Scrubbing the Volcanic Rock

The rubber seal of my mask is biting into the bridge of my nose, a persistent, dull ache that reminds me I have been under for exactly 41 minutes. Down here, 11 feet below the surface of the main display tank, the world is a series of muffled thuds and the rhythmic, metallic hiss of my own breath. I am scrubbing a stubborn patch of calcium carbonate off a volcanic rock formation while a 31-pound grouper watches me with the suspicious eyes of a landlord.

I am late. I missed the 101 bus by exactly 11 seconds this morning. I watched the heavy doors hiss shut and the taillights mock me as the bus pulled away into the grey, humid exhaust of the city. That 11-second gap felt like a personal insult from the universe.

Now, underwater, my mind is still at the bus stop, replaying the moment I realized my sprint was futile. I felt that familiar spike of heat in my chest, the tightening of the jaw-what my yoga teacher would call “sympathetic activation.” And that is exactly the problem I can’t seem to scrub away, no matter how hard I work the brush against this rock.

The Window of Tolerance

I first noticed the shift about 21 months ago in a small, candle-lit room in the back of a community center. It was a “Spiritual Inquiry” circle, the kind of place where people are supposed to talk about the Great Mystery or the Longing for the Infinite. Beatrice, a woman in her late 61s with hands that always smelled like rosemary, asked a question that should have cracked the room open.

“I had a sudden, overwhelming sense of being ‘dissolved’ into the light, a terrifying and beautiful surrender that left me weeping for hours. How do I live in the wake of such a vast, devotional encounter?”

– Beatrice

For a moment, there was a holy silence. Then, a younger man in a crisp linen shirt cleared his throat. “It sounds like you were experiencing a massive dorsal vagal shutdown,” he said, his voice dripping with the kind of clinical empathy that feels like being patted on the head with a wet cloth. “Your system probably couldn’t handle the intensity, so you dissociated. We should look at your window of tolerance.”

The room nodded. The “Mystery” was packed away into a neat, plastic box labeled “Polyvagal Theory.” Beatrice’s face, which had been radiant with the memory of the divine, curdled into a look of confusion. She wasn’t a devotee anymore; she was a patient. Her encounter with the Living God was just a glitch in her wiring, a leftover reflex from a childhood where she wasn’t seen.

The Cathedral vs. The Clinic

I’m not saying trauma isn’t real. I spend half my life checking the life-support systems of this aquarium. I know that if the pH levels are off or the nitrate cycle crashes, the fish die. I understand that our pasts are the filters through which we breathe.

But a tank is more than its pumps, and a human life is more than its injuries. If we spend all our time staring at the plumbing, we forget to look at the fish. We’ve replaced the cathedral with the clinic, and I’m starting to think the ceiling is getting too low for us to stand up straight.

I accidentally used a “grounding technique” when I missed that bus. I counted five blue things in the street. It worked. I didn’t scream at the disappearing bus. But there is a bitter contradiction in my heart: I am grateful for the tools that keep me from falling apart, and I am resentful that these tools are the only language we are allowed to speak when we are together. We are so busy “regulating” that we have forgotten how to be “transformed.”

Pathologizing the Bodhi Tree

The language of trauma is a seductive one because it offers the illusion of total explanation. It’s a closed loop. Why do you love too hard? Trauma. Why can’t you sit in silence? Trauma. Why did you have a vision of the Virgin Mary in a laundromat? Temporal lobe epilepsy triggered by-you guessed it-trauma.

Last week, while checking the seals on the 71-inch viewing glass, I thought about the 31 years I’ve spent avoiding the “spiritual” because it felt too messy. Now, I find myself defending it because the “psychological” has become too tidy.

We are pathologizing the heights of human experience. If the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree today, we’d probably try to get him on a weighted blanket and explain that his desire to end suffering is just a fawning response to a dysfunctional family system.

There is a specific kind of arrogance in thinking that our 21st-century neurobiology has finally “solved” the questions that have haunted saints and poets for 4,001 years. We think we’ve explained the “Why” because we’ve mapped the “How.” It’s like me thinking I understand the migratory patterns of the North Atlantic just because I know how to calibrate a thermometer.

Bailey K.-H., a guy I work with who handles the shark feedings, once told me that he thinks people are “scared of the deep end.” He’s right. Trauma language is a life vest. It keeps you bobbing on the surface, safe and “regulated,” but it prevents you from diving.

I find myself looking for spaces where the nervous system is acknowledged but the soul is given the lead. Places like Unseen Alliance seem to understand this delicate tension-that we are biological creatures who also happen to be inhabited by something that biology cannot fully account for. It is a rare thing to find a group of people who won’t try to “fix” your transcendence.

The View from the Glass

My oxygen gauge is hovering near the 21% mark, which means I need to start my ascent soon. As I move toward the ladder, I see a group of schoolchildren pressed against the glass on the other side. They aren’t looking at the filtration pipes. They aren’t wondering if the fish are “trauma-informed.”

They are staring at the rays, their mouths open in a silent “O” of wonder. They are experiencing awe, a state that clinical language would probably describe as a “positive arousal state of the autonomic nervous system,” but which anyone with a pulse knows is simply the soul recognizing its home.

We can take the engine apart, we can name every gasket and spark plug, but we are terrified of the open road. We are terrified of the “Unseen.” We want everything to be “safe,” but the spirit is famously unsafe. It is a “consuming fire,” not a “regulated heat source.”

I think back to Beatrice. She didn’t need to know about her vagus nerve. She needed someone to say, “Yes, the Light is real, and it is okay that it broke you open.” She needed a priest, or a poet, or even just a friend who was willing to sit in the wreckage of her “dysregulation” without trying to tidy it up.

I reach the surface and pull myself onto the platform. The air is thick with the smell of salt and ozone. My skin is pruned, and my back aches from the 51 pounds of gear I’ve been hauling. I strip off the wet suit, feeling the sudden chill of the room. I missed the bus, I have a headache, and my bank account has exactly $11 in it until Friday. My nervous system is, by all accounts, “taxed.”

Vertical Eruptions

But as I look back at the water, watching the light filter through the surface in long, shimmering curtains, I feel a sudden, unprompted surge of gratitude that has absolutely nothing to do with my childhood. It is a purely spiritual moment, a vertical eruption in a horizontal life. I could call it a “serotonin spike.” I could call it a “completion of a stress cycle.”

But I think I’ll just call it Grace, and let the clinical world wonder why I’m smiling at the floor.

Standing in the Rain

We are allowed to be mysterious. We are allowed to be “dysregulated” by the beauty of the world. We are allowed to have experiences that don’t have a name in a DSM-5 manual.

As I walk toward the locker room, I decide that tomorrow, if I miss the bus again, I won’t count five blue things. I’ll just stand there in the rain and let the disappointment be what it is-not a “trigger,” not a “symptom,” but a brief, sharp encounter with the fact that I am alive and the world is not under my control.

And that, in its own way, is the most spiritual practice I can think of.