing-touch techniques like Japanese reiki. The patient gradually discharges the trapped chemicals and hyper-activity in his or her nervous system by recalling and re-enacting vignettes of the loss or other trauma. After peeling off several layers of the trauma in a series of somatic sessions, the nervous system is re-regulated.

Step 6: How to Take a Leap of Faith

A couple of things occur when people get hit by a trauma like a car accident, natural disaster, major surgery, job loss, bankruptcy, divorce, the death of a parent, rape or other violent crime. The object constancy that D. W. Winnicott suggests is installed in our psyches around the age of three can be wiped out like a deleted computer file. The other thing that happens is that our nervous systems, spiked with adrenaline and other stress hormones, go into hyper-drive. “It is as if the nervous system is wired for 110 volts and is hit with 220,” write psychologists Diane and Larry Heller.

We climb a roller-coaster to a state of high activiation, the term of art popularized by the pioneering biophysicist, Peter A. Levine. Most mammals instinctually come down the roller coaster by discharging the intense energy of activation, also known as the fight or flight state, by literally shaking it off and sounding off — kind of like the way King Kong goes bat-shit after beating off attackers by roaring and chest-thumping.

But evolution gave humans a manual over-ride in the brain’s center of thought and language. Instead of spontaneously discharging our nervous systems, many of us unwittingly turn to alcohol or drugs to cycle out of high activation after a trauma. Legendary billionaire Howard Hughes is a case study.

After Hughes crashed a plane in L.A. during a 1946 test flight, his body was disfigured by third-degree burns, 24 broken ribs and a crushed collarbone. Hughes used opiates to treat pain and unconcsiously bring his nervous system down below trauma’s bandwidth of activation. He became addicted to a panopoly of drugs for 30 years.

Next: A New Treatment Called Somatic Experiencing

A NEW TREATMENT CALLED SOMATIC EXPERIENCING

After a trauma jolts you into a state of high activation, one of the simplest ways to discharge the intense energy trapped in your nervous system is by doing vigorous workouts like biking, kickboxing, or heck, chopping wood. But if Howard Hughes were alive today, we would advise him to try a more powerful and targetted approach to recover from his 1946 plane crash: a cutting-edge therapy called somatic experiencing.

One of the problems with traditional psycho-therapy is that you can develop a new understanding of yourself and have amazing breakthroughs in self-awareness but they often fail to translate into real change. The realizations you get from talk-therapy are still only thoughts in your head. Somatic therapists seek to anchor those realizations to felt-shifts in your body. They do this by inducing mild states of hypnosis, using sound, touch and other sensations.

“The therapist helps the client move back and forth between small pieces of the traumatic material,” write SE psychologists Diane and Larry Heller. Looping back and forth allows patients to discharge the activation in their nervous system as they work through the traumatic event in layers. Peter Levine originated this effective and imaginative mind-body therapy, and his basic book about SE work is Waking the Tiger. Here is a directory of trained professionals in this emerging field.

Next: Addicts + Artists = The Most Spiritual Beings

When you're human, loss happens