Spring Updates :: Winter Garden Healing Arts

In this newsletter:

• Welcome!

• Standing up for Trans Lives

• Sphincter Gymnastics

• In Defense of Insomnia

• Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles

Welcome and happy spring to you all! For those of you new to this list, I send these updates out on a roughly seasonal rhythm. As of today, they are also archived on my website here. You'll generally find a bit of news about my practice, some literary or artistic offering, and a few words about whatever's on my mind lately. I try to balance brevity and relevance against the desire to write a newsletter that I would actually want to read. I hope you find something worthwhile. This one is a little longer than usual. Replies are always welcome.

Schedule your next session here. I am now practicing in Uptown Oakland, Mission District SF, and on-site around the Bay Area!

Standing up for Trans Lives

As someone with many trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming loved ones, friends who perform in drag, as well as a professional practice in which I prioritize competence and respect with regard to trans bodies and perspectives, I'm increasingly alarmed at the hateful discourse and the atmosphere of violence being advanced by the religious right in this country. Hundreds of repressive and discriminatory laws are being proposed around the country in order to strip trans people of their bodily autonomy, to criminalize queer culture and basic healthcare, and to provide legal cover for all manner of violence. It's not exaggeration to say that trans genocide is a pillar of the Republican party platform in 2023, and they are winning in many places. Solidarity and even basic understanding from mainstream Democrats is, for the most part, underwhelming.

Trans people and trans-led organizations can use your support and respect right now—financial, emotional, and otherwise. If you are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with any of the evolving language, culture, or healthcare practices around gender and sexuality, you may find this page to be helpful. But most importantly, please know that the fundamental issue is to just treat people with respect, and leave them alone if their personal decisions aren't harming anyone else. And be especially alarmed when the state starts talking about taking away people's children and criminalizing difference. If you are looking to learn more about what's happening, and how it does and does not diverge from existing transphobia and repression in the USA, I found this article to be useful, as well as this resource maintained by the ACLU, and much of the writing on them.us. If you are looking to donate money, there are trans-led grant-making organizations such as the Trans Justice Funding Project and Trans Lifeline that put money in the hands of individuals and small organizations building trans autonomy and resilience.

Sphincter Gymnastics

And now for something completely different...

Years ago, one of my first manual therapy clients gave me a copy of a book called The Secret of the Ring Muscles, by Paula Garbourg. As a rule, I avoid health-related titles that include words like secret, miracle, cure, etc., so the book gathered dust on my shelf for a while. I decided to finally give it a read this past week, and have been pleasantly surprised. The author was a German-Israeli dancer and opera singer who developed a set of exercises focused on some of the body's voluntary sphincter muscles, and sets of muscles that have a sphincter-like function. Her terminology, sphincter gymnastics, gets my commendation for pure neologistic jouissance.

In Visceral Manipulation work, we have techniques for treating the sphincters of the digestive tract, valves of the heart, and more; similarly, Craniosacral Therapy teaches the importance of balancing tension across the diaphragms that separate the body cavities. In Garbourg's sphincter gymnastics, the eyes, mouth, tongue, urethra, and anus receive most of the focus. She draws out connections between these structures and overall posture, digestion, cognitive function, etc. The pelvic floor techniques are similar enough to widely available Kegel exercises, but there are a number of peculiar features to Garbourg's system. Her anatomical knowledge is a bit underdeveloped, let's say, and she doesn't waste time substantiating any of her claims beyond a few anonymous anecdotes, but the exercises are weirdly compelling.

The sphincter gymnastics are generally quite simple, such as "open the oral cavity as widely as possible behind closed lips." I find the simplicity to have an almost Fluxus-like quality to it: do this tiny or mundane, but very specific thing, for an unusually long time, and see what happens. And a lot can happen! I have felt some interesting shifts right away.

I also appreciate the DIY quality of Garbourg's method. There is no course to sign up for, no expert you need to coach you (although I've learned that her daughter-in-law now offers relatively cheap telehealth instruction in the techniques). The guiding principal is generally to do it until you don't feel like doing it anymore, but try to keep a regular practice.

As a sample, feel free to try the following exercise, entitled "Strong Eyelid Contractions." Garbourg recommends lying on one's back, knees held to chest, but emphasizes that other positions are acceptable.

"Squeeze your eyes shut to contract your eyelids as strongly as you can, as though reacting to very dazzling sunlight or some other extremely bright light. The area around your eyes should scrunch up, and the feeling around your mouth and nose may be affected as well. Hold this position for as long as you can, then relax. When you feel you can, contract your eyelids again. Repeat the entire sequence several times, until the fatigue in the muscles 'tells' you to stop. Do not open your eyes at any time during the exercise, even when you relax your eyelids. After you have repeated the exercise several times, cover your eyes with your hands and assume whatever position feels comfortable. After some time, you may, if you wish, start again."

The above photo is by the great innovator of night photography, the Hungarian-French expatriate Brassaï.

In Defense of Insomnia

I have a complicated relationship with sleep. My sleep routine has changed many times over the years, but almost never has it looked like a steady 8 hours, nestled evenly between dusk and dawn. At times this feels vexed, a vicious spiral of sleep deprivation, distraction, and difficulty prioritizing activities that nourish and rehabilitate. My nights become later and less satisfying, while my days become groggy and detached. A losing battle fought against my body and against the clock.

At other times the night feels capacious and welcoming, a nourishing terrain for the free play of ideas and creativity, for exploration or quiet reflection. I was reminded recently of a time in my life, spanning the better part of my twenties and early thirties, where late night excursions and long, rambling walks home—generally in solitude—were some of my most cherished habits. The journey home from an evening activity was often as meaningful to me as the activity itself.

More recently, I've played off and on with the practice of biphasic sleep (warning: this mostly cute and informative BBC article starts with a brief but disturbing story of a woman's murder in 17th century England). Biphasic sleep means sleeping twice per day. For the vast majority of human history, this has actually been the norm: an early sleep for a few hours after sunset, followed by a period of wakefulness and another sleep for a few hours before dawn. Monophasic sleep, i.e., the current norm of eight or so uninterrupted hours of sleep, only came to prevalence after the industrial revolution, and was reinforced by rapid shifts in technology, family structure, housing, urbanization, and economy.

As with many other norms now taken to be biologically inherent, the deviations of those who can't or won't accommodate themselves to an expected pattern of behavior point to the inadequacy and ultimately the sociopolitically constructed nature of the norm itself. Similar arguments can be made regarding modern notions of neurotypicality & madness, compulsory heterosexuality & biological essentialist notions of binary sex and gender. Norms like these are politically and economically expedient for those in power—all the more so when they can be promoted as biologically inherent and/or morally or religiously inscribed. Insomnia need not be seen or treated as pathological. We could instead understand it as humanity's biologically inherent resistance to an artificially regimented sleep schedule. Human experience is vast and varied, and always has been. I bring up the idea of sleep cycles not to point to the one correct way of sleeping, but rather to reinforce that if you happen to do something differently from the way someone tells you it must be done (or the way it has always been done), I encourage you to trust yourself and figure out what really works for you. There are other models out there, or you can create your own.

For me, biphasic sleep usually takes the form of a short nap at my partner's (early) bedtime, followed by a few hours in which I finish any remaining dishes before sitting to read or concentrate on a project for a bit—preferably offline. When it works well, it allows me to clear my head and gather a bit of mental acuity and focus that may be depleted by the end of the day, and apply these energies in a relaxed but alert state at an hour when the atmosphere is more conducive to quiet solitude. I also appreciate the evening nap as a natural break between daytime and nighttime activities. It reminds me that the night, while not the exclusive domain of sleep, is nevertheless appropriate to a different, equally important set of activities and energies.

Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles

The other night, however, when I decided to write about sleep for the newsletter, I did not intend to sleep twice. I went to bed late, tired, and frustrated—ill at ease after spending too much time stressing over something on my phone. After several hours in bed lying perfectly still, pretending that sleep was imminent, I surrendered to my restlessness, and got up to stretch and read a book. I picked up The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. The Street of Crocodiles is a slender volume of vignettes tracing a somewhat fantastical outline of the author's childhood and family life in Drohobycz, southern Poland (now a part of Ukraine). It was published in 1934, Schulz's first and one of his only published works. Schulz died in 1942, killed by the Gestapo during the Nazi-Soviet occupation of Poland.

The excerpt below is from the story Cinnamon Shops. It recounts an evening errand the boy Schultz's mother sends him on, which is immediately and repeatedly diverted onto various sidetracks. The narration assumes the form and logic of a dream: numerous motivations and subplots are suggested and abandoned, time reeling forward and backward; multiple conflicting possibilities happily make room for each other as the nocturnal adventure spirals outward. This is how I often remember my own late night excursions. Time folds in upon itself, or stretches luxuriously; space similarly reveals itself to be sinewy and full of holes. Places exist at night that simply cannot be found at other hours. Numerous resonances emerge from the text: Kafka's Description of a Struggle, Calvino's Invisible Cities, Aragon's Paris Peasant, Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life; more recently, Renee Gladman's Ravicka novels. The Brothers Quay famously adapted one of the collection's chapters into their animated film of the same name (visible here, but well worth seeking out elsewhere). Unlike any of these, Schulz's work is imbued with a juvenile enchantment that is impossible to fake.

From the chapter Cinnamon Shops:

I stepped into a winter night bright from the illuminations of the sky. It was one of those clear nights when the starry firmament is so wide and spreads so far that it seems to be divided and broken up into a mass of separate skies, sufficient for a whole month of winter nights and providing silver and painted globes to cover all the nightly phenomena, adventures, occurrences, and carnivals.

It is exceedingly thoughtless to send a young boy out on an urgent and important errand into a night like that, because in its semiobscurity the streets multiply, becoming confused and interchanged. There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, make-believe streets. One's imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which the streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night. The temptations of such winter nights begin usually with the innocent desire to take a shortcut, to use a quicker but less familiar way. Attractive possibilities arise of shortening a complicated walk by taking some never used side street. But on that occasion things began differently....

The colored map of the heavens expanded into an immense dome, on which there loomed fantastic lands, oceans and seas, marked with the lines of stellar currents and eddies, with the brilliant streaks of heavenly geography. The air became light to breathe and shimmered like silver gauze. One could smell violets. From under the white woolly lambskin of snow, trembling anemones appeared with a speck of moonlight in each delicate cup. The whole forest seemed to be illuminated by thousands of lights and by the stars falling in profusion from the December sky. The air pulsated with a secret spring, with the matchless purity of snow and violets. We entered a hilly landscape. The lines of hills, bristling with the bare spikes of trees, rose like sighs of bliss. I saw on these happy slopes groups of wanderers, gathering among the moss and the bushes the fallen stars which now were damp from snow....

On such a night, unique in the year, one has happy thoughts and inspirations, one feels touched by the divine finger of poetry. Full of ideas and projects, I wanted to walk toward my home, but met some school friends with books under their arms. They were on their way to school already, having been wakened by the brightness of that night that would not end.

With care,

Wilson