I didn’t expect the hotel spa to send me on a trip with my dead grandmother.
I had imagined that the gentle sounds of the spa’s new meditation program would be calming, soothing. I had expected this trendy new treatment might even put me to sleep. Instead, I found the intensity of the gongs to be unsettling and sometimes nerve wracking. And I was surprised by the bizarre directions my experience took.
I’m not the kind of person to seek out yoga or meditation classes. I’m a rather hyper, easily distracted type, and if I relax too much I’m likely to simply doze off. But when one of the top luxury hotels in Mexico City offered me the chance to try out one of their newest spa experiences — a gong therapy session that’s part of its new “no-touch” spa offerings — I was all in for trying something new.
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Since the pandemic, hotels in Mexico and around the world have found new ways to provide spa services and other activities while minimizing physical contact. The gong session at this swanky Mexico City hotel was one of the latest examples. Sure, lying on the floor while someone bangs a giant gong nearby may not be the standard idea of a perfect Mexico vacation for most people, but it seemed like an interesting concept.
Soon, I found myself lying face up, fully clothed, on a mat in a nearly pitch-black conference room (the spa uses conference space for larger groups, and I did this class with work colleagues). The therapist advised us that we may feel a variety of sensations, which I silently poo-pood. I was sure I’d be snoring rather than discovering new planes of existence.
The first gong gently vibrated as I closed my eyes. But I didn’t sleep. I felt compelled to imagine sensations even if I wasn’t actually experiencing them. At first, I felt like I should make my prone body levitate and fly, but the requisite sensation of weightlessness didn’t come. I had also expected a tingling in the parts of my body that touched the floor, but that didn’t come either. So I just imagined myself flying through the dark of my eyelids.
Another gentle gong.
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My body was stiff, motionless. For some reason, my mind concocted the idea of levitating my body through the times of my ancestors and deceased relatives. I found myself hovering over the childhood home of my grandmother, Eunice Earle New, in western Kentucky, trying to picture the details on the angular roof and wood frame structure, smelling the humid wood furniture inside. I pictured my grandmother as the young girl I’d seen in very old, painted photographs, wearing a frilly white dress complemented by a carefully tied bow in her soft, curly brown hair. I watched as she filled a rigid brown suitcase with her belongings, as her father (who had frequently told her she was ugly and sometimes called her “pig”), sent her away to live in her grandparent’s boarding house in Dawson Springs, a western Kentucky destination that in the late 19th and early 20th century was a popular vacation destination because of its hot springs. I watched Gran arrive, suitcase in hand, at the two-story white boarding house, where she’d spend most of the rest of her childhood.
The gong chimed again, as if to shuffle me off to the next chapter — kind of like those annoying “speed dating” business meetings at conferences, where they blow a whistle or make some other distracting noise to signal that your five-minute appointment is over and you need to move on to the next person you’re supposed to impress.
I glided forward through the dark, blank space of my eyelids, trying to move further back in time, to the lives of Gran’s ancestors and other relatives. I imagined myself flying through dark night skies, like Peter Pan, watching wind-battered boats that brought my ancestors from the British islands and Barbados in the 17th century. My eyelids were filled with dark night skies, dark ships and dark waves. Various shades of midnight blue and black, with little variation between the colors of the water, the sky and the ships. The wind was strong and cool. I couldn’t quite see the condition of the vessels and saw no people at all.
I attempted to reach the British islands and conjure up some rolling hills in the dark, but was rather disappointed: no lights, no details, no people. I saw the vague outlines of bodies of water and tried to push further back to Gran’s ancestors in France and the boat that may have brought over some other ancestors from Sweden, centuries earlier. But I couldn’t see much more than dark, cloudy skies.
I knew all of this was bullshit.
But I had to do something with my time. This was a 45-minute session that consisted of lying in a pitch-black conference room while a woman made banging noises. I might as well take a family vacation of the imaginary kind. So where next?
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Our session leader rubbed the gong with the mallet, creating a hum that slowly grew in intensity. This was when I started having weirder thoughts.
I flew back to Kentucky and suddenly it occurred to me that my prone, immobile body was not unlike the deceased bodies of my relatives. I tried to make my own body inhabit the stiff form of gran’s mother and grandmother when they passed away; I wasn’t sure who I was, but it seemed that I had a hawk nose and was in a casket in a very small but attractive living room with wallpaper. Then I realized that the home of my grandmother’s parents and grandparents probably would have been humbler than that, with no wallpaper, so I tried to replace the scene with plain wood walls, painted white and smelling of the legendarily intense humidity that characterized every summer in western Kentucky.
I tried to picture Gran as a teenager approaching the casket and looking at my body, tried to imagine what her facial expression would have been upon seeing her deceased mother, who had been powerless to prevent Gran from being sent away to live in that boarding house, or her grandmother, who had provided a calmer home, away from Gran’s verbally abuse father.
Then I floated into Gran’s own deceased body — which I had actually seen myself, at a flowery and fragrant funeral home in Benton, Kentucky. Next, I floated into my grandfather’s body in the very same funeral home. I tried to imagine what he might have thought if, while lying there, he could have heard the hilariously jaw-dropping conversation my mother had with the minister as they stood next to the casket. If only he’d seen the preacher’s shocked reaction.
Someone lying nearby started to snore.
The gong sounds suddenly grew louder, vibrating the air around me and rubbing against my eardrums. The intensity erased any possibility that this imagined trip could be a moving, relaxing connection. It had become a sometimes overpowering experience with dark, movie-like visuals and sometimes negative undertones.
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As the gong grew in loudness and intensity, I had to leave the funeral home settings, for fear that it would become a scene from a horror movie. I tried to just stare at the orbs and shifting forms inside my eyelids. This hadn’t been the experience that I’d expected. Sure, I’d pushed myself in some directions just to keep from being bored, but I was still surprised with where the session took me.
I’ve been working on a memoir about life, death and travels with my mother for the past couple of years (it will be published by Vine Leaves Press in 2022), so I guess it’s not shocking that family history was already on my mind. But I was surprised that Gran had become the center of my journey during this session. I was instinctively drawn to her sadness, her challenges, the lack of support from her parents, and how she found a secure place to live with her grandparents and later with the family she created, even if she didn’t get to do quite as much with her life as my mother said she probably would have liked. It was an interesting journey.
Before I knew it, the session was over and I was standing up, dazed and ready to run upstairs to my hotel room to write down all the details about my trip. I was afraid that if I didn’t write it down immediately, just like with dreams, I’d forget the entire experience.
The guy who’d been snoring woke up and returned to his room, too.
Have you ever participated in a gong therapy session? I’d love to hear what it was like for you, and where it took you. And by the way, I’d be happy to share the name of the luxury hotel that provides this gong therapy session. I just didn’t want to associate my bizarre experience with the quality of the hotel’s offerings.
I’m a travel writer, travel blogger and Mexico travel specialist, and I love sharing travel tips to make your next trip better. Please feel free to share your comments, experiences and questions about Mexico travel and Latin America travel and vacations!
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