Brain is Body Too

Art + Ritual as Medicine

Twenty of us sit in an wide, tabled circle, exposing a scuffed linoleum floor in Room 213 of Kaiser’s Psychiatry Department. We are each here for a five-week Behavioral Medicine class called “Managing Depression.” The series is free and, for such a time as this, we are not. We are vulnerable. We are a mixture of races and ethnicities yet each in a way, pale, dimmed. We are even a kind of ashen. We are a receded people, yet somehow we have arrived here. Our instructor Teresa tries very hard to be gentle, so hard that she borders on condescension even though she likely does not mean to. I can hear us barely breathing. We are a caved-in collection and the windows are high.

Introductions are awkward, but we survive them. Teresa remains in her seat and says, “Let’s open our workbooks to page seven, and take a look at the picture at the top. See how in a normal brain, there is all that activity happening between the cells? Can you see the sending nerve cell, and then those neurotransmitters—bits of communicating chemicals—moving from the sending to the receiving neuron?”

I am surprised to be up to this learning. Pictures help me. They always do.

At the bottom of this image, it says, “This is normal brain cell activity.”

She continues, “Now let’s look at the picture below that one.” She speaks on and on in a slightly mommying voice, but it is the image itself that I hear. Look at that. All those attempts to send signals. Hopeful and tiny flares, floating in the space between, sometimes returning to the sending cell. It is hard to tell if they are lost, forgotten or doing unproven work. The receiving cell is an empty darkness, a faceless void. Why are the neurotransmitters framed as the problem, and not the sending cell’s launching abilities nor the destination’s magnetic reach?

I find myself focusing on the middle space of this image in our spiral-bound workbooks, open face-up like unmet hands on the cool tabletops of this worn down classroom. In the space where it appears neurotransmission is failing, I see countless bodies and souls in the Middle Passage of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. I see the space between the mouths of parents and children as the latter are forcibly taken to Indian Boarding Schools; I see the space between their small bodies and the garments of their culture; I see the space between shoulder and waist where sacred hair used to be. I see the miles between the bar-held hands of encaged children and the praying ones of their parents at a site called “border.” I see the space a brown trans woman is gauging between her car door and the approaching cop. I see the space that increases between the store window and my father’s boy-aged shoes as they turn away, responding to the sign, “Jap Go Home.” He only wanted an ice cream cone.

In the middle space of presumed sloth and inadequate propulsion, I do not see inactivity after all. And to caption it “abnormal” is a shorthanded affront; I feel it in my body. I see neurochemical remnants working so very hard to endure the globalized epigenetics of dominance.

I look around the room and see the sensitive, porous, permeable ones. I see my own thighs seated on this made-for-nobody chair. I wonder what would happen if a real medicine person came into this room and—rather than trying to teach us how to cope with all we cannot in our souls accede or ascend to—asked us what we intuit, notice and sense?

I see how much bodies know, and how much they do not really know how—or at the very least, want—to lie. In us, despite our appearances, I see humanity wanting itself back again.

(Thank you to Deirdre Visser for performance photos)